"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" Paug Gaugin
One of the fundamental question that one has to answer for himself is the question about his origin. And for this, man has created theories about it. Of course the truth is that no one can come with an infallible theory because it's very hard to prove.
Until Darwin, the prevailed myth that answered the question of man's origin was the "Ceramic model of the Universe" provided by the church. Darwin was maybe the first to oppose this widespread idea when he introduced the "Theory of Evolution" which is based on a Newtonian model of the Universe.
Now it seems that this theory is starting to shake as many scientists argue that this century old theory has many flaws in it, many that couldn't have been predicted by Darwin. The debate started from the mid 1980's from a book entitled "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" by Michael Denton.
The "Intelligent design" theory is based upon the principle of "irreducible complexity". An irreducibly complex system is one composed of multiple parts, all of which are necessary for the system to function. If even one part is missing, the entire system will fail to function. Every individual part is integral. So there has to be an intelligent design for all these parts to have been set up in the correct place. The probability of this to happen by mere chance is so small that is almost impossible.
This principle is not found only in the biology but even in astrophysics. The distance to our Sun is tremendously important for the life to exist as we know it. If we were a little closer to the Sun or further from it, the water, our essential vital substance, wouldn't be in the liquid form and we couldn't live. In Physics, we have what we call "Universal constants". If these constants were other than what we know today, the Universe wouldn't be like the way it's know, or it could have been destroyed.
We can conceive even a theory of evolution for the Universe, or Multiverse, in a higher dimensional plane in which all possible universes are created from the beginning (whatever that is) and maybe the laws of physics would differ and the universe with a wrong mixture of universal constants and laws could destroy itself. That's natural selection on a universal scale.
The Darwinians reply that given a considerable amount of time, and try every combination, without repeating it through natural selection, the nature can find it's way to evolve towards complexity.
In a recent 2008 documentary movie "Expelled: No intelligence allowed" we can see how this idea of "natural selection" can turn into a dangerous idea. It has feed Nazi's racist efforts to create the "Aryan race" throughout exterminating "inferior races".
On the other side, creationists argue that science is a form or religion of itself. No one know how the life started. How did all happen, how the first protein was conceived. The fairy story "that a lightning stroke the primordial soup" the life appeared it's a gimmick. Laboratory experiments showed this could never happened.
Today we live with the disastrous results of the ego, which, according to nineteenth century common sense, feels that it is a fluke in nature and that if it does not fight nature it will not be able to maintain its status as an intelligent fluke. Therefore the geneticists and many others are now saying that man must take the course of his evolution into his own hands. He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, unintelligible processes of nature to develop him any further; he must intercede with his own intelligence and through genetic alterations breed the kind of people who will be viable for future human societies. This, I submit, is a ghastly error, because human intelligence has a very serious limitation. It is a scanning system of conscious attention that is linear, and it examines the world in lines [...] However, the universe does not come at us in lines. Instead, it comes at us in a multidimensional continuum in which everything is happening altogether everywhere at once, and it comes at us much too quickly to be translated into lines of print or other information, however fast it may be scanned. That is our limitation, so far as the intellectual and scientific life is concerned. The computer may greatly speed up linear scanning, but it is still linear scanning. - Alan Watts
So, man is tackling these fundamental problems but it has thousand year old weapons that never changed.
Using these tools, we designed what we call "intelligent robots" but these robots don't even have the intelligence of a drunken cockroach. For example, there is no definitive algorithm that can distinguish cats from dogs from a set of images. A tentacle-robot makes an impressive amount of computations for moving it's hand from one point to another using inverse kinematics, while most three year-old can do it in an instant. Efforts have being made in this area of research, on understanding how the brain work and Jeff Hawkings came up with an interesting approach called memory-prediction model. More on this subject in his ted talk or his book "On Intelligence".
With this approach, we could come to the realization that our complex intelligence can be reproduced by a machine that can safely pass the Turing test. Then what ? The philosophical implications of this is that life, like the matter, is not intelligent and it's just mechanical. That would be a great disappointment for mankind, for it's ego. An intelligent design would just lay out the matrix for all things and we are just a product of it. If we are going to find that design it won't be that intelligent for us when we'll think of it. Maybe we don't know what this concept of intelligence really means.
But there is another way to put it. Life it's not a fluke. The matter is just as intelligent as the human brain is or the cell. There is no need then for any intelligent design but there is no reason that it could not be at the same time. The matter itself is intelligent as it basic core. Alan Watts explains this principle in the following video.
All in all, the entry can be summed up into the following table. For me, the last two theories are correct and even if they contradict each other. They are saying the same thing, that the nature of life, is not separated from the nature of matter. So the matter is one with life, despite on what we call intelligent or not.
| Theory | Matter | Process | Life |
| Creationism | Non-Intelligent | God | Intelligent |
| Darwinism | Non-Intelligent | evolved | Intelligent |
| Intelligent design | Non-Intelligent | is | Non-Intelligent |
| Tao | Intelligent | is | Intelligent |
