Caution: IDist in Action

The process of intelligence involves trial and ........eh... error?. 

In a post dated 6 March with the heading "Intelligent Design in Action" we can read the following on the "Intelligent Design" web site Uncommon Descent:

See if you can spot the pattern [William Dembski] highlights in the introduction to [No Free Lunch] and elsewhere: 

. . . (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. (No Free Lunch, p. xi. HT: ENV.)

Are we getting a feel for what design as process and as artifact looks like?

Is it reasonable to argue that functionally specific, complex organisation and/or linked information (FSCO/I) is credibly produced by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity?

Is this authoritarian vision of plan formation and imposition really how intelligence works? I hope to comment briefly on this a little later.  In the meantime see if you can spot the pattern of misconceptions.

7/3/16 Further Notes

The above suffers from the usual defacto ID false dichotomies. Even if we assume intelligence as a "black box" it doesn't work in the manner of the simplified model above. Even "purpose" might have to be discovered. and a product of seemingly chance encounters. And once purpose is discovered intelligence doesn't then go on to form and execute foregone plans which are then imposed on "nature" to create "artifacts". There is a lot of trial and error with feedback from experiments and searches of the environment having a crucial role in the process of intelligence. "Blackboxing" intelligence is itself naive. Intelligence is not analytically indivisible and is decomposable: There are likely to be parts of the brain which are given to "thought" experiments and therefore have a role not dissimilar to the role environmental objects have in searches and experiments. In short there is, as I always maintain, no clear cut demarcation between intelligence and "natural forces" as the de facto ID community habitually assume.

As I have oft repeated many of the problems with defacto-ID can traced back to the explanatory filter.