The "Intelligent Design" Theory Of Wikipedia, Er, Maybe We Should Call That "Intentional Design" Options Rating

[Jon Awbrey]

There's a theme, so far ex tempore, that persists in tugging at my little gray cells in divers and sundry e-vironments. I will begin by replicating and mutating an unnatural selection of these sporting thoughts here.

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

Tongue In Cheek (TIC)?

In my youth I had a fairly robust Integrating Facility (IF), but I let it wax rusty in the iron cage of oeuvre-speciation, so it's something of a struggle for me to integrate the many-splintered themes that I enumerated above, not to mention the yarn-bag packed full of loose threads and tangled skeins from which I can hardly tease them.

And now another Infantile Fantasy (IF) hits the fan — it's the one that goes a bit like this:

We're all perfectly equal in our knowledge of everything, and all it takes is the stubborn insistence of random jostling in gang-banging ganglia of self-confessed I-Am-Not-An-Expert-Bots for the obseen hand of e-volution, re*acting witlessly to one damn e-mergency after another, for knowledge to arise in the Systern.

It is of course but another turn on a very old gambit, so a word to the wise will be sufficient — how about this one:

∃←Ø (Something For Nothing)
That Old Con (TOC)!

Jon

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey: Sun 27th April 2008, 4:50pm

[Milton Roe]

It is of course but another turn on a very old gambit, so a word to the wise will be sufficient — how about this one:

∃←Ø (Something For Nothing)
That Old Con (TOC)!

Jon

No, the only actual con is "Money for nothing and the chicks are free." That never happens. However, the universe itself is the ultimate free lunch (Guth) or Big Lurch, and all the "freebies" from there, have been driven by the increasing entropy from that beginning. To be specific, all the little free lunches result from the Big Lurch™. Including you and me.

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: Mon 28th April 2008, 12:40am

[Jon Awbrey]

It is of course but another turn on a very old gambit, so a word to the wise will be sufficient — how about this one:

∃←Ø (Something For Nothing)
That Old Con (TOC)!

Jon

No, the only actual con is "Money for nothing and the chicks are free". That never happens. However, the universe itself is the ultimate free lunch (Guth) or Big Lurch, and all the "freebies" from there, have been driven by the increasing entropy from that beginning. To be specific, all the little free lunches result from the Big Lurch™. Including you and me.

The stuff you've been ladelling out here is a whole lot of pop culture mush. I can dish that out as good as anyone — and there is some fun to a good food fight.

Let me know if you ever wanna have a real discussion about AI, where it is and where it AIn't today.

Jon

[Milton Roe]

No, the only actual con is "Money for nothing and the chicks are free". That never happens. However, the universe itself is the ultimate free lunch (Guth) or Big Lurch, and all the "freebies" from there, have been driven by the increasing entropy from that beginning. To be specific, all the little free lunches result from the Big Lurch™. Including you and me.

The stuff you've been ladelling out here is a whole lot of pop culture mush. I can dish that out as good as anyone — and there is some fun to a good food fight.

Let me know if you ever wanna have a real discussion about AI, where it is and where it AIn't today.

Jon

We'll never get anywhere until you admit that intelligence in animals (at the very least) is a free lunch. It runs on sunlight. No design.

We humans may have had some "bootstrap" existential hand in the design of our own intelligence, by means of our own intelligent selection of each other as mates, but even so, we started as animals too, so ultimately, that also is free lunch.

This is NOT pop culture (any longer-- it was pop culture in 1930 with Stapeldon, but that's long gone). This is Dawkins and (the late) Gould and where standard biology is. If AI theory is going to shrug off biological intelligence and its emergence as "pop culture stories," then it can go hang. But (fortunately) AI is not ignoring biology. And as for me, I don't really want to talk about artificial intelligence. I only care about intelligence. AI is not going to get here first. But "better than human intelligence" (BTHI) is already here. It sent men to the moon. I can't do that, and you can't either. Nobody can. Nobody ever could. It's so far outside the bounds of human ability that some people still don't believe it happened. But yet it did. I'm interested in understanding how.

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: Mon 28th April 2008, 2:13am