However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure.
Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.
1. The designer does not have to be "omniscient" only intelligent. Some people believe in it's omniscience but I don't think it's a requirement.
2. How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs?
3. You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings.
The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.
Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form.
> You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings.
Show me an intelligent designer who can literally design the universe, but is still not intelligent enough to avoid these flaws even we can recognize. I don’t think we are intelligent enough to design a completely novel life form, let alone as many as exist on earth in all their forms.
This is all beside the point that there’s no evidence of any kind for intelligent design, only supposition based on nothing more than intuition and feelings.
If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.
Would a perfectly and optimally designed being get no diseases? won't die? won't fall?
Only if you assume the designer had infinite time, knowledge and resources. But life on Earth did not have to be created by some omnipotent god who created universe. It only requires more advanced intelligence than us. Although theoretically even we may reach this level in the future with advances in bioengineering.
> This is all beside the point that there’s no evidence of any kind for intelligent design, only supposition based on nothing more than intuition and feelings.
Depending on what you consider "evidence" the same sentence could be said for evolution. There are many arguments in favor of intelligent design like for example no viable mechanism of randomly evolving genetic code. I wouldn't say it's as open and shut case as you make it seem.
Iow, it’s not only robust enough, but just robust enough and never pretended to be ideal or durable, except for few accidental cases like sharks, crocs and turtles. Who surely can suffer from long-term non-killing issues but cannot whine to their GP about it.
The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.
Nah, it’s a vast space. There may be natural trade-offs, but there’s no force to solve an issue in the best way possible. It solves randomly and if that creates a non-fatal problem - bad luck, now we just have it. You’ll always have a set of non-fatal problems just under fatality, and also a set of fatal problems just under a reproduction disabling line.
Of course you can. We could regenerate limbs like a lizard’s tail, keep growing teeth like a shark, not require so many different types of foods to survive healthily… The list goes on and on.
I disagree, evolution is not perfect nor intelligent (as far as we know). It's never the "best design" that survives, it's always "good enough for now", merely better than other solutions at the time. A billion years of good enough is not necessarily the best it can be theoretically.
I'm sure we can find examples of living processes that are dumb and inefficient, with obvious room for improvement, but have survived for millenia simply because it was good enough.
No need to be so coy. Who/what else do proponents of intelligent design believe designed us if not an omnipotent, omniscient, God? Ancient aliens? Deep Thought?
The fact that conditions change doesn’t make your current form ideal.
Speaking of conditions.
In 5 billion years there will be no need for natural selection cause Earth will dip into the exploding Sun and evolution game will be over. Nothing will keep working. Even in 1B years it will be pretty hot outside. We’ll have no time for that “optimal” crap anymore, starting now tbh, considering our stupid tribal nature and the complexity of overcoming it.
Btw, if we fail to continue our current civilization, there will be no another civilization, cause we’ve drained all under-your-feet resources long ago. The next civilization will be forever farmers slowly burned by a star.
We absolutely can escape this fate by finding something much better than a bare minimum.
Edit: messed up numbers, fixed
No, the other consequence of evolution is that whatever we are today is not enough to kill us. Some of the things in our bodies and behavior are just useless, but not bad enough that they endanger our life and cut the genetic deviation responsible for it, so it just keeps on being there.
There's no good reason we still have 5 fingers on feet, but they're also not bad enough that having them all would endanger us as as species, so they just stay there.
Personally, and in hindsight ofc, I find abiogenesis much more miraculous than the life/evolution following it, cause the latter was sort of obvious and almost indestructible by its nature after it all started. It sort of just happens unamazingly in the complexity space it is lazily exploring (which itself is amazing that it exists).
Only intelligent agents can explore it with a goal different from (but still including) stable reproduction.
If we ever make silicone man that runs on sunlight then I'll say, "ah, this looks like a being created by a moral intelligent designer".
It's going to be pretty revealing when a creature with such "lowborne morals" as ourselves creates a being that can function and operate without the explicit need to kill something every ~7 days to survive.
If there’s some other scientific theory of “intelligent design” you’re referring to, please enlighten me as I’m not aware of it.
> Depending on what you consider "evidence" the same sentence could be said for evolution.
There is empirical evidence for evolution.
It starts with a discussion about the miseries people suffer and if they have any utility at all. Is pain a useful warning of problems or could that information be gotten across in a better way?
It ends with the two characters agreeing that neither believes in God, with one not believing in a good and kind God and the other not believing in an evil malevolent God.
There are parts that might be a million years old, but everything is in a state of flux at all times. Things are changing all the time. Evolution is a process with no end goal.
And just because that got us here today doesn't mean it's the best design. If that's the case, cats are equally the best design. As are dogs, and elephants, and mosquitos, and platypuses. Evolution is the ultimate form of the adage, "You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend". Good enough works well enough.
We are effectively held together with duct tape and string. Our eyes are wrong, our backs are wrong, our throats, nerves, circulatory, etc. are all wrong in some manner. And some of the fixes are simple. There is no reason for our ocular nerve to start from the inside of the eye. It just happened that way. And it worked well enough.
You can use a lead pipe to hammer nails, that didn't make it a good choice.
But yes, there are a million ways in which the human biology is imperfect.
If our bodies are temples, then whoever made us is probably Nurgle. Nothing else really explains the reproductive organs sharing space with the waste removal ports.
Please point to a theory of intelligent design that is verifiable and doesn’t involve magic.