DEBATES — excerpts from Zann Gill's books,
If Microbes begat Mind and What Daedalus told Darwin

Richard Dawkins: In a universe of blind forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

"DAEDALUS": Richard Dawkins has elevated blind, pitiless indifference to the status of a household phrase. But the squirrel cares if the squirrel survives. Why assume that all evolutionary progress is solely arbitrated by an external, Objective Assessor, an “indifferent environment”? How does that mindset influence how we view the environment, our sole source of sustenance? And how we view ourselves as morally responsible Earth citizens?

So here’s the rub. If we designed a light bulb, and if turning that light bulb on were like becoming alive, then once we designed and built the light bulb, we’d turn it on. But who are “we”? If we subscribe to the traditional view, then  “we” are the environment. There’s no one else at home to turn the light bulb on. But isn’t there a subtle hitch here? What does it mean to be “turned on”?

One can easily agree with Dawkins that the universe as a whole exhibits “nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” But does the environment, with its blind, pitiless indifference, appreciate this off/ on distinction? Would it bother to turn anyone on? If the boundary between non-life and life is too fuzzy to make an off-on distinction, there’s no switch to flip.

This entire argument may boil down to a semantic distinction. Traditional evolutionists have a pat answer. Once proto-life achieved the requisite level of complexity, the next (brilliantly effective) random mutation turned life on. But the reason that next random mutation was brilliantly effective was because all the components of life were collaboratively working together. Without their integrated collaboration, the next mutation would not turn them on.

I know when to quit. And I quit on that note.
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Richard Dawkins: We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully “designed” to have come into existence by chance. . .  But the whole sequence of cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process, when you consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original starting point. The cumulative process is directed by nonrandom survival.
                                               
"DAEDALUS": Well. . . So what does Richard Dawkins imply by saying that the cumulative design of evolution is directed by “nonrandom survival”? Who cares about nonrandomly surviving? Certainly the environment doesn’t care who survives. Dawkins would argue that nonrandom survival is the survival of the fittest.

But the crux of our argument for a third option hides, implicit, in Dawkins’ quote: Whose nonrandom choices affect its nonrandom survival? The squirrel cares if the squirrel survives. Choice, a manifestation of mind, affects survival and so drives evolution into the future.
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Suppose that the process of evolution underlies, not only the origin and synthesis of life, but also intelligence. Suppose further, that “random mutation with environmental selection” versus Intelligent Design are not the only two options, that there’s a third option. If the origin and evolution of life are analogous to the emergence of creative intelligence, and our capacity as designers to solve creative problems harnesses the same evolutionary principles that life does, then evolution, rather than being life’s attribute, may be the process that preceded and invented both life and intelligence. This does not imply a simple, linear sequence: evolution begat life, which begat intelligence. Evolution, life, and intelligence all progress through cyclic feedback. And their feedback cycles are intertwined.

My “argument from design” strikes the core of the debate about evolution, showing that our traditional explanation of how evolution occurs is incomplete. When “design” was hijacked into the top-down Design (with a capital D) camp, bottom-up design (with a little d) was neglected.

How evolution generally advances toward complexity and increasingly ingenious adaptations to its environment is not explained by the traditional theory of evolution. Although some adaptations, such as moles losing the power to see, seem to reverse direction, the general thrust of evolution is toward increasing complexity.

Intelligent Design begs the question about the design of intelligence by presuming a God, an Intelligent Designer with a goal. Although traditional evolution rejects both gods and goals, it leaves unanswered questions about how evolution achieved adapted complexity. Staunch traditionalists maintain that tiny incremental changes, preferred by the selecting environment, explain everything. But many are not quite sure. Invention’s toolkit may need a third option to complement random mutation and environmental selection — to reclaim the word “design.” When we focus on organisms as objects, we neglect design as a process — the process that explains how those objects come into being.

Beyond the traditional interpretation of evolution and Intelligent Design lies a third option, which answers questions raised by Intelligent Design proponents without resorting to a supernatural cause. I say little here about progress and politics, which Herbert Spencer entwined with “survival of the fittest” and the movement called Social Darwinism, still less about God and creationism, which many equate with Intelligent Design.

This third option, synergetic evolution, falls in neither of these camps: it complements the traditional view of evolution as random mutation and environmental selection and debunks Intelligent Design, offering a consistent perspective, not only on the origin and evolution of life but on life’s future prospects on Earth.
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“I think, therefore I am” versus "I am, therefore I think"

René Descartes focused on analysis, maintaining that rational thinking must start from certain bedrock. He built his “logic of deduction” on the foundation of facts that we can know with certainty. Deduction allows the mind to move step-by-step from one idea to the next, tracing a path of inference from premises to a conclusion. With “cogito ergo sum” [I think; therefore I am], Descartes saw the point of departure for a rationalist philosophy. But this hard rock of certainty was based on his subjective perception. I think, therefore. . .

Philosopher Martin Heidegger also sought a bedrock foundation, but he disagreed with Descartes as to what was bedrock. Reversing Descartes’ criterion for rational thinking to “I am; therefore I think” led Martin Heidegger to propose that “Being” was bedrock. Existence sounds reasonably basic, but only in an object world. The nexus between thinking and being alive, both processes, will be broken if computers develop the capacity to think. If they can think, will we call them alive?

Descartes, the father of rationalism, described intuition, as “not the wavering assurance of the senses, or the deceitful judgment of a misconstructing imagination, but a conception, formed by unclouded mental attention, so easy and distinct as to leave no room for doubt in regard to the thing we are understanding. It comes to the same thing if we say: It is an indubitable conception formed by an unclouded mental attention, one that originates solely from the light of reason, and is more certain even than deduction, because it is simpler.” So Descartes, the rationalist, opened a window through which C.S. Peirce saw the need for “abduction” (beyond induction and deduction, thinking horizontally, by analogy) and made that leap.

One might assume that Descartes’ and Heidegger’s two statements exhaust our options. But there’s a third option. What intrigues me about both statements is neither “thinking” nor “being” as their starting points, but rather the criterion for making either statement in the first place — the assumption of both that the bedrock of certainty should be the starting point.

Rather than reverse Descartes’ statement, as Heidegger did, I propose reversing the criterion that generated both statements. Descartes started from that of which he was most certain. So did Heidegger. Both of these thinkers perceived a need to start from certainty, although they disagreed about what was certain.

I disagree with their criteria for defining where to start. Suppose problem-solving starts from the place of maximum uncertainty — neutral gray on the spectrum between black and white, where maybe. . . there might be an image of a zebra.

Questioning the “Cartesian dictum” counters Descartes’ idealized view, and the conventional view in science for several hundred years, that a scientist must start from certainty. “Reversing the Cartesian dictum,” I propose starting from the gray neutrality from which figure emerges, from uncertainty, to gradually bring its subject into focus.

Shifting focus from object to process, from analysis of objects to their design, requires recognizing the potential in starting from uncertainty.
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competition versus collaboration dynamics

The connotations of two key words in the English language expose what we have misunderstood and block us from conceptual breakthroughs toward understanding how evolution operates. The social and environmental impact of not correcting these misconceptions will increase with time. These two words have been so misconstrued that we have gaps in the English language without terms.

The first misconstrued word is “collaboration.” One computer scientist objected, “You cannot speak of ‘collaborating arguments.’ I argue that agents cannot collaborate; even robots cannot collaborate. They’re not conscious.” Yet we glibly speak of “competing arguments.” We speak of competing organisms, not requiring them to have a high level of consciousness to compete. To assume that only humans (and some other complex life) can collaborate, leaves us lacking a term to describe the dynamics through which synergy is achieved.

Buckminster Fuller defined synergy as the behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by the observed behaviors of the system’s separate parts or any subassembly of the system’s parts. Synergy is the essence of chemistry, exemplified by an alloy that has greater tensile strength than any of its component elements. It is also the essence of life. Fuller contrasted synergy with a chain that is no stronger than its weakest link. Synergy is the result of effective collaboration.

Why have we relegated “collaboration” to the specialized niche of higher-level consciousness, while we accept that “competition” occurs throughout Nature? How does making competition a big, universal term, and collaboration a narrow, specialized term restrict what we can understand? I use “collaboration” to designate the complement of “competition” — both equally important dynamics.

Synergetic evolution requires sacrificing our first sacred cow, our notion that competition for “survival of the fittest” alone enabled life to originate and evolve. The riposte of the traditional view is that collaboration simply increases the ability to compete effectively is indisputable. But does competitive effectiveness explain how collaboration enables evolution to point its arrow toward complexity?

The second misconstrued word is “design.” The English language has overemphasized “design” as an attribute of objects, neglecting that “design” is also a verb. I use “design” to describe a directed process toward a coherent outcome. Design is the process of producing an outcome that responds to recognized needs, whether that process was evolutionary or interventionist. Both can be characterized as searches for an optimal response to a given need. The former arrives at a well-adapted, but unpredicted, outcome without direction from that outcome as a goal. The terms design and environmental selection do not presume intelligence. Intelligence is manifest as an emergent after-effect.

If our understanding of evolution is restricted to the half domain of competition for survival of the fittest, we will fail to see that Nature offers a model for how to cope with the environmental crises looming in our future. Evolution’s competitive paradigm has a complementary, collaborative paradigm.

And if our understanding of design is restricted to the half domain of top-down design, we have no term to describe how we as individuals can participate in a bottom-up strategy to achieve global environmental sustainability.

We need to reclaim the word “design” to describe the discipline for understanding evolution as life’s way of designing its future survival, bottom up. There are many books on the “philosophy of science,” few on the “philosophy of design.” Design is not only intuitive and ad hoc, as many scientists assume, but also characterized by systematic principles.
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