A Debate of Evolutionism vs. Creationism

[Luduan]

According to science, give me the reason helping others makes you happy. Describe the full chemical process.

I don't see what this has to do with God or evolution. You seem to imply that all evolutionists think the brain analogous to a computer model, an idea long abandoned by most psychologists and philosophers. (Heidegger in particular was crucial for breaking away from the substance ontology necessary for this line of thought.) This came to a head with Dreyfus's critique of "good old-fashioned AI", which is all but extinct. Human behaviour is much more complex than biological processes alone (although most behaviour is ultimately rooted in such processes). A "full chemical process" is not necessary for understanding love as a product of sociocultural evolution. That being said, I don't expect you to understand any of this, but my point is that your entire argument is both a red herring and a strawman.

One last thing. If purpose = philosophy, and philosophy = improving the way of living, than doesn't having purpose for everything is the best way of living?

...What? Have you ignored everything I have said in this thread thus far? Modern philosophy is not a search for "meaning" (to you, God; to Plato, the Good; etc.). Rather, it can be seen as an explicit denial of ultimate meaning.

 

[Brain]

[Relictivity] seem to imply that all evolutionists think the brain analogous to a computer model, an idea long abandoned by most psychologists and philosophers. (Heidegger in particular was crucial for breaking away from the substance ontology necessary for this line of thought.) This came to a head with Dreyfus's critique of "good old-fashioned AI", which is all but extinct.

A computer model is perfectly acceptable for the human mind, or anything else for that matter. The biggest difference is that current computer hardware lacks the parallel processing power or the physical adaptability of the human brain, but structures such as FPGAs can be seen as a step forward. Ignoring limitations in raw processing power, you can perfectly imagine simulating the brain with a computer. Maybe you just worded wrong and meant this:

The main problem with "old-fashioned AI" is that it tries to "figure out" how intelligence works as if it was a human-readable (conscious) process: a sequence of if-then statements, branches, loops, etc. where each line can be understood in its own right and everything (love, consciousness, greed) has its own little subroutine. But the truth is that the brain is a machine which filters and transforms both sensorial inputs and its own internal state into deep stacks of highly distributed intermediate representations that have little to do with the nice logical categories we can think of. Our brain is just a gigantic heap of pipelines combining some numbers coming from outside with others coming from inside into other numbers that can either be stored and reused or transmitted to the rest of the body in order to make it do something. And then every sensorial input modifies the system in order to calculate slightly better numbers. None of these numbers really mean anything for us - they just happen to work well together. When we say consciousness is an emerging property, we mean that it is not some "thing" that can be identified and described. It is simply a class of behavior that the brain happens to exhibit and could be exhibited by many other completely different things. There is no particular chemical process, neuron or pattern of neurons that you can point to and say "this is consciousness" - chances are that they are many other things too. Of course, you can identify zones of the brain that play a major role in doing X or Y, but they are rarely alone in doing them. If a behavior is wanted, it will happen using whatever is available: a bit of this, a bit of that, maybe some larger area can specialize in it.

But in any case, there is no difference between a machine or a brain doing this. There's nothing in there that cannot be abstracted.

This said, in my opinion, Dreyfus suffers from the same sort of narrow-mindedness that plagues old-fashioned AI scientists: "Instead he argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours."

Given the current breadth of the Internet, a machine could arguably acquire human-like intelligence in a purely passive manner. There are enough pictures and videos for it to conceptualize a fairly accurate representation of the 3D world along with what words correspond to what objects. There are enough written works for it to learn proper grammar, enough blogs and videos of happy, angry or sad people for it to modelize these emotions fairly accurately. A long way can be gone towards AI with passive machines.

He also seems to imply that human-like intelligence requires bodies and society as if human-like emotions and independence were some sort of requirement. They are not. Models that learn like the brain does could be used to make machines which are intelligent yet perfectly passive, unconscious and obedient. You simply need to tweak rewards and punishments so that intelligence is the only desirable property.

Lastly, the brain is not the only computational model which exists. It is merely a convenient one that we are trying to understand better and reproduce in principle for our own purposes. Current computers are optimized to run human-tuned programs which in many situations are a lot more efficient than humans at pointed tasks. Obviously, an ideal model would try to combine the best of both worlds. For examples, you could imagine hybrids with "rich" neurons that are capable of old-fashioned AI and are combined using principles grounded in biology.

Edit: yes, I went very off-topic. No, I don't care.

 

[Altmer]

Relictivity, please read what Russell had to say about this, particularly his teapot. Atheists are not claiming God does not exist. They are merely lacking a belief in God.

Two very different things.

 

[jamespicone]

Except in some cases. I make a positive claim that the Christian deity as he/she/it is usually presented does not exist, on the basis of the problem of evil, among other arguments. I also claim that Allah, Jehovah, and essentially all pagan deities don't exist (Even the cool ones, like Odin).

On God in general though, yes, you're absolutely right - he's a teapot.