Chance Design

Check out this interesting post by Jim Anderson at Decorabilia. Jim created a "random" pattern of terms and asked for the rule guiding the pattern. There was no intentional rule. But one clever reader tried to figure it out and created a primitive outline for a rule.

Design - a notion that implies intentionality - requires a rule, a generality, a pattern, a model. Nature functions in terms of generalities as well as particulars, laws, patterns. But note that nature and design are connected only analogically in the typical ID argument: X has discernible laws and patterns, design involves rules and patterns; therefore, X is discernibly designed (and further, requires a designer).

Update: let me put this in contrast. I think the logic basically follows this pattern: soil helps plants grow, and water helps plants grow; therefore, soil is water. Do we need to plug in intentionality? Well, that's the further leap: since plants grow, there exists a gardener. In order to draw that conclusion, you would need another premise: plants only grow because the gardener (One? Many?) helps them grow through the application of soil and water. Show that premise to be true and you've got the whole thing. But there are two problems: 1. in this particular example, the premise clearly isn't true; 2. the entire argument for a designer (or gardener) rests on bringing in the premise. So what the argument does is simply assert in its premises what is supposedly proven in its conclusion.

I would think that arguing for fundamental beliefs from analogy would be a shaky enough proposition to disturb most anyone out of the firmness of those beliefs.

...It's all about trying to find a pattern that isn't real--when pathological, the condition is called apophenia--by relying on human design intuitions. All of the strategies are possible, even probable, modes of uncovering the structure of the puzzle--if the design is in fact designed.

It was, and it wasn't. In the vague, meaningless sense of "design," one often trumpeted by Salvador Cordova, an intelligent agent crafted the pseudopuzzle, first by noticing an instance of a possible pattern, then by combining words with similar endings, finally deceptively claiming a solution was possible. But the design was essentially random. Words were chosen using associations in memory (for all the -eese words, of which "Edwin Meese" is my favorite) and from a list of -ary words found here. There was no leitmotif other than "hmm, this word sounds nifty."...

What is my point? ("You often have no point," my wife always cuts in.) In their delightful and accessible introduction to probability, Chances Are, Ellen Kaplan and son Michael write,

Recent experiments using positron emission tomography (PET) scans have revealed that, even when subjects have been told they are watching a completely random sequence of stimuli, the pattern-finding parts of their brains light up like the Las Vegas strip. We see faces in clouds, hear sermons in stones, find hidden meanings in ancient texts. A belief that things reveal meaning through pattern is the gift we brought with us out of Eden.

Our problem, however, is that some things can have shape without structure, the form of meaning without its content. A string of random letters split according to the appropriate word-lengths of English will immediately look like a code.

Redirecting slightly, recall, also, "unintentional photography" and "intelligent art" below. Part of the point of both posts is that decisions made about what to look for or how to create are as much a function of accident as they are rational design. If you look at the photos and decide they are "art" (I know this is presumptuous, but bear with me), understand that you are the one doing it. I made a selection of photos to show you. But I can't call them art, which, even allowing for the artist's relationships with accident, involves intentionality on the part of the all-too-human artist.