On Formlessness

When I took advanced US history in high school, our instructor walked up to the blackboard on the first day and wrote a bunch of words on the board:

dog cat horse ox run jump climb fish green blue orange apple pear swiftly Jane Bill

Those probably aren't the actual words, but that doesn't matter.  He then told us, "Organize these."

"According to what," someone asked.  It might have been me, but I don't remember and it's not important.

"Not my problem," he answered with a shrug.  "Just organize them however you want."  I put them in alphabetical order:  apple Bill blue cat climb dog fish green horse Jane jump orange ox pear run swiftly.  Done.  Our instructor asked us how we organized them - one person had organized them into parts of speech, with "fish" going under both the Noun and Verb headings, "orange" being both a Noun and an Adjective, and "Jane" and "Bill" under the Proper Names subheading of Nouns.  Another student had divided them into Domesticated Animals and Other.  We had hit all the obvious ones, and then the instructor put some others on the overhead and had us try to guess what they were.

Arguing on the Internet: Is there intelligent life on Earth? No, really - is there?

The following is an elaboration on a conversation I've been having with paradoctor over on Daylight Atheism. This whole mess started with a rather scholarly discussion of the conceptual failings of IDiocy, segued smoothly into talk of abandoned dinosaur cities on the Moon, and so far has come to paradoctor asking me if I think there's intelligent life on Earth (whether seriously or facetiously, I cannot tell). Then I thought of the following.

There are days when I would be inclined to say, "No, intelligent life does not exist on Earth." But of course this is absurd, and I am not typically interested in advocating for absurd positions. Although I do freely admit that reality is absurd, I think the only positions worth taking are non-absurd ones - I agree with absurdists on a lot of things, in other words, I'm just not one.

In all seriousness, in my experience, what many people mean by "intelligent" is something along the lines of "has first-person experiences". However, we can't test for this directly, by the same line of reasoning that I can never "really know" what it's like to be a bat because I am not a bat. So we instead come up with things like the Turing test, which of course works for determining whether our candidate is able to do the things an intelligent agent is also able to do, but leaves the rather glaring problem that a Turing-complete philosophical zombie is absolutely indistinguishable from its genuinely "first-person experience-having" counterpart. Then comes Daniel Dennett to the rescue, "We are the zimboes," and blah blah blah.

As Dennett himself explains the idea, "Zimboes think^Z they are conscious, think^Z they have qualia, think^Z they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!" His point is that there is no meaningful difference between thinking and thinking^Z, therefore zimboes are no different from persons as we ordinarily think of them - le sigh... or think^Z of them - and if there's no difference between two things then they're the same. Of course, this leaves the problem of whether things we might not even consider to have first-person experiences are zimboes just like ourselves. We have no reason to think so, of course, but the whole point is what if we're wrong? Pascal's Wager of animism, in other words, with a weird line-drawing problem that seems to center around nervous systems or perhaps circuits (we'll get to this line-drawing later).

The other main camp I've encountered means by "intelligent", "can demonstrate learning", conveniently bypassing the p-zombie problem. Of course, on this analysis, dogs and mice are intelligent for being able to learn non-instinctive behaviors and solve problems - which is generally unproblematic, as they are cute and fuzzy to most people, most of the time. But even pigeons have been shown to form superstitious behaviors, which to me would indicate both an ability to learn and a high probability of first-person experience. The problem here is one of principled interpretation: we say that a mouse has "solved" a maze by reaching its end, having been motivated to do so by the conditions of the experiment; could we not then say that the elements in the Miller-Urey experiment "solved" their situation by forming amino acids, having been motivated to do so by the conditions of their experiment? Both cases involve watching the behavior of particular configurations of mass-energy in an artificial environment. While it might be unproblematic to attribute (admittedly limited) intelligence to insects, for they still have brains, even amoebas engage in what looks like hunting, and they're just single cells! In both experiments, the things being experimented upon merely behaved in whatever ways they could, and I see no principled reason to attribute one with intellect and not the other (given the smooth gradations that can be made at every step of the way in between). Could not we humans, for all our scientific endeavors, be seen as a mere means in reality's effort to understand itself? A sort of cosmic navel-gazing, if you will, in which introspection on things like "purpose" is itself our very "purpose"!

While such wildly irresponsible speculation may make philosophers feel good about themselves, the slippery slope cuts both ways here: we can show that many organisms which "demonstrate intelligence" are completely uncommunicative in ways that we are able to recognize, so who's to say that other things don't simply possess lesser and lesser degrees of intelligence, whether or not they have first-person experiences? I mean, sure, we can draw a line somewhere between fish and rocks, but precisely where we draw it will make a difference (I promise, we're getting there!). Cutting back, when we say that a thing "acts as if" it has a higher level of intelligence than can be reasonably attributed to it, what's to say that purportedly intelligent things almost certainly possessed of first-person experiences aren't merely "acting as if" they have intelligence? The mystical "I" at the helm of consciousness is, after all, a story that the brain tells itself, ret-conning and confabulating memories will-ye, nil-ye.

Dennett argues (very persuasively, I think) that consciousness is more like fame than like being on television, insofar as it happens distributively and by degrees rather than in a strict "on or off" sense. The degree to which we are aware of the calculations performed by our brains is, to my mind, rendered irrelevant - the parts of our brains that execute whatever steps they have learned to execute are no more intelligent than the components of a computer running an installed program (and no less!). Or as Edsger Dijkstra put it, "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." But at the same time, any matter could be said to be "running" whatever "program" would perfectly describe whatever it is that it does. In fact, a biophysicist named Gregory Engels has discovered that plants accomplish photosynthesis at their level of efficiency by exploiting principles of quantum mechanics. The Scientific American version actually credits them with performing the computations, but my point is, what's the meaningful difference? (I suppose the "daffyrance" would be that the SciAm folks have never heard of pareidolia.)

So in one sense, "intelligent" is a word and words are made-up, so of course there's no intelligent life on Earth. In a more pragmatic sense, of course there's intelligent life on Earth, but the interesting question is how much of it can we call intelligent? Between these two extremes - nihilism and treating the matter as a necessarily open question - lies just a mess that relies on presuppositions and other motivations to get a clear answer. In short, the only clear answer is a semantically bizarre yet unequivocal No; Yes answers are by their very nature unclear and open to debate (which is awesome!). Of course, this won't stop a bunch of really sexy heroes sporting labcoats and degrees from pointing out which arbitrarily-arranged distinctions have this or that pragmatic value, and this is perfectly fine. But I have neither a labcoat nor a degree, I am instead interested in understanding the whole problem, and what this understanding tells me is that on the one hand there's nothing, on the other hand there's everything, and in between is just a mess. Viva la mess!

OK, finally. This all matters because a computer-based Synthetic Intelligence (there's nothing artificial about the Turing-complete sort of intelligence we're talking about here) would seem to warrant all the rights and responsibilities of any other person. And why not? If you were to upload your complete brain state to a sufficiently advanced computer to "run" you past the expiration of your organic body, would you not then be one such Turing-complete computer-based SI? Would you not want the termination or erasure of your process to be regarded as a murder? Anyone would! Including an SI "born" on a hard drive with no biological precursor. But how can you murder something that's not alive to begin with? And what about copies that modify themselves or blend with each other to the point of no longer being the same "person"? Do we need to count any form of intelligence as "alive"? Or can we simply regard the extinguishing of an intellect as "murder"? This would seem to handily resolve difficulties with people in persistent vegetative states, as well as the abortion of fetuses lacking brain tissues (at the very least). But eating meat would now well and truly be murder, unless we either genetically engineer brainless animals (which doesn't sound all that bad to me), or only eat animals that die of natural causes (which has problems of its own). We can push the problem back a bit by talking about legalistic "citizenship" rather than philosophical "personhood", but the issue remains that we want to make our in-group as wide as possible while still leaving the "stupid mass-energy" open to the sort of resource exploitation that we won't perform upon our persons/citizens/what-have-you. Double trouble if we assign intelligence to rocks, for "running" their "rock programs". (Then PETA changes their name to People for the Ethical Treatment of Mass-Energy, PETME, and comes up with new slogans: "Mining is murder!" "Minerals are people, too!" "Rocks are not ours to skip across the ocean waves or keep as pets in our homes!")

So to answer paradoctor's question, at long-winded last: there is intelligence on Earth in every way that counts; there is also life on Earth in every way that counts; but these do not always "go together". You can have unintelligent life, and intelligent non-life, depending on your definitions. In order to meaningfully answer the question, we need a more robust understanding of the problem with respect to which the question is being asked - it matters what else will be at stake. Or we could keep our answers provisional and revise them as new issues come up. I mean, it's not like we're codifying a religion here or anything.

101 Interesting Things, part sixteen: Russell's Paradox

My last two philosophically-oriented posts have chiefly concerned the limitations of language as a system of categorization in a bottom-up (or "designoid") Universe. This is as opposed to a top-down (or "designed") Universe, in which things in the world are designed intelligently to fit into preconceived categories, which would give language metaphysical primacy over reality. I want to take a little bit of time today to show how this quickly causes a worldview to degenerate into absurdity if we insist that language really does stick to the world and that our categories are somehow "real" instead of "imaginary." This dovetails perfectly with my planned entry on Russell's Paradox as part of my 101 Interesting Things series, so here I go!

Words are used to label and categorize things in the world, but words themselves may also be labelled and categorized as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, and so on. We can also create categories arbitrarily, such as "seventeen-lettered," which refers to those words which have seventeen letters. Every word is a member of the category, "words." So far, so good.

There's a rather interesting way of categorizing words, specifically: according to whether or not they describe themselves. "Word," for instance, is itself a word. But "words" is not more than one word, so it doesn't fit into the "words" category, if you want to be a stickler about quantifiers. "Seventeen-lettered," however, is a seventeen-lettered word, and so describes itself. Such words are called "autological," because they refer to themselves and so are metaphorically contained in their own boxes. If a word does not refer to itself, then it is "heterological." The word, "verb," is not itself a verb, and so is a heterological word.

Logically speaking, these categories ought to be exhaustive: i.e. one or the other of them should apply to every single word. After all, it seems intuitively obvious to an almost painful degree that a word should either refer to itself or not. "A or not-A" is a true disjunction, after all, and the proposition "A word is autological or it is not autological" is surely of that form. Defining "heterological" as "a non-autological word" seems to complete the disjunction and make it so that every word goes into one or the other of these boxes.

Here's the question: into which box should the word "autological" be placed? If "autological" is, in fact, an autological word, then it's an autological word and it goes into the autological box. But! If autological does not refer to itself, then it does not, and so it would go into the heterological box. This seems simple enough - so how do we decide the question? What can we do to test whether the word "autological" is itself autological or heterological?

Umm... oops! As it turns out, there is no way to decide the question. Sure, we can arbitrarily stipulate that it's one way or the other, but we can't come up with any justification for putting the word "autological" (which, as a word, clearly belongs in one or the other box but not both), into one or the other box but not both. Crap!

But wait, there's more! How do we classify "heterological?" If "heterological" is a heterological word, then it goes into the heterological box - but then it goes into its own box, and so it's an autological word, and goes into the autological box - but then it doesn't go into its own box, and so it's a heterological word, and goes into the heterological box - but then it goes into its own box, and so it's an autological word, and goes into the autological box... and so on ad infinitum. If it goes into one box, then it doesn't belong there for one reason, but if it goes into the other box, then it doesn't belong there for another reason. This is because "whether a word refers to itself" and "whether it goes into its own box" are "supposed" to mesh every single time, but with the word "heterological," they are necessarily opposed: if heterological refers to itself, then it goes into its own box, which makes it autological. But its own box is reserved for words which do not refer to themselves, so it can't go in there if it's autological! But that's the only way it can go into its own box, and so on and so forth. Oops!

Now, "autological" and "heterological" are intuitively coherent categories - we can make sense of them - but it's clear that they break down because of themselves. What's wrong with this picture? Is it the things we're trying to categorize to blame, or is it the way we're trying to categorize them, or is it categorization itself that's messing us up? Hmm... interesting question. If only there were some stalwart hero of logic to come to the rescue and show us what's up...

OK, so there was this great guy by the name of Bertrand Russell, and he was an outstanding logician, and he's my hero and I want to have his babies but he's dead now, and he had this great insight into what is known formally as "set theory," which is really just a fancy hat that philosophers put on "categorization" so it looks like it belongs in the ivory tower. This guy, Gottlob Frege, was going around running his mouth about how there's a "set of all sets," which was his way of saying that "there's a category that contains all categories: the category of categories." Like being the King of Kings, you're still a King, but you also rule over all other Kings, so the set of all sets is the set that contains all other sets. Components of a set, the things that make it up or go into its box, are called "elements" of that set, so the set of all sets has itself as an element of itself, which is kind of neat. Then Bertrand Russell arrived on the scene and said, "Wait a minute! What about 'the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves?' Is that in your set of all sets?" And Frege said, "Sure! After all, it's a set!"

But what Frege didn't realize was that "the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves" is to set theory what the word "heterological" is to language. Bertrand Russell knew this, because he knows everything and is awesome, so he told Frege and Frege was like, "Yeah, well, whatever." But then Bertrand Russell said, "Hold on! The set of all sets which are not elements of themselves results in a contradiction when we try to determine whether or not it is in fact an element of itself. But it is a legitimate set nonetheless, as you say, because we can coherently state the criteria for whether something is or is not in that set, and that's what defines a set. So the statement, 'It is true that there is a set of all sets,' results in a contradiction when we try to resolve one of its entailed implications - namely, whether or not 'the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves' is an element of itself - and in formal logic, this means that our starting premise is in fact false! Therefore there is no 'set of all sets,' quod erat demonstrandum, motherfucker!" Then Bertrand Russell folded his arms across his chest, smiled smugly, and flew off in a rocket ship to take tea from his Celestial Teapot. True story.

Now here's the really interesting part: we can mutatis mutandis the above all the way to "It is logically necessary that 'category' is not itself a category, because all categories would go into it, including the category 'heterological,' which results in a logical contradiction." But category is a category, conventionally speaking, because it meets the criteria we've set forth for "being a category." Or, in other words, we talk as if there are categories all the time without our brains exploding, so we can see the conventional/metaphysical split rather clearly. Take it one level higher, and we see that language, while capable of formulating conventionally true statements, can never attain metaphysical truth because it entails that there are categories as a category, which entails a contradiction. But that's the only way we can talk about things: as categories, such as "things," and by using language which is intrinsically imprecise and not "sticky." So, to answer our earlier question, categorization itself is to blame.

Poof.

Categories are imaginary. Language is all in our heads. Top-down Universes might even be logically impossible, though I can't think of how to prove it at the moment. What say you?

Quick End Note: One practical implication of this is that the micro/macroevolution distinction is purely imaginary, which anyone with half a brain can tell you, but now has been conclusively proven. Arguments citing this as a premise in support of ID are thus made categorically invalid beause this supporting premise is tautologically false - the worst kind of false. Rock on.

The Bubblegum Theory of Language: Essentialism in a Designoid Universe, part two

In my last post on the importance of categorization's metaphysical subordination to reality, I made quite a big deal out of how language as a system of labels may or may not "stick" to reality. Why is this such a big deal, and what bearing does it have on the relationship of language to the world? I realized after reading a rather poignant comment that I had smuggled in what is informally known as the bubblegum theory of language (my Google-Fu is weak here, so please let me know if someone can find a reference to this).

The bubblegum theory of language is a metaphor for how we use words. It works best with ostensive definitions, and it's a good metaphor insofar as people behave consistently with it most of the time. It starts to break down with abstract concepts, and it fails in that hardly anyone actually thinks they're doing it this way when they're using language. Here's the gist of it: when I heard that the thing I was sitting on is called a "chair," I stuck a piece of imaginary bubblegum to that "pile of atoms arranged chair-wise" (which for simplicity I shall simply call a "chair" from here on, just please remember that this is strictly a language of convenience), and I put the label of "chair" on the other end. I carry this label wherever I go, sticking that bubblegum to all the other chairs I encounter. I also have a piece of bubblegum for "my desk chair at home," which only attaches to one chair in the world. There's also a piece of bubblegum for "my desk chair at work," which also attaches to exactly one chair in the world. Both of those chairs, however, are attached by another piece of bubblegum to the label of "my chair." I also have labels and bubblegum for armchairs, high chairs, recliners, and so forth.

So what do I do with all these labels? Well, I place them all into a box labelled "chairs." And this box itself shares a space with my "tables" box, and my "couches" box, and my "armoires" box, and many other boxes in a much larger box labelled "furniture." So I've got all these boxes which contain other boxes which themselves contain labels which are attached by bubblegum to piles of atoms out in the world in a big sticky mess: that's language.

Here's the important part: there are no "things in the world" contained in these boxes, the boxes only contain the labels¹. Furthermore, the boxes, labels, and bubblegum are all purely imaginary. This is, in at least one very important way, how language works; this is going to require some serious unpacking, though.

The boxes are categories, the labels are concepts, and the huge web of bubblegum connects my concepts to their referents out in the world (albeit in a purely conventional way). But concepts are not themselves the things out in the world, they simply represent my understanding of those things - they are merely ideas, in other words, and ideas are only in our heads. They're very useful, to be sure, and they may correspond to reality and cohere with each other to varying degrees, but they're still ideas in our heads. The important part here is that there is a very real difference between "a thing" and "an idea of a thing," and though we may conflate the two in everyday language (which is usually fine), we should be aware on some level that there is still a crowbar separation between the two (to borrow Eddie Izzard's turn of phrase).

So far, so good. Language is fueled by concepts and concepts are different from the things in the world that they are supposed to represent. None of this should really be controversial so far (at least, I hope not), but there are some surprising implications to be drawn from this.

Our knowledge about the world is propositional²: to know something, there must be a proposition that can express that knowledge. Propositions can have truth value. Things out in the world do not have truth value. Propositions must be expressed in terms of language, and moreover, require syntax and grammar and all sorts of other made-up stuff. Things out in the world simply are what they are and don't need anything from us to go on being as they are (in other words, reality just is what it is, regardless of what we would like to say, think, or do about it). Language is fueled by concepts, though, and concepts are fundamentally divorced from the things in the world which they represent³. This is a problem: propositions, the only way we can express our ideas about things in the world, can have truth value; but they are ultimately unable to correspond completely to the things in the world about which we wish to talk.

This is a constraint of the system, and there's no getting around it. It's kind of like the way that reason can never be externally justified, because justification requires a reasoning process, and now you're justifying reason itself with a reasoning process, which is circular and doesn't really accomplish anything. Language is the only way we can talk about the world, it's the only way we can check for truth value (whether or not a proposition corresponds to reality), but language will always be fundamentally divorced from reality at some level, so we'll never get complete correspondence.

"This is all fine and dandy," you say, "But at the end of the day, our television sets turn on, our computers access the internet, and NASA still uses Newtonian physics to send very expensive robots to other planets even though general relativity and QM correspond better to reality." Yeah, for NASA's purposes, Newtonian physics corresponds enough, even though it doesn't correspond completely. The laws of physics don't have to fit perfectly into our "Laws of Physics" box for us to get some use out of that box. This is true of the principles behind television sets, computers, and the internet as well.

What I'm saying is that this is conventional truth, which is good enough for everyday applications. But conventional truth is fraught with ambiguity, and needs constant revision and maintenance to keep up with all the new things we discover every day and have to integrate into our conceptual frameworks. If we wanted something more than conventional truth, we would need to close the gap between language and the world to get metaphysical truth, which would at last dispense with the ambiguity and allow us to use linguistics to discover facts about things in the world since we would have complete correspondence (the boxes and labels would fit perfectly). This would be like using an understanding of a computer language to discover how things are going to play out when the program is run, simply by looking at the program - you can have a complete picture, so you can discover things "about the world (model)" just by analyzing the language on which it runs, because the "things" in the "world (model)" are modeled after the preconceived categories (and not vice versa). The real world doesn't run on language, though, because the real world is bottom-up.

In a top-down Universe, metaphysical truth is at least in principle accessible. In a bottom-up Universe, it's fundamentally inaccessible. What I'm saying is that as long as we continue to have this gap, this will be strong evidence that we live in a bottom-up Universe. If we did ever discover the "machine code" of the Universe, and could use it to discover things without empirically verifying them⁴ (as we can do with computer programs), then this would be almost clinching proof that we're in a top-down Universe. What this means for religion is that their top-down languages are failures: animals were not created according to any discernible "kinds," "detestable abominations" such as shrimp and lobster are fucking delicious, there's absolutely nothing that is demonstrably "sacred" about cows, and humanity has no principled and privileged status above the rest of the organisms on the planet. In short, this is not a knock against conventional truth, but rather a rough illustration of its constraints, and an attempt to show (conventionally, of course) what it says about the world that we have these constraints in the first place; it's a knock against the great body of codified superstitious nonsense that comprises most religions.

I hope this helps clarify my meaning.

Notes:

1: There's clearly no way that an imaginary box in your head could literally contain a thing in the world, but that's not quite what I mean. There is a figurative way that an imaginary box in your head could contain such a thing, though: if you had complete understanding of a thing in the world, if your idea of that thing was "perfect," so to speak, then you would be able to discover true propositions about that thing in the world merely by analyzing your idea of it. That's what it means for a label to "really stick," or for a thing in the world to "really fit" into a box. Though it is logically possible for things to be set up this way, this idea is clearly absurd when applied to the real world, and demonstrates that whenever we write, talk, or even think "about" things in the world, we're really and truly writing/talking/thinking about our ideas of those things, and not the things themselves. The ding an sich is fundamentally inaccessible to us.
2: OK, yeah, there's propositional and procedural knowledge ("to know that X is the case" vs. "to know how X is done"). This is the difference between knowing what the rules of tennis are, and knowing how to deliver a good serve, as Ebonmuse points out in A Ghost in the Machine. However, procedural knowledge is more about reflexes and muscle memory and isn't really able to correspond to the world in the same way that propositions can. Hence its exclusion, I just wanted to take a moment to explain why.
3: To be fair, this is only contingently true of fallible beings like us who lack second-order knowledge (the knowledge qua "justified true belief" that you know something, or justified absolute certitude). But until or unless someone demonstrates omniscience or gnosis or some such happy horse-shit, we don't really need to concern ourselves with this qualifier.
4: Because we're fallible beings, we'd have to empirically verify these discoveries anyway. However, we would still be discovering facts with this machine code if it were genuine; what we would discover with empirical verification is merely that the machine code is genuine, thereby providing a justification for discoveries obtained with it. In other words, they're true already, we're just checking out the source.

Essentialism in a Designoid Universe

Whether or not there is some cosmic force of design behind the structure of the Universe, I think that people of all metaphysical persuasions could agree that the Universe at least appears designed. We see order and function all around us, and while we may disagree on the conclusions to be drawn from these observations, the observations themselves are fairly undisputed*. But like a Rorschach ink blot, the Universe simply is what it is, and anything we read into it is simply the result of what we project onto it.

And we project so much! All our language is boxes and labels for categorizing the variety of experience that comes our way: this class of objects goes in this box; that individual object gets this label; these labelled objects kind of fit into a box all together; these boxes seem to deserve a special label all their own; and so on and so forth.

These boxes and labels are certainly very useful tools for trying to make some sense of the world, and for trying to communicate with one another, but they are not without their flaws. Chief among these flaws would be the inescapable problem that no label or box ever "truly" fits. For all our categories - tables and chairs, Nick and Lisa, chordates and fungi, good and evil, tools and weapons, numbers and grammar, art and literature - none of them is immune to the central problem that the Universe came first, and we slap our categories upon it as a metaphysical afterthought.

Why is this a problem? Ultimately, I suppose it's not - if I wanted to be rigorous, I could say that "problem" is just another category that ultimately breaks down and has fundamentally arbitrary (or at least intersubjective) borders, so there's really no such thing as a problem anyway. This is the issue, in a nutshell: the things in the world come first, and then we come by and divide them into categories which we've made up; but since we're making up the categories after the things in the world (instead of making the things in the world after any pre-planned categories), we can't reasonably expect these categories to "stick."

All I've said thus far is that language is secondary to reality, that there is a fundamentally impassable gap between the way we talk about a thing and the thing itself (the ding an sich, to borrow Kant's term) which will prevent the former from ever "really" corresponding to the latter. What does this have to do with the Universe at large, or the fact that it appears designed?
First of all, it tells us that "apparently designed" is yet another label that we slap onto the world. It's a category that is built, at some level, on our ability to recognize patterns. We seem to be surrounded by patterns, and when we start to take the Universe apart, we see that it behaves in patterns all the way down (or at least as far down as we've come). We see these patterns, and we infer design, and whether or not we disabuse ourselves of this notion, we can all recognize the "apparent design" that appears to be behind the patterns. But "pattern," after all, is itself just another label that we slap on to certain things we encounter in the world, and so on and so forth. Do you see where this is going? "Apparently designed" and "pattern," useful though they are, can never really "stick" to the Universe.

This is exactly what we should expect to see in a Universe that is built from the bottom up: from complex interactions of fundamental principles, other more superficial patterns emerge; and those patterns act as the fundamental principles from which the next layer of superficial patterns emerges, and so on and so forth. As the tree of life stymies our taxonomic endeavors, so the tree of causality stymies our attempts to get labels to stick to the world. The reason for this in both cases is because of the tree itself: we stand at the tips of the branches and try to say which tips "go with" which other tips, and certainly some of them seem very different and some of them seem very similar, but how far back down the tree we go before we say "this is separate from that" is ultimately an arbitrary decision. No matter how clever our labels are, and no matter how well things may contingently fit into our boxes for the time being, there is no principled way to decide how far back to the trunk we "ought" to go before drawing a line between this and that category. The tree is continuous, the tree is one; but we see it as many and so try to make it fit the notion of many that is in our heads because we cannot deal intelligently with undifferentiated experience.

Compare this with what we should expect to see in a truly designed Universe. Objects that are, dare I say it, intelligently designed tend to show a pattern which makes them good candidates for going into one of our boxes: they are organized from the top-down. This is going to get hairy, but please try to stick with me here. Take our language, for an example: though many elements of it are organized from the bottom up, it does show several top-down elements of genuine design (insofar as "genuine" has any meaning, given the foregoing on labels & such). These top-down elements we may call designed, and the patterns that simply emerge on their own from the bottom-up elements we may call designoid (to borrow Dr. Dawkins' term).

Though this top-down design does not "truly" apply to any discrete object we see in our bottom-up world (and don't forget to keep in mind that these are all just labels, anyway!), we can see something closer in the world models we create with computers. For clarity, I think that a computer's world model is better classified as an "idea" than as an "object," it's just an explicitly codified idea. In such a model, the better-designed it is, the more top-down organization it will show. "Things" in the model will behave as discrete "kinds" of things, they will adhere well to categories, the labels can really stick to the world (model). Were the real world like this, we could expect to find that our categories stuck to it, and then words like "sacred," "kosher," "good" and "evil," "abomination," "table" and "chair," "soul" and "mind," could all have unambiguous referents which lacked fuzzy borders and were not victim to classification problems.

Instead, we have fuzzy borders galore, as many classification problems as we have words, and no apparent top-down organization no matter how we slice the world. Psychoactive drugs find themselves used for different treatments throughout their careers - Abilify (aripiprazole) was once used as an anti-psychotic, and is now also used to combat bipolar disorder and clinical depression - we discovered that the category describing its function upon the human brain didn't really stick to it, so we moved it to a bigger box. Klonopin (clonazepam) similarly has various effects upon the human body. The marijuana plant has myriad uses as a source of cloth, oil, fuel, various cosmetic products, and one of the most benign intoxicants known to man, and it's prolific & hardy to boot - what is this supremely useful plant doing in such an otherwise hostile world, and how could it possibly come to be demonized despite it's marvellous apparent design? Tobacco is way more popular, but is significantly more difficult to grow and carries more cons along with it. Corn is another hardy and useful plant, but it doesn't naturally occur - it's a modified wheat-like plant born from the dialectic of selective breeding that blurs the distinction between "invention" and "discovery." Mammals nurse their young while birds & reptiles lay shelled eggs, but then monotremes came along and had to have their own category invented out of whole cloth to solve the "problem" of their own existence.

The problem was never with the monotremes, the problem was (and is) with our boxes. Whenever our boxes break down, we try to find a different set that works better, or we modify our current set to make it work better. This isn't bad in itself, but it's a never-ending project: there is no set of boxes for us to discover or invent that will magically accommodate everything. In a top-down Universe, there would be such a set of boxes, because everything is explicitly designed: the top-down Universe is discrete, discontinuous, and totally boxable. Our bottom-up Universe is exactly the opposite: indiscrete, continuous, and fundamentally boxless.

The exception to this might be "philosophical atoms," a placeholder name for whatever it is that comprises the most fundamental building blocks of reality. However, even that most basic of labels may not stick, for there is an alternative to the existence of philosophical atoms: "gunk." We don't know enough about Universes to really say whether there must be any philosophical atoms, and it very well could be that the Universe is composed of infinitely subdivisible gunk all the way down. (Dammit, now I have to revise my whole metaphysics!)

I guess what I'm saying with all this, to revisit the Rorschach test, is that we need to project our categories onto reality in order to deal with it, but we should also keep in mind that this is ultimately artifice and contrivance - at the end of the day, it's just philosophical atoms (or gunk) arranged blot-wise, so we just need to be careful how seriously we take our boxes and labels. Taking them too far, thinking that the Universe is actually created according to a top-down plan with discrete "kinds" of whatever, is just foolishness. It's metaphysically backwards and it gets in the way of our attempts at understanding things. This goes for Essentialism as well as for Creationism, and it goes double for anyone who believes in the "microevolution/macroevolution" distinction.

It goes triple for philosophers, though. If tables and chairs are just ideas that we superimpose upon reality, then so is "knowledge" merely a category, which makes epistemology into a language game. "Good" is also a mere category, which makes ethics into a language game. Metaphysics might not be a mere language game if philosophical atoms exist, but if it's gunk all the way down, then metaphysics is also just a language game. And until or unless we break all our arguments down to symbolic logic (which would reduce philosophy to "competitive language gaming"), most of the serious disagreements in philosophy start to seem rather silly, like so much table-pounding from people who really ought to know better.

Continue to part 2.

* - With a few notable exceptions such as Flat-Earthers.