Well Said

Dave Scot, in the comments here:

Our position here, or at least mine, is that it has been sufficiently demonstrated that humans can invent abstract codes that both specify and drive complex machines. Furthermore, there has been no demonstration that anything else in the universe has this capacity.

I’m quite willing to concede that AI and AL is possible through human invention. In fact I consider it inevitable in the not too distant future if technology continues to progress at the current accelerating pace. FYI, I’m a fan of the technologic singularity hypothesis.

But all that does is provide additional evidence of what, for all the empirical evidence we have, are inescapable laws of nature:

1) life comes from life

2) intelligence comes from intelligence

The AI and AL, primitive as they are in comparison to human mind and body, that exists today would not exist without a preexisting intelligent mind to invent them and a preexisting body to instantiate them.

Of course this raises the question of either a first intelligence (first cause) or an infinite regression of intelligence begetting intelligence. I’m sorry I don’t have an empirical answer for that. Be that as it may the empirical evidence I do have all supports the two laws described above with absolutely no known exceptions.

In any science except evolutionary biology when a great body of observation and with no known exceptions exists it is the basis of promoting theory to law. At this point in time the laws I described should be accepted as law but instead, due to dogmatic exclusion, what should be laws are not even granted the status of hypotheses. If find this a totally unacceptable corruption of science.

I concede there is the possibility of exceptions to the laws but these must be demonstrated rather than imagined. In the meantime the laws remain unbroken.