Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Accidentally Acquired Intelligence?

Accidental Intelligence?



An accident can’t make something choose that has no ability to make a choice.  It can’t confer intelligence on something that can’t choose to use it.  So if an entity that’s supposed to be living can react to an accident by choosing a different path, then that entity has made a choice that the accident has caused it to make. Intelligence was at work within that entity as well as, in my view, “outside” of it.
Does that mean the accident itself was intelligently directed?  Not necessarily, as more likely intelligently created for what had likely been a different purpose.  It also means the living entity was intelligently devised, because being alive requires the ability to intelligently react.
Then how or why could intelligence be at work outside of that entity as well?  Because it took an outside event to produce the initial something that intelligence has evolved to advantageously react to.

So if we have an intelligent system that needs to evolve for the purposes of better taking advantage of accidents, then we’ve either had accidents that have always existed along with the intelligence that accidents then served to evolve, or had intelligence that created accidents as potentially beneficial, or accidents that, illogically, created intelligence (or had a form of logical accident that we can only conceive of as magical).
So then do we have what appears to be an evolving series of more effective accidents, which would seem to mean then that accidents were self created for a purpose?
Because the apparent paradox here is, first, that we’ve had accidents that have created intelligence. (Which would seem to be a logical impossibility).
Or second, intelligence that then created accidents for its own evolutionary purposes. (Except that, as another logical impossibility, intelligence had somehow not needed accidents to reach the stage where it began to need them.)
Or third, that accidents and intelligence somehow have existed for all of time as separate phenomena, each being necessary for the other to exist at all.
(Possible if only because of the impossibility of having nothing.)

And take mathematics for example, which many of our educated brethren see as evidence for a non-intelligent universe that follows its fixed rules in an automatically mechanical fashion, and yet if its systems haven’t learned to do these things intelligently, won't that mean they've never needed to be taught them?  The universe then being accidentally mathematical?
So again we come back to the only alternative set, a magical creator of these phenomena with conflicting purposes, or as some will say, no purposes, while they also say any appearance of purpose at all is accidental - since purpose requires an intelligence that these accidental forces did not have - because of course they could not - unless by magic.

What’s left then?  Can an intelligent universe have created what only appear to be accidents, or did an accidentally directed one create what only appears to be intelligence, yet at the same time do so in the presence of an unexplainably intelligent observer from which our more intelligent creatures have somehow now evolved?
Some observing physicist will now raise the possibility that multiple worlds exist which are also (or apparently) intermingled - one for example that’s unintelligently accidental (and neither frozen nor chaotic) and one that’s intelligent, yet not with any accidents available for that intelligence to have ever found the need to use.  (Neediness being logically unable, in my book anyway, to exist without a purpose.)
The question remains that since we, as humans, must use a trial and error method for the exercise of intelligence, how compatible is that to existing with an intelligentless system of accidents, unless it may have happened that accidents are not entirely a non-intelligent procedure?
In other words, if all’s said and done, there must be an element of intelligence to every accident, no?
And if intelligence cannot be accidentally caused, I must ask again, have all accidents been intelligently caused?