The other day I wrote a post about the definition of intelligence and whether it could apply to the universe. I confess that I was too subtle with my point that the definition of intelligence is subjective. An angry critic hallucinated that my post argued “only intelligence could create intelligence.” That is the argument of Intelligent Design proponents. I’m not in that camp.
Other angry critics read what the first angry critic hallucinated I said and assumed I said it. Soon it became fact by repetition and spread through the Internet. Many people said they could no longer read Dilbert because of my stupid opinions (the ones that some guy hallucinated). They echoed the refrain that they were people of science, damn it, and they used to think I was smart until they read the hallucination of some guy they never met and accepted it as fact.
Other angry people argued that I was just talking semantics. In other words, they angrily pointed out that discussing the definition of a word is exactly like discussing the definition of a word. I was humbled by their grasp of the obvious.
Naturally, my feeling about all of this negative reaction was “How can I throw some gasoline on this fire?”
What follows is a discussion of semantics. That doesn’t make it unimportant. If you plan to dedicate your life to God, just to pick one example, it would be nice to know what God is. Arguments don’t mean anything unless you first agree on the definitions. Semantics matter.
In my earlier post on this topic, I explained how the universe seems to have intelligence. I won’t repeat that post here. But many of you objected because the universe is not conscious, does not have intent, and is not self-aware. Those are all good points, assuming the word “intelligence” requires any of that. So I fired up Dictionary.com and found this definition at the top:
INTELLIGENCE: 1.a. The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge.
That’s the top definition, and it makes no reference to consciousness, intent, or self-awareness.
So, does the universe have the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge? Clearly it does, because the big bang caused evolution (say the scientists), which led to creatures with brains, and those creatures acquire and apply knowledge while remaining part of the universe.
You could argue that the universe didn’t “design” anything, and that the outcome was random. But no reasonable person can conclude that the universe at the time of the Big Bang did not have the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, since it did exactly that. Otherwise you couldn’t read this blog. Or to put it another way, the proof is in the fact that we can make pudding.
My critics confused intelligence with design. Design requires intent and knowledge and reasoning. That’s what the dictionary says.
Hey, what about ants? This is an actual question, not a rhetorical one. Ants apparently “design” their ant habitats, but do they have intent and knowledge and reasoning? Or are they more like tiny organic robots that simply react to stimuli?
Here’s an interesting paper on ant intelligence. See if it makes you question your understanding of what it takes to be a designer:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/93/931115Arc3062.html [no longer available]