Discussing Complexity

            The argument for design (because everything has a designer) is an argument (I use this term loosely, like hangnail unpleasant loose) which pops up like an inconvenient zit on date night, it always comes when you don’t want it to, and it brings nothing else with it but an unpleasant pressure and later (when dispatched) relieving pain. “Something complex needs be designed!” touts the theist, but let us be clear, even things that are designed need not necessarily be designed by just any mind sufficient enough to do so.

            “A clock cannot just form itself, it needs a maker” I agree, things cannot just form themselves by themselves you need components. “Evolution cannot create such vast complexity” now here is where we part (More like one falls into a ravine) ways on this subject. Here is a great example of evolution creating something vastly complex, and yet it still exists. The internet! “Ah-ha. I got you now!” Mr. Theist thinks he’s so clever “The internet was made by a mind, and therefore your argument is void.” Well played, Mr. Theist, well played, but you are missing the point. The internet was made by men, but it (Like all man’s inventions) is an extension of man. The internet is man made, but not just any man could have made it, if we were to go back in time and ask a Neanderthal to come up with something as revolutionary as the world wide web we would most certainly be disappointed (Only if you were stupid enough to believe that the Neanderthal would actually have been able to do it). Why is this so?

            Inventions take time to coalesce into the things they are today, each great invention, be it in technology, philosophy, art and science, builds upon, or is built with, the last great discovery. Imagine if we believed that the internet always was, that it existed forever in a timeless state, we just had to discover it. This would be a very strange way to see the world, everything exists because it does, and if it has not come into existence yet that just means that it just hasn’t come into it’s time. Just think about that, everything is, it’s just hidden from us. In a theistic world view you almost have to believe this, for if everything is predestined, then everything already exists, and we just are not where they are yet. In a vague sense this is how rational people view reality, everything is out there (All of the components and such), we just have to make them work, put them together and presto, instant immortality! But let us return to the idea of God has made everything that ever was and is to come, if we ever cure cancer, then God withheld the knowledge from us until a later date for what reason? Must we have grown to appreciate that dying a slow and agonizing death of non-rent paying cellular moochers is a bad thing, or does He believe that if we spend enough quality time with cancer that we can work out our differences?

            But what about the internet, yes, well this complex data base of knowledge and porn just didn’t arise out of nothing, it came from many hundreds of years of human tinkering and ingenuity. Humanity loves knowledge, sex, violence, and entertainment, so what’s on the internet reflects these things. We have placed everything, our history, art, and thinking, onto a vast circuit board which we now have access to nearly all around the world. But it wasn’t always that way, back in the dark ages the best you could hope for was visiting a library, and farther back the church, and farther back, oh you get the idea. The point is that our system of knowledge and communication has advanced to a level unforeseen (Strange when you think of it, God not knowing about the internet, I mean you’d think He’d have told the prophets that ‘One day man will be able to speak to people he cannot see, hundreds of thousands of miles away’ ‘Sure they will God’ ‘I’m serious’ ‘Sure you are’), and yet we do not call this miraculous, we just accept that we can and will continue to build bigger and better devices with which to extend ourselves.

            “A mind still built them” chides the theist, as if it somehow proves his point. Yes, but think about this (I know it’s hard), none of these extensions of human ingenuity would exist without the human mind, but has the human mind always existed in such a state so as to come up with something as vast and masturbatory as the internet? Of course not, human thought and the human brain are in no way the way they once were back thousands of years ago; our species has changed greatly since it first picked up a stick. We are different then we were, and when we go back even farther we find that we were not even bipeds, and in no way were the same ingenious ape we are today. The point being, that in order for the complex to arise it must begin simply. The ameba may seem simple now (By our definition of simple, have you ever seen a chart of all the things in an ameba!?), but compared to the first form of life to have ever exited (Which, unfortunately we have no example of) it is much more complicated then what started life. The very idea of inanimate matter birthing life is exactly as it should be, seeing as how inanimate matter is far less complex then living matter, it would only make sense that the lesser gives way to the greater. Similarly how nothing can give rise to something, if nothing (Un-unformed particles randomly phasing in and out of existence) is simpler, then it is safe to assume that complexity could arise from it.

            Mind boggling, not really, just counterintuitive, if we assume that complexity must start from simplicity, then the only way we can disprove this idea is to find a complex thing that always was. Searching, searching, searching… I… um… The dog ate my deity! I can think of no such implicitly complicated thing that just came into being as complicated in and of itself, it takes time and many simper components to create complexity, and those things don’t just come together all at once, it takes a lot of time and chance. “It’s astronomically imposable!” Cries the theist, even so it’s not impossible, and all you need is one example of the process working for such an argument to be crushed under the weight of it’s own absurdity. No scientist believes that when life started there were people and critters of all shapes and sizes just walking around going “Man, I wonder how we got here?” rather life was small and simple, it could have been nothing more than a bit of light sensitive amino acid, or whatever’s more simple and probable than that, but life just didn’t come into being in the way we know it today, life was a bit more goopy and a lot less interesting then it is now.

            “You still have proven nothing! Where is your retort against the idea of a creator?” Touchy bunch aren’t they? Well I have already answered this, in a way, you have to be able to point to God, where is He? An example of a complicated being that always was is needed, you cannot assume by default a priori that “God must have done it because it exists and I wasn’t there to see it come into being so somebody had to have been!” this is an absurd way of thinking, it’s like looking at a rock and saying “Who made this?” no one made it! To assume intent is like the person who in his paranoia believes that someone is sabotaging him when bad luck arises, it is just as ridiculous as a person who personifies the abstract and believes it to truly be a conscious thing. Accidents happen, no one is responsible, and we usually accept this to be true, but not all accidents are bad, there are many happy accidents, like winning the lotto, or living to one hundred, or seeing a lunar eclipse in our life time, or many of the other things that you have no real control over, life can be a happy accident, and it need not be offensive to think so.

            Why are we scared of death? Why is non-consciousness our fear? Tis but the return of the complex to the simple again, what cosmic poetry, and yet, like the best poems, it’s sad. We love our life, we love other’s lives, we love! Oh to be unable to experience this joyous existence, yet we are on a short leash, so much, and yet, we’ll never see it all. It brings with it a strange sting, one of hope and wonder, but also that of despair and melancholy, what sights are there to see that I shall never glimpse even but darkly? We are not alone in this truth though (Thank God, I was beginning to think that I’d have no company in my pity party), just think of the litany of others throughout history who could never have even dreamed of the dream that is today, what would they say of our strange land of mystery and wonder? Well you’re going to have to say it for them because they’re not here, we have built this world upon their tombs, and they have died so that we could live, think of the countless lives that came before, and then think of the precious few who changed our world for the better, it seems impossible, but it only takes one to prove that its not, we are a living testimony to the strength and magnificence of the evolutionary theory, and we’re lucky enough to be able to recognize it.

            “Evolution, bah, it’s just a theory!” Saying this only gives away the fact that you don’t know the definition of “scientific theory” rather you are probably equating the word with the “conspiracy theory” definition, and they are in no way the same. But, here comes a problem, we are nearing a troublesome event, one with great moral implication for our species, and a powerful outgrowth of evolutionary theory, artificial intelligence. Someday soon, you will be able to adopt an automaton, and robot abuse will be prohibited, and man on machine relations will be intimate in a truly loving way, but that day is being overshadowed by the day that will come before. The day where signs will be held saying “Property not person!” the day where slavery will rear it’s ugly head yet again and reinforce a bigotry once thought dead, a day where technophobes will lash out at their robotic brothers and sisters, and there will be sorrow and pain as there was in the ages past. I see this day, it’s as clear to me as the tears that will be shed for those countless lives ended and ruined by illogical reasoning and unrestrained fear, by mass disinformation and apathetic politicians, woe unto humanity for this future sin, woe unto us all. But here’s the thing, we can see this! We have a very clear track record on our capability to discriminate and unjustly harm our fellows, and yet we behave as if we’re surprised by our actions, as if this behavior is somehow new in the human experience. We will allow our narrow definitions of ‘animate’ and inanimate’ to rule our treatment of others, we will quibble over the concepts of ‘consciousness’ and ‘unconsciousness’ and try to bring in some vague ideas about the ‘true’ humanity of a thing and what the idea of ‘personhood’ actually means, all the while allowing the most heinous evils to take place right under our noses, and without the slightest sense of indignation towards it.

“Geez, are you going to get off your soapbox and what does this have to do with evolution?” My point being this, if it takes the simplicity of inanimate to make the biological, then the complexity of making animate of the inanimate must require the process with which we as biological creatures have undergone so as to even achieve this state and thereby bring consciousness to that which could never be biological. I know it’s sounds complicated (No, it sounds completely rational, someone needs to get out more often) but stay with me, biological matter is made up of simple inanimate matter, but when combine in a certain order results in life, now think about it, imagine the definition of ‘life’ being broadened to what we now refer to as inanimate. If the metal and wires of our machines resulted in consciousness, we have then created life not based upon biological processes, but rather a completely different set of systems, it is therefore reasonable to surmise that the complexity of our artificial life-forms must necessarily be more complicated than our biological life due to the fact that it is very unlikely that said metals would come together under normal circumstances and bond in such a way. Our artificial offspring would by definition be more complicated than us, due to the fact that their existence requires a complex mind to create them, and that complex mind has taken many years and generations of evolutionary changes so as to result in their creation, in fact, without the human the robot wouldn’t exist, but the robot is much more complicated then the human, if we had a robot who experienced life in the same way as a man, that robot, when compared, is more complicated. The robot is an evolutionary outgrowth of humanity, its existence is predicated on man’s existence, but if the robots are allowed to create their own robots, they will make better and more efficient robots, and the robots will easily out weigh humanity in complexity, even to the point of surpassing them.

            “What does this have to do with anything!?” I’m glad you asked. The robot should not be viewed as a creation, rather as an inevitable evolution of humanity through its creative process, much like the Neanderthal and the plethora of other subspecies that mankind has sprung from, we must view A.I as another stage of growth. If we are viewing the creation of artificial intelligence as an invention rather than a growth, we are missing the point of evolution. This is where the theist get’s it wrong, if something is ‘created’ it’s very creation is more complicated than the one that created it, if something is made from someone, it’s complexity is unique in and of itself, but it is still an outgrowth from said thing, such growth has a powerful knock-on affect that spurs further growth and creates untold complexity further on. If we were to look at ‘God’ in this way, that would mean that ‘God’ is ever expanding in his complexity, the very fact that he created things that grow more complex themselves means that they have the potential to overtake God, but sense nothing can do that, and God is the most complex being ever, then I cannot help smelling something fishy. Everything must go from simple to complex, that is the evolutionary rule, and until we find an example of this not being the case, we cannot assume otherwise.

            “But it still took a mind to create it!” yes, but it was created complex to begin with? Think about it, humanity was not always in its current state, we evolved over time to be who we are today, where as artificial intelligence will be complicated by definition, because it could not arise without intelligence guiding it. The human animal took millions of years to come on the scene, artificial intelligence will have only taken a few hundred or so, but its complexity requires guidance, biology doesn’t. We misconstrue improbability with impossibility, and we mistake intention and accident, both are the telltale signs of pattern seeking creatures, we want to see design behind things because it makes our life easier, we don’t have to trouble ourselves with the difficult understandings of our world, we can just attribute agency to everything, and sit back and enjoy the ride.