Evolution Is Intelligence: Paley, Design, Hume, Darwin and Conclusions

I do accept that there is merit to the bits of Paley's argument that survive Darwin's explanation. Because the Argument from Design, if we remove the ad hoc conclusion that 'God did it', still says something. While Darwin explained how nature can design itself through a rather amazing emergent phenomenon, he didn't explain why these things look "intelligently" designed.

The conclusion Hume draws is still, I believe, acceptably true. "Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man..." -- The equivalency fundamentally holds. Darwin simply showed us that the Author of Nature was a bottom up process of self-design by evolution. He in no way showed that therefore it's nothing like "the mind of man." This is generally and wrongly ignored, and often thought to be a complete rebuttal. That because we know how design occurs in nature, that it can't be intelligence. But, really we don't know how intelligence fundamentally works, so Darwin pinning down the "Author of Nature" side of the equation does nothing to negate the equivalency and we should, I believe rightly, conclude that the mind of man works very similarly to evolution by natural selection.

In fact, if one considered a robust evolutionary algorithm surviving on, accurate predictions about some external environment, rather than energy, one would find that such a system would account easily for the senses, how they work, how they adapt to shortfalls and gaps, how they cooperate, and a great deal of the robust bits of intelligence which current theories completely fail to explain, much less predict. As well as giving a rather interesting paradigm for how the brain would necessarily have to work. Namely as a virtual black box, which could be as isolated as DNA is from the ongoings of nature, but still able to contain a great deal of very important and accurate information about that environment. DNA, afterall, knows a lot about the world, and the only sense it possesses is death. Is it therefore much wonder that a skullful of neurons testing theory after theory against confirming or rejecting senses could create a remarkably accurate view of the world, without those senses in anyway necessarily causing that view or needing to be fundamentally accurate?

I think that Intelligent Design in Paley's time had merit, and was right about a lot of things. But, like Einstein expanding Newton. Darwin actually built on Paley and Intelligent Design, by finding the underlying process for bottom-up self-organizing design, and explaining not only the design but ultimately intelligence. The best metric for intelligence is the Turing Test which explains nothing but comes off as a version of Justice Potter's pornography test: "I don't know what intelligence is, but I know it when I see it."  -- And yet, for thousands of years people have been looking at trees and saying: "That's so clearly made by intelligence!", and thus, in a very general sense, passing the Turing Test with evolution. And I think that with such an proper understanding creationism and intelligent design is hollower than anybody ever dreamed. When they offer that the intelligence behind nature is God, they are really deifying evolution, an apotheosis of a simple bottom up mechanism for producing additional order by ruling out what doesn't work, very much akin to the accusation of "worshiping evolution" that atheists are occasionally pilloried with; frankly I don't blame them.

David Hume, I pencil, Markets, and Intelligence.

All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man...

 One should logically draw this conclusion. The author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man. Somehow about the time Darwin looked behind the curtain and determined  that the author of nature is nothing more than compounded dumb luck, blind chance distilled into the miraculous, where life cheats at thermodynamics and only collects on the winning bets and forgets it even made the losing ones. That design is the product evolution by natural selection sufficed to give cause for forgetting these previous conclusions. Why should we accept a logical conclusion of the sort that "the author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man"? When we know full well how the author of nature writes? Sure we don't have a flipping clue how the mind of man works, but certainly we can be justified to ignore the logical arguments above out of hand, without explaining it. After all when one considers the amazing nature of  human minds, it ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. And equivalences somehow only go one way, to say that the author of nature is similar to the mind of man, certainly it true but to be disregarded because we now have Darwin to explain the authorship of nature. And why should anybody bother taking that one tiny extra step of saying that perhaps the mind of man is somewhat similar to Darwinian evolution? -- I would argue that they should because it explains the vast majority deep mysteries about intelligence. But that's just me.

There was a somewhat influential essay within Economics, which some are coming to understand  is Darwinian in nature, called I Pencil. Which argues, that the markets are such that nobody really knows how to make a pencil. That we cannot fathom how trees are made and so we conclude that it must be God. Only God can make a tree. But, nobody really knows how to make pencils. We know they are wood, graphite and brass (now aluminum for the ferrule) but who knows how to mine graphite, who knows how to make the mining equipment, who knows how to drill for oil to power the equipment, who knows how to make the lighthouse for the shipments of tin, or to power the saws. The division of labor by the markets is so profound that nobody really knows all the steps. You could set no person on a massive island filled with resources for the taking and have them make a pencil, because nobody knows how to do it.

There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.

Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

 That evolution plays a distinctive role is nothing new, to economics. It's gaining some steam but isn't a rather widely understood point. Evolution is decentralized and doesn't require that particular part know the whole. It's just not needed. And though, Read here seems to suggest that God is behind the invisible hand rather than the same blind watchmaker behind the tree. And also concludes his essay with a presumption of laissez faire faith.

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.

Neglecting that the blind watchmaker does better for humans when humans gum up the works. Everything in nature is on a knife's edge. Nature's red in tooth and claw. And filled from the foot fungus to head lice with parasites. We shouldn't have faith in the markets, we should recognize that they are the single most powerful economic tool we have but are far better off domesticated than dominating.

In any event, the invisible hand of the markets, the blind watchmaker, the homunculi that live in the pituitary gland are really just different sides of the same process. A decentralized process that doesn't require knowing anything to know everything, to design without understanding, to arrange without forethought, to create without a creator. Is it any wonder that religious people the world over have been saying intelligence is behind the designs of nature? Darwinian evolution looks exactly like intelligence, because intelligence is likely the same process at its core. Intelligent design is trying to replace the cranes (in the Dennett sense) of evolution with the skyhooks behind intelligence often wrongly attributed to God, but really if one takes the arguments seriously, the universal acid of evolution flows the other way. It doesn't save God from the clutches of evolution, it allows the universal acid of the explanatory power of evolution to explain away that meek idol of that He who made the lamb made thee. It ends up splashing acid in the face of God. Because yes, you can argue for intelligent design in nature, but the intelligence, like all intelligence, is just another face of Darwin. The illusion of design, and the thoughts of intelligence behind nature, which even Darwin noted tend to come and go, are the other side of the same coin.

Within research into intelligence, we haven't produced anything even remotely intelligent and fail to produce anything, there is an utter lack of something we could confuse for intelligence. Within biology we have gobs of intelligence, it's all over the place infecting ever facet of what biologists do, and a seeming effort to call it an illusion of design, a mirage of intelligence. On one side of intelligence, we have no intelligence and deeply want something we could confuse for intelligence and no understandable processes and on the evolution side, we have lots of intelligence and a process we understand and all the while deep in the vaults of human intellectual history we have valid arguments which say these are the same thing. It was a mistake to disregard the equivalence of the Author of Nature with the contrivances of human minds, just because Darwin fully explained nature. We should have, at the time, and in the years since, realized that Darwin also explained human minds. It isn't that intelligence in nature is an illusion or that the design is a mirage, it really is there. It's actually completely really deeply and truly a part of nature. God is the illusion. We see the intelligence in the essence of nature and claim that it must belong to somebody, but that's just not the way it works. You can worship the Author of Nature as God, the Intelligent Designer as a divine being, but really if you look behind the curtain you'll find that you're just worshiping what Darwin so aptly described. But "It's intelligent!" one  might insist, rightfully I concede, but that's not a contradiction. Darwin's process is behind that curtain as well. Intelligent Design doesn't save God from evolution, it meekly attempts to call evolution God. Somehow I don't think that even theists who find Paul Tillich's God (a theism as close to atheism as twilight is to night) palatable could manage to swallow that bitter idolatry when properly unmasked.

Properly, the argument for design has been touted as the greatest argument for God ever devised, but really, when you get down to the core, and a dollop of universal acid is splashed on it. We find that much of theological effort, has been, over the years, engaged in worshiping Darwinian Evolution. Insisting on the false distinction that because it's intelligent, it can't be evolution.

Evolution is intelligence, summary

Imagine if there were no intelligence, and rather than intelligence, people could evolve robust new instincts in real time after repeated exposure to a given environment and do so without the massive trial and error of entire genomes but just the trial and error of specific neurons and patterns of neurons of the brain. How would this differ fundamentally from having a mind?
 

Intelligence is evolution & evolution is intelligence

Evolution === Intelligence.

I don't mean this in any sense but the most absolute. The two have an absolute equivalency. Intelligence is an evolutionary algorithm and only an evolutionary algorithm. Evolution is intelligence at the very core of its essence.

I think it's strange that this idea hasn't found any traction or have been fully realized as a fundamental equivalence. I also find it to be completely understandable that it has not, because it seems to throw up red flags.

I figured it out 6/29/07 while blogging and narrowly managed to not dismiss it out of hand. It's actually a fundamentally profound idea and a seemingly obvious one that suffers a long history of near misses.

A lot of people seem to understand evolution is intelligence at a cursory level. I've watched as people come tantalizingly close over the years, while others have waxed poetically about obvious absurdities.

Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism goes to great lengths to show how the seeming learning of the immune system via a microcosm could be expanded to explain how neurons work. And for as much promise as that idea has it seems to get bogged down in explaining neurons rather than piercing the fundamental equivalencies.

People point out how intelligently designing things requires a sort of tinker, tweak, and try methodology which sort of works like evolution, or how more generally technology evolves over time.

Jeff Hawkins goes on about how prediction is fundamentally what intelligence is about but fails to see what this means about the underlying algorithm. I read his book and looked at the source code for the work it spawned. A lot of promise and its ends up a basic Bayesian engine.

There's a 1995 paper from 15 years ago. That seems to get it (which I discovered a few days ago) but suggests using it with regard to neural networks and fuzzy logic.
http://65.44.200.132/Library/1995/Evolution_CI.pdf

In principle the truth is all of these ideas and none of them. Intelligence and evolution are two sides of the exact same coin. And to actually program a machine intelligence you need to evolve a prediction biosphere. How would a well functioning evolutionary algorithm whose population's successes and failures depend on the efficacy of their predictions about the outside world differ from an intelligent mind? I don't think they would.

If you were to codify predictions about anything and everything and evolve organisms whose success depends upon making accurate predictions, even if you could not see them as directly and obviously as equal to an intelligent mind, you should at the very least be given the jaw dropping impression of the power of such an idea.

One of the obvious problems with using genetic algorithms for anything more than making a really awesome antenna or critters to walk in a virtual world is that even the best solutions are still profoundly limited to their selection metrics and the sparsity of the environment. However, what couldn't you do with evolved predictions? You would have a set of understandings that could apply at a given time. In example of illusions two or more could apply but rarely at the same time.

With evolved predictions you could figure out the nature of the planets. You could identify a briefcase. You could use sound to help recognize something visual. You could go from the tiniest predictions about the distance of objects to the nature of the universe. After all, there's really no fundamental difference between a child playing and a scientist trying to figure out the nature of reality. There's also no real difference in going from a thoughtless baby to having figured out the most basic elements of the real world. One can go through most of Jean Piaget's developmental steps and understand why and how those understandings build.

You should also note that the idea answers a number of fundamental questions about how the brain works. Such a system would necessarily reverse the generally assumed information flow of senses and the brain. It isn't light hits your retina goes through some neurons and into the brain and then gets processed by the brain. Rather the mind is constantly making predictions and this light either confirms or denies those predictions. You don't need the image at all. There is no Cartesian Theater to watch the outside world through your eyes. You have already predicted what it should look like, and the only thing "seeing it" does is check if that prediction is correct or not. This is after all how evolution works. It isn't the DNA that contacts and interacts with the outside world but rather the body built by the DNA that either survives or does not.

This also demands that the brain is very plastic. That you should entirely be able to see again via electrical impulses on your tongue. You should be able to learn echolocation to see. You could quickly learn how different magnetic and electrical fields feel with a tiny magnet surgically implanted into your finger. If we allow for new predictions to be made, even if they seem rather absurd, if they are right they thrive and expand if they are wrong they die off. The first law of psychology is the second law of thermodynamics. We can learn skills quickly and effectively, even if we don't know we're learning them. We evolve a robust complete intelligence. We have a good "picture" of what the world looks like even without needing to really see anything in the world. There's no need to program anything about this internal landscape because evolution is a fantastic programmer (as I've seen many times first hand).

Much to my dismay, there is a lot of popularity for the Computational Theory of the Mind. That we have evolved programming and simply re-adapt it to a more modern context. But, there's no need to take the Pleistocene programming to throw spears and re-adapted it via fuzzy laws to do Euclidean geometry. After all, if we're already going to suggest that our brains have programs in them and these programs are evolved, why not evolve them again in real time? The idea ultimately relies on evolution making programs, and in fact there's no debate that evolution is at the core of human intelligence (regardless of what people think it is).

Why are we to conclude that this programing is somehow stored in our genes? After all, we don't have that many genes to make these programs. And why would these programs largely need a massive amount of development in order to perform? Why must children learn the basics in order to adapt the basics to other tasks. Why is childhood development so damned long before children engage these magical eye focusing programs? And why do they seem to actively learn so much? If so much of this is adapted from other bits of mentalese then why can't such things be coded by the brain from ground up. Why can't we all be Cartesian code houses? Solving the problems as they arise? And why can't we just use the same very powerful idea to solve all of these problems?

Further, when you realize the power of the idea, you also realize all the little things that cognitive science typically leaves out of the theories. Even the simple act of learning to focus your eyes involves a lot of prediction. You need to know which part of which eye fits with which part of the other eye and when those two points are actually further apart than expected it gives one the prediction that the perceived object is further away. While also accounting for the jiggling of the eye, and staring at different things, while not changing anything about the ones internal idea of what the world should look like. Your brain does a powerful amount of work that at some level everybody gives credit to evolution but somehow escapes people's that if its really evolution all the way down, all the problems go away.

William Paley is credited with one of the better versions of the Argument from Design, which in turn is probably the best argument in favor of a God (even despite it's shortcomings). The argument is admittedly an argument from ignorance. It says, basically when you look at a tree you know that it needs an explanation far different than what you could give for a stone because there's some kind of intellectual real work there. That there is an amazing amount of real design work that has gone into that tree and when we consider things like watches we equally well know that a lot of real design work went into them and they need a real explanation. He then "reluctantly" admits this is must be God. Then after Darwin, the evolutionists chime back that the equivalency is false. If I can explain exactly how the tree came to be using only natural well understood laws, it can't be intelligence. Therefore Paley is wrong and there's no equivalency between the intelligent works of man and the evolved works of nature.

This is wrong. It's true that the 'God conclusion' that Paley attempts is unwarranted but there is a conclusion you can draw and it is that the intellectual works of man and intellectual works of nature are cut from the same cloth. Establishing that evolution is the foundation of the works of nature doesn't set asunder the ingenuity of man might not also be evolution incarnate. After all, what kind of refutation is that: "This can't be intelligence because it's evolution." Why can't it be both! On one end we have a well understood, natural process, and on the other end we have a glorified and fundamentally unexplained skyhook. The only problem that seems to arise is that accepting that it is true demands that we finally have an explanation for intelligence.

The problem with the "intelligent design" movement isn't the claim that there is "design" but rather that "intelligence" is a solution. Intelligence isn't a solution unless it's on fundamentally firm ground. You can't claim that intelligence is the answer unless you can explain intelligence. After all, Alan Turing provided the only answer for the question "What is intelligence?" that was ever met with any good reception. It was pretty well Justice Potter Stewart's explanation of what obcenity is: "I don't know but I'll know it when I see it." It seems a bit silly but prudent to note that I know something that passes the Turing Test: an oak tree. People have for millennia been identifying the products of nature as being the product of an intelligent mind, maybe, just maybe, they aren't all completely stupid? After all it is admittedly rather naive to suggest that humans don't have a spidey-sense of design. That we can look upon the natural world and see real intelligent design work having gone into every twig and every critter while at the same time knowing that that it's evolution at work. Why must we tell ourselves that these are mutually exclusive? Why can't they be a very fundamental equivalency?

Nature is the product of non-random selection of randomly varying replicators. To say that because we understand this, it certainly can't be intelligent, is rather naive. If nature is so stupid, why do we steal many of our best ideas from nature? If nature is dumb, why are natures designs so much better than our designs?

“I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, “Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away'” - Duke of Argyll (F. Darwin 1888, I:316)

With much being played at via this observation of intelligence in nature from Paley's arguments to William Dembski arguing that there's some amount of "Specified complexity" where evolution no longer suffices to explain design and only intelligence on the other end of this same fuzzy line can manage to explain anything (while explaining nothing, as it taken as a hollow skyhook). There's no limit to the amount of obvious interplay between the jaw-dropping power of evolution proper and the cunning wit of sharp intelligence. And while we noddingly agree with things like Orgel's second rule "Evolution is cleverer than you are." we don't take it seriously, and we should.

The truth will set us free. Nature's design, nature's intelligence, and nature's brilliance are not merely illusions they are reality and the production of evolution and evolution is intelligence. Evolution is the real intellectual work of nature. If we are to manage to have any hope at all of programing intelligent computers to do real intellectual work, we need to know that intelligence is to do more than code a tiny subset of poorly executed solutions. We need to make the solution to solutions, and with evolution this is exactly what we have. With evolution working on prediction space, we'd can answer everything. Until we see life itself as the most basic form of intelligence, we stand little chance of programming anything of note in Artificial Intelligence (a term which itself makes about as much sense as artificial evolution.)

It has been said that geology is just physics in slow motion with some trees. Well, biological evolution is just intelligence in slow motion carried out in nature, rather than in a skullful of neurons. They are the same exact thing. And the sooner we pay attention to that fact, the sooner we can use the universal acid of evolution to melt away our problems with intelligence.

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." - Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

Googling: "intelligence is evolution".

• "The cause of human intelligence is evolution"
• "But the essential ingredient in using these structures in computational intelligence is evolution: population-based search with random variation and selection."
• "If intelligence is evolution squared then what comes next will be expolution"
• "One major advantage that animal intelligence has over robotic intelligence is evolution."
• "Intelligence is evolution's unique gift to humans."
• "The cause of human intelligence is evolution."
• "The seeking for Intelligence is Evolution and bangers big or small"
• "less sophisticated forms to complex life (or even intelligence) is evolution."
• "Intelligence is evolution on steriods."

Googling: "evolution is intelligence"

• "It was these extensive research areas that later became the watershed for his book, “Nuclear Evolution is Intelligence, and Intelligence is Life”"
• "As the major survival element in human evolution is intelligence, the conclusion that the higher evolved race, the Caucasians, possessed a superior"
• "The biggest issue I have with evolution is intelligence. If we arrived over millions of years of chaos, chance, uncertainty and random processes"
• "The key to this evolution is intelligence and information management. In order to hit a target,"
• "The positive tool of evolution is, intelligence used with honesty, love, understanding, compassion, sensitivity and kindness."
• "Evolution is intelligence/information accumulation. Development is intelligence/information preservation. Evolution causes ongoing unpredictability"
• "I'm inclined to agree with Idiocracy: the determining factor of procreation (and therefore evolution) is intelligence, though I would add"
• "A more likely sign of Human evolution is intelligence level."
• "Would they argue about evolution? Is intelligence a blessing or a curse?"
• "The most important trait in human evolution is intelligence."
• "I agree that the pinnacle of evolution is intelligence"
• "So, I guess that what I am saying, is that evolution is intelligence at work. Not there yet. What we have is mechanical principles at work"
• "Evolution is intelligence/information accumulation. Development is intelligence/information preservation. Evolution causes ongoing unpredictability"
• ""Evolution is intelligence denying intelligence." Sorry to ruin your party, guys."
• "If evolution is intelligence then why can't we identify it? -- Some have claimed evolution to be the cause behind design and yet who has isolated the scource of this ability for evolution to think or built?"
• "'Evolution Vs. Intelligence?' - Evolution is intelligence. -- We think we're intelligent, so we look at nature and some think that it shows intelligence, while others think it is down to evolution. The basic principles of both intelligence and evolution are the same"
• "Details of Evolution Is there intelligence behind it ?"
• "Further, you make an implicit assumption that the 'aim' of evolution is intelligence – that is completely untrue."

This is every example I've can find of those words together. And the solutions themselves seem so very satisfying that I cannot fathom that they are out there, in earnest, and I've somehow never heard of them. Please consider the idea, and please tell me what you think.

They're made out of meat!

Absolutely classic.
The Original Short Story.

You're the smartest person on the planet!

Nobody can understand that people are smarter than them, at least to any degree. The ability to tell that somebody is smarter than you... requires that you be smarter than them, and thus by proxy that you be smarter than yourself.

I honestly believe that everybody thinks though are roughly the smartest person on the planet. They may be tied for first with 5 billion other folks, but they are totally right up there. I personally can't gauge how much smarter a person is than me, but I can tell you how stupid they are in exacting detail. I can rank the less intelligent with absolute precision, but for the more intelligent... eh, they seem on par with me.

Intelligence is, in part, the ability to gauge intelligence.