Design, No design. How to tell the difference?
By design I mean a blueprint, a plan, that is brought to fruition in an object that then acquires the property of being designed.
One of the arguments for the existence of God is that the universe has features of planning - laws of nature, physical and chemical constants, to name a few. This argument is also referred to as the watchmaker analogy and asks what else but a designer must be inferred from a watch? Surely the universe, having all the trappings of design, must have a designer/God.
This argument is usually countered by presenting the possibility of order, the primary reason for inferring a designer, arising randomly in the universe. It is possible to win a lottery even if the chances are extremely minuscule. It is this that I have an issue with.
Normal people, including people who make the above counter-argument, actually think the exact opposite. We can run an experiment with two rooms A and B. A is in disarray with things in no particular order and B is neat and objects have been arranged in a discernable pattern. If someone, anyone, were to be taken into the two rooms and asked which room probably had an occupant then the answer would invariably be room B. I don't think anyone will/can disagree with this deduction.
If so, how do we make an exception for the universe? Why does a perfectly normal person infer a designer/occupant from a well-ordered room/space and then contradict him/herself by rejecting a designer for the universe which too is well-ordered?
One of the arguments for the existence of God is that the universe has features of planning - laws of nature, physical and chemical constants, to name a few. This argument is also referred to as the watchmaker analogy and asks what else but a designer must be inferred from a watch? Surely the universe, having all the trappings of design, must have a designer/God.
This argument is usually countered by presenting the possibility of order, the primary reason for inferring a designer, arising randomly in the universe. It is possible to win a lottery even if the chances are extremely minuscule. It is this that I have an issue with.
Normal people, including people who make the above counter-argument, actually think the exact opposite. We can run an experiment with two rooms A and B. A is in disarray with things in no particular order and B is neat and objects have been arranged in a discernable pattern. If someone, anyone, were to be taken into the two rooms and asked which room probably had an occupant then the answer would invariably be room B. I don't think anyone will/can disagree with this deduction.
If so, how do we make an exception for the universe? Why does a perfectly normal person infer a designer/occupant from a well-ordered room/space and then contradict him/herself by rejecting a designer for the universe which too is well-ordered?
Comments (195)
There is a difference between a human tendency towards certain interpretations and such interpretations actually being warranted by the evidence / supported by arguments.
Examples include the fundamental attribution error (attributing behavior to character flaws when it might as well be based on circumstance), or the way humans tend to judge the probability of an event based on how easy it is to recall instances of said event. These are false assumptions, but "normal" humans will nevertheless gravitate towards them.
It's the same with the designer. Humans are toolmakers, so they see purposes and tools everywhere. Humans also have a tendency to anthropomorphise - attributing human like intentionality to everything from pets to natural disasters. That doesn't mean these tendencies actually represent reality.
Quoting TheMadFool
Nature seems to act without a blueprint. But then it has the luxury of an extravagance which human designers do not.
Are you saying this particular inference - design ergo designer - is an erroneous tendency and unwarranted?
Why?
Name one instance of design without a designer. You can't say it's the universe because that would be circular.
Quoting Wayfarer
I humbly disagree. There is order in the universe. From whence this order? Surely an intelligent being of some sort.
As it is, we often make unjustified apophenic assumptions about things we experience. (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia if you're unfamiliar with that.)
That's actually a straight inductive conclusion. We see that watches are made by watch-makers, and conclude that all watches are made by watch-makers. So when we find something which looks like a watch, and acts like a watch, and we say that it is a watch, then we apply the inductive conclusion as a deductive premise, to make the further conclusion that the watch we have found was made by a watch-maker.
Yes. Good point. Knowledge of watches is required to infer a watchmaker but the point is the universe does resemble a watch - an even bigger more complex watch. If I see a water clock and then a digital watch what should I infer but progressive intelligence?
You can characterize it as abductive, too.
You'd need knowledge that universes are the sorts of things that are usually made by universe-makers.
That's an ideal scenario we're asking for. However, I think the critical deciding factor is the resemblance between a watch and the universe - a certain set of principles which determines how each works. In that there's no doubt and so the inference to a designer isn't mistaken.
Who else would make a universe?
I am saying the inference isn't justified. Upon reflection, there is no actual evidence that the universe is designed.
Quoting TheMadFool
That is circular. Calling it a design presupposes a designer. The question is: is the universe a design?
Quoting TheMadFool
Would it be possible to discover anything at all that does not work "according to a certain set of principles"?
Again, it would be an example of apophenia.
Yeah, just like a watch is a natural occurrence. You know, the principles employed by modern scientists tend to break down the division between artificial and natural. Human beings are considered to be a "natural occurrence", so all things which human beings create are also natural occurrences. So it's really meaningless to say that the universe is "a natural occurrence", because this doesn't distinguish it from anything else; all things are natural occurrences, even watches.
That, however, renders any talk of a designer moot as well. Design is eliminated as a category, there are only physical laws.
No. I'm using the sense of "natural" where it's distinct from "made by a person." So watches are artifacts, not natural occurrences in that sense. It's the natural/artificial distinction.
To some there is design in the disorderly and no design in the orderly. What is orderly or disorderly isn’t sufficient for design nor is it enough to just say watches are made by watchmakers. I want to know the materials and processes used for the design of a watch, and why these particular materials and processes as opposed to other materials and processes. ID advocates are usually silent on these matters.
You are asking about the regress of how 'God' was ordered, and so on.
Are "order" and "design" equivalent terms? Can you have order without design?
What does what you say make you but a designer?
Quoting Happenstance
You have a point but if order is insufficient to prove a designer can you give me a counterexample?
That's another side to the argument which I want to avoid at the moment. Thanks though.
Thinking of a 'designer' as best explanation is just availability heuristic. Irregardless of whether all designs at present have designers, there could be an alternative explanation that is unintuitive, but true.
At this point, there are good reasons to not think there's a designer because it's now established the universe operates by rules that result in ordering. Those rules are intrinsic to the structure of the universe and not external to it; i.e. it's not a stagnant, lifeless clay that gets molded by some external hands or force; it is self molding.
Even supposing any sort of designer seems so anthropocentric. Maybe the universe is intrinsically self-creative; maybe there is something or process that 'creates' that is entirely unlike any thing we could imagine and would better be understood as just being a fundamental component of reality itself. It'd be hard to imagine a 'creating' force that isn't itself inextricably linked with what it creates because in order to create it must interact with its creation which implies it shares properties with the creation; those properties being what mediate the interaction. If it shares properties with that creation then its substance is the same as that creation. This is the same reason why strict mind-body dualism doesn't work; how would a soul/body interact if there's no intermediative? My point is, even if there's a creative engine, its likely some other fundamental element of one singular reality - be it a multiverse or whatever else`.
Snowflakes, for example, are fromed from chaotic water molecules.
There is also a good post about order from chaos here: https://www.quora.com/In-the-natural-world-can-order-arise-from-chaos-Are-there-examples-of-this
There is apparent order and apparent chaos in the universe. A designer may or may not be the source. The same with the rooms, on two levels. Both rooms may be inhabited and designed, one by a person who enjoys order the other by a person who enjoys chaos. Both may be uninhabited, since chaos is peppered with little pockets of order (e.g., the solar system).
Second:
Your argument centers on a troublesome analogy: between human beings and "designers." Universes are not a thing, like a room, that a human being creates. Your leap from "human being" (a human being ordered this room) to the abstraction "designer" (a designer designed this ordered room) is unwarranted. The category "designer" contains too many unknowns to be a meaninful tool in philosophical exchange. It was a human being that ordered the room. Your analogy and argument are about humans and should read:
1. Order (e.g., an orderly room) is something a human being creates.
2. The universe is orderly.
3. A human being created the universe.
Both premises are questionable.
(The "rooms" and "universes" analogy seems to have a problem too. One is a thing and one is all things: A category issue?)
As I said, there is no scientific validity to such a distinction. Human beings are natural and so are the things created by human beings. The "artificial" is just a specific type of natural thing.
We can make a distinction between things that people make and things that aren't made by people.
Quoting TheMadFoolI don’t understand what you mean by counterexample given that I think disorder either is not enough to imply design. If you mean an example of order not implying design then I know of a factual story:
One day a Christian missionary in an Amazon Jungle observed a few tribe members digging a trench with their hands so he gave them a couple of spades. The tribal folk didn’t know what to make of the spades so the missionary showed them how to use such tools.
Once they had been shown the function of a spade, the tribe members used them like they’d had spades all their lives. However when it came to the end of the digging, they threw the spades into a river much to the exasperation of the missionary. The reason they did this was because they didn’t realise that the spades had been designed artificially and thought they were just sticks with metal at the end that white folk had pulled up from the ground and so plenty more where they come from. And It’s not as if they had no idea of things being designed given their own huts, hunting weapons and tools.
So the orderly shape of a spade, or its primary function of being a digging tool, didn't imply to this tribe that they had been designed because the tribe lacked the knowledge of spades being manufactured.
Quoting aporiap
Thanks. It's the wide-scale application of this heuristic (order/design ergo designer) in our everyday lives and then making a singular exception of rejecting it when it comes to the universe that I'm asking an explanation for.
I understand that exceptions are the rule, so to speak, but there must be a good reason which I presume is an instance of order/design without a designer. Can you give me an example of that?
Quoting Echarmion
This isn't a good example because the water molecules are chaotic to observers without complete information. To those who possess the right information the molecules will be behaving in accordance with the laws of physics.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
The analogy depends only on the presence/absence of order and this is demonstrated quite well in my argument.
Quoting Happenstance
Sorry but, not to be disparaging, a certain level of education is a prerequisite for seeing the connection which is absent in your story. An interesting story. Thanks.
To All:
The argument from design:
1. There is design/order in the universe
2. If there is design/order in the universe then there exists a designer/God
Ergo
3. There exists a designer/God
One can't reject 1 because order in the universe is obvious.
Therefore we can question only premise 2. To falsify this premise we need to find an instance, a counterexample, of order without design.
What is it that has order without design?
I just thought of something and would like your opinion on it.
Consider the universe as the universal set U. Now the design argument works by picking a subset D consisting of human-designed objects and then generalizes it to the set U.
Now, someone may reject the design argument by referring to another subset of U, call it R, which consists of objects that have order e.g. a flower but obviously isn't human-designed.
As you can see both arguments are on an equal footing, referencing a subset of U and then generalizing to U itself.
There is a particular fallacy that appears relevant viz. the fallacy of composition - attributing to the whole, properties of its parts. This fallacy, if committed, negates both for and against design arguments.
However, we may view this in terms of which analogical argument is the more powerful or are they both equal?
Personally speaking I find the design argument more powerful because the order/design ( the primary relevant feature in the analogy) is multiplied many times from, say, a man-made watch to the universe. In other words there is an even greater order in the universe than in a watch.
The same can't be said of the analogy against the design argument simply because the absence of a designer, as the relevant feature in the analogy, isn't increased from my example, a flower, to the universe.
"If I am inclined to suppose that a mouse has come into being
by spontaneous generation out of grey rags and dust, I shall do well
to examine those rags very closely to see how a mouse may have
hidden in them, how it may have got there and so on. But if I am
convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these things,
then this investigation will perhaps be superfluous.
But first we must learn to understand what it is that opposes such
an examination of details in philosophy."
The way that we know a watch is designed isn't via making interpretive analogies with anything. The way that we know that a watch is designed is because we're familiar with watchmakers, we know that humans invented watches, that watches are an artifact that we produced.
This is true. Under all circumstances.
But if you take a room in which movements of self-propelling objects are present, then without any designer they can take up a shape that looks like someone lives there, and several moments later there is disarray. And several moments later again there is the appearance that someone arranged the objects. IF the objects have a self-propelling ability.
The universe is not stagnant. It is not like a room with inanimate objects. Instead, the universe is full of self-propelling objects. It acts semi-randomly; the self-propelling objects take up all kinds of configurations, all different from the previous ones. There are instances when a section of the universe looks like someone lives there (to live with the analogy of your allegory); but mostly, vast amounts of sections look like there is nobody living there.
The point though, is that there is a number of problems with your approach. The first problem is that if it requires that we see a person making the thing, or that particular type of thing, in order to say that the thing is artificial, then when we find something which has already been made, and we haven't seen a person making that type of thing, we have no way to make any judgement as to whether or not it's artificial.
So TheMadFool has a different approach, claiming that there are certain characteristics which demonstrate that an object has been 'made', or designed, and we can make a judgement based on that criteria. This approach is much more useful, and widely applicable than yours, allowing us to judge a thing by its properties, rather than requiring that we observe the creation of the thing. In many cases, (such as with ancient artifacts) observing the creation of the thing is not possible.
The second problem is even more substantial. This is the fact that you are making an arbitrary division between what is "designed", and what is not designed, based on the assumption that only human beings are capable of designing things. And again, archeological evidence poses a problem here because the humanoid beings, which are not properly "human beings" were designing things. Furthermore, when we see things like a beehive, a bird's nest, and a beaver dam, applying your principles we would have to say that these things are not "designed", because they are not built by human beings. But in reality, "design" is determined by intention, and these things are just as much intentional as anything produced by human beings. All you have done is created an arbitrary division between human beings and the rest of the natural world, one which is not at all supported by the science of biology. Biology gives no such special status to the human species.
Quoting TheMadFool
What I see as the issue, is how we define what constitutes a "designed" object. Terrapin's approach is to limit "designed" to things made by human beings. But as you can see there are numerous problems with this approach. It is not a useful, or helpful approach, and may lead to misunderstanding in numerous different ways. The more realistic approach is to determine the characteristics of "design", and judge things accordingly. I propose that "intention" is what defines design, such that anytime there is evidence of intention, design is implied, regardless of whether the thing was produced by human beings.
It seems to me that disorder doesn't necessarily mean that their isn't a designer either. People leave messes and are disorganized themselves. If I saw your desk in disarray with papers all over, was it you, or some whirlwind that came in and left your desk in that state? When you look at your child's room and it is a mess, was it the children or a earthquake that caused the mess?
So, it seems to me that in order to establish a designer/non-designer, as opposed to order/disorder (because you can have order or disorder with our without designers) you'd have to establish what the designer's intent/goal was.
What would be the intent/goal of the designer? Why would it create an enormous universe that is mostly inhospitable to life? What's the point?
And it seems to me that in proving the existence of a designer, we aren't proving the existence of a "god" - whatever that is, we would be proving the existence of extra-dimensional aliens.
I don't bemoan the lack of life in the enormously overwhelming proportion of the universe.
I claim that an all-knowing mind that is capable of creation would not create. It could know instantly what would happen when in this universe. So why go through the effort of making a model, when you know precisely what the model's state and vectors will be at any time in the infinite expanse of time?
Futile work, mere duplication, no purpose, to prove what's already obviously true to the all-knowing mind.
** Christianity and other monotheistic religions claim that the creator created the world and that the creator knows everything.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Correct but order definitely involves an agent with intent or a plan if you will.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You assume all life has to be like the ones we're familiar with - earthly life forms. However there may be life of a different kind in space or even in stars themselves. Yes I'm speculating but I do want to discourage an earth-centric view of life. I'm reminded of how aliens in movies so closely resemble humans or animals on earth. We've all been surprised by plants and animals found on earth itself haven't we? So why not lend the universe the same amount of regard in terms of possible life forms?
To All
The relevant feature between the universe and a watch is order - a specific arrangement of parts following a set of principles/laws.
The universe is more complex than a watch.
Therefore the universe definitely has a designer.
Order doesn't imply a designer. What tells us that a watch has a designer isn't order. It's the fact that we know that watches are designed. We know their history. We know how they're made.
Sure we do. We're not blank slates in every situation. We know that the sort of thing in question is made by people, because we're aware of that type of thing, its history, etc. That doesn't imply that it's impossible for us to be wrong, but that doesn't matter. When we get info that we're wrong, then we make the adjustment that we need to make.
Given that definition of "order", there is no chaos at all in the physical universe, since everything physical behaves in accordance with the laws of physics. In that case, your question would be incoherent.
This is not true at all. I won't respond to countering this, as this is an internal judgment, which you are unwilling to make. I don't blame you, because in this case I am unwilling to accept the judgement of which you are only capable of making.
I offer to agree to disagree.
But to reiterate, it shows a lack of more profound insight to not be able to see how order can be achieved without an agent or a plan.
And I can prove it too.
Here's the proof:
1. Order can only be achieved by an orderer.
2. Only intelligent planners can be orderers.
3. Planners and orderers have order inside of themselves. They are ordered.
4. Nobody can order himself from scratch.
5. Therefore orderers must be ordered by a previous orderer.
6. This leads to infinite regress of orderers.
7. This is possible.
8. But it does not exclude the chain of events, that an orderer can be created by chance in a chaotic system.
------------
So again, I accept that an infinite regress of orderers can exist, but I reject the idea that an absolute orderer of first order can exist. If 1. and 4. are accepted.
I would agree if I knew what "preponederantly" and "choatic" meant.
I say order and order-makers may be randomly generated. -- Period. No need to proceed farther.
How could you ever get info that you're wrong though? If, being created by design required , by definition, that the thing be created by a human being, and this principle is really wrong because something else like another form of creature or something, actually creates by design as well, how could you ever get information that you're wrong? It's impossible that something other than a human being could create through design, by your very definition, so it's impossible that you could ever get information that something which was created in some way other than by a human being, was actually created by design.
You're left with judging whether the thing was created by a human being in order to determine whether the thing was created by design. And accepting this false principle, that human beings are the only possible type of being capable of creating by design, closes you mind to the reality that other things like beehives, birds nests, and beaver dams are created by design as well.
Quoting god must be atheist
To introduce #8, you must reject the conclusion stated as #5. These two contradict each other. But #5 is produced as a conclusion from #1, #3, and #4. So, the order which an orderer has, can only have been produced by a previous orderer, And #8, that an orderer could be produced by chance is excluded by these premises.
They are mutually exclusive, yes. But they are both possible.
Much like it is possible that god exists, and possible that god does not exist. One excludes the other, but both are possible.
You have to see that. If you don't see that, then you can't see how your criticism isn't right.
Just like the earth reveals through subtle hints that it is must be rather spherical, the universe reveals through subtle hints that it must have a beginning. From there arises the idea of a first cause, God.
The fact that order appears out of chaos, however, does not strike me as particularly special, or even as being such hint.
Separate things in an otherwise chaotic system will spontaneously enter and stay in a highly-improbably game-theoretical equilibrium, when such equilibrium is very, very stable.
John Nash describes the conditions in which such equilibrium will arise in his famous 1950 publication, "Equilibrium points in n-player strategy games".
Say that a thing maximizes its own integrity. If it can enter a situation in which other things contribute to its own integrity, it may favour to stay in that situation. If these other things can also maximize their own integrity by maintaining that situation, then none of the things involved, is willing to change the situation. Such situation may be highly improbable, but once it exists, it will refuse to disappear. So, that creates a new, stable thing consisting of a game-theoretical equilibrium between sub-things.
In a next stage, that new, stable, composed thing can improve its own stability by becoming a member in yet another super-thing. If all the things involved react in the same way, you get again a new situation with a super-thing that consists of things that themselves consist of sub-things. That composition pattern just keeps going on, and creates increasingly improbable results, but that are also increasingly stable.
So, incredibly complex and orderly situations tend to arise pretty much spontaneously from chaos. As far as I am concerned, they do not necessarily point to an underlying design. They could just arbitrarily be satisfying the conditions of particular game equilibria.
There is nothing wrong with the criticism, because the one (if it is correct) excludes the possibility of the other. So you could say that each of them, or both of them are possible, but it is incorrect to say that they are "both possible", as this implies the two of them collectively.
And you state at #8 "it does not exclude the chain of events...", when actually 1 - 5 does exclude that chain of events. By saying this you imply that the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, when actually each one excludes the possibility of the other.
Quoting alcontali
It is actually impossible for order to appear out of pure chaos, this was demonstrated logically by Aristotle. To state the opposite is to misunderstand, or change what is meant by "pure chaos".
Quoting alcontali
The problem with this analogy is that you already assume the existence of "a thing", and this implies order. "A thing" is an ordered existence. Lack of order would actually mean a lack of things. In Aristotelian terms a lack of order would simply be the "potential" for existence of a thing. So if you are describing how order comes out of non-order, you cannot start with the existence of a thing, because this is to presume the existence of order already.
Quoting alcontali
Maybe you do believe this, but you seem to misunderstand what "chaos", or complete lack of order really entails.
Not by a human being. What I wrote is "I'm using the sense of 'natural' where it's distinct from 'made by a person.'" I chose those words carefully. "Person" is broader than "human." There can be persons of different species, or even "supernatural" types of persons, if there were to be such things.
We learn that we're wrong, when we are, via an investigation into the object in question. Again, we're not simply in the dark when it comes to scientific, forensic, etc. investigations. We can formulate hypotheses and then discover that our assumptions were wrong. The butler didn't kill Mr. Jones, the cook did, for example. We can discover such things via systematic investigations.
OK, what defines "a person"? Is a beaver a person, or a bird a person? Is a rock a person?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Now I understand why we might find ourselves to be wrong. We might assume that a beaver is not a person, or that a rock is not a person, and then find out at a later date that these things really acted as persons. Aren't you really just appealing to a division in the classes of "agency"? There is a type of agent which acts with intention (person) and a type of agent which acts from a simple chemical process (like a cleaning agent).
As someone interested in philosophy, this is a good thing for you to think about, as it has long been seen as an important ontological issue that's often very contentious. It's as important as asking, say, "What is/what is to count as justification?" in epistemology.
My comments above do not hinge on a particular definition of personhood, so I don't want to sidetrack things by arguing about that. Any commonly proposed definition you like (with an emphasis on "commonly proposed") would be fine to use. But of course, we have to be familiar with the personhood issue in philosophy to be familiar with commonly proposed definitions.
Here's a bit of background courtesy of two of the most commonly cited sources. It's worth reading the two articles in full (SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/ ) (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood)
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SEP: "What is it to be a person, as opposed to a nonperson? What have we people got that nonpeople haven’t got? More specifically, we can ask at what point in our development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. An ideal account of personhood would be a definition of the word person, taking the form ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if … x … t …’, with the blanks appropriately filled in. The most common answer is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties then (e.g. Baker 2000: ch. 3). Others propose a less direct connection between personhood and mental properties: for example that to be a person is be capable of acquiring those properties (Chisholm 1976: 136f.), or to belong to a kind whose members typically have them when healthy and mature (Wiggins 1980: ch. 6)."
Wikipedia: "Personhood is the status of being a person. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law and is closely tied with legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a natural person or legal personality has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.[1]
Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate and has been questioned critically during the abolition of human and nonhuman slavery, in theology, in debates about abortion and in fetal rights and/or reproductive rights, in animal rights activism, in theology and ontology, in ethical theory, and in debates about corporate personhood and the beginning of human personhood.[2]
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How would one know that one is all-knowing? Would that even qualify as "knowledge"? It seems to me that "all-knowing" is an incoherent term and doesn't make sense to apply that to an entity. It makes more sense to just say the "god" IS the universe. If that is the case, then I prefer to use the term, "universe", and not "all-knowing god", as that includes all sorts of unnecessarily loaded implications.
I don't know if you had a chance to think it through or you had a chance to proofread your script.
You wrote: "So you could say that ... both of them are possible, but it is incorrect to say that they are "both possible" Why is one correct and the other incorrect? I think the two say the same thing.
In the second quote, I made a mistake in the wording, and I admit it. It was a fatal mistake. I ought to have written, "if you assume that 1. and 2. are not true, or not necessarily true, then it is possible Quoting god must be atheist
I regret the error.
So please reconsider my argument with the above corrections.
The insight I requested (and it came out all wrong, I apologize), is that 1 and 2 can be true, but they also can be false. I am not saying or arguing for whether those two are false or true; but I insist that both alternatives are possible.
Again, congratulations for catching me on this mistake. Please reconsider my stance as corrected in this post. Thanks.
No, it doesn't. That was my point - that we need to reject this notion that order and design go hand in hand. It is the goal that we need to determine as the goal is the design.
Order is simply how minds categorize information. Minds look for patterns so that they can make predictions which make it easier to survive. Not only that, but limited perspective of time would make us think that this "short" period of "order" that we live in is how the universe is all the time and forever. It is predicted that the universe will die a slow cold death where eventually all matter breaks apart. Does that sound like design to you?
The fact that we exist is not evidence that there is design. Its' like saying that winning the lottery was designed because how could I win such a randomly determined contest with enormously low odds? The universe isn't random, nor is the emergence of life a low-odds event. It is very possible that life is an inherent property of the universe as much as space and time are - not because of it being designed, but because that is just how things happened and are.
It's like you are claiming that you know that universes can't exist with life without there being design. How do you know that? How do you know the odds of life evolving in this universe, or any other?
There is nothing to know about god. I am on the opinion that there is nothing humans can learn or know about god until things in this world fundamentally change, furthermore, it is not even guaranteed that there is a god or there are gods. It is merely a belief that there are gods, not knowledge. Much like the opinion that there are no gods is not knowledge, but opinion.
If you reject the assumption that god is all-knowing, then my statement does not stand.
In Judaism, in Christianity, and in Islam the gods are all-knowing. It is a given in those religions, and the believers insist that it's true. I am not familiar with Hinduism, and I admit to that.
So you are saying, that the Hindu gods are not as intelligent and well-informed as the Jewish, Christian and Muslim gods, according to the respective believers of these four religions?
It's not. You should think about it more objectively. Claiming a god exists is a positive assertion without any evidence. It is an unfalsifiable claim.
There are many unfalsifiable claims - probably more than falsifiable ones. Why would you put weight into any unfalsifiable claim while rejecting others if they all (religious, scientific, etc. claims) have the same amount of evidence - none. The existence of unicorns is just as likely as the existence of gods, but I'll bet your reject the existence of unicorns without being on the fence. That would be inconsistent.
What I do is throw all unfalsifiable claims in the same heap and they all hold the same amount of weight - none - until someone can provide some kind of evidence or make a falsifiable claim in regards to their belief. I am an a-unfalsifiable-beliefist, not just an a-theist.
So is the claim that a god does not exist. Or some gods do not exist. If you don't believe me, prove it to me.
I personally believe that there are no gods or god. But I allow the possibility that they do exist. We just don't have any evidence either way. And we certainly don't have any knowledge what they are, what they want, what they want of us, what they can do, and what they will do. This is unknown to humans at this point, on the odds that there are actually gods (or god).
---------------
Aside from that, I don't claim that a god exists. I claim that it is possible that a god exists. Big difference.
And you must think about it more philosophically.
I don't think that Aristotle was particularly familiar with self-organizing systems or the concept of spontaneous order:
Spontaneous order, also named self-organization in the hard sciences, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.[1].
It is closely related to game theory, which is largely based on the work of John von Neumann and especially John Nash, after the second world war:
Game studies. The concept of spontaneous order is closely related with modern game studies. As early as the 1940s, historian Johan Huizinga wrote that "in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primeval soil of play." Following on this in his book The Fatal Conceit, Hayek notably wrote that "a game is indeed a clear instance of a process wherein obedience to common rules by elements pursuing different and even conflicting purposes results in overall order."
The principle of emergent behaviour is a similar concept:
An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. Systems with emergent properties or emergent structures may appear to defy entropic principles and the second law of thermodynamics, because they form and increase order despite the lack of command and central control. This is possible because open systems can extract information and order out of the environment.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You seem to be unfamiliar with the concepts of "spontaneous order" and "emergent behaviour" which are quite modern, only a few decades old, actually. Maybe it would make sense for you to read some publications from after the second world war. Unlike metaphysics, mathematics has made incredible progress in the 20th century.
"Intelligent design" theory acknowledges that mere order is insufficient, instead requiring "specified complexity" to count as evidence of design. Its proponents cite well-established scientific fields, such as forensics and archaeology, that have particular methods and criteria for distinguishing intentional agency from natural processes.
However, as with any hypothesis, plausibility depends on acceptance of the underlying assumptions, and an objection such as that of carries some weight. Of course, we also have no experience with universes popping into existence or entirely new kinds of animals evolving, so it cuts both ways to a certain extent.
You do seem fixated on the idea that order is sufficient for design, so say for argument's sake I agree with you that order is sufficient to imply design and because I'm such a curious cat, I have a question of my own: how would an intelligent designer go about creating this orderly design?
I'm confident you'll have a certain level of education to answer this question.
So let me see if I understand you. You are saying that we know whether or not something was produced by design, by knowing whether or not it was produced by a "person". But what it takes to be a "person" is left undefined, and extremely vague. Doesn't that leave whether or not a thing was created by design as undeterminable?
Quoting god must be atheist
English is probably not your first language, because you seem to be missing out in some nuances. The way I use "both possible" implies the two together, collectively. So to say it more clearly, it is impossible to have both. This uses "both" to refer to the two collectively, and we agree that they are mutually exclusive, so it is impossible to have both, together. But when I said they are "both possible" it refers to each of the two individually, and individually each is possible. Therefore I can say that both are possible, but to have both is impossible. "Both" is used in two distinct ways, one time referring to each of the two individually, and the other referring to the two together, collectively. Sorry no confusion or equivocation was intended.
Quoting god must be atheist
OK, but as I explained in my last post, directed at alcontali, I believe that it is impossible for order to come from disorder, in any absolute sense (meaning order cannot come from absolute disorder).
Quoting alcontali
"Spontaneous order", is nothing but a rehash of the old concept "spontaneous generation", which was long ago disproven. It's pie in the sky.
Quoting alcontali
As I said, your example of game theory starts with the existence of things, which itself implies order. So the theories you refer to do not describe order coming from disorder, only one form of order coming from another form of order. If you believe that these theories describe order coming from disorder, you have been misled.
Quoting alcontali
Yes, I've noticed that mathematics has made incredible progress in misleading people. Luckily I'm not one of them. You ought to learn how to read these theories more critically and free yourself from the binds of such deception.
An intelligent designer would have intent of ends/objectives and then think of means to achieve these ends. Take your story of digging holes - it begins with sticks, then iron hoes and then to mechanization. It's not just purpose that indicates design but also the way designed objects evolve over time in terms of efficiency or power or whatnot.
That really depends on how you define "order" versus "chaos" or "disorder". The following definition for self-organization does not seem to use your definition:
Self-organization, also called (in the social sciences) spontaneous order, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. Self-organization occurs in many physical, chemical, biological, robotic, and cognitive systems. Examples of self-organization include crystallization, thermal convection of fluids, chemical oscillation, animal swarming, neural circuits, and artificial neural networks.
As I already pointed out, this "self-organization" view in exact sciences has an important foundation in John Nash's Nobel-prize winning (1994) publication (1950), "Equilibrium points in n-player strategy games", which predicts the existence of highly improbably but very stable structure-creating equilibrium-seeking processes. You can find a copy of this theorem-cum-proof in the official database of the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" (PNAS).
I am obviously not familiar with the nitty-gritty details of how they investigate self-organization in various physical, chemical, and biological systems, as these are highly empirical subjects that seek to guarantee minimum standards of real-world correspondence, and therefore, spend a lot of money and effort on activities such as experimental testing.
I only peruse the mathematical foundations of why it makes sense to think like that.
So, yes, I can somehow "see" the profound implications of John Nash's Nobel-prize winning discovery, and why it strongly suggests a widespread principle of self-organization.
While I certainly agree that system-bound knowledge is based on basic beliefs that must necessarily come from elsewhere, and that the universe itself must necessarily be the result of principles that lie outside of it, I avoid applying that view to observable phenomena WITHIN the universe.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, we know exactly what the basic beliefs are in mathematics. The axioms are not a secret. Therefore, we strictly control the source of deception. There is no hidden deception in mathematics.
Furthermore, as I already pointed out, mathematics is not about real-world correspondence. Any such claim will first have to go through the hands of empirical disciplines, who will then take responsibility for what they say about the real, physical world.
That is also one reason for my very negative views on constructivism.
Unlike the constructivists, I do not believe that mathematics should directly link to the real, physical world, without regulating and mediating such real-world claim first by empirical, minimum standards for correspondence.
So, yes, I am critical about particular mathematical philosophies, but I also subscribe to other ones. For example, I am quite happy with Platonism, structuralism, logicism, and formalism, which each of them emphasize one aspect of mathematics, which is clearly there to me. I may not agree with all ontological views, for example, by decisively rejecting constructivism, but I also do not reject all of them.
Yes. The universe is orders of magnitude more complex in its order, therefore requiring a designer. @Terrapin Station referred to a disanalogy between a watch and the universe but you spoke against that by alluding to complexity.
Are you saying order is subjective, it's more like an impression and not objective, a truth about reality?
If yes then reality should be frequently countering the "perceived" order and it should be impossible to plan anything.
You also point out flaws in the design - heat death - but I don't think eternal existence is part of the plan as such. Even the best stories have an end.
I find this confusing because game-theory is about strategy and that involves some rules which isn't chaos to my knowledge. Maybe I'm mistaken. Kindly clarify how order may arise from chaos. I thought it was the other way around.
It is also the other way around. I don't think that anybody is denying the irreversible trend to entropy. However, there are also other principles at play. The likelihood of a particular situation does not matter as much as we may think. For example, a highly-improbable situation may be an incredibly stable game-theoretical equilibrium. Many structures in nature are highly improbable, but they still exist, because they are also incredibly stable.
Then, you have at least one other principle which throws a spanner in the works: group re-normalization. Some elements are substantially more stubborn than others, even in physics. These other elements will just acquiesce to what these few stubborn elements want. That leads again to absolutely improbable outcomes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about that in "The most intolerant wins":
[i]The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority.
This example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was attending the New England Complex Systems institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was observant and only ate Kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid called lemonade, and another Kosher person commented: “liquids around here are Kosher”. We looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a U inside a circle, indicating that it was Kosher. The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the minuscule print. As to others, like myself, I had been speaking prose all these years without knowing, drinking Kosher liquids without knowing they were Kosher liquids.[/i]
However this isn't chaos giving rise to order. Anyway I can now conceive of order arising from chaos but such events would be improbable and short-lived. Of course we mustn't forget the qualifier "relative" for "improbable" and "short-lived".
Why is it incoherent?
Imagine that a thing can improve its own stability by forming an equilibrium with other things, who also improve their own stability by doing that. In that case, that equilibrium is a super-thing with these existing things as sub-things. John Nash's paper "Equilibrium points in n-player strategy games" enumerates the precise conditions in which this will happen.
So, now we have super-things. Of course, the process just repeats, because super-things may be able to improve their own stability by forming an equilibrium with other super-things. So, layer after layer, you get a composition process that yields increasingly improbable structures that are increasingly stable.
It explains why a large molecule tends to be more stable than free-floating atoms, which in turn, tend to be more stable than free-floating electrons, protons, and neutrons. This large molecule, will become even more internally stable, if it becomes part of a living body, which tends to be longer-lived than its constituent molecules (Within reason, that body has a process of replacing broken sub-things).
A human body may live for almost 80 years, but its constituent free-floating electrons, protons, and neutrons are very short-lived. If these constituent parts want to stay around longer, and they seem to do, they will have to join an equilibrium with other similar parts. The influence of these other parts through the equilibrium will substantially improve their own internal stability, and therefore, make them live longer.
Everything physical behaves according to the laws of physics. If the laws of physics are "order", then everything physical is thus ordered. You were asking for examples for order arising out of Chaos. But since everything physical is already ordered, where would such examples come from?
The problem is that in self-organization theory, "disorder" is not defined in any rigorous way. For something to be a "system" requires some form of order. Order is inherent within a "system", by definition. So the "initially disordered system" is really a contradiction because "system" requires order. What is really described by this theory is some form of order arising from another form of order, not order arising from disorder.
Quoting alcontali
There may be some Nobel prize winning work here, but the work does not show order arising from disorder. And if it refers to a "disordered system", which is of course contradictory, it is Nobel prize winning deception. Maybe you didn't know that Nobel prizes might be given to deceivers.
Quoting alcontali
I take that as a joke.
Quoting alcontali
Platonism itself is a falsity, disproven by Aristotle. But it is essential to some modern day mathematical axioms, which require that mathematical symbols refer to mathematical objects. So right here we find deception hidden within mathematical axioms, when a mathematician claims that a symbol refers to a non-existent Platonic object.
It wasn't left undefined. There are common definitions of personhood. I directed you towards some of them via the articles in question. I didn't forward a definition because I'm not interested in arguing about definitions. I said that you could use any common definition of it that you like.
Again, it has nothing to do with order or complexity, assuming there are plausible ways to quantify such things in the first place.
You don't seem to understand what unfalsifiable means. Prove to me that unicorns don't exist, or that I'm not Elvis reincarnated. It's not the responsibility of others to prove or disprove some claim. You are making the claim - you prove it. I didn't make a claim. You are. It is up to you to prove it to me. One can only reject the existence of some thing AFTER a positive claim for it's existence is made. One can't make assertions that some thing doesn't exist before some claim is made for it's existence. I never made a claim. You did. Now you prove it to me. If I reject your claim, then I'm doing so based on your lack of evidence, not any proof that I need to supply.
Quoting god must be atheist
What the hell is a "god". Just replace "god" with "aliens" in your post and we should be good to go. I can accept the possible existence of aliens, but not "gods" as I don't understand the concept, or how "gods" would be different from "aliens".
Quoting god must be atheist
LOL - so thinking philosophically is not thinking objectively? That would seem to be the case for some people on this forum.
Quoting TheMadFool
Not necessarily impossible. Like I said, your concept of time is limited - as if this small span of time that humans exist in is the goal of some designer - while ignoring the huge expanses of time where there appears to be no goal.
Quoting TheMadFool
Right - so your claims are unfalsifiable. The hoof-prints in the sand are evidence that unicorns exist.
What are the odds that human beings exist in some universe without a designer? How do you know? Answer the question.
I appreciate it's your belief, and against belief I have no logical argument.**
Let me know if anything changes.
** Not you, but people tenaciously cling on to beliefs like the holy trinity and like an entity can be omnipotent. So if I can't sway someone on a belief which is impossible, I won't even attempt to sway a person on a belief that is possible (but he believes it's the ONLY possible of two alternatives).
If you don't know what the hell you are arguing about, then why are you arguing?
One more case where you ought to have thought philosophically.
I say this, because objectivity / subjectivity has nothing to do with proving or disproving the existence of god, or the non-existence of god. It is not a matter that can be true one way (objectively / subjectively) but wrong the other way (objectively/ subjectively). So that's why I said you must think philosophically, for you to consider that the existence of god is such a proposition in philosophy.
Quoting god must be atheist
Quoting god must be atheist
I am sorry, but I see no nuance difference between these two expressions.
I am on the opinion, @Metaphysical Undercover, that you may or may not be a native speaker of English, but you can't tell two equivalent sayings as being equivalent when they are.
Why you have that fault, I don't know. It is none of my business why you are incapable to see equivalence in English expressions.
That is actually a reasonable interpretation. I can live with that. It is just that the people involved in working on that theory have developed their own lingo and views. I don't feel like arguing with them over this, really.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, The Nobel Prize system is probably full of deceivers. Nassim Taleb is certainly sure of that:
[i]Taleb has called for cancellation of the Nobel Prize in Economics, saying that the damage from economic theories can be devastating.
Taleb and Nobel laureate Myron Scholes have traded personal attacks, particularly after Taleb's paper with Espen Haug on why nobody used the Black–Scholes–Merton formula. Taleb said that Scholes was responsible for the financial crises of 2008, and suggested that "this guy should be in a retirement home doing Sudoku. His funds have blown up twice. He shouldn't be allowed in Washington to lecture anyone on risk."
Haug and Taleb (2011) listed hundreds of research documents showing the Black–Scholes formula was not Scholes' at all, and argued that the economics establishment ignored literature by practitioners and mathematicians (such as Ed Thorp), who had developed a more sophisticated version of the formula.[89][/i]
And then there is, of course, also the acrimonious insult fests with Stiglitz and Krugman about bitcoin. These two Nobel laureates are hated by the bitcoin community for their deceptive remarks.
Furthermore, the canonical prize in mathematics is the Fields medal. It is normally not possible to get the Nobel prize for mathematics.
Firstly, I think you are equivocating ordered and 'design'. The way in which a designer makes designs, which are ordered, is fundamentally different from the way nature orders. A designer, by necessity, intervenes on otherwise inanimate material to construct a particular design. A designer, by necessity, is an external force that designs something external to it. Order or patterns, on the other hand, is a more encompassing term and includes designs (i.e. patterns constructed, by an external agent) or self organized patterns. In nature, order and patterning is intrinsic to nature itself. I.e. a 'dog', cat, snowflake are all self organized; those things don't have external agents constructing them, hence they are not 'designed'.
Secondly, even if we equivocate order and design, that heuristic does not support the conclusion. I.e. Even if every design we know has a designer, not every design necessarily has a designer. In the same way that there being clouds in the sky does not imply rain. If rain then cloudy and if designer, then design, yes both of these are true but they are not exhaustive - i.e. the antecedent can still be false while the conclusion true.
For example:
"The most common answer is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties..." Said properties are left undisclosed.
Wikipedia: "Personhood is the status of being a person. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law..."
"Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate and has been questioned critically..."
These are quotes from your own post. "Common definitions" (notice your use of the plural) indicates that there is no universal convention, therefore no accepted definition. Clearly, "person" was left undefined, by you.
Quoting god must be atheist
If the belief is illogical, it is easy to produce logical argument against it. That's why I can produce endless logical arguments against the belief that order can arise from disorder.
Quoting god must be atheist
There is no such thing as equivalence in English expressions. Each expression is unique. I don't see imaginary things, and that's why I don't see equivalence in English expressions.
Quoting alcontali
I'm glad that you see this in a way similar to me.
Quoting alcontali
I' don't mind arguing over this. When I see people barking up the wrong tree, I feel morally obliged to point it out to others, that these people are barking up the wrong tree. The ones actually barking up the wrong tree are usually beyond hope of emancipation, so it might be a waste of time to point it out to them.
No, mere complexity is also insufficient; "intelligent design" theory requires specified complexity and/or irreducible complexity to count as evidence of design. Again, the plausibility of such an approach depends on one's opinion of the underlying assumptions.
Because I'm not the one making the claim that some thing exists! If you are, then define that thing if you expect me to believe in it too. If you can't define it, then how do you expect to prove it to me? Do you understand how "Making a claim and proving it", works?
If I made the claim that Smelshlops exits, and then told you if you didn't know what Smelshlops are then you don't know what you're arguing about, and that you need to accept that they might possibly exist without defining what it is, then you'd think I was nuts. :roll:
Quoting god must be atheist
I never said objectivity/subjectivity has to do with proving or disproving god. I said it has to do with being consistent in thinking about and accepting claims that have the same amount of evidence - none. You aren't being consistent in your acceptance of claims that have the same amount of evidence. Smelshlops are just as likely to exist as Gods, yet you only accept the existence of Gods.
How the universe came to be is a scientific matter, not a philosophical one.
Ha!
For your information, I am not making that claim either. I am making the claim that it is possible for that thing to exist. Whether it exists or not, is beyond my ability to claim, show, prove, or even support as a theory.
What is the measure of complexity? What is its unit value? How is it defined?
I think the quote makes sense, but only intuitively and qualitatively, not quantitatively.
If it's not quantifiable, then talking about multiples of the quality is meaningless.
I.e. "the Mona Lisa is 5.4 times more beautiful than "The Scream" by Munck." Beauty is not quantifiable. The same problem exists with complexity.
Yes, and I proved it. I am talking "possibilities" not facts. Do you understand the difference between probability and actual occurrence?
Show me evidence that god does not exist. It is the same amount that god exists -- zero.
I don't expect you to believe anything. I only expect you to accept that the belief in it is just as valid and has equal probability of being true as not believing in it.
You are really seriously troubled by not noticing the difference between "what is" and "what can be".
You seek proof of "what is" when that proof does not exist. You fault me for not providing that proof; I never promised that proof to you.
You must get out of the groove of what you THINK I am talking about. You think I am insisting that god exist. Far from the truth. I insist that there is no proof for god's existence, and there is no proof against god's existence. Therefore the two outcomes are equivalent to each other in probability values.
THIS if you can't understand, then I don't know how else to explain to you, @Harry Hindu.
How do you think then the word Equivalence came about? "Equivalence in expressions is a thing which does not exist." -- entry in the great Encyclopaedia by @Metaphysical Undercover.
Yeah, there's not one universal defintion. That's why I said to use whatever common definition you prefer. My comments didn't hinge on a particular definition. It's just that I don't want to argue about definitions of personhood.
The question of the thread is how to tell the difference between design and no design. You refer to personhood; something can only have been designed if it was created by a person. Now you say that one is free to define "person" however one pleases. So you have made absolutely no progress toward answering the question. The distinction between design and no design is made according to whether or not there was a "person" involved, but an individual is free to use whatever definition of "person" that one might dream up. How is that useful?
I do believe you are headed toward a circle, and you would define "person" as an agent which is capable of creating by design. Is this what you were thinking of? If not, then elucidate, tell me what you believe constitutes being a person, as this is what you have mentioned as the criteria for making the distinction between design and no design.
If you'd prefer not to argue about what constitutes personhood, then why partake in this thread, where you have already stated that personhood is the criteria for distinguishing between design and no design?
It is interesting to compare the role of a human designer to something like a creator of all that we know as our universe. We are in an awkward position to opine upon the matter.
a) God exists, and created the Universe
b) God does not exist and the Universe was created (by itself?)
c) God exists, and did not create the Universe
I think that (a) and (c) are either redundant or mutually exclusive. If that is the case, we are left with (a) and (b). Now, can scientific study ever settle the issue? Can faith ever settle the issue? I believe the former is possible, but the latter is never possible: as long as there is faith, facts will never be sufficient to convince everyone, or the "faithful few".
My question again is, are we bound to accept (a) over (b) by the sheer weight of reason? I don't think the argument about a designer can be settled without settling the argument on the existence of God. Arguing about design does seem to miss the point.
And for the Faithful, the argument against the existence of God can will never hold any credence, because they choose to believe.
You have to start with defining god so that I may show the incoherence of the concept.
Actually, that is how all "God Exists" thread should start - in defining the "god" they are talking about. There have been countless versions throughout human history. Which one are you talking about?
It's useful because it is elucidating the falseness of the problem in the first place (although that may well not have been Terrapin's intent).
Why do we have a word 'designed' as a categorising term to distinguish from other apparently ordered matter? What does it mean to say something is 'designed'? It means put together with intent. But intent is a property of persons not objects. So we cannot see in an object the intent of the person.
A sentence incidentally written by a random process iterated a million times is indistinguishable in every way from a sentence written that way with intent apart from by its history. Same for any object. It is only by its history which we can distinguish objects ordered by intent from objects ordered by chance.
To me, any definition will do.
Because we have no evidence of god, we have no evidence of god's alleged quality, quantity, capability, wishes, demands, if any and if they exist in the first place.
You ask me to define something that we have no reliable evidence of. "Define the thing that nobody has seen, heard, eaten, touched, was touched by, etc etc".
So... this is not a request I could fulfill, and I assert, that nobody else human can define god with any degree of certainty.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/god-west/
Is it irrational to hold to the God-concept in the light of "no evidence" or the contrary? Once you admit God as Being, then God as Creator immediately follows.
Strangely enough, none of the arguments for Design appear to be conclusive, or to put it another way, arguments for design are not arguments for God's existence, these fall within the category of circumstantial evidence, it would seem.
Quoting Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
Quoting IEP
No. I specifically did not say that. I said that any of the common definitions of personhood would do.
Actually I wouldn't be inclined to make such a distinction, it appears like if it is ordered, it must have been designed, so there is no need for that distinction.
Quoting Isaac
I believe it is a mistake to restrict "intent" to persons, claiming that only persons have intent. As in my earlier examples, things like beehives, beaver dams, and birds nests, exhibit intent, and we would not call the authors of these things persons. Yes, persons have intent , but they are not the only things with intent. So I think that we must widen the category of things which have intent, beyond just persons. That's what I was getting at in my discussion with terrapin, the use of "person" is generally restricted to refer to human beings only, but evidence indicates that beings other than human beings definitely have intent.
Quoting Isaac
I don't believe this at all. Any "random process" which produces a sentence would necessarily have been created with that intention. Likewise, it is contradictory to say that objects could be ordered by chance, because then they would not be ordered. So all you are doing here is reciting contradictory nonsense.
Quoting Terrapin Station
As I've been trying to explain to you, beings other than persons create and do things with intent. So I find your assertions to be unacceptable. One does not have to be a person to create by design.
So what common definition of personhood are you employing?
What I consider the most common, a person is an individual human being.
How. What law of physics/nature prevents things from appearing ordered by chance. By definition, a chance event can result in any consequence it is not artificially restricted to chaotic looking one's. A random throw of the dice, with no intent, can still land 1,2,3,4,5,6.
The subject here is designed/not designed. In order for there to even be a category 'not designed' it has to be the case that some force can produce a state of affairs which are 'not designed'. Are you suggesting it is somehow impossible for this state of affairs to nonetheless appear to be designed by chance?
That's not a common definition of "personhood."
That's why I said any definition is fine, but it has to be a common definition of personhood.
How about Zeus?
Quoting god must be atheistThen how could a human even come to have the concept of "god" in their head if there is no reason (evidence) for them to have it?
Reasoning entails using reasons to support some claim. If there isn't a reason to claim something, why claim it?
For the same reason or mental process which enables humans to create fiction.
It only takes a leap of faith to take fiction for reality.
There are tons of reasons. 1. To help you oppress a great number of people at once, without too much effort. 2. To help you make people behave in certain ways that you want them to. 3. To get their monies and to get them to serve you in other ways. 4. To help you explain unexplainable phenomena you encounter in your life (this is historical) 5. ETC.
Exactly. Now what does "fiction" mean?
Is there a difference between Zeus being a god and being fiction, or not? If there is, how do you show it?
I'm not going into a discussion of infinite regress of questions by you asking me to define things for you. Sorry; that's not my cup of tea.
So the definition of god is "mass delusions propagated by the elites in culture"?
So sorry, you have to answer these two questions for yourself. I am not going into an infinite regress of enlightening you.
Please understand: I am not your paid teacher.
Consider the definition of order: "a specified sequence". Without the "specified" part, the sequence might appear to be ordered, but it is not. So the chance throwing of the die might produce 1,2,3,4,5,6, but it was not specified and therefore not ordered. A chance occurrence, by the meaning of "chance", cannot be an ordered occurrence by the meaning of "ordered". Whether or not one might say that a chance occurrence appeared to be ordered, or vise versa would depend on context, and what exactly would be meant by this.
Quoting Isaac
There is a problem with the idea of a force producing a not-designed state, if the existing state is already designed. That force must come from within the existing designed state, an would therefore be part of the design. How could you say that the outcome of a design is not designed? Perhaps we could appeal to accidents or mistakes, but I think that the not-designed state could only come from a not-designed state.
And, as I explained above, it is impossible by way of contradiction for a designed state to come by chance. So it doesn't make sense to say that a designed state could "appear" to be designed by chance. It's like saying that a hectogon appears to be a circle. If you know it's a hectogon (designed state), and are calling it such, then you know it's not a circle (created by chance), so it doesn't make sense to say that it appears to be a circle (created by chance), when you know it's not.
Quoting Terrapin Station
That was the number one definition of "person" in my OED, "an individual human being". That's why I chose it. For "personhood" I find "the quality or condition of being an individual person". What else did you have in mind?
As I suspected, I still think you are seeking some definition of "person" which will make your argument circular. A "design" is something only created by a "person" A "person" is the type of thing which could create a "design". What's the point?
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Not at all, I could previously specify that the 'order' I'm looking for is 1,2,3,4,5,6, then it is a 'specified sequence'. I then throw the die six times, it lands 1,2,3,4,5,6 exactly as I specified. It has not now become the case that the order arose by design, it arose by chance.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, but this is exactly the context here. The OP is about the argument from design. The fact that the universe 'appears' to be designed, ordered etc. So if you say, "everything that appears ordered/designed is ordered/designed by definition" then you've either just begged the question, or defined away the distinction the whole investigation was trying to examine. The question is a simple one - does something appearing to us to be ordered/designed mean that some intentional force must have ordered/designed it? It's about what we can inductively assume from the evidence of order. If you want to say that the term "order" automatically implies a designer simply by the use of the term, then (apart from completely disagreeing with you) we'll just need another word to describe things which look like things which are ordered but might not be.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes - by appealing to accidents and mistakes. What's wrong with that? Are you going to define away 'accident' now?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We're not talking about a designed state. We're talking about a state which 'appears' designed. One which has a type of order we recognise from other states we know to be designed.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, we're not talking about states we know to be designed. We're talking about states which bear a resemblance to those we know to be designed and what we can rationally glean from that. I'm saying that if we call a state 'designed' on the grounds that it was intentionally made that way, then it is reasonable to conclude that states which appear to be designed (ie ones which look superficially similar but whose history we do not know) may not actually be so, if we can point to states which look designed/ordered, but which we know to have happened by chance, or without intent. We have examples of such states.
Clearly that order arose by design. You specified the desired order, you threw the dice intentionally to create that order, and succeeded in creating that order. Any other set of throws would have been a mistake, or failure in succeeding at doing what you were trying to do. When someone proceeds in the process of trial and error, and has success, we cannot say that the success was not designed.
Quoting Isaac
I don't see your point here. Are you suggesting that we could judge something as having order, when in reality it really has absolutely no order, and what we thought was order was just an "appearance" of order? I think that's nonsense, because even for the thing to appear to us as something which could be judged, requires that it has some kind of order. Don't you agree that this is the way that the human body with its sensual apparatus works, we only sense things that are orderly?
I think what we are lacking here, and why there is such a gap between what you are saying and what I am saying, is a clear indication of what "order" and "disorder" mean, how such things would manifest in the world. Here's what I propose. Consider that we live in a world in which time is passing. Also, as time passes things change. What I think is that if when time passes in the world, there is a continuity of existence (sometimes expressed as inertia), then there is order in the world. For a thing which is composed of parts, to maintain its composure as time passes, requires that the parts are ordered to do this. So for instance, as time passes I see that the objects around me (which are composed of tiny parts) remain intact, as the objects which they are. I know that it is possible for these things to be annihilated, so I conclude that the parts are "ordered" so as to make the things around me remain intact as time passes. "Disorder" would imply that all the parts of all the things in the world would exist in any random way from one moment to the next. Can you agree with this proposal, and if not, why not?
Quoting Isaac
I just threw that suggestion in, to see how you would respond. The problem is that accidents and mistakes are inherent to intentional acts. So if someone is trying to produce one thing, and instead they produce something not quite as intended, this does not mean that the thing produced was not designed. It just means that the thing produced did not come out quite in the way that it was planned. But this does not remove the fact that the thing's existence was planned.
This brings up the issue of one thing having many different aspects. We can look at a thing as a whole, and say that it was planned, or designed, but there might be certain aspects of the thing which were not designed, they came into being accidentally, or by mistake, even though the thing overall was designed. Generally this is due to the designer failing to grasp all the intricacies or complexities of the situation, or materials being used. Something like that might cause a mistake or accident. Do you agree with this line of thinking? If so, let's apply it to the universe as a whole. The universe displays order, and the property of having been designed, as described above in my proposal, with the concept of "inertia". However, there may still be certain aspects of the universe which don't seem to have any order at all. This would not mean that the universe is without order, it would just mean that there may be mistakes in the design.
Quoting Isaac
Again, I see this as an unsound distinction. If something actually existed without order, it could not even appear to us at all. It would be so random, from one moment to the next (and that's an extremely short time), that it could not even appear to our senses which are programmed to perceive order. For example, some people propose that this sort of randomness exists at the quantum level. But this randomness doesn't even appear to our senses at all. We have to set up a complex apparatus to determine that such a disorder might actually be something real.
Therefore, I believe that if a "state" appears to us, it is necessarily designed, because we could not perceive a disordered state. This is a real, sound premise, because our perceptual systems of sensation could not make any sense out of a disordered state, so a "disordered state" could not appear to us. And since a "state" must have temporal extension, "disordered state" is actually contradictory. So your premise of a state which appears to be ordered, but is actually disordered, is contradictory, therefore unsound.
Quoting Isaac
Here, you are taking Terrapin Station's faulty premise. You assume that we judge between designed and not designed on an analysis of how a thing was created. Was it created by a "person", with "intent", or not. But as I explained to Terrapin, this is not actually how we make such a judgement. We actually judge in the opposite way. We find all sorts of things which we believe were designed, and we judge that they were created with intention, by people. In fact, the nature of intention is such that even if we watched a person create something, we would have no way of concluding from this observation that the thing was created with intention. Intention is not observable. So in reality we look for certain features of things, which indicate that they were made with intention, and we judge that way.
This is why we need to go beyond the premise "if it was intentionally made, then it was designed", to accurately determine whether a thing was deigned or not. That premise is just circular, because in reality we cannot judge intention through observation, and we really observe to see whether the thing was designed, then conclude that it was made with intention. There is no way to observe intention in action, so we must judge the characteristics of the thing to determine whether there was intention. So we need a good description (like the one I proposed above) which can be used to distinguish order from disorder in things, and then we can apply this. This sort of principle allows us to determine which aspects of the intentional object were mistaken, or unintentional. With yours and Terrapin's premise, "if it was intentionally made, then it was designed", we have no principle to distinguish the unintentional aspects of the intentional thing.
We're on a philosophy board, ostensibly discussing philosophy, from the perspective of that discipline. Personhood is a core concept in ontology. There's a philosophical tradition of discussing personhood under ontology, just like there are traditions of disccussing things like identity in general, time, ontic simples, etc. I directed you to the philosophical ideas if you're not familiar with this.
Seriously, it's like talking to a wall to try to interact with you.
No, I'm saying I merely specified the order that would interest me, then threw the dice. Not that I threw the dice with the intention of making 1,2,3,4,5,6. My intention may well have been, for example, to prove how unlikely that was.
Order is a subjective opinion, it's just a pattern we recognise. I could as easily have accidentally dropped the dice, if they landed 1,2,3,4,5,6, I'd say "oh look, that's an order I recognise". Nothing to do with intent. Same thing would happen if they were my phone number, but to you that would just be random.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Possibly, but that principle doesn't extend to an object created entirely by accident, without the intention to make anything at all. I certainly can't just be prima face applied any object at all, even if we don't know if there were a designer or not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. This is the main issue. You're conflating 'ordered' with 'designed', the two do not describe the same thing at all, that is the very crux of the matter, you can't just assume it. What you described was a perfectly adequate working description of 'order', and yes, the universe exhibits such structure. But how can you justify saying it also bears the hallmarks of being 'designed' simply because you've recognised 'order'?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, all this is true of 'order', but my statement was about appearing to have been 'designed' a different property from merely being 'ordered'.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Same conflation. 'designed' in the first part, 'ordered' in the second. The two terms are not simply interchangeable.
Even if we did accept this, it would simply be the claim that all ordered things must have been designed, which is the very issue.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Do you have any evidence for this? I don't judge things that way for one. And if you demonstrated that some critical mass of people judged things that way, how would that effect what is actually the case, they might all be wrong.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We can. We just ask.
That's a great observation. I have a simple answer. Humans find the task of imbuing machines with sentience (artificial intelligence) a very difficult problem. Yet, the universe has us and other animals that are sentient. Nano-machines operate within the cells of an organism but nano-technology still has a long way to go. I consider these as sufficient evidence that the universe is more complex than what man has achieved.
Quoting Echarmion
That's the issue I want your views on. As I wrote elsewhere in this thread the argument from design is premised on a subset of the universe viz. objects that have order and have a designer - specifically man-made objects.
To counter the design argument you'll need to provide instances of order sans a designer as you have tried. This tactic is symmetric to the design argument itself in that we call upon a subset of the universe viz. objects that have order and have no designer. Notice however that this subset of objects, in fact any subset of the universe apart from man-made objects, consists of objects far more complex than what human creativity and ingenuity are capable of. Thus, shouldn't we conclude a far cleverer designer of the universe instead of saying the universe has NO designer?
Not only awkward but also probably futile. How can a chimpanzee ever comprehend Mozart or calculus? In fact there are humans who can't do that. Nevertheless for humans it's just a matter of effort or interest but a chimpanzee, no matter how interested, simply lacks the basic hardware/software to understand humans. To say nothing of how vast the mental gap between god and humans maybe.
I don't agree with the concept of irreducible complexity. It flies against the natural process of creativity. For instance flight began as a simple toy and no we have hypersonic missiles. Creativity isn't about getting things perfect right from the start. Objects of creation evolve from simple beginnings to perfection and what could be more ingenious than having the process of evolution built into the scheme/plan? An object of creation that requires minimal intervention, like evolution, is more well-designed than irreducible complexity that would fail immediately in a different environment. In other words an ability to adapt is a better design than something built for a specific environment/purpose.
Assuming that I am conflating design and order what could be the reason for that? Could it be because the inference that order implies design(er) is a well-founded heuristic?
@aletheist made a pertinent remark viz. that complexity itself isn't sufficient to infer a designer. We need irreducible complexity. What is your opinion on irreducible complexity which basically states that if object x is irreducible complex then it shouldn't be possible for an object y, through small increments, to become x?
To this issue of irreducible complexity I simply draw your attention to human creativity. Which is a sign of greater designing ability - a computer program that is task-specific or an artificial intelligence that evolves and adapts and can make your morning coffee or crunch numbers for a space program?
Quoting Terrapin Station
You are the one who wants to talk about "personhood". I think this digression of yours is nonsensical. If you can come up with an ontologically based definition of personhood, be my guest. I already tried, to the best of my abilities, but in all my ontological studies I never came across "personhood", so my abilities are extremely limited in that department.
Quoting Isaac
This is where you show ambiguity, and perhaps inconsistency in what you are saying. If order is a "subjective opinion" then it is proper to the judgement that there is order, and the judgement itself, only. If it is a "pattern we recognize" then it is something within the thing itself (objective).
You spoke of order, last post, as if it were something within the object, recognized as "order" through association with intention. ("We're talking about a state which 'appears' designed. One which has a type of order we recognise from other states we know to be designed.") But now you're saying that someone could randomly throw the dice, with no intent of creating any order, and if a person happens to judge that there is order in the outcome, then there actually is order in that outcome. But really, this is just what you say, a "subjective opinion".
The problem with this scenario, is that throwing the dice itself is an intentional act. So you cannot remove the order which is inherent within the intentional act, simply by saying that you did not intend to throw any particular combination of numbers. The intentional act of throwing the dice six times in a row gives order to the outcome (six throws in a row) regardless of what the outcome is.
Quoting Isaac
Again, you cannot remove intent from the act, by turning to a particular aspect of the act, and saying that this particular aspect was unintentional. That's what I tried to explain in my last post. The overall act (the act as a whole), you picking up the dice and carrying them for some reason, is an intentional act. You would have reason for carrying or holding those dice. The fact that you happened to drop them makes that particular aspect of the thing created (the precise time of the roll or something like that), unintentional, but it does not remove the intent which was behind the act as a whole.
That is what I explained. If we look at intentional acts in this way, we can distinguish the aspects of the outcome which are unintentional, mistakes, and we can analyze the "unknowns" which caused the mistakes. But mistakes, and accidents are inherent to intentional acts only. They require that the act itself is intentional, so it is contradictory to say that the existence of a mistake or accident makes the act unintentional.
Quoting Isaac
Of course you ought to see that this is contradictory. An accident, or mistake only occurs as part of an intentional act, so "object created entirely by accident, without the intention to make anything at all", is just contradictory nonsense.
Quoting Isaac
"Ordered" and "designed" both mean pretty much the same thing, implying intent within the thing ordered, or designed. You are trying to create ambiguity between the act of recognizing an order (subjective opinion), and the act of creating a designed order (ordering the object), actually conflating the two to create inconsistency and contradiction through your attempts at obfuscation, as I described above.
Quoting Isaac
I don't see why you have a problem with this. What supports your desire to make this unwarranted separation between "order" and "design"? Let's start with the assumption that "order" is completely subjective opinion, as you mentioned at the start of the post. The observing subject notices an "order". The subject claims there is an order in the object (the universe in this example). But this "order" is not justified by anything real within the object according to the specifications of the premise, it is just judgement made by the subject, subjective opinion. So the subject wants to justify the claim of "order", by pointing to something real, a real order in the object. The only recourse for the subject is to appeal to an ordered creation (design).
You might insist that if you and I, and others, all agree that there is "order" which is inherent within the observed object, and we agree on the nature of that "order", then this justifies the claim that there is real order within the object. But this is just inter-subjectivity, and inter-subjectivity cannot validate the claim that what "we" conclude about the object really represents what is true about the object. So this claimed "order" is still a subjective opinion, agreed to by other subjects.
Therefore, we must turn to the reasons why the object appears to 'us' as having order, to validate this claim which 'we' have, that it does have order. We cannot turn back to the individual subject, and say 'if the object appears to the subject as having order, then it has order', because we know that the subject may be mistaken. And if one subject may be mistaken, a number of subjects agreeing cannot remove the possibility of mistake. So we must turn to the object itself, and explain why the object appears to have order. Claiming that the object appears to 'us' as having order, therefore it has order, does not suffice. We could say 'it appears to have order because it actually has order', but this is also unjustified due to the same possibility of mistake. Therefore, to justify the real existence of order within the object (the universe in this example), we must demonstrate what it means to have order, and show that the object in question fulfills the criteria.
The only way to show what it means to have order, is to show an instance of ordering, demonstrating that the object has been ordered. This is an act of intentional ordering, design. Therefore your proposed separation between "order" and "design" is completely misguided. Ordering can only be demonstrated by design. You will never demonstrate, as you have tried through reference to accidents, an act of ordering which is not intentional. Each time you do this, by the very fact that you are doing it, it will necessarily be an intentional act. Thus you will never demonstrate how order may come into existence without intention, and you will never justify the claim that the order observed within the object is real, and part of the object, without showing that it must have been put there by design, intention.
Quoting Isaac
The two are the same, by the principles described above. If something is ordered, then necessarily it appears to have been designed. There is no escape from this brute fact. This is because we cannot demonstrate an instance of order arising, without designing that instance. That's the problem with theories like "spontaneous order", and "self-organization" which alcontali referred to earlier in the thread. Any experimental demonstration of such things requires a designed system.
Order, within the natural universe is so pervasive, that we would need to design a very special set of circumstances to remove it for the purpose of experimentation, if we wanted to show order coming from disorder. But this act is already a designed act, therefore intentional, and ordered. And that's why this approach of yours is futile. We need to give up on these nonsensical, contradictory ideas, and recognize that overall, the universe is ordered, therefore designed, but there may be aspects of it which are mistakes, accidents. Then we can focus on these particular aspects, these parts which appear to undesigned, unintentional, and this will give us a route, a passage into the most highly disordered aspects of the universe, allowing such experimentation. But it makes no sense to pretend that the isolation of such accidental aspects is not itself a design.
Quoting Isaac
Now, hopefully you'll see how my claim is justified. Since we cannot demonstrate any instance of ordering without designing such a thing, and the claim that order simply exists in the object cannot be justified, the opposite claim to mine, that things may be ordered without design is completely unjustifiable. And, since we have a vast and magnificent multitude of examples where order is designed, as well as examples like yours of accidents, where order appears to be undesigned, but is really designed, it is simply illogical (by inductive logic) to make the claim that there is order which was not designed. So this proposed division of yours, between order and design, is unsupported, unjustifiable and illogical.
Therefore you ought to quit referring to such a division as a premise for criticism of usage of the terms, such as my usage. You are creating an artificial unjustifiable and illogical separation between order and design, and applying that unjustifiable and illogical principle as the basis for your criticism of what I am saying. Therefore your criticism has no efficacy and you are just wasting your time. It would be much more practical, worthwhile, and productive if you would just drop this nonsensical approach which is only hindering any progress which you might desire to make into understanding this reality.
Quoting Isaac
This is another nonsensical point of departure. Look around you, in your house, at all the objects. How many of these objects do you judge to have been created with intention? How many of these objects have you observed a "person" or some such thing, creating? Now think about the judgements you have just made. Did you make the judgement that certain things were created intentionally, by imagining, or referred to in your mind, images or propositions about how the things were actually produced, manufactured by equipment and human beings, or did you make the judgement simply by seeing something about the object? I don't know of anyone who would think about the manufacturing process when making the judgement that an object was intentionally designed. We take one look at the object and make the judgement.
If that doesn't convince you about how such judgements are made, imagine that you see in the corner of the room an object which you are unsure whether it was created intentionally or not. Suppose it's a piece of rock, which may have been sculpted, or may be natural. If you wanted to pass judgement on this object, you might think about how you got it, but then you'd be trusting the word of the seller, or that information might not even be available in your memory. Isn't the more natural way of making such a judgement to look for evidence of sculpting on the stone itself?
Quoting Isaac
There are at least two very good reasons why this reply is faulty. The first one, is that the person asked might not know the truth, might pretend to know the truth when not knowing, or might not speak the truth (deception). The second reason is even stronger. The artifact often lasts a lot longer than the person who made it, in this case there is really no reliable person alive to ask.
Maybe it’s because the way we define ‘design’ differs. What did you think of my definition.
I don’t think order implies a designer - part of that is because the examples of natural, order - snowflakes, molecules, galactic filaments- are so numerous and we know the mechanisms and none of them require an external intelligent designing agent for their generation.
My understanding of ‘irreducible’ in the term irreducible complexity is irreducible with respect to function - ie, the object cannot function unless all its parts are present, functioning and arranged in a necessary way. I don’t think this necessarily implies designer. I can think, for example, of a protein, which by that definition is irreducibly complex. A functional protein is formed by an unguided, semi-stochastic process of protein folding.
I think what you could use as a criteria to infer designer is an inability to conceive of a plausible mechanism of generation. Ie if the pattern’s generation cannot be explained by an unguided, mechanistic process then it’s likely a design.
I’d definitely say the artificial intelligence. And, whilst it’s true the components and the logic gate states which generate an artificial intelligence are something that cannot come together alone, implying AI is designed, this does not mean all intelligent agents are designed.
Actually, we do not really know these mechanisms. We can describe these processes to an extent, provide a partial description of them, but not enough to say that a designing agent is not necessary. As I explained a couple posts back, the fundamental aspect of such processes, which we take for granted, inertia (the tendency for things to remain the same as time passes), which is how we describe temporal order, cannot be accounted for without an appeal to a designing agent.
No, because the act of recognition can occur in different people based in different patterns. I might recognise my phone number, to you it's random digits.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I'm saying there is no such thing as 'actually' order. Order is entirely a subjective judgement, no 'actually' about it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't agree with your interpretation. I think it defines away the meaning of intent. Why is 'carrying the dice' and intentional act and not just 'going about my day' (which happened to involve carrying dice), or 'living my life'. Where we draw the line between acts is arbitrary.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As above, I disagree with your use of 'act'.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The subject wanting to justify some judgement does not in itself mean that they must then be capable of doing so. I want to fly but I can't.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Almost all of them.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Almost all of them (or objects very similar to them).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Neither. I've already made that judgement in most cases and I just recall the outcome.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well you do now.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. I'd use its history, it's strong similarity to other objects I know the history of, or reserve judgement.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So? We can ask hundreds, we can ask a dozen people, each of whom has themselves asked a dozen people, each of whom... This is a perfectly normal means of learning, how much of what you know can you claim to have actually learnt from first hand direct experience?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, so what? In those cases we just don't know. We can't just make up some method of defining 'designed' to suit the availability of evidence.
Probably the only thing I mentioned that is unknown enough to even make remote the possibility of a designer is galactic filaments. To my knowledge, there isn't a full explanation for how or why dark matter, which pulls ordinary matter to form filaments, is distributed in the organized way it is,. Snowflake formation, molecule formation is known with sufficient detail. If we didn't know how these were formed, we wouldn't able to make snow machines or pharmaceuticals.
I'm unsure what you mean by inertia being a fundamental aspect of these processes-- if anything it is the electromagnetic properties and kinetic energies of molecules and atoms that are fundamental to snowflake and molecule formation. How does inertia require a designing agent?
OK, but now it's clear that you and I have completely different views of "order". I think order is something that the physical world exhibits to us, you think order is totally within the mind of the subject. I take it then, that if a person designs and creates something, this is not case of putting order into the physical object, by your definition of "order", because the physical object can never really have any order.
Quoting Isaac
I think the answer to that is very obvious, and I don't understand why you would ask it. We are intentional beings, and act intentionally, so 'going about my day' is itself acting intentionally. Are you trying to argue that you are not an intentional being, and that your actions are not intentional? If so, I would say that this is just a ploy in an attempt to avoid legal responsibility. Trust me, it won't work, in the eyes of the law we are intentional beings and therefore responsible for our actions. You cannot avoid the fact that you are an intentional being, by claiming that you are not. That's why the argument of determinism does not absolve you from legal responsibility. No matter how much you insist that you have no intentional control over your actions, such assertions do not convince people that this is the case.
Quoting Isaac
That of course is the very problem with your claimed stance, that order is completely subjective. Any claim of order cannot be justified. Even if the subject wants to justify that claim, it is impossible to. I see that our discussion on the topic of "order" is completely pointless now, because you very clearly have claimed a definition of "order" which renders any claim of order as absolutely unjustifiable. This means that "order" can be whatever you want it to be. You say "there is order here", and by your definition there is necessarily order there, regardless of what you are referring to as order. What's the point to insisting that this is what "order" is when you've made this concept into something which could refer to absolutely anything? And of course, for me to discuss "order" with you is a complete waste of time because you can say about anything, that there is order there, or there is not order there, and by your professed definition, what you say would be true.
Quoting aporiap
This is obviously untrue, as evidenced by the unknowns within quantum mechanics. Just because we can observe enough of the process to make us believe that we understand it, doesn't mean that we actually understand the activities of those subatomic particles involved in these processes. And until we understand those activities of those subatomic particles, we cannot say that they haven't been designed to behave in the way that they do.
Quoting aporiap
Do you understand that every massive body is composed of parts? And, the parts within a massive body are not necessarily arranged in the way that they are, so as to make that particular mass. However, as time passes, the mass retains its composition, (parts not flying off in different directions), and this is inertia. This requires that the parts are "ordered" to maintain the existence of that massive body. As I explained to Isaac (who has now ignored my explanation and opted for an absolutely useless definition of "order"), the only way that we know of, by which these elements could be ordered like this, is through design.
Design wouldn't work without causality being true in some sense. There has to be some pattern that can be manipulated or directed for design to be possible.
Looks like causality (in some sense) is necessary for both design AND determinism. Does this lead to a contradiction? You tell me.
To illustrate take the example of clocks/watches. Chronometers began as sun dials and water clocks. They were then replaced by pendulum or mechanical clocks which were in turn superseded by digital versions. I've heard of people refer to this as "progress" from the primitive to the modern and is understandable in terms of increasing complexity. This increased complexity indicates increased knowledge and designing capability.
Since everything in nature is "surely" better designed than anything we humans are capable of i.e. is even more complex we should actually infer a better, far more knowledgeable designer than no designer; just like a digital watch is better designed than a sun dial.
I don't mean to be pestering, but what quantum mechanicals unknowns? All the quantum mechanics needed to understand basic subatomic interactions is well characterized: orbital geometries, bonding interactions between orbitals. The activities of the relevant subatomic particles - electrons and protons, are well known.
If what you mean by "we cannot say they haven't been designed to behave the way in they do" is that until we have an explanation for why they behave that way, we can't say they haven't been designed to do so, then I'd also disagree saying it's not the forming of snowflakes that's designed, it's the fundamental constants and forces that are designed to be the way they are. I think, however, this kind of thing just moves the problem up a level. The designer would have to be explained as well as, by being able to interact with matter, it must have some sort of form or mechanism of interacting. This implies there's a logic or order to the way the designer works. This order would then need to be accounted for.
We are working with different definitions of inertia. Your definition, the tendency of parts of an object to remain together over time, is not the same as the traditional definition of inertia, the tendency of an object to maintain its state of motion - either continuing at a certain velocity or remaining at rest. I don't think either of these require a designer.
The first case can be explained by just fundamental forces at work - at small scales [electron to maybe hundreds of kilometer range] electromagnetic force is most influential contributor to bodies maintaining their composition; at larger scales gravity is the most influential contributor.
The second case can be explained by general and special relativity.
This example avoids the difference in our definition of design, and its influence on the arguments. If you agree with me that self organization is not the same as design then, by definition, order in the universe is not a result of design and you would agree with me that examples such as the one above has no bearing on the question of whether order in the universe is designed.
Secondly, I disagree with the idea that higher complexity implies more knowledge, I think instead higher efficiency implies more knowledge. A clock that is made of less organized parts, i.e. less complex, but is able to still function just as well as a more complicated watch with more parts is indicative of knowledge. It's certainly a fact that order in the universe is not the result of efficient means - evolution of species, for example, had to go through innumerable iterations before getting it right enough for survival [as opposed to perfectly right]. Human bodies are not fully efficient systems, there are many ways in which our strength, immune systems, cardiovascular systems could be optimized to minimize fatigue and effects of aging and so on. But I ultimately think this is a different issue.
Efficiency: Don't you think the universe is efficient? If "yes" then that's great design.
If "no", can you give an example? You mentioned human bodies and that reminded me of Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, who deprecated the design argument by stating that building an entertainment system (sex organs) right in the middle of a sewage system (excretory system - anus and all) was "poor" design. However, if efficiency, your criterion, is considered, multi-purpose structures should be the norm rather than the exception.
How the particles move is an unknown. Some aspects of their movements are predictable, but that only means that the movements are orderly. The capacity to predict does not imply that the movements are known. For example, one could predict that the sun will rise in the morning, and predict the precise time of the rising and setting, while believing that a giant dragon is moving the sun around the back side of the earth every night, in an orderly fashion, therefore not knowing that the earth is actually spinning. If the movement of an object is orderly, its appearance is predictable, but the ability to predict its appearance doesn't mean that its movements are known.
Quoting aporiap
Right, that's what design is, don't you think? To say that something was designed, doesn't imply that there is a person standing there making by hand, each designed object. We set up the production equipment, in the manufacturing plant, and pump out the objects. Of course those objects are designed. To argue that in this case, the objects are not really designed, only the production plant is, doesn't make sense. Likewise, it doesn't make sense to argue that the snowflakes are not designed, only the fundamental constants and forces which make them are.
The issue with "design" which you seem to be missing, is that things are designed for a reason, a purpose, that's fundamental to "design". So if these constants are "designed", then there is a reason for their being.
Quoting aporiap
That's not a very good argument. It's like saying "that's a dark and scary place, I'm afraid of what might be in there, so I'll just assume that there is nothing in there, that way I won't need to go in and look. People commonly say this about God, if you assume that God created the universe, this doesn't get you anywhere because now you have to determine what created God. But this is a false argument, because accepting God actually gets you one step closer. You must accept that there is God before you can start to understand God. So when the evidence points to God, as creator, it doesn't make sense to deny God on the account of, we still need to determine who created God. To recognize the reality of God is one step on the ladder, and regardless of how many steps there are, one step is still progress.
Quoting aporiap
It's the very same definition. The parts within an object are in motion, and that motion must remain uniform or the object will cease to exist as such. It's a matter of stability in motion.
Quoting aporiap
This is a good example of what I mean by the capacity to predict does not imply that the motion is understood. The capacity to predicted is based in the assumption of uniform motion, Newton's first law. But Newton's first law takes uniform motion for granted, it doesn't explain why the motion of a body remains constant from one moment of time to the next. And, when we get down to tiny particles, in short times we see no reason why this law ought to be upheld. Yet it is.
These explanations you refer to are not real explanations at all. To say 'mass is created by fundamental forces at work', really doesn't express an understanding of mass.
As a retired Architect, I have some understanding of Design and Blueprints. And I do see evidence of design intent in the world, but the nature of the artist can only be inferred from the nature of the artwork. However, most arguments against a designing deity, point-out the imperfections and failures of the so-called design. So I no longer use those terms in my discussions of a philosopher's First Cause.
Instead of the Genesis concept of magical creation of a perfect Garden of Eden, I view the world as evolving like a computer program from basic codes and criteria toward an answer to the programmer's "what if?" question. This notion is supported by physicists who have concluded that the material world is essentially mathematical in nature.
Of course, arguing that the world is a program won't satisfy Atheists, because they would require hard evidence of a Programmer, and it won't sit well with Theists, who prefer the traditional biblical account of seven day creation. It also won't suit those who think in terms of the Blueprint metaphor as a predestined design. It may not even make sense for those who imagine that the world is evolving toward a Technological Singularity. But, for me, a better metaphor for the Information Age is Evolutionary Programming in which the final answer is unknown until computed via a heuristic process of evolution. Hence, imperfections and failures are to be expected.
Evolutionary Programming : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming
Thanks for the link
Are you saying that the mathematical nature of the world is a clue? Can I then say that the programmer/architect is god?
Let's suppose determinism is true and we lack free will. However one thing is certain - we're capable of rational judgment and analysis which informs us that order is strongly associated with a designer. So, despite a lack of free will, we must conclude that the universe has a designer.
So I am not sure we even know what 'design' means. Perhaps God has free will. But we have no coherent model for what that is. If we believe in determinism I don't think 'design' is a meaningful concept.
:chin: ???
Does determinism preclude consciousness and the ability to comprehend/appreciate truths, two of which are the order of the universe and how we humans design?
I think we may be writing past each other here.
My point is if my making a pot was determined in the Big Bang, I don't think it makes sense to think of me as a designer. Nor more than a plant producing a bloom, or a could producing those beautiful, seemingly designed snowflakes.
Personally I am agnostic as far as determinism and free will. But it seems to me if one believes in determinism, design - any design, human, animal - no longer makes sense. Stuff just happens. An architect plans a house, but that plan was determined long before he was born. Atoms bash into atoms, molecules follow their paths. This isn't design, it is just inevitable unfolding.
So you agree that even if determinism were true, we'd still be able to recognize order in the universe and also be able to reason. If so then the argument from design should convince us about the truth, right?
1) I don't think determinism precludes correctly recognizing order in the universe. Though if we believe in determinism, its seems to me there is always an asterisk, since we are compelled to believe it and then compelled to think X and Y are the reasons we believe in it, we can never be quite sure if we are being rational or not. 2) I don't see where order necessitates design. 3) I still don't know what design means in a deterministic universe.
Yes. My personal philosophical worldview is based on the 21st century understanding of the dual functions of Information : both mental and physical. So, the fact that some physicists have concluded that the material world is ultimately mathematical (abstract information) supports my thesis. Of course, most people would find it inconceivable that immaterial abstract math could become concrete material stuff. But I have been developing my own hypothesis of how that phase transition might work. However, I'm not a scientist, so you don't have to take my word for it. You can research the mathematical and physical literature for yourself.
I prefer not to use the traditional term for a creator deity, because of the superfluous religious baggage attached. But I found that more scientific (Multiverse) or philosophical (First Cause) terms don't convey the real world implications as completely (quanta and qualia). So, I compromised on the novel spelling "G*D" to indicate that the Cause of our world's existence is in most ways equivalent to the ancient notion of a Creator. Then, in the glossary I try to define that neologism in such a way as to dispel the anthro-morphic & magical & anti-science meanings attached to the conventional term that don't apply to my thesis. I also use other metaphors, such as "Programmer", to convey the concept of the Enformer of our world. The key difference between "God" and "G*D" is that the latter doesn't have to intervene in the process of natural evolution. The Programmer just runs He/r program, and waits for the final output.
Mathematical Universe Hypothesis : "Tegmark's MUH is: Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure. That is, the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis
G*D : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
For philosophical purposes it's good that you are not prejudiced in favor of either Free Will or Determinism. In my own worldview, I've concluded that humans are both pre-determined by natural laws and free-to-choose due to inherent randomness. Thus, we can have cosmic design and local freedom too. A good example of how that freedom-within-determinism works is illustrated in computer design using Evolutionary Programming and Genetic Programming methods. In these cases, the programmers are seeking solutions that cannot be pre-determined.
For those who cannot see any signs of design in nature, I can only say that even atheists, like Stephen ("know the mind of god") Hawking, are forced to use "design" terminology to describe how the world began and proceeds to evolve, presumably without intention. In my own training as a designer, we once did an exercise called "design by accident". But even though we allowed objects to arrange themselves randomly, the exercise would never get started without the intention of the designer to set-up the system and then allow it to evolve freely. As in Evolutionary Programming the system is "designed" to "unfold inevitably". Since the intention occurs before the exercise begins, it is not obvious from within the experiment.
Evolutionary Programming : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Design_(book)
Order From Randomness : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2FZxTKTAtDs2bnfCh/order-from-randomness-ordering-the-universe-of-random
Order Within Chaos : https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/physics/discover-the-hidden-order-in-chaos/
Freewill Within Determinism : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page67.html
Now let's say you are right and there is a random element. That doesn't lead to design or choice either. Random effects are not under anyone's control or choice.
None of that leads to anything like freedom or design.
No I don't think so. A clear example is energy loss going from trophic level to trophic level. Only 10% of the energy contained in an acre of grass is transferred to consumers of grass. The energy level drops exponentially as one goes from one level of consumer to the next, due to the cost of metabolic processes which result in heat production, and due to the inability to digest or store certain bonds. An efficient ecosystem would be able to maximize the utilization of energy. And what do you think of vestigial organs, pseudo genes?
I agree, we have no idea why the universe is the way it is. Why particles move at all. Why they move in characterizable ways. I think, however, theories that presuppose anthropocentric things like 'demons', 'dragons' moving objects that are similar to us with respect to being intelligent agents with a will to move things is just ridiculous- not saying you believe that, but a god in the sky designer, a computer scientist who's simulating/designing a universe on a computer and we're all in it, whatever other anthropocentric idea for why the universe operates the way it does is just absurd. Living things with brains that can interact and manipulate things physically etc. only exist on a single mote of dust in the middle of [basically] an infinite space of swirling stuff. Humans or anything conceivably like them do not have the capacity to manipulate the universe in a way that leads to ordered movements which obey the same equations at all points in space and time. Everything points to these movements and their order being generated intrinsically from reality itself and not something external to it.. it would also be very difficult for me to imagine what it would mean for something to be external to reality, since reality is defined as everything there is, observable or unobservable.
My point is while, sure, the world could just be a design, there is nothing that makes it the most likely explanation - I stand by that order doesn't imply designer for the reasons I mentioned to @TheMadFool. Designs are made ordered by something external to them, by definition.
But let's think about this. To me it says something like: if we lift the curtain of appearance, we'll find math. A smile is mathematics. Even the idea that the physical universe is mathematics... is somehow itself 'really' mathematics. But if everything is math, then nothing is math. This is the fate of all monisms?
I don't see how it can float without the husk/kernel metaphor. It's something like the end of The Matrix. But why call the husk illusion?
Are you talking about genetic algorithms? Those are awesome. But we provide the fitness function. I can imagine watching a population without knowing the fitness function and trying to deduce it. Perhaps that's what you have in mind. Fascinating theme.
I demonstrated that your so-called "reasons" are unreasonable, so why are you falling back on this unreasonableness? Let's look again.
Quoting aporiap
You now agree that we don't know the mechanisms well enough to say that these processes do not require an external intelligent designing agent. And now, all you say is that this idea of an intelligent designing agent is "ridiculous", without any reasons for this claim.
Meanwhile, I've demonstrated that the only way we know of, that order could possibly come into existence, is from an intelligent designing agent. And, it is unreasonable, and illogical to think that we could ever know of order coming from another source.
So who's position is really the ridiculous one?
That's based on the assumption of Determinism. And Randomness does indeed allow short strings of "apparent" order, that lead to the Gambler's Fallacy. But long and progressive chains of order, such as the evolution of intelligent beings (novelty), supposedly from random collisions of atoms (disorder), cannot be explained by rigid Determinism, except as an act of faith. There is no novelty in randomness without the Direction of Selection, or the Action of Intention.*1
The Theory of Evolution was based on a> Random Mutations plus b> Natural Selection. But "selection" requires Criteria, which require Intention. So, Evolution is Freedom Within Determinism, Randomness ordered by Selection, which allows Novelty despite Laws. :cool:
"In a godless universe with no design or purpose, the emergence of consciousness is an unexplained anomaly." http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page66.html
Gambler's Fallacy (non-independent events are not completely random) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy
*1 Intention : Darwin's theory was based on the example of humans intentionally selecting canines for certain functions over thousands of years, which resulted in dogs that could hardly survive in the wild without the help of humans.
Human Selection :
Natural Selection :
I was not referring to the snowflake example, I was referring to the definition of design; he has not addressed that point.
How about : the foundation of everything is mathematical, therefore everything is made of Information? In my thesis, "Information" is equivalent to Spinoza's "Substance" (Monism). And everything in the world is a "Mode" of that Eternal Mind Stuff.
"According to Spinoza, everything that exists is either a substance or a mode (E1a1). A substance is something that needs nothing else in order to exist or be conceived." https://www.iep.utm.edu/spinoz-m/
Yes. Evolving programs, as opposed to calculated programs, are heuristic in that they explore random paths (mutations) and judge their fitness against the programmer's criteria. In my thesis, the Great Programmer set-up the initial conditions and natural laws that determine which options are selected for the next generation. The "unfit" paths are ruthlessly abandoned to extinction. Which could apply to humans if we prove to be unfit for future generations. In that case, we may be replaced by robots. :smile:
By the bolded's logic, the universe must be designed by a terrestrial animal capable of design. We have never observed anything intelligent enough to design things that is not an animal capable of design, so any intelligent thing, by your logic, must be an animal capable of design. So it must be so that God is, in fact, a terrestrial animal... Well maybe a computer, so maybe God's an uncreated computer.
Do you see how ridiculous that sounds?
But we see design in plants as well, so design is not limited to animals. It's not the argument which is ridiculous, it's the way you interpret it which is.
Your justification is that every instance of things we conventionally define to be ordered, derives from a ‘designer’. You infer from all instances of design-designer you’ve seen, that order in the natural world must also be from a designer.
I’m just extending the logic here. While it’s true everything we define to be ordered has a designer, it’s also true that all designers are intelligent terrestrial animals. There is nothing to suggest designers could be otherwise because we’ve never seen any other possible designer, in the same way we’ve never seen any other source for design. So it would be illogical to assume that the universe could be designed by anything other than intelligent terrestrial animals
You don’t see design in plants, you instead conclude that the order in plants is designed, which you ultimately infer from the fact that all man-made designs come from human designers.
Well, sure. That's been the working assumption - one I do not make in general since I am agnostic regarding it - all through my discussion with Mad Fool. I generally state this or make subjunctive starts, like 'if determinism is the case....'
Quoting Gnomon
I didn't say anything about randomness not allowing order, apparent or 'apparent' or real order.
Order and free will or design are not the same thing.Quoting GnomonI don't know what pure randomness would be like, but novelty can be created and there are many simulation type programs that do this, where you have rules plus a random element. None of that leads to something like design.
We might call it design, but it is simply unfolding, just like the pretty patterns in these programs.Quoting GnomonNo it doesn't. If having a third wing in the middle of a bat's face makes it hard for it to fly, it won't find food. There is no intention make this mutation lead to deaths and elimination. It is a consequence of the change meeting hard non-choosing reality.Quoting Gnomon
Natural selection is precisely intentionless.
And nowhere in this did you explain how randomness and determinism lead to freedom.
Exactly.
All the artefacts we know have been designed are also artefacts of the late Pleistocene, so that puts a limit on the age of the universe too.
Also, of all the artefacts we know have been designed, none of them are larger than the earth, so the universe must be pretty small.
Intelligent Design logic is great, we'll have all the mysteries of the universe sorted in no time at this rate.
There's a further aspect which I explained earlier, which you don't seem to be accounting for, and that is that it is impossible that we will ever find an instance of order which we can justifiably claim came into existence without a designer. This is why I told Isaac that this is a pointless position to take.
Quoting aporiap
This is illogical, and not an extension of my logic. We find designed order within the bodies of animals and plants, about which we cannot say that the designer is the animal and plant itself. The design comes from the genetics and underlying processes. So an animal such s a human being, designing something, is just an extension of this underlying designing which is occurring in all plants and animals all the time.
Therefore your proposed extension of logic is a composition fallacy. You are proposing that what is true of some instances of design, that the designers are "intelligent terrestrial animals", is true of all instances of design. But in reality we see design in lower level life forms, without intelligence, so we cannot restrict our conception of "designer" in such a way.
What we do, in philosophy and metaphysics is observe very closely, and analyze the intentional acts of human designers, which are very evident to us, so that we can develop an understanding of the underlying designing process which is responsible for the existence of living bodies. This designing is what Aristotle called final cause.
Quoting aporiap
Again, this is unsound logic. We often see designed things where the designer is nowhere to be found. You are not respecting this obvious premise, which along with the fact that our spatial-temporal perspective for observation is extremely limited, makes it very likely that there are many designed things where the designer is not evident to us. So when we see a thing which looks like it was designed, yet we cannot see the designer, there is no reason to conclude that it wasn't designed. In fact, this is the conclusion which I explained is pointless, because it can never be justified. And a conclusion which cannot be justified is an unsound conclusion and ought not be accepted.
Quoting aporiap
Right, strictly speaking, we don't "see" the design in plants. We see the order, and with the aid of equipment we might say we "see" the DNA etc., but we don't "see" the design. And this is consistent with human designs. We do not "see" the person's intent, or plan, it exists immaterially in the mind of the person. This is why understanding the nature of final cause, and how the object, as the goal, exists immaterially before it has material existence is very important to understanding the nature of design.
So, we know how to recognize order. And, we know a little bit about how ordered things come into existence through acts of human intent. So, when we see other things which have order, we can apply these principles, toward understanding how that other order (things ordered by design other than human intent) came into existence through design. Then we find consistency between these two, and we know we are on the right track. Your criticism appears to be that since there is not a necessary connection between order and design, we ought not proceed in this way. To answer your criticism, I would say that you need to understand the relation as one of probability rather than as one of necessity. It is this lack of necessity which validates the concept of "free will". There is not a relation of necessity between the thing ordered, and the design which orders it, there is a "free" act required.
Most discussions of this topic are argued from the assumption of a True/False dichotomy : Either/Or. But my worldview and operating philosophy are based on the Both/And assumption : Yin/Yang. That's why my reasoning is hard for Black/White thinkers to grasp.
But, if you have the patience to follow the thread, these excerpts from a Quora Forum topic may explain how I rationalize human Freewill. It uses a mathematical analogy (Bell Curve) to illustrate that neither directionless Randomness nor cause & effect Determinism is absolute. Statistically, the Bell Curve makes the behavior of collective systems predictable, but the actions of individuals remains unpredictable, hence free from determinism. But this is not the kind of FreeWill that most people imagine. Instead, it's restricted conditional freedom. Humans are both free-ish and predetermined.
Freedom Within Determinism : http://enformationism.info/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=12&p=58#p58
Begin at third panel : 08/04/2018
BothAnd Principle : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Precisely! Randomness is an integral part of the "design" of Evolution. The program has two major components : a Randomizer to generate multiple options, and a Derandomizer (CPU) to select the "fittest" options to meet the Designer's criteria. Together, these components provide exceptions to Dumb Destiny, and a progressive arrow to the otherwise directionless "unfolding" of Time. But ultimate control was in the mind of the designer working outside the system. Which is why demands for empirical evidence of the Creator are fruitless. The only evidence is in the architecture of the system itself.
As an architect, I created Dumb Designs that depended on construction workers to interpret and implement the designer's intentions. And sometimes they got it wrong, so I had to intervene to get the project back on track. Yet the Cosmic Designer created a system that constructs itself from nothing but a metaphorical blueprint (or recipe, or DNA kernel) encoded in the Singularity. The Programmer's Intention was translated into the operating system code. From the Big Bang onward, the system is self-creating and self-directing.
The assertion above about "control" assumes, erroneously, that any postulated designer would have to reach into the system (intervene) to make any course corrections. But if you think of the universe as a Black Box functioning automatically, then the designer had to think "outside the box". In other words, the system was designed to work autonomously. This is not how the bible-god works. But it is how the postulated Enformer is presumed to work. The universe is an Autonomous Self-Directing Evolution System. Once set in motion, it requires no further inputs. It works by inherent (built-in) Teleology, not by ad hoc interventions (miracles).
There's no need to get into this kind of implicit insult. I have no problem with non-binary thinking or even seemingly paradoxical answers, but while both and thinking with determinism and randomness may create not predictable actions in humans, it doesn't add up to free will. Just as it doesn't in mutation which also has deterministic and random components or processes mixed. The mutations form has not been chosen by the mutation, nor its abilities. It is the r esult of mutation plus deterministic processes. Your sense that the two add up to free will, would mean that free will is everywhere, also. I don't think it holds at all, but if it did, it would mean that any stochastic process, in your deism, would mean there is free will present. So, Brownian motion of particles in a liquid would be free will, since there are deterministic and free will facets. Heck, even the stock market comes to life as a conscious entity, making choices. Now, I'm a panpsychist, and all, but the stock market? Anyway I am gonig to leave this here.
How about if we look at it in a different way:
Let's say grass has 100 calories total and herbivores extract 10 calories from it (10%). This, at first, looks like poor design but what if the usable calories in grass is actually 15 calories. Extracting 10 calories gives us an efficiency of 66.66% which is quite good.
Can you expand on that a bit. Thanks.
Does your theory include an explicit fitness function? Or it more like Darwin generalized?
No insult was intended. The Black/White reference was intended to show what the BothAnd philosophy is supposed to provide an alternative to.
Quoting Coben
No. IMHO, Evolution does indeed progress freely without any specific predetermined path -- only a general direction. But that doesn't mean that Brownian molecules have any choice in their movements. FreeWill is a feature of self-conscious creatures, who can predict the future from past experience, and choose a direction that seems desirable.
Enformationism has some similarities to Panpsychism, but the fact that all things in the world are composed of generic Information, does not imply that they are self-conscious. Again, self-consciousness is an emergent feature of creatures that are freewill agents. Consciousness is necessary for animals to live. But self-consciousness allows some creatures to thrive, by merging their individual creativity into a species Culture. :smile:
Oh no. That's would be far above my pay grade. I'll leave the specifying of an evolutionary program to those who are experts in that field. And I leave the specifics of G*D's fitness function for Natural Evolution to the Creator. But, in general, Darwin has discovered that nature seems to be designed to experiment with a variety of species, in its search for ever "better" forms of Life & Mind. What the ultimate goal might be, I have no idea.
But, judging from the evidence we've collected so-far, the upward trend of Evolution probably requires physical complexity and mental intelligence, and even some level of FreeWill. Put those traits together and you find that Evolution has already created little creators of its own. That is not what you would expect from an accidental universe. Some even speculate that a future creative species, whether silicon or carbon based, might create something like a god-on-earth. I'm not smart enough to see that far ahead.
Note : what qualifies as "better" depends on the applicable Fitness Function.
From what kind of logic could you infer otherwise? Do you have any reason to believe in spontaneous creation of organization, energy, laws? The reason Aristotle postulated a First Cause, was that an eternal regression of causation is an empty gesture that doesn't answer the question of origins. The Prime Mover concept answers the question with a "buck stops here" assertion that does not imply spontaneous emergence from nothing, but intentional creation from everything.
Logically, in eternity-infinity all things are possible. Once an organic system has been created (by magic, if you like), all subsequent order would be produced by cause & effect Necessity, not magic. But we now know that the space-time universe is not eternal or infinite. So its origin must lie outside the boundaries of space-time, in the infinite "unbounded" -- what I call G*D, as the job-title for Creator, Designer, Programmer, Energizer, World-Maker functions.
Spontaneous Generation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
"Anaximander, who believed that all things arose from the elemental nature of the universe, the apeiron (???????) or the "unbounded" or "infinite,"
First of all the argument is circular. Your discounting natural cases of order as having an alternative source of order depends on your [in all honesty, narrow-sighted] conclusion that there are no other sources of order. You then use this assumption to conclude that there are in fact no other sources of order.
This is despite the dis analogies in man-made and natural cases of order pointed out by @Isaac - i.e. (1) that hurricane Katrina, black holes, snowflakes, the spherical ordered tangle of the rubber bands in my pocket, and mars, were not made with any clear purpose or intent; (2) that natural order results from self organization as opposed to an external agent or individual. These clearly provide enough justification to assume the things generating natural and man-made order are different .
Secondly, there is a chicken and egg dillema here. The thing which allows humans to be intelligent, the their brain [we know this unambiguously because of lesioning studies, in which damage to the brain directly causes deficits in intelligence], is itself a natural object operating by universal natural principles. So, fundamentally, the patterns it generates ['designs'] are patterns that nature itself is generating as a deductive consequence of the way it is structured (which, in one local region of reality at one local time in reality, happens to be a 'designer'). So, 'design', then isn't really the result of 'designers', it is fundamentally a result of the way the universe is intrinsically structured. So, in this view, there is only ever one ultimate source of order [and disorder] which is nature itself.
Anyway I've gone on a limb and did a cursory search for clear examples of order arising from entirely unpredictable, random processes. I was able to find a nice article which provides an example of pendulums which take on an orderly state of swinging when swung at in entirely random ways. In this case the ordered properties of the system - the orientation and swinging of the pendulums - results entirely from the disorder of the inputs to the system. So here is one case in which order comes out of disorder.
Of course we also know the universe is fundamentally indeterministic or random - this is why schrodinger's equation is a probabilistic model, not a deterministic law. In fact it gives you, based on the energy of the system, only all possible locations where the system could be and the likelihoods of 'finding it' at those points - should you assume the system as actually, a conventional point particle. Alternatively, you can imagine it as telling you the object exists in all possible locations it could be given that energy.
You've just decoupled 'intelligence', 'external agent', and even 'external cause' from 'designer'. How do you distinguish design from order?
Aristotle's entire framework of causation is just that, a framework. It doesn't necessarily map to reality. To give a real world example: There is nothing to suggest that proteins are made to function the way they function. For every functional protein [e.g Hemoglobin], there are hundreds of 'pseudo' genes that failed to function in the process of attempting to make that one.
And proteins don't have singular purposes, they are multifunctional. In fact it's precisely this cognitive bias we have [ functional fixedness ], of assuming purpose, that leads to so many mischaracterizations of proteins -- we fail to realize just because they're important for something in one context, doesn't mean they have entirely different functions in others. To carry the example, hemoglobin, most well-known for carrying oxygen in the blood and most expressed by red blood cells in the blood. Carrying oxygen seems the 'purpose' of hemoglobin, but hemoglobin is also expressed in numerous other tissues. In those cells it plays roles completely different than its role as an oxygen carrier. This also discounts the non-bodily uses of something like hemoglobin. We repurpose proteins all the time, taking them out of their natural contexts to do other things.
To distinguish between usable and unusable calories is precisely to highlight the inefficiency. There is no fundamental reason why to make that distinction or why the number of usable calories is so little. We could, in theory, design our own proteins that digest more of the bonds in grass and do so in a more energetically efficient manner.
Quoting aporiap
I don't see how the argument is circular. You accept that it is a "conclusion", therefore there is logic behind it. One of the most useful aspects of logic is to exclude from the category of "possible", things which are actually impossible. If this is what you call being narrow-sighted, then so be it. And I've already explained why it is illogical to think that order could come from anything other than design, so call me narrow-sighted, if that's what being logical is. I'd rather be narrow-sighted than believe that something impossible is possible.
Quoting aporiap
We went through this in this thread already. "Self-organisation" is a bogus concept. Organisation is already presupposed, required as an initial state for any system self-organizing, so it is just a matter of one form of order creating another form of order.
Furthermore, the fact that we can point to instances of order which we do not know the reason for that order, does not justify the claim that there is order with no reason for that order.
Quoting aporiap
I really don't know what you might mean when you say that the brain operates by "universal natural principles". I tend to think that you're just spouting words, and you don't know what you're saying.
Quoting aporiap
Yeah sure, but the universe, as an ordered structure was necessarily designed itself, so how does this help your case? This is the same issue with your reference to the brain. The brain, as an ordered structure, was itself designed. So saying that the brain operates according to "universal natural principles" doesn't really say anything, because designed things operate according to such principles. In fact, that's how they are designed, through the use of such principles.
Quoting aporiap
I'll repeat myself, citing instances of order occurring, in which we do not know the reason why the order occurs, does nothing to support the claim that order could arise for no reason. So you might as well give up your search for these examples, if that's the reason why you're looking for them.
Quoting aporiap
This is contradictory. If a probabilistic law is effective, then the system is not random.
Quoting aporiap
That's the point, any attempt to separate design from order is illogical.
Quoting aporiap
Ever heard of 'trial and error'? Trial and error by its very nature is a designed procedure. It requires a predetermined condition of success.
Quoting aporiap
I'll repeat again. Just because we do not know the purpose, or in this case if someone says 'X is the purpose' when this may be proven false, that does not mean there is no purpose.
Circular reasoning involves using your conclusion as a premise in the same argument. In order to form the conclusion 'there is no other source for order', you already have to assume there is no other source for order- i.e. that natural cases of order are not caused by something other than a designer.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We only talked about how there is no explanation for why the world works as it does.
The physical laws that describe how the world works are approximations and are not deterministic, they are probabilistic. Randomness and chaos are intrinsic to the world. You will have to explain why there is chaos.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In that example we know the precise reason, it is the randomness of the inputs to the system. When you replace the random inputs with ordered inputs, the order of the pendulum swings goes away.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't know what you mean by effective. By definition, probabilistic models incorporate randomness. It will not tell you the coin will be heads or tails after you flip it. It tells you it could be heads or tails. You could imagine there's a 'predictable pattern' though, if you knew all the variables you could know if it would be heads and so there's still a pattern. But fundamentally there is no predictable pattern of movement of a particle or the state of its properties (whether it spins in one or another direction, whether it's in this location or that location). It is fundamentally random.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How is it illogical? To my knowledge, it's only you and Madfool that don't distinguish between them.
Even in your applying the term 'design', there is a fundamental difference. You, by definition, know that man-made things are 'designed'. You 'infer', by analogy, 'order' in nature is designed. To infer in the latter case, you necessarily need to distinguish between order and design because prior to inferring the order is designed, you are implicitly acknowledging the thing has a pattern i.e. order and yet, at that moment, it is not known whether that pattern is a design or not. So you do distinguish between them. My question is what way.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is not trial and error. There is no person with a predetermined goal trying to make proteins. There is nothing special or intentional about this world or a single protein, it exists in the middle of nowhere and is the galactic equivalent to a quantum fluctuation - proteins are more than 30 orders of magnitude smaller in diameter than a single light year, galaxies are hundreds of light years across.
I simply can't imagine what would lead you to assume a goal in the random process that just so happened to result in a protein after, billions of years of random iteration. And of course, the equivalent of a galactic eyeblink, it'll all be gone as if nothing ever happened. It's like saying the ripple in your cup of water was intentionally made to be there, and god is using trial and error as his method of doing so.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The point is an object can do very different functions in very different contexts and be considered 'useful'. The definition of a purpose or final cause Aristotelian sense, is the singular intrinsic function of something [candle to light house, seed to form adult plant]. How can there be a fundamentally intrinsic function of something if it can function in multiple contexts? Sure we say a candle as having the purpose of lighting a room, but it can be used in many other ways that have nothing to do with that.
"Fine-tuned" is used in different ways by religious folk (Christian, Muslims, etc) and scientists (physicists, chemists, etc). Typical scientific definition/use:
1. science is model ? evidence convergence (evidence, observation, experimental results accumulate, and models converge thereupon)
2. the models incorporate constants (lightspeed, elementary charge, the molar Planck constant, 3+1 dimensional spacetime)
3. by dialing the constants in the models (like they were variables), and deriving the consequences of the models, various ranges of in/stability can be supposed
4. additional smaller ranges are derived from the models in which life (implicitly as we know it) can presumably come about
5. fine-tuned is (defined as) the ranges found in 3 or 4, against other mathematical values of the constants, that variables otherwise might take
6. apart from these scientific constants, we also have mathematical constants, like ? and e, that are used in scientific models
"? was created and fine-tuned so we can have circles?" :)
Our best models per se, suggest micro-chaos and macro-regularities (some of which are trivial). So, this is a fairly narrow definition, especially against a backdrop of possible worlds.
Christians also posit Yahweh, to whom such laws presumably do not apply, but nonetheless is possible according to them. Muslims also posit heaven (for example) as another world. What we'd then be looking for, is an assessment of all possible worlds. Feasible?
Maybe some see faces in the clouds, but that's not much of an argument, though.
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Wikipedia » Ramsey theory — order from chaos
Wikipedia » Ramsey's theorem
Wikipedia » Universality (dynamical systems) — emergence
Wikipedia » Self-organization
Wikipedia » Chaos theory » Spontaneous order
Wikipedia » Texas sharpshooter fallacy — :fire:
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I agree. But I also infer from the constructive order of the universe that the "intrinsic structure" of the system was not a random accident. And, since the structure as a whole is evolving in an apparently positive direction, I can't buy the Genesis account of a "designer" who made a perfect world, and then was chagrined to see it quickly falling into disorder. That's why I prefer the analogy of an Evolutionary Programmer who uses randomness to generate novel options, and selective criteria to guide the process toward an optimum solution.The search method is heuristic : a journey of discovery, not a fait accompli. That's why I think evolution is not just about the destination : "getting there is half the fun." :grin:
Intrinsic = essential, inherent
Quoting aporiap
Chaos Theory is based on the fact that there is potential for order in randomness. For example, the random interactions of heat, moisture, and wind produce recognizable weather patterns, that forecasters can analyze to predict short range future arrangements. But the key to such ephemeral capricious phenomena -- which caused the ancients to infer that whimsical gods were responsible -- is only possible because Natural Laws (criteria) combine with Initial Conditions to produce repeatable patterns under similar conditions. But, since those "Laws of Order", and the Energy to enforce them, were in effect at the very beginning of evolution, they must have been established prior to the Big Bang.
So, of course there is order in random behavior. And although those simple patterns seem to arise spontaneously, the "Rules of Order" are intrinsic in the system. Yet, weather patterns are never progressive, but cyclical. The image link below is an example of design by Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Programming. Marvelous, but the codes and criteria for the process didn't emerge spontaneously. They were input by human "designers" of the goal-oriented process. :cool:
EVOLVED ANTENNA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
The conclusion does not involve the prior assumption of "no other source of order". That is the conclusion, and this comes about from understanding the distinction between order and disorder, and the fact that order cannot come from disorder without a cause. That cause is design. That's simply what creating by design is, and ordering things is something only done in the act of creating by design. So when things are ordered there is design at work, because that's what ordering is. And things could not be ordered without having been ordered, by way of contradiction.
Quoting aporiap
I already discussed this with someone else in this thread, maybe you should go back and reread some sections. There is no randomness and chaos in the natural world, as the world appears to us. All that we sense is orderly, and this is because human beings are so disposed so as only orderly things are sensed. If there were unordered things out there we would not sense them. One might create a system where it appears like randomness and chaos prevail, but that would be a created system, and therefore it would be designed and ordered simply to produce the appearance of randomness and chaos, when the system is actually ordered to do this.
Quoting aporiap
But the system itself is created, which is what a "system" is, and is therefore ordered by that act of creation. For example, we create dice to give a random roll. But that system is created for that purpose, so it is inherently ordered, and this will not suffice as an example of natural randomness for that very reason. The pendulum system is set up (ordered) with random (unknown) inputs, just like the roll of dice gives unknown outputs. Since the system is artificial, and made to be this way, it is contradictory to say that it is not ordered.
Quoting aporiap
If there is no predictable pattern, then Schrodinger's equation would be useless. So when you talk about "no predictable pattern" you are not talking about the universe according to Schrodinger's equation, and that's why I accused you of contradiction. There is a predictable pattern, but some aspects are not predictable. Again, I went though this earlier in the thread, the overall system, as a whole, is orderly and predictable, though some aspects (what we call accidentals) are not predictable.
Quoting aporiap
It's not inferred by analogy, it's an understanding of the word "order", what it means to be ordered. You seem to have no understanding whatsoever of what it means to be ordered, and you go off using the word in strange ways, as if when human beings set up a system like a random number generator, this is not an ordered system. Isn't it obvious to you that these systems are designed to produce these so-called random results and are therefore ordered?
Quoting aporiap
You seem to misunderstand. To say that a thing has order is to say that it has been ordered, and this implies "by design". There is nothing else which orders things but a designer.
I see you mention "pattern", and you might want to go to Isaac's position, and argue that a pattern is completely subjective. Isaac said there is no order inherent within the thing, it is only in the observing subject's mind. Is this what you are saying? But if the pattern or order is within the thing itself, it must have been put there by design. Otherwise we could not call it a pattern or order, could we? If the things were positioned by some random force, then it would necessarily be just some random positioning of the parts. Don't you agree? It might look like a pattern to one of us, but we'd have to say that it's really random positioning. What could make it not-random, other than being positioned by design?
Quoting aporiap
Who said there's a person involved? Trial and error is a process not restricted to human activities, and your description sounded exactly like trial and error:
"For every functional protein [e.g Hemoglobin], there are hundreds of 'pseudo' genes that failed to function in the process of attempting to make that one."
Do you not understand that "function" implies purpose? You write phrases like this, then in total self-contradiction you proceed to deny purpose. I really don't think that you have a good understanding of what you are saying.
Quoting aporiap
You seem to misunderstand Aristotle's "final cause". The final cause is the goal, or end, what we might call purpose, and this is specific to the circumstances. Yes, it might be true that each particular thing has a singular final cause specific to itself, but that's because each particular thing exists in its own particular set of circumstances. You might say that this object, if it were in a different context, would serve a different function (in a counterfactual way), but the fact is that each object only exists in one unique set of circumstances.
TheMadFool,
I have summarized and outlined your argument below:
1. If order is to explain the existence of God, then order should always assume a designer.
2. Order does not always assume a designer.
3. Order does not explain the existence of God.
Although I understand the argument that the existence of order should not assume the existence of a designer, I think it misses the argument asserted by the watchmaker analogy. The watchmaker analogy, or the fine-tuning argument, asserts that our world is so intricately set in tune with its natural laws that it requires a Creator. In this argument, I will disagree with Premise 2 of your argument and assert that the order we experience in our universe should always assume the existence of a designer, or God.
The thought experiment you provide of room A and room B seems to miss the argument of the watchmaker analogy. First, it should not be assumed that occupying a space and designing a space are interchangeable. Second, the fact that processes of thermodynamics naturally lead to chaos or disorder, also known as entropy, makes the case that room A is more likely to have a designer. The fact that order exists in room A and not in room B assumes that somebody entered and cleaned the room to create that order. The fact that things naturally move to states of disorder explains the disorder of room B as well as the future disorder of room A upon human interaction. Consider a new thought experiment, imagine infinite possible rooms in which each one contains all the normal fixings of a room. Each room has the capability for each desk, table, nightstand, chair or other items included in the room to be situated in any possible manner. Some rooms have furniture situated on the ceiling while some have upside-down desks and tables. The fine-tuning argument for God’s existence postulates that our world is one in which, if placed in the thought experiment of infinite rooms, would have all of the furniture correctly situated, a perfectly made bed, a full color-coded closet, the perfect color palette, and, on top of it all, an ocean view. The point here is not simply that the evidence of order and design leads to the conclusion that God exists, but rather that our world is so finely tuned in regards to physics, gravity, molecules, and other scientific factors for human life to persist that there must be a Creator. The thought experiment of infinite rooms proves that having a room that is perfectly designed is much more unlikely than having a room that experiences any sort of disorder whatsoever.
Even if you were assuming a sort of many-universes hypothesis in which universes can be randomly generated and one universe is destined to have life-permitting natural laws, it still would not prove against the existence of God. For example, if universes were randomly generated then what scientific process would facilitate the continual creation of universes? This universe generator of sorts would need to be designed by a Creator. The generator would also be required to self-select the laws of physics but who is to determine what those laws are? A creator is needed to determine the boundaries of natural laws. And finally, why was the universe originally created with such meticulous order despite the laws of entropy? A creator is needed to explain the order that exists within the universe.
In conclusion, although disorder can be symbolic of human life, like that of an unorganized room, complete and perfect order requires the existence of a Creator for its' explanation. The order we experience in our universe is so finely tuned for human life that the existence of a designer is simply necessary.
Your argument seems to go, as follows, like a usual design argument:
1. If the universe has all the trappings of design, then the universe must have a designer.
2. The universe has all the trappings of design.
3. Therefore, the universe must have a designer.
As you mention, people object to this argument by objecting to (1) by saying that the order of the universe could arise randomly without a designer. You argue, using the two rooms experiment, that this is a bad objection because people see ordered things on earth and conclude that there is a designer/occupant, yet reject a designer for the universe which too is well-ordered.
I would argue that your experiment is disanalogous to the design arguments for the universe. Clearly, both rooms have at least a touch of design; they have items in the room that got there somehow. Room A is in disarray, but not by chance. At least one being put those items in the room, whether they were placed orderly or not. Also, as one who has seen a college dorm, it is not unjustified to conclude that the room in disarray is the occupied one. There are reasons to believe that an occupant’s intentions are to be disorderly. Perhaps the room started out orderly, then a person over time made it disorderly. Clearly, if both rooms started out orderly and only one ended up disorderly, the disordered one is the one with the occupant. This is in opposition to what you said about the two room experiment. Perhaps, in the same way, the universe could have been disorderly even with a designer. Maybe one would object that purposeful disorder is still, in fact, a design. But nonetheless, it still seems possible that disorder could arise with a designer.
Additionally, a room is like an artifact, which is intentionally made by humans, rather than something like the ocean or the mountains. But the universe is not like an artifact. Humans make justified assumptions about things like artifacts because we know how they work. But humans often make unjustified assumptions about things that are not like artifacts, such as experiences.
I must humbly disagree. The whole question of efficiency, in this case of nutrition, must be considered in terms of which creatures we're talking about. May be it is true that a specific animal x has access to 10% of the calories in grass but there could be other creatures a, b, c, etc. that share the rest, 90% resulting in 100% group efficiency.
Think of it as a soccer team Each player forms a specific percentage of the game having a role to play as a keeper, defender, striker, etc. and they all come together to yield 100%.
Quoting Coben
Here's what I think:
1. If determinism is true then there must be causality
2. If design is true then ther must be causality
As is obvious the link between design and determinism is causality and confusion is inevitable.
However, there is no necessity that design implies determinism. For example:
1a. A is the friend of B
2a. C is the friend of B
It doesn't follow that A is the friend of C.
You raise an important issue that disorder is correlated with conscious being. However, the point is order is always associated with a conscious being (a designer).
We have the following:
1. Disorder is either designer or no designer
2. Order is always a designer
The stronger, ergo reasonable, connection is that between order and design.
I don't disagree with this, but I am still working, from quite a ways back from the following....
Quoting TheMadFool
For this example to work I think there would need to be as many rooms as there are chances, however minuscule, for life to exist. Only having two rooms to choose from fails to address the main claim in the counter-argument. In the objection to the design argument one could claim that the chances of life and the universe existing are very improbable and we just happen by chance to live here where we can contemplate it.
For argument's sake let's say the probability of humans existing is one in one million. Similarly, when tweaking the room example, instead of their being two rooms, there would need to be one million rooms. If all these different rooms had arrangements in no particular order, seemingly at random, and I happen to come across one that is in a perceived discernable pattern, i'm not sure I would conclude that it was designed. If most people had the time to go through all these rooms, I think they would conclude that even though improbable, the neat room just happen by chance to be neat. I might claim that it seems suspicious, but I think it would be false to conclude that the room was designed.
Order is a more unlikely event than disorder for the simple reason that there are more ways to be in the latter state than the former. I have taken that into my consideration and the 2 rooms represent and capture this truth adequately. There is a strong correlation between order and designer.