09.08.07
ID an ‘esoteric’ subject?
Luke comments on ‘Lots of Homework…
ID an ‘esoteric’ subject??? … Maybe THESE guys ought to start comparing notes with the guru bunch. From what it sounds like here, it seems like that’s where they’re headed if it requires some special sort of Rosicrucian wisdom to truly understand the design issue.
Still, I’m also a tad bit skeptical still about many so-called commonsense views about life’s complexity having to have been engineered or DESIGNED … esp. when these are only as common or universal as the cultural meaning system under which they’ve been shaped (i.e., as in the Western tradition)(… and even there, these perspectives might have only been as universal or commonplace as what would have ‘trickled down’ to the rest of society from the prevailing view of the elites). In any case, I only wish even Kant or Hume could have drawn more from the induction-based, rationalist tradition of philosophy in their own work because it could have avoided much of the etherealism of either today’s creationistic ID on the one hand or where ‘design’ ends up being carried to if one follows the Hegel route. I don’t know, but none of these options for DESIGN seem intellectually supportable. So what for “design” in such an instance? … Is there any remedy for this nagging concern I have that the entire “design” parlance is all messed up? … … … That’s what I’d like to get clearer on here.
So, if you, John, or anybody else on the blog has any ideas on better cutting through this metaphysical tangle on the subject of design, I’d appreciate hearing them. “Natural Design”, after all, is a fine idea for starting in on the job … but even there we face a problem. We still have the dilemma of deifying the universe/nature/or what have you. GAIA becomes the “consciousness” behind the design-evolution process in history or the “designing intelligence” in question. So is there anything else conceptually to be put forward in tandem with ND to sufficiently steer clear of this design-designer-god bugaboo? That’s what I’m wondering here.
Luke Rondinaro
The Consilience Projects
Luke Rondinaro said,
September 9, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Some more thoughts here on our ID discussion coming from the rationalist, epistemological angle. “Design” here is clearly about the structural emergentism of informational systems in the universe, both from the self-organizational aspect and the synergistic angle of material-energetic realities as well in our cosmos. Matter, after all, is energy that is structured in a complex, ordinate way … or to put it in this sense, it is energy in is “in-formation.”
Yet, what I’ve described here still begs a question: what brings this about, how, and why? And, here’s where we inevitably run into the “intelligence” and “consciousness” dilemma of DESIGN. The god impulse in people wants a DESIGNER, a personality who crafted that design that we see unfolded in the universe and specifically in “life.” The pantheist/monist/GAIA impulse wants to say in effect that ‘reality pulled itself up by its own bootstraps’ and, through its own consciousness, designed itself. And, the scientistic, materialist position wants to have the universe, through, willy-nilly morphogenetic change as well as the determinism of scientific laws of nature, produce the outcome of a complexity-of-form through Evolution by Natural Selection. So how do we work around these problematic alternatives? …
One way, is to recognize that “natural design” practically is more a functional methodology to work from more than a true metaphysical position. The point is, whether an actual personality consciousness is really involved in “design” or not, the “information-of-state” (Amoroso and Martin)(See bibliographic information for this at: http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/
papers/ziolo/PISTA03-paper.doc) of natural-physical-material events is such that we see the manifestation of functionable complexity and the metaphor of “intelligence” in it. Furthermore, it seems to come about not either by pure chance or rigid determinism, but by the give-and-take of system elements, their developing integrating wholes, and the environments in which they are framed all operating in an interactive framework of dynamic “nature.” And, this I think is what’s key in current Complexity Theory discussions of ‘encapsulated randomness.’ Parts naturally interact with what can be termed their substantive totality, but they are not acting in an ocean of open space and randomness; rather they’d be acting in a squeeze, a pinch, a specific context of specified framing in which the ‘world’ itself might work under, and beyond which it is meaningless to talk about. Under those conditions, a so-called Blind Watchmaker (ala Dawkins) could produce an outcome of Intelligent Design. And, that’s what I think we might be dealing with in the nature of our cosmos.
At least that’s one proposed take on it for your review and further comment. I hope you find it of interest and use. Best!
Luke Rondinaro
The Consilience Projects