Zen-ish Thoughts About The Designer of the Universe

Zen thinking should always begin with and prominently feature what is so. Not what is illusory, or desirable, or undesirable, or not what we expected, or what has intuitive appeal, or what provides comfort, or confirms a fear.

Often, what is so creates compelling illusions. Distinguishing between those illusions and the bare truth is one of life's relentless challenges. To become perfectly illusion-free is so difficult that the traditions that give this as the sine qua non of enlightenment tell us it takes dozens or hundreds or thousands of lifetimes to get there.

In 1802, in Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, William Paley presents a now well-known illusion as if it is proof of a fact. The Grand Designer argument he presents says in effect:

This has a certain natural appeal, but it is pregnant with at least two gigantic assumptions:

1. It assumes that the existence of some god-like being is the only possible explanation for the universe we observe – a logic error.
2. It arrogantly assumes that god-like being must be the particular God that Paley has in mind.

Among the topics in Eat The Strawberries I have addressed the suspiciousness of each religion's and sect's God or pantheon being the correct one out of thousands believed in, and of the assertion that there are any gods at all.

Leaving that there, here I will deal with Paley's much simpler assumption. Many have done so at length before me. I will given it much briefer, and hopefully more easily relatable treatment, but for your reference, at the end of this article I will list some especially famous refutations of the Grand Design assertion.

Let us begin with dogs. It is well-known that dogs are not good at generalization. This is one way of saying that they do not have anything like the human capacity for producing and applying general concepts. This is demonstrated behaviorally, anatomically, and in brain scans.

An apparent paradox is that, once "house broken", dogs quite reliably seem to generalize that they should not pee or poop inside any type of building, only outdoors. "Any type of building" is a very complex concept. How can dogs do this with no explicit training in all or at least very many types of buildings if they don't have a "building" concept? How, to a dog, is a skyscraper like a hut?

I think in terms of "buildings" because, as a human who forms and relies upon concepts all the time, that is just how I automatically think. As a consequence, I think the dog has developed some concept of "buildings", but this is an illusion, generated by my own conceptualizing bias. This is quite like the mistake that Paley made.

What science tells us is that dogs rely on observations available to their senses. They show no evidence of having complex concepts like "any type of building", but lots of evidence of having fantastic sense-behavior circuitry. The dog does not perceive "building". The dog perceives things like "people smells (or carpeting smells, or …) predominate here". The dog perceives the impact of floors, walls, and ceilings on sound, without having a concept of "contained spaces". The dog knows when it is "outside", without needing a concept of outside, because it smells and looks and feels and sounds as it does, and contains more unpredictable stimuli than the places we conceptualize as "inside".

Given my own modeling of the world, heavy as it is with concepts, I imagine the dog has concepts, but the dog is much more present in the moment than I am and is responding to collections of non-conceptual stimuli that I don't even consciously notice.

I don't think the science proves that dogs have zero conceptual ability, but it is very clear that they can not even approach something as abstract as "this skyscraper is a building, and so it this hut". Similarly, they absolutely know who their caregivers are, and have behavioral expectations and long term memories for their own emotional responses to people, other dogs, places, and so on, but again, these are far more rooted in stimulus-response connections than in concepts. It's not even clear, and is deemed extremely unlikely, that they recall the story of whatever good or bad thing previously happened, just their own emotional reaction to some set of stimuli.

"But my dog knows when I am distressed and comes to comfort me!" Your dog detects distress signals from particular living beings, and responds with behaviors that comfort dogs. This is instinctual, not conceptual. They were specifically bred (genetically engineered) by us to do this.

"But my dog is so smart that she …"
Uh huh.

What I am saying here does not mean they are not sweet and lovable, and capable of learning. They certainly love you passionately in their doggie way, but their love and loyalty and wonderfulness is not your conceptually-rich love and loyalty ¸and wonderfulness. It just looks that way to us because we are so conceptually-rich that we don't realize when we are projecting our thoughts and feelings onto pets (or onto other people!).

The above is intended to present a relatable illustration of what scientists call emergent behavior. This is how ants "organize" to efficiently bring food to the nest without a concept of food, or foraging, or even nest. They just do what they do, primarily based on following each other's scent trails, and it results in effective food foraging. That makes it look intelligent, but to be intelligent and not just emergent requires a level of conceptualization we know to be vary far beyond the capacity of the few neurons that comprise their brains. (This, and what I've said about dogs, can all be scientifically demonstrated, but is far too much of a digression for this article.)

This emergent behavior is exactly how AI appears to be not only artificial intelligence, but advanced intelligence, when it is actually just computational intense pattern detection over vast data sets. It's not even slightly intelligent in the way humans are, simultaneously outperforming and underperforming humans in many ways and having no concepts (or consciousness) at all. It's good and getting better at giving the impression of intelligence, but that is not the same thing as truly possessing intelligence.

All of which is to say that the appearance of intelligence, design, and intelligent design are not in fact only explainable by there being a Designer. That is not what is so. What is so is that we frequently observe things that strongly suggest intent and design, personality and agency, awareness and action to our brains that are biased to "see" such things, but might just be the consequence of complex systems of entirely non-conceptual, thought-free computation or biological responses to stimuli. Many things suggest a designer, but a careful thinker will note that they also suggest emergent behavior from a complex system, and that the latter occurs in the world a gazillion more times often than intelligence does.

People who like to ponder whether or not we have free will must have noticed that this line of thought begs the question of whether or not we ourselves have intelligence, or if we too are just creating the illusion of it. What complex behavior isn't emergent? Keep this in mind the next time your own or someone else's stupidity rankles you. Give it a thought the next time you watch the news.

Lastly, note that in the more general realm of Zen-ish thinking, we have seen here that the gap between what we think is obviously so and what is actually so is often both large and nearly impossible to discern. Be humble, be curious, and be kind.