Humans Are Complexity, Not Choice

2007.08.15   prev     next

Steven Frank: There’s people that are, you know, die-hard, “I’m not paying for any application under any circumstances, ever!” You know. For whatever reason.

John Gruber: “It’s all just ones and zeros, dude. I ain’t payin’ for that!”

SF: I know, “I can make my own ones and zeros! Check it out: One, one, zero, zero, one, one, zero.”

JG: Yeah, “I am not paying for math.”

SF: Yeah — exactly.

—The Talk Show, ep. 15

PROBABLY the biggest oversight/inconsistency in the modern ID movement is its failure to fully recognize complexity — and complexity alone — as the hallmark of design in the brains of humans, and its desire to focus instead on “free will” or “choice” as the important signifier. William Dembski is the one who most specifically commits this error, but the rest of the ID movement seems to go along with it, or at least is willing to look the other way. Why?

Probably because the ID movement has received its nascent membership from the conservative right, which in turn has its roots in religious thinking, which of course is all mixed up with morality: the idea that some choices are more “moral” than others. And what does ID inherit from this legacy? It inherits the idea that humans are human because they have free will; and the corollary that humans are only “meat puppets” if they don’t have truly free will. If our minds operate strictly according to programmed algorithms in our brains — no matter how ingenious those algorithms may be — we’re just “meat puppets.”

Think about the phrase “meat puppet.” With or without metaphysically free will, does it make sense to call the human body, with all its graceful capability and spectacularly sophisticated mechanisms and systems (particularly those of its brain), a “meat puppet?” Does it make sense to liken a human to a sloppy, rotting marionette made of sewn-together ham hocks and chicken wings — a piece of folk art that would make Ed Gein proud? That makes about as much sense as calling our planet a “dirty, infested rock,” or calling the Milky Way galaxy a “spinning mess of dying embers.” Maybe we should refer to new BMW convertibles as “shiny metal boxes,” as Sting cynically called cars in “Synchronicity II.”

Or, we could use the time-honored tactic of labelling humans without free will “robots.” In this usage, the word is a sly equivocation between “deterministic system without truly free will” and “clumsy, awkward, crude imitation of a human, in the vein of Star Wars’s C3PO or Forbidden Planet’s Robby the Robot.” The fallacy is painfully transparent when shoved out in the open as I am doing here, but usually slips by undetected when a free-will advocate regurgitates to the casual audience, “Without free will, we’re just robots!”

It’s easy, and maybe even a bit of sadistic fun, to gloss over the marvelous details of a refined, carefully honed thing, by splattering it with some derogatory, massively oversimplifying descriptor. But glossing over marvelous details is what the whole ID concept is crucially against. Glossing over details makes Darwinism work just fine, and thus neatly flicks ID off the edge of Occam’s razor. ID advocates throw their own, fledgling victory on the trash heap when they embrace the idea that fantastic complexity can be blithely dismissed any time it suits your purposes to do so.

Conclusion

The same logic that makes ID a viable argument against Darwinism, also neutralizes attempts to define humanhood in terms of free choice. What makes us human is a plethora of complex features that aren’t found in other lifeforms on this planet. Reflexively categorizing that definition as some sort of debasement of humanhood is simply phobic.

Free will might not exist at all. It might be just the sensation we feel when a certain part of our brain makes the final adjudication of a complex decision, or when another part randomly selects from among multiple, equally attractive, but mutually exclusive options. And if free will does exist, it might easily be a feature not just of humans, but also of dogs, cats, birds, and worms. Free will is a trivial feature, functionally equivalent to a random variable, and has nothing to do with the really amazing ways that humans exceed all other life on Earth.

Read more about the disconnect between ID and moralistic religion in Mechanism.

Update 2008.01.22 — The Talk Show quote added.

Update 2008.03.14 — On Uncommon Descent, it’s become popular to refer to Darwinists by the derogatory “Darwinbots.” Q: If Darwinism makes us robots, does it make only Darwinists robots? Did Darwinists evolve, and everybody else was designed? Who believes that? Q: If you define “robot” expansively enough to include the best and brightest humans who have ever lived, then haven’t you defined it so that it’s no longer an insult? No longer something we shouldn’t want to be? Q: How is the desire to be “more than a robot” relevant to finding out how humans came to be?

Update 2012.08.21 — New one (to me) at Uncommon Descent: referring to the human brain as “expensive meat.” Yes, the human brain, like all other parts of the human body, can (if eaten) be broken down into its smallest component parts and then reassembled into some completely different human or animal tissue. Boo. Hoo.

Update 2013.10.30 — Uncommon Descent takes hideously distortive equivocation to new levels with their endorsement of the following William J. Murray quote:

To materialists, words are nothing more than an evolved form of feces which hairless apes fling at that which displeases them.

Irrespective of the truth of Darwin’s theory: Let me venture to say that if mysterious, metaphysically free will of the highest, absolutely non-deterministic order is the only critical difference you can see between feces and Shakespeare’s plays — you just might be hell-bent on defending metaphysical free will at any and all cost to your intellectual integrity.

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