ID & Ego

ID & Ego July 23, 2009

It has been far too long since I’ve posted on the subject of intelligent design, but I was inspired by Eric Reitan’s recent post to comment on the arena into which ID seems to be turning its attention, namely the soul and mind-body dualism.

The whole method of intelligent design seems to be reducible to a simple two-step procedure:

1) Find something science allegedly cannot explain in principle;

2) Appeal to ‘intelligent design’ as the one size fits all ‘explanation’ for the phenomenon in step 1.

When it comes to consciousness, cdesign proponentsists might seem to be on safer terrain than the bacterial flagellum or the immune system, since consciousness represents the ‘hard problem’ and it is likely to remain a mystery for many years to come.

But in actual fact, intelligent design’s approach to this subject rests on a category mistake. To object that, because we do not understand how consciousness arises from brain activity, it therefore cannot be an emergent property of brain activity, is a serious non sequitur. To use an illustration in a domain that would have seemed a few hundred years ago inexplicable, it is in no sense true that, by a careful analysis of my computer’s hard drive and processor, it can be shown that Windows Vista does not exist (would that it were so). Vista, like all modern software, provides an experience when it operates that is not exhausted by the description of the binary ons and offs of a chip, but neither can be accounted for apart from the physical operation of a computer. What happens when Vista runs – and all the pain and suffering it causes – is an emergent property of the interaction of hardware and programming. Neither those who approach the mind reductionistically, nor those who assume that new properties require new substances, will be able to do justice to the need for different sorts of description on different levels.

To this it might be useful to add that the ‘intelligence’ responsible for design is presumably conscious, and thus ID has no explanatory power whatsoever in this arena, since saying consciousness is created by consciousness is not in any sense an explanation, much less a scientific one.


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