CONSCIOUS COGNITION

 This post is still undergoing enhancement and correction

Is there really gritty matter out there? Or do we construct the out-thereness 

of matter from the mathematical rationality of our pattens of consciousness? 

Unraveling the Puzzle of Consciousness: Key Brain Region Discovered - Neuroscience News

I've written a lot on the subject of consciousness over years. In that time I've expressed my philosophical slant towards idealism, a philosophy that I see as the only chance of making sense of consciousness.  In trying to summarize my view I would give account of my own version of idealism as follows:

The Problem

There seems to be an incommensurability, or conceptual disconnect between conscious cognition and the material world of particles which make up the many kinds of dynamic configurations we perceive around us. What is it about a dynamic configuration such as we see in the neural structure of the brain which makes it conscious? The problem is compounded by recent strides in Artificial Intelligence which are starting to do a good job of simulating at least some aspects of human behavior. The AI problem seems to be simply a case of creating the right kind of dynamic configurations which imitate human thinking. In trying get the AI cognitive dynamic right the question of adding the sentient magic of consciousness doesn't come into it and in fact is of no help at all when trying to design AI systems. It is no surprise, therefore, that some people, misled by the third-person linguistic currency of science which deals largely with dynamic configurationalism and which is (necessarily) oblivious to the first-person perspective, will tell us that consciousness is a mirage or some kind of illusion; a position which is a bit like saying that pain and suffering are illusions and therefore what's the fuss all about?

But yes, on the face of it there is an issue here: In all our attempts to investigate the dynamic configurational basis of intelligence/sentience, whether by deeply probing neural structure or trying to simulate intelligence/sentience computationally the concept of consciousness simply doesn't come into our thinking: So, does it really exist?

The Solution. 

The consciousness problem arises because of the seeming logical impossibility of finding consciousness even in the most sophisticated material configurations; for the closer you look at any configuration the more you find just further configurational detail and that is not what we mean by consciousness.  I would explain that this is because conscious cognition is an entirely different genus of category to configurational categories; conscious cognition is the thing that is doing the looking, whereas material configurations are the things being looked at.  The question "Where can one find consciousness in the physical regime?" is therefore unanswerable until our attention becomes focused back toward the observer rather than the observed. 

So, if we are going to treat material configurationalism as fundamental, axiomatic and elemental we will never be able to solve the question of consciousness. The solution, then, is to turn the question around: Viz: If the perceptions of conscious cognition are taken as fundamental, and axiomatic can we then find a material physical a regime? The answer is a clear yes.... 

If the perceptions and qualia of sentience are sufficiently organized with mathematical precision and faultless registration it then becomes possible for conscious cognition to define material objects in terms of the mathematical logic controlling experience. But to do so would also require that conscious cognition is itself sufficiently organized, rational and sophisticated for it to be able to mentally construct material objects from its experience. The elegant twist in the logic here is that we find conscious cognition is itself describable in terms of the very material physical regime conscious cognition constructs and perceives. I love this twist of circular self-affirmation: As I've said before it so reminds me of the way a computer language compiler can be written in the very language it compiles; that is, a computer language is actually described in terms of itself. Likewise conscious cognition constructs and conceives the objects of the physical regime and discovers itself to be describable in the self-same terms of that physical regime*. See the introduction to my book where I grappled with these ideas.

 

The Thing-in-Itself

Of course, we can never know the nature of the thing-in-itself which delivers the organised patterning of our experiences (However, see Acts 17:28 for a possible Biblical answer).  But if we have sufficient intelligence we can perceive and understand the organization of the experiential interface that this thing-in-itself mysteriously presents to us. It is this organization which enables us to define a rational physical regime of apparently "gritty" matter (or should that be "wirery" strings?). And at the same time we find that we can also self-describe ourselves in terms of that matter. 

At this point one might be tempted to say that because the material physical regime is a mathematical construction made possible by the high organization & high registration of our experiential interface then it follows that "gritty matter" is a kind of mathematical illusion and that conscious cognition is the actual elemental & fundamental reality. This turn of phrase, which I have some (but not full) sympathy with, turns the "consciousness-is-an-illusion" philosophy on its head; if I say "gritty-matter-out-there is an illusion" it serves as a useful hyperbole to get the message of idealism across that the thinking perceiving intelligence is fundamental and axiomatic to the cosmos. 

But that message needs qualification: As I've said before, I suspect there are no bit parts in the material "illusion": I'd guess that no object is simply an experiential facade, unlike the characters and objects which appear in a novel or a computer game and are developed just enough to keep up the illusion of a deeper reality. All the mathematics of all the objects and characters in the story of matter have, I suggest, been worked out in full whether it be those distant galaxies or those events of the distant past. 

So, am I claiming that life, the universe and everything is some kind of thorough computer simulation giving us a facade of apparently gritty matter? The answer to that is both "yes" and "no". 

"Yes" because there is, I believe, some kind of matrix dedicated to supplying us with an experiential interface capable of empirically answering all the questions we put to it. This constitutes the equivalent of a kind of Turing test for an ontologically real world; as far as empirically interrogating this world is concerned the "illusion" seldom reveals itself to be an "illusion" and survives robust probing.  But we just don't know the absolute nature of the medium on which this mathematics has been reified (although as a Christain I would quote Acts 17:28). Moreover, because the philosophy of idealism gives conscious cognition such a primary and fundamental place it helps to break us into the notion that divine conscious cognition is the a-priori matrix on which the physical regime is reified.

"No" because the computer simulation argument has only been presented in a way where it is clear that "gritty matter" is assumed to be axiomatic, elemental and fundamental. See here for my reaction to the computer simulation notion.  

Very early on in my thinking career I was impressed by the logic of positivism; it seemed irrefutable that not only did all knowledge come via experience/observation but also the objects of the material world were meaningless without their ordered experiential base and the cognitive ability to construct them mathematically. This kind of logical positivism rightly assumed that the combination of organised experience and sophisticated cognitive abilities were axiomatic and fundamental. But where positivism was in danger of falling-over was that it was liable to render meaningless any thought that the constructions built from the data dots of experience pointed to a reality beyond the observer; history, distant galaxies and above all other sentient beings were in danger of, very counter intuitively, dissolving into nothingness, leaving us with a very egocentric solipsism. There had to be a matrix out there that was far more fundamental and elemental than the cognizant observer and which maintained that highly organised facade and interface to a real world. Given the primacy of sentience in the idealist philosophy, for me Acts 17:28 was a rational guess for the nature of the matrix, a guess that integrated and made sense of so much about the human predicament. 

End Note:

My own highly speculative attempt at the physics of consciousness can be found here. I don't push this theory with any strong conviction, but just to prove that theorizing on consciousness should not be a taboo subject. What this theory lacks however is the colourful qualitative nature of conscious experience. Experiential qualities are irreducible to the formal black & white terms of configurationalism. Although Penrose's idea that conscious cognition is a correlate of incomputability is a possible line of inquiry I'm not impressed by this theory myself. 

Footnote

* It must be understood that this self-description is only in terms of the formal structure of cognition as opposed to the qualities of conscious cognition: An AI system may be able to do a could job of formally simulating/describing the neural activity of the mind, but identity of formal structure is not a sufficient condition to create the qualia of consciousness. 

NAID Part V: Politics and North American Intelligent Design

 See here for the previous parts of this series: Quantum Non-Linearity: NAID Part IV: Evolution: Creation on Steriods (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Wesley J Smith channels the primordial 
fears fueling conspiracy theorism and by 
default furthers the cause of a certain
D J Trump and his demagoguery

I don't like politics. It is a messy business bound up with the complexities and foibles of a human nature, impossible to fully understand and render in neat formulaic expressions. Well, I suppose I was being naive when I thought the Evolution/Intelligent Design question could be approached from a purely mathematical angle and that politics wouldn't figure; in actual fact the subject is shot through with group identification, group think, and group camaraderie; how silly I was; what did I expect of a highly gregarious human animal? Moreover, since the appearance of a certain Mr. D J Trump and the far-right the question has become even more politised and like covid-mask wearing it has become a predictor of one's woke or unwoke status.

In this connection I was piqued by the following article on the North American ID website Evolution News written by a Wesley J Smith a man who I would place as part of the religio-political wing of the North American Intelligent Design community:  See here:

Beware of the “Right to Health” | Evolution News

Wesley, it seems, is a specialist in human exceptionalism. I'd not disagree with him on human exceptionalism, but although not necessarily disagreeing with his conclusions I can almost guarantee that I'd disagree with the cultural route to those conclusions. Actually, come to think of it, I can bet that I'd also disagree with just what he means by "exceptionalism". But all that is another story, so back to his article. I reproduce the article below, but before I do some general comments.....

Since I wrote a series of posts in 2007 that I called "Mathematical Politics" my suspicions of both the collectivism of Maxism and the libertarian individualism of the far-right has only increased. In fact, I would go as far as to say that both, when pushed hard enough, are the gateways to dictatorships. Both try to sow distrust in the cut & thrust of democratic politics and its established institutions, e.g. democratic forums, the civil service, the police, the army, the judiciary, the media, academia, big tech, big pharma etc, which they believe to be harbouring malign highly self-interested parties.  Both Marxists and libertarians have visions of doing away with "big government" which they will tell us is serving a quasi-anonymous elite. This sense of alienation and suspicion is what I refer to as proto-conspiracy theorism, a precursor which provides fertile ground for the more specific & detailed nonsense of conspiracy theorism such as QAnon and 5G-vaccine theories etc. The political fantasy goal of both Marxists and extreme libertarians is of a folksy decentralization, either in the form of communism or a thoroughly decentralized market.  Both visions see government as part of the problem and therefore both seek the dismantling of the ramifying democratic state which they will portray as the enemy of the people. Much as the romantic idea of a decentralized society sounds attractive, just and fair, it would leave a dangerous power vacuum up for grabs by the demagogues who would emerge out of Marxism and libertarianism.  

In his article Wesley takes the view that those ostensively good causes promoted by governments, quangos and technocratic elites in actual fact favor authoritarian control or may even be a cover story for those whose ambitions are power & social control. Let's recall that Marxism makes a similar claim: Viz: Government, whether we call it democracy or not along with its associated institutions, is there to support the interests of the propertied classes.  But for those who see social reality through the spectacles of proto-conspiracy theorism, no obvious dictators pulling the strings are named; instead they lump people into malign classes and nefarious hidden actors who are identified as the cause of our problems with perhaps some individuals (like Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci) singled out as especially evil. In the malaise of a troubled democracy folk discontent readily latches onto these casts of hidden actors who are blamed for social woes and become a target popularists love to hate. This "who-can-we-blame" effect is readily exploited by demagogues who are looking to displace the complexities, contentions and cut-and-thrust of democratic & accountable government with the great simplifications of dictatorial and quasi-monarchical rule. 

Wesley's article speaks for itself. As we see below it is full of how apparently good causes are being used as a cover story to influence the populace to accept the covert goal of authoritarian rule. In his article he names all the hot topics which make the blood of far-right pundits boil: Viz: Gun control, vaccinations, confiscation of intellectual property rights, rule by experts, the international technocracy, the WHO, the UN, Anthony Fauci, limiting fossil fuel use, climate change, human rights, "woke" philosophy, racism, welfare state, public health care, gender transitions, abortion, and more...  These are all bad, bad, bad and set the pulses racing of those who have been baited by the idea that they are all pretexts for ultimate authoritarian control, just as Marxists will claim that government, the legal system, the police, the army and private property rights of the ruling class are a way of keeping the working classes in their place.  

In Wesley's article below I've highlighted the inflammatory & emotive phrases:

Wesley J Smith: Wealth and wellness are becoming the primary justifications for international technocracy, or “rule by experts.” Indeed, we are told that preventing the next pandemic will require that the World Health Organization be given the power to declare pandemics and impose emergency policies internationally. Anthony Fauci went even further, arguing that that the UN and the WHO must be given greater powers to “rebuild the infrastructures of human existence.” Imagine the authoritarian potential.

We have been told, also, that climate change is a health emergency that justifies greater technocratic control. So is racism. Ditto, gun proliferation in the U.S. And we can’t forget the threats to biodiversity. On and on the proposed policy imperialism goes. This is why the seemingly good-sounding proposal for an international “right to health” is such a trap.

A Purported Right: As an illustration, the Lancet just published an article seeking to push this purported right into international law. Note the expansive scope of the proposal. From “Revitalising the right to health is essential to securing better health for all” (my emphasis):

The right to health is a duty held by all states under international human rights law and covers a range of entitlements, including available, accessible, acceptable, and good quality health care for mental and physical health, along with freedoms such as bodily autonomy. The right to health also extends to the underlying determinants of health — those factors, such as the rights to safe drinking water and to adequate food, which are integral to human dignity. Health is a fundamental human right that is indispensable for the exercise of other human rights and essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

That covers just about the entire range of contemporary international technocratic ambition, including the desire to do away with fossil fuels, establish worldwide abortion absolutism and a right to access “gender transitions,” attack the ability of meat and dairy producers to remain in business and family farmers to properly fertilize their fields (as we have seen in Europe, lately), etc. Indeed, the advocacy is steeped with a voracious technocratic grasping for power. To wit:

The report of the International AIDS Society–Lancet Commission underscores the centrality of human rights to achieving better health for all, discussing many of the key issues that require urgent attention. Newer challenges include the worsening impacts of the climate crisis and the potential harms emanating from digital technologies, especially generative artificial intelligence, which continue to advance in a regulatory vacuum.

Efforts to advance the right to health must also involve consideration of the impacts of commercial companies, given their practices that are too often inconsistent with their responsibility to respect human rights — for example, on pricing and distribution of medicines and vaccines.

Good Grief: Under this guise, almost everything becomes about “health,” and authoritarian powers — such as the ability to suspend intellectual-property rights during a health “emergency,” as is already proposed — are justified under a so-called human-rights economy.

At the national level, embracing the Human Rights Economy approach — a concept that places people and the planet at the core of economic policy making — can promote investment in health care and other social goods.

A Human Rights Economy can also drive effective action to end power disparities — often the painful legacy of slavery, colonialism, and racist and patriarchal structures — that perpetuate discrimination and marginalisation, entrenching inequalities and inequities.

 You get the drill.

Yes, I do get the drill Wesley! You are a proto-conspiracy theorist and all this plays into the hands of far-right demagogues and conspiracy theorists. Well, OK those government institutions & quangos are composed of flawed human beings and therefore self-interest and error always lurks in the background; cockups and cover-ups are frequent. But when these failings are exposed, fearful and imaginative conspiracy theorists all too easily weave them into the fabric of their paranoid and highly organized macro-conspiracy fantasies; this appears to be a coping strategy in the face of the chaos and randomness of the human condition. But I would maintain there is no organized macro-conspiracy needed to explain this condition; common-or-garden human sin and epistemic limitations are enough. 

Wesley is adding fuel to the fires of fear, discontent and alienation. What is notable is that he names no authoritarian leader who is behind the plot striving to get into the cockpit of society; instead, he just stokes up resentment, blame and above all fear. He fails to see that the real dangers come from identifiable autocrats & potential autocrats who when their guile fails will use threat and coercion to impose their will. It is also notable such authoritarian leaders stoke up popularist fears and have a history of exploiting conspiracy theories and lies to apportion blame on covert actors that the popularists believe have got-it-in-for-them. See here for more on why I believe conspiracy theory to be false theory society. (See also here)

I would challenge Wesley's understanding of how a society works and in particular the dynamic of societal authoritarianism; the means of authoritarianism is, as always, the good old fashioned overt dictator working through a brutal secret police. So, look out for the up and coming "strong-men" and not those ostensively good international causes no matter how misguided they might be; whilst accountable democracy still exists these causes can be openly argued over. 

Nevertheless, I have some sympathy with the reaction of the NAID community of which Welsey is part. They have been rejected by a highly secularized academic community, a community who have lost their way in regard to the meaning of life; they can only offer emptiness when in fact human instincts about ultimate purpose & meaning actually point elsewhere.  But the NAID community, as I have tried to show in this series, haven't helped themselves with the kind of nonsense they have served up and things have only got worse with them as they have accepted the welcoming embrace of the far-right. But they do have fragments of a case at least worth considering. Writing-off that case wholesale as pseudo-science has only help fuel the grievance politics that motivates Trumpite popularism and blights the academic community in the popularist imagination. 

I'm pretty sure Wesley, like Ken Ham, will be voting Trump, and in doing so he'll be voting for authoritarian control with knobs on.

NAID Part IV: Evolution: Creation on Steriods

Picture from: Natural selection – News, Research and Analysis – The Conversation – page 1

The Earlier Parts

The three previous parts of this series can be found at the end of these links:

Part 1: Quantum Non-Linearity: Casey Luskin Promotes a Flawed XOR Epistemic Filter. Part I (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Part 2: Quantum Non-Linearity: Logging Some Notes on Naive Intelligent Design Theory. Part II (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Part 3: Quantum Non-Linearity: Naive Intelligent Design: Part III (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

***

Evolution's  a-priori information

The following is based on a paper which can be accessed here

The unconditional probability of life evolving, Prob(Life), is extremely small: It is equal to the ratio of the number of possible organic configurations to the total number of all possible configurations. Because living configurations are highly organised then according to disorder theory, the number of possible organic configurations is a minute fraction of the total number of configurations thus implying a tiny unconditional probability of life. 

If we now assume that standard evolution has actually taken place as a result of the right physical conditions being contrived, then the unconditional probability of life is given by this equation:

Prob (Life) = Prob (life, right conditions) x Prob (right conditions)

The first probability on the right-hand side of this equation is the conditional probability of life evolving, a probability calculated assuming the "right conditions" are in place. If evolution has occurred, this probability must be sufficiently large for there to be a reasonable chance of life evolving in a cosmos where its dimensions are considered to be part of the physical regime with the "right conditions". But because the value of the unconditional probability Prob(Life) is so miniscule this implies that a huge improbability must be embedded in the second factor on the righthand side of the above equation, namely the unconditional probability of the right conditions existing, Prob (right conditions). 

If we turn the above equation into a Shannon information equation by taking the negated Log of both sides, we get:

I(Life) = I(life, right conditions) + I(right conditions)

Since we require that Prob(life, right conditions) is a realistic probability this implies that the information value of the first term on the right-hand side won't be enormous. Hence, it is clear that most of the information required for the emergence of life will be embedded in the term "I(right conditions)".  Nevertheless, some information is embedded in I(life, right conditions) and this means that so-called "natural processes" do generate information if only a relatively small amount. This is contrary to what many Naive IDists and Biblical literalists try to push past us. I made this point about slow information creation by a physical regime in Part II ......but see the important qualifying footnote at the end about parallel processing vs expanding parallelism*.

But the main point is this: Conventional Evolution, if it is to work, must be the depository of huge amounts of a priori contingent information and this information is embodied in those "right conditions". Although a physical regime using parallel processing does generate some information (slowly) by far and away the greatest part is found in those given right conditions. In conventional evolution that information would be embedded in the "spongeam": See Part I for more on the spongeam. Conventional evolution, if indeed it is the process by which life has emerged, is necessarily an astonishingly sophisticated process in terms of its demand for information. 

In times past I might have referred to the necessary a priori information required to get evolution to work as "front-loaded" information, but I believe that expression has an implicit error: This is because the a priori information required by evolution effectively constrains the behavior of the cosmic system everywhere and everywhen and therefore it is more appropriate to talk of the ongoing input of information rather than this information being "front loaded"; an expression which smacks of deism. 

***

Joe Felsenstein

In my short contact with atheist and mathematical evolutionist Joe Felsenstein it was clear to me that he understood the implications of evolution; namely, that it must come with the necessary package of a-priori information in order to work and that this information is embodied in the smooth "fitness landscape" (i.e. the spongeam) that would allow evolutionary diffusion to find and settle on organic structures. Felsenstein's understanding here leaves us wondering whatever NAIDs Casey Luskin and Stephen Dilley are supposed to mean when they talk of "Evolution on its own" (See Part III). Cleary Felsenstein doesn't believe that there's such a thing as "Evolution on its own" because evolution necessarily comes packaged with a lot of information. Although, of course, Felsenstein doesn't believe that evolution's burden of a-priori information has its origins in Divine design. Instead, he decides to leave the conundrum of the origin of this information in the hands of physicists. Here's an extract from his comments on one of my blog posts ... (See here):  

You said: "In my reading of Dembski all he seems to be saying is that the fitness surface required for evolution to work is a very rare object in the huge space of mathematically possible fitness surfaces. Given its rarity and assuming equal a-priori probabilities it follows that the required fitness surface has a huge amount of information." And you also said "The mathematical fact is that smooth fitness spaces are extremely rare beasts indeed when measured up against the totality of what is possible."

If the laws of physics are what is responsible for fitness surfaces having "a huge amount of information" and being "very rare object[s]" then Dembski has not proven a need for Intelligent Design to be involved. I have not of course proven that ordinary physics and chemistry is responsible for the details of life -- the point is that Dembski has not proven that they aren't.

Biologists want to know whether normal evolutionary processes account for the adaptations we see in life. If they are told that our universe's laws of physics are special, biologists will probably decide to leave that debate to cosmologists, or maybe to theologians.

The issue for biologists is whether the physical laws we know, here, in our universe, account for evolution. The issue of where those laws came from is irrelevant to that.

...apparently Felsenstein sees the question of the origins of evolution's a-priori information as beyond his brief and in the realm of physics. This response by Felsenstein simply shelves the fact that the descriptive character of physics means we will always face the barrier of an absence of Aseity; that is, science is destined to remain in the domain of explanatory incompleteness. The "explanations" of physics ultimately present us with a "compressed information all the way down" barrier. Nevertheless, it is clear that NAID culture does no justice to evolutionists like Joe Felsenstein who are acutely aware of the question of evolution's a-priori information. And yet conversely it is also true to say that secular evolutionists have given no credit to the work of serious IDists like William Dembski who have been unfairly written-off as pseudo scientists; no wonder they've fallen into the embrace of the far-right! (See my next post on NAID's affair with the far-right)

***

Creation with a Vengeance

The question of whether a physical regime capable of evolution can exist and/or actually does exist presents some imponderables: Firstly, do physical regimes which set up the necessary conditions for evolution have at least a mathematical existence? Secondly, assuming this mathematical existence, how would one go about successfully finding and selecting these conditions?  Such a question, if it is a computationally irreducible question, may be beyond human ability to answer: In which case evolution is creation with a vengeance. 

Clearly, it is understood by competent commentators that evolution isn't some kind of random magic. Therefore, what theologian Rope Kojonen is saying (See previous parts) isn't news at all, as anyone who really understands evolution like Joe Felsenstein knows about the necessary conditions which must exist in the abstract landscape of configuration space for evolution to work. So, Casey Luskin, Stephen Dilley and Rope Kojonen seem to be barking up a tree that's been long since barked up before. Rope Kojonen is saying nothing new. What compounds the confusion, however, is that Casey Luskin and Stephen Dilley seem to be responding to Kojonen with incoherent nonsense as we have seen in the previous parts. 

***

None of this is to imply that I'm in anyway culturally committed to a particular stance on conventional evolution, whether of NAID culture or the academic establishment. But in my opinion the waters of Intelligent Design have been thoroughly muddied by Naive ID and as with questions like Junk DNA they've prematurely nailed their colours to the mast. The irony is that once one understands just what a working evolutionary system demands in the way of a-priori information intelligent creationism itself puts evolution back on the agenda. 

Footnote

* IMPORTANT QUALIFICATION

As I've said before the above considerations only apply in a cosmos whose processes work in parallel: They don't apply if the cosmos somehow employs the exponentials of expanding parallelism. There is, after all, a measure of expanding parallelism and even hints of declarative computation in quantum theory. 

Naive Intelligent Design: Part III

The NAID community hold an a-priori anti-evolutionary position. 
Their subliminally deist concept of "natural forces" connives with
this view.

What started as a single post has now become a four-part series with the fourth part to come. The two previous parts of this series can be found here:

Part 1: Quantum Non-Linearity: Casey Luskin Promotes a Flawed XOR Epistemic Filter (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Part2: Quantum Non-Linearity: Logging Some Notes on Naive Intelligent Design Theory (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

As we saw in Part I the North American ID community (NAID) have painted themselves into a corner that has committed them to defending a Dawkinesque philosophy of evolution: Namely, that evolution and intelligent creation are mutually incompatible. Evolution, they'll try to tell us, makes no claim to using intelligent design and creative input; therefore, to be an evolutionist in their view is an attempt to do away with the necessity of intelligent input. 

In the dualist paradigm of the NAID community there is a clear XOR choice between so called "natural forces" and the artificial forces of intelligence. This dichotomy does work if we are dealing with agencies, sentient or not, that work within the created or "natural" order: Viz: When we come across a material configuration of some sort, such as an object of archeological interest, a signal from Outerspace, or an Unidentified Ariel Phenomenon, it is a meaningful question to ask whether we looking at an outcome of the physical regime and generated "naturally" or whether it is the work of one of those natural intelligences that are actually an aspect of the physical regime: e.g.  humans, intelligent apes, elephants, birds, little gray men from Zeta Reticuli or even Greek sub-deities; these intelligences are "natural" in so far as they are cosmically in-house; that is, they are material objects. In this context the natural physical regime and natural intelligence are regarded as distinct causative agents and it makes sense to see a material configuration as the outcome of either purely natural forces or having input from natural intelligence. Here the NAID epistemic filter works after a fashion.

Given the foregoing scenario it is meaningful to declare that if a configuration is generated purely by the physical regime, this therefore excludes the involvement of natural intelligences.  Moreover, those unintelligent "natural forces" are seen as autonomous generators of configurations, albeit innovationally inferior to the creative potential of natural intelligent agents. If the physical regime is going to generate configurations more startling than say crystals, layers of rock, or random noise or rhythmic pulses from the stars, it is going to need at least a little help from those natural intelligences which reside within the natural order such as humans, apes or little grey men. In this context it makes sense to ask the question "Did natural forces do it, or was intelligence involved?". This dichotomy brings to the fore the current conundrum which surrounds the question of organic forms; they are clearly more sophisticated that anything human beings can construct and, apparently, far, far more sophisticated than anything we directly observe nature constructing. Therefore, according to Naive Intelligent Design life must be evidence of intelligent agency. But in drawing this conclusion the distinctiveness of the natural intelligence category is not given cognizance by C&S.

As we have seen and will continue to see in this post, the foregoing is the epistemic paradigm NAID culture has locked itself into, and ironically it is also the paradigm of those committed to exclusive secularism such as Richard Dawkins. In the Dawkinesque world it makes sense to put all one's philosophical eggs into the "naturalist" basket of evolution because it can then be declared that "The creation of life is a natural phenomenon that hasn't had intelligent help". And ironically this is also how the NAIDs think of evolution except that they believe that without "intelligent help" evolution is not up to the task of generating living configurations. Consequently, NAID philosophers are committed to minimizing the life generating powers of evolution whereas Dawkinesque philosophers are committed to maximizing the constructive efficacy of evolution.

But as it turns this polarized paradigm is shoddy theology and falls over badly in the context of Christain theism. 

***

In this post I will be critiquing the following post by Casey Luskin and Stephen Dilley:

Evolution Falsified? Rope Kojonen’s Achievement | Evolution News

As will become increasingly clear they are using a secularist paradigm that only makes sense in the context of natural intelligence. 

 ***

CASEY & STEPHEN: If mainstream evolutionary theory can account for the eye of an eagle, does it make any sense to say that intelligent design is also needed?  

MY COMMENT:  Yes and no! "No" if you are thinking of natural intelligence and potentially "yes" if you are thinking of transcendent divine intelligence, as we will see....

***

C&S: The heart of Kojonen’s book is an attempt to reinvigorate a biology-based design argument that is compatible with mainstream evolutionary theory. That is, he accepts evolutionary explanations of the rise of flora and fauna, yet he also argues that this same flora and fauna provides empirical evidence of intelligent design. At first blush, this sounds like a violation of Ockham’s razor. If natural selection and random mutation are up to the task, what ground is there to say that an intelligent agent is also needed?

MY COMMENT:  The reason why C&S think Kojonen has violated Ockham's razor is because they are unable to mentally free themselves from the ID vs Natural Forces dualism forced on them by their flawed epistemic filter. As a consequence, they have superimposed an either/or choice on the question of whether evolution is sourced in natural forces or intelligent agency. In their eyes, one must choose one or the other or else be accused of multiplying entities contrary to Occam's razor. The subtlety they haven't spotted is that their epistemic filter has encrypted into it the subliminal assumption that the kind of intelligence this filter deals with is always a natural intelligence. 

***

C&S (my emphases): Kojonen believes that his particular conception of design rises to the challenge. He argues that design helps evolution succeed. In this collaborative model, God directly designed the laws of nature, which in turn gave rise to special preconditions that enabled evolution to produce biological form and function. As we explain in our article:

In chapter four, Kojonen marshals various arguments to show that the preconditions of evolution must be designed if evolution is to be successful (as he believes it to be). The deck must be stacked in advance. In particular, fitness landscapes must be finely tuned ahead of time in order for evolutionary processes to successfully produce biological complexity and diversity. Kojonen believes that it is implausible to think that evolutionary processes can account for flora and fauna without these special preconditions. To make his case, Kojonen cites the work of Andreas Wagner, William Dembski, and others on protein evolution, evolutionary algorithms, structuralism, and the like. For Kojonen, these thinkers’ arguments powerfully show that evolutionary processes need prior “fine-tuning” of fitness landscapes (Kojonen 2021, pp. 97-143, esp. pp. 109-23). Thus, “evolution and design” is superior to “evolution alone.” 

MY COMMENT:  As we will see in Part IV Kojonen isn't saying anything startingly new. Therefore, to say "Kojonen believes that his particular conception of design rises to the challenge" is grossly inappropriate. As we will see we cannot imagine evolution being anything other than how Kojonen describes it as a process that necessarily exploits a smooth well-tuned "fitness landscape".  It beats me why C&S are so startled by Kojonen's very unoriginal claim.

And yet it is clear from the above that C&S are actually attempting to frame their deliberations within the context of a transcendent divine intelligence as opposed to natural intelligence: Viz: "God directly designed the laws of nature". So, as we shall see in due course their epistemic paradigm crashes ignominiously because it is unable to handle transcendent intelligence: When it comes to a transcendent Christian deity it makes no sense to talk of a collaborative model. Once again, we see the NAIDs epistemic filter forcing on the debate a paradigm that is only meaningful when dealing with natural intelligences; given natural intelligences it is meaningful to say that these intelligences collaborate with nature when creating artifacts. 

Actually, in spite of my reservations I can agree with the general drift of the quote above. After all, as I have said in my previous post, if the probability of life forming in a very finite universe is to be significant it must be a conditional probability: Viz:

Conditional probability of life ~ significant = Prob(Organic configurations, right conditions)

That is, life has all but no chance of forming unconditionally given the nature of naked randomness: It can only form if the randomness is "dressed" with the right conditions, usually expressed as mathematical constraints (i.e. laws governing the physical regime) putting a tight envelop on the dance of randomness. Naturally, being a Christian theist there is only One Power I can think of capable of that. In fact, we hear about that Power in the quote above. Again: "God directly designed the laws of nature"! ...this suggests that C&S are in actual fact attempting to frame the question of evolution in the context of Christian theism but they fail to see that this throws a whole new complexion on intelligent design as we shall see. 

But although I largely agree with the above quote C&S betray at least two subtle flaws in their thinking....

ONE:  They refer to "pre-conditions" and "prior fine tuning, done ahead of time" and God "designed the laws of nature". The thinking expressed here about past-tense pre-preparation of the cosmos looks like subliminal deism; deism is also a feature of proto-secularism. In deism God sets up the necessary conditions in advance and then lets the cosmos dance its dance while He stands back. And yet the constraints of the physical regime (i.e. its laws) are a presence-tense-continuous influence on the ongoing patterns that the cosmos generates; those constraints are there as transcendent pattern controllers everywhere and everywhen, justified by no apparent logic which can wipe away the utter surprisal (i.e. the information content) of their contingency. Recycling old well-known phraseology, it might be said that natural law is daily and hourly scrutinizing & controlling events throughout the world. Let's also recall the sophistication of randomness itself; randomness is the absence of any succinct mathematical rule which might describe it or constrain it. In its ideal state randomness is incomputable. All this sounds suspiciously like the ongoing input of a very competent exocosmic agent, whether sentient or not.

I have to confess that when talking about the necessary conditions for a working model of evolution I might have once expressed myself by talking about preconditions and the physical regime being "front loaded" with information, but I now see this as a deistic error; those contingent constraints on the patterns of the physical regime are ever present and ever working; everywhere and everywhen. 

TWO:  NAID pundits use terms like "Thus, “evolution and design” is superior to “evolution alone.” without embarrassment because they conceive evolution to be distinct from intelligence agency. Well, as we have seen that's OK if we are dealing with humans, aliens or sub-deities like Greek gods. But if we are dealing with the immanent Judeo-Christain God the implicit categories here underlying NAID culture's natural forces vs intelligence paradigm fail: For if standard evolution has occurred (caution: I'm not committed to saying it has) it is necessarily the subject of both present-tense continuous mathematical constraints and the event surprisal of randomness; for a Christian theist such a process would clearly require the ongoing immanent input from the One and Only Transcendent Sovereign. In this conceptual context “evolution alone” is unthinkable.

Is it possible that C&S are simply repeating Kojonen's own deistical terms which then provides them with enough rope to hang Kojonen. I can't speak for Kojonen on this score as I haven't read his book. But I can criticize C&S for adopting a proto-secularist deistical philosophy for themselves as the basis for critiquing evolution; for as soon as you admit the existence of an imminent Judeo-Christian Deity, the possibility of the existence of the strict mathematical constraints supporting an efficacious evolution then looms on the horizon.

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C&S: This is a keyway that “design” adds value to “evolution.” Yet is there empirical evidence that these fine-tuned preconditions and landscapes exist? If so, then there are good grounds for Kojonen’s particular conception of design. If not, then his view of design falls short. As we explain:

Kojonen situates design precisely in those fine-tuned preconditions which yield smooth fitness landscapes that allow evolution to succeed. His case for marrying design with evolution therefore depends on the existence of this fine-tuning. So, it is crucial to assess whether this fine-tuning is real. And this question can be assessed scientifically: are fitness landscapes smooth? Are there open pathways between functional proteins, for example? Or are there impassible barriers between such proteins?

Alas, this is where the dike breaks. As we show in our article — and in previous posts — there is no good evidence for fine-tuned preconditions and smooth fitness landscapes (as Kojonen envisions them). Indeed, there is extremely strong evidence against such things.

MY COMMENT:  At last C&S are actually making some good coherent sense here and I might (or might not!) agree with them (apart from quibbling their use of the term preconditions). As I said in Part I and many times before, standard evolution depends on the existence of what I call the spongeam, a structure of thin fibrils in configuration space which join the complex ordered configurations of survivable organic structures into a connected set thus facilitating the transport of probability via the diffusion equation through to those complex ordered configurations we call life. But along with NAID culture I would want to raise a plausible question as to whether such "smooth landscapes" actually exist in configuration space given the known cosmic physical regime. But on this question there is one big difference between myself and NAID culture: NAID culture has burnt its boats, and its mutual back-slapping groupthink has lead it to assert with confidence "There is extremely strong evidence against such things." Well, true there may be evidence against such things but is it extremely strong? I'm not so sure; for am I to believe that all those scientists (and that includes Christian scientists) who claim there is empirical evidence for evolution are in a conspiracy to ignore what NAID culture claims is strong evidence for the absence of those "smooth landscapes"?  The question sounds moot & debatable to me.

So, in conclusion... From my point of view, I can allow that NAID culture does have a prima facia case here, but as I'm not a biologist and don't have sufficient grasp on the empirical data I therefore have to admit I can't speak intelligently on this question. However, I must stress I have no commitment to the groupthink of either side. 

Be that as it may C&S have at least admitted that a physical regime fine-tuned enough for the spongeam to be an ongoing controlling envelope is a sign of intelligent agency, presumably a transcendent intelligent creator: Viz:

"Yet is there empirical evidence that these fine-tuned preconditions and landscapes exist?If so, then there are good grounds for Kojonen’s particular conception of design."

Whether or not this is the case swings on whether or not the spongeam exists; perhaps it doesn't! In which case organic forms are irreducibly complex with their working components isolated on islands of functionality. As I've said before, discovering whether or not organic structures are irreducibly complex may be a computationally irreducible question; that is, we may be looking at a computation that has no short cut analytical answer and can only be answered by an actual "long hand" evolutionary experiment.  

But in spite of the absence of easy analytical answers about whether evolution is feasible, it is an axiomatic part of NAID groupthink to assert the irreducible complexity of organic structures; it has therefore become a culturally irreversible choice for them.  Consequently, in the face of a seemingly irresolvable and acrimonious empirical debate with the evolutionary establishment about irreducible complexity, NAID culture is casting around for stronger logical grounds for eliminating evolution from the debate. Cue, their precarious crypto-deistic epistemology.......

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C&S:Kojonen’s model may have devastating implications for mainstream evolutionary theory. Recall that the heart of his proposal is that evolution needs design (in the form of fine-tuned preconditions). Evolution on its own is insufficient to produce flora and fauna. But if we are correct that Kojonen’s conception and justification of design are flawed, then it follows — by his own lights — that evolution is impotent to explain biological complexity. Kojonen’s own account of the efficacy of evolution depends upon the success of his case for design. But if the latter stumbles, then so does the former. In a startling way, Kojonen has set the table for the rejection of evolution. If he has failed to make his case for design, then he has left readers with strong reasons to abandon mainstream evolutionary theory. The full implications of this striking result warrant further exploration.

Kojonen’s model provides yet another significant reason to reject evolutionary theory. Of course, the general falsity of evolution is not the focus of the argument in our paper per se; it is nonetheless a direct implication of the failure of Kojonen’s model. Readers who take his case seriously will realize that he has given a beautiful account of how to falsify evolutionary theory. Kojonen mounts a sophisticated argument — based on evolutionary algorithms, convergence, structuralism, and the like — that evolution is impotent on its own to explain biological complexity. It requires design. If he is correct, then evolution cannot succeed without design. And if we are correct, there is no such design. The inescapable conclusion is that evolution does not succeed.

MY COMMENT:  The hidden logic underlying the above argument is based on NAID's flawed epistemic filter which forces a choice between intelligent design and natural forces (See my initial preamble above and Part I).  In the NAID paradigm intelligent agency and natural forces are two mutually excluding categories and one must choose one or the other, just as one must choose between, for example, aliens or a natural radio emission when doing SETI. 

It is the NAID category system which enables one to conceive that there is such an object as "Evolution on its own"; that is, as a process unaided by (natural) intelligent interference. So, in the NAID universe of conceptions Kojonen is mixing the two categories of intelligent agency and natural forces in order to give evolution a little help from intelligence to bump it off the bottom of otherwise natural inefficacy.  C&S are trying to get past us the incoherent notion that Kojonen's thesis is tantamount to admitting that "Evolution on its own is insufficient" as a life creator and therefore the alternative is that it is an admixture of intelligence and natural forces.  But according to C&S this dual explanation of evolution violates Occam's razor. 

Moreover, C&S see this as a backdoor clincher in favor of their thesis: Kojonen in admitting evolution's need for intelligent help has, according to C&S, admitted its inefficacy in creating sophisticated configurations such as organic structures without that help.  Therefore, if evolution shows no evidence of those design nudges which might be the work of a sub-deity or alien intelligence then Kojonen is effectively telling us that evolution ("alone") doesn't work. In fact, as C&S are fast to point out Dawkinesque secularists "reject design precisely because they think evolutionary processes are fully sufficient"

Let me repeat all that in slightly different words: According to C&S (and also Dawkinesque thinking) evolution is supposed to work without design; that is, without the input of the ad hoc tinkering by some sub-deity or super-alien giving it a nudge or two to get it moving in the right direction. So, if you believe that evolution needs the designs of fine-tuning to work, this is tantamount to admitting that without a lot of intelligent tinkering evolution as a natural process doesn't work.

Well, the foregoing is the logic of NAive Intelligent Design. As I have already said this logic is bad theology in that it actually employs in a form of crypto-deism. This follows because one is being asked by NAID thinkers to conceive a category of so-called natural forces that are able to operate autonomously as configuration generators, if only with the potential to generate relatively elementary configurations. In the NAID paradigm these "natural forces" are deemed "blind and unintelligent".  But this NAID category only makes coherent sense if it is being contrasted against natural intelligent designers who work within the confines of the created order and are part of it, such as humans, apes, aliens and classical sub-deities - it doesn't work in the context of the transcendent, immanent God of Christianity who creates not just at the beginning of time, but whose creative power is an ongoing present-tense-continuous power controlling and creating the patterns of cosmic behaviour. 

 Assuming that C&S are rightly representing Kojonen's views, then according to C&S Kojonen is telling us that evolution needs to be supplemented with the kind of fine-tuning that entails smooth "fitness landscapes" in configuration space.  But as we shall see such fine-tuning isn't a mere supplement but is in fact part and parcel with the very description of evolution and cannot be divorced from it. Least of all does Kojonen's work count as a new radical and startling departure as C&S seem to (wrongly) think it is. Kojonen's contribution is something we already know to be a minimum requirement of a working evolutionary model, in fact part of its very definition. 

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C&S: We bring our long series to a close on a note of current relevance to the ID community. As members of this community know, some thinkers actively call for advocates of ID to accept only versions of design that are compatible with mainstream evolutionary theory. They believe that ID will only stand a chance of success if it accepts conventional thinking. Naturally, advocates of this view may be tempted to see Kojonen’s model as an ally in their quest.

MY COMMENT:  I'd accept the underlying point here: It is not a good strategy to bully the NAID community into accepting mainstream evolutionary theory. To do so has only had the effect of pushing the NAID community into the embrace of the far-right evangelicals & Trumpites. As I have said in Part 1 of this series the existence of the spongeam (i.e. "reducible complexity") can be challenged and the NAID community do have a reasonable and even plausible case here. In fact it is a good thing to have such anti-evolution critics on the sidelines challenging the evolutionary establishment to come up with solutions to those apparent gaps in what they think to be smooth evolutionary change. And yet C&S tell us above that the general falsity of evolution is not the focus of the argument in our paper per se. That is, in this instance C&S are not focusing on this constructive challenge to evolution. Instead, they have foolishly followed an epistemic willow-the-wisp which uses the bad theology of their "natural forces vs sub-deity" paradigm.  

May I repeat: Personally, I have no vested interest staked in either the truth or falsity of standard evolution: I'm not a biologist and so I don't have at my fingertips the empirical evidence to decide on a question about the reality or otherwise of what may in fact be a computationally irreducible process. What I do know is that the NAID epistemic paradigm is flawed through and through and they should scrap it and spend more time backing their argument for their empirical theory of irreducible complexity.

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C&S: But the reality is quite different. Kojonen’s argument is that mainstream evolution on its own is insufficient to explain biological complexity. Hence, he argues that designed laws and preconditions are needed. His claim about the impotence of evolutionary theory is hardly the received view among evolutionary biologists. [That is, Dawkinite thinkers and not Biologos!] (At least, this is true in their public-facing statements; in private, one sometimes hears great cause for concern.) Indeed, many evolutionary biologists say they reject design precisely because they think evolutionary processes are fully sufficient. [Again, Dawkinite thinkers and not Biologos!] Why else would they accept the theory? So, even when Kojonen’s model is taken on its own terms, it runs against the grain of mainstream evolutionary thought. Thinkers who petition the ID movement to accept evolutionary theory and who see Kojonen’s model as an aid to their cause have not understood the actual contours of the debate. Kojonen’s model is no ally of accommodationist versions of intelligent design.

Moreover, if our criticisms of Kojonen’s model are correct, then he has, in effect, falsified mainstream evolutionary theory. Far from bringing people into the evolutionary fold, Kojonen has done science (and ID) a great service by showing them why they should pursue a richer, more thoughtful path.

MY COMMENT: The deistical idea that there is such a thing as "Evolution on its own" is a notion one hears from Dawkinesque thinkers who want to become intellectually satisfied atheists. One also hears it from NAIDs (and Kojonen?) who think the notion is coherent enough for them to attempt to prove "mainstream evolution on its own is insufficient to explain biological complexity". And when we read above that "many evolutionary biologists say they reject design precisely because they think evolutionary processes are fully sufficient" that only makes sense in the context of "Dawkinesque" deism, a philosophy which is also subliminally shared by NAID crypto-deism: Viz: that "natural processes" have an autonomy as a causal agent and stand in distinction from intelligent agency.  But to make this distinction both NAID pundits and Dawkinesque atheists are subliminally contrasting natural processes with natural cosmic in-house intelligent agents like aliens or human. Such natural intelligent agents are distinct from "natural forces" and provide an alternative explanation when those natural forces seem unable to account for a material configuration.  But all that goes out of the window if we admit Christianity's transcendent & immanent theism. 

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As we will see in Part IV Kojonen is actually saying nothing really original or new, for by the very definition of a working model of standard evolution it must exploit an a-priori spongeam (what some call a smooth "fitness landscape"). Consequently, conventional evolution, as properly understood, can never be anything other than a highly sophisticated information rich process, the depository of huge contingent dependencies.  What Kojonen is saying isn't in error except that according to C&S's account of his argument (and, true, they may be misrepresenting him) for some reason Kojonen appears to have divorced evolution from its own definition and even goes as far as making a "claim about the impotence of evolutionary theory". Therefore, according to C&S Kojonen has actually, "in effect, falsified mainstream evolutionary theory". On the contrary Kojonen has simply stated the conditions that we know must hold if evolution is to be a working model.

As we shall also see, if one is so minded, even the existence of a conveniently smooth fitness landscape facilitating evolution isn't necessarily enough to trigger an "it must be intelligent design" response. But the Christian who isn't befuddled by Naive ID's bad theology will find standard evolution to be such an astonishingly sophisticated process (i.e. of huge surprisal value) that it provides plenty of grist to the mill for the design hunter.