There are many candidates for what could be considered to be an intelligent agent. Examples include humans, animals, aliens, AI (e.g. ChatGPT?), and supernaturalists would probably add angels, deities, God or gods, and similar candidates to the list as well. So, if we want to talk about "some" in...
More annoyingly, the question looks very much like a duplicate of philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/99719 which the OP asked just days ago . Is the OP trying to learn or trying to push an ideology?
@tkruse There are nuances to the various questions. They explore variations on a theme. While I think ID will always fall back to the a dispute between those okay with supernaturalism and those not, there's legitimacy in exploring intelligence in relation to design philosophically. I get the sense the OP is patiently moving through various angles trying to reassess the metaphysics that goes into intelligent design from different angles, like a reporter would do. To be fair to the OP, the questions have been relatively articulate, posted across a range of communities, and within bounds.
@tkruse Intriguing foray into the realm of detective work, but you are clearly mistaken about this one. You can learn about the context of the question here: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/146539/…
@causative I would like to differ on that. Evolution has all time to try literally every possible random thing. It's no more intelligent than saying that humans "win the Lottery" by having millions of them try their luck every week. 99% of all animal species have gone extinct, often for good reason. I wouldn't say a programmer was 'intelligent' who just changed one letter at a time until I approved the resulting program. Any AI system that does that is more like Artificial Idiocy.
@ScottRowe Evolution does not try every possible thing. There is a reason evolutionary algorithms are used in AI instead of a brute force search. Evolution gradually walks through genotype space in the direction of higher fitness. It can't and doesn't explore all of genotype space. Humans have 3.2 billion base pairs, so to try every variation of those would take 4^(3.2 billion) attempts, clearly not what happens or ever could happen.
@causative I was told that mutations are random. Evolution tries every thing that happens to the DNA along with combining from 2 parents. I was told that the crossing-over mix from the parents was random. How would you build a Lottery-winning machine? I guess I would have it stop when it won more than it had spent. Evolution is exactly like that. Next day, there's a new draw...
@ScottRowe Mutations are random(well, sort of - not entirely. Many factors influence the rate of mutation of different genes and the overall mutation rate of the organism) but the overall process is not random; it predictably tends toward higher fitness. Crossover is a specific innovation that allows "winning" genes from different lineages to be combined. Just because there is randomness involved does not mean the whole process is dumb or brute-force. It's not.
@ScottRowe There are random aspects to how your own brain works, too. Indeed, a reasonable model of human creativity is that we generate random patterns based on prior patterns, and select the ones that make more sense.
@ScottRowe "99% of all animal species have gone extinct, often for good reason", and often for a dumb reason, such as the Chicxulub event. Evolution then got on, and did the best she could to repopulate the planet.
While I'm accustomed to being able to determine design in an object based on its properties, there is no singular general theory that permits this. The counter-point comes down to "You can't get design out of a rock."
@SimonCrase: Rock here doesn't mean the tool made from a rock. It means dug up the rock. You can get a bit of geology from the history you can read from it, but there's no design to find. If you want to look for design you have to look elsewhere.
Discussion on question by Mark: Is th…
Discussion on question by Mark: Is th…