The Quest for the ultimate free lunch rolls on.

Designless" Logic: Is a Neural Net a Budding Brain?
Evolution News & Views September 30, 2015 3:16 AM 


Whenever you harness a random phenomenon for a function, you are doing intelligent design. For instance, raindrops falling on the ground are unpredictable, but the moment you dig a ditch to channel them to run a waterwheel, you have used your goal-directed intelligence for a pre-determined purpose, even if the inputs were random. Evolutionists routinely miss this distinction. Maybe it's because they just hope their bottom-up theory is true.
Designless Logic
The authors of a new paper in Nature Nanotechnology commit the fallacy right in the title: "Evolution of a designless nanoparticle network into reconfigurable Boolean logic." If it's reconfigurable, it's not designless. If they "evolved" it to do logic, it's illogical to call it Darwinian, which they say inspired their approach. If they applied their minds to exploit the physical properties of particles for a purpose, then they circumvented the purposelessness of natural selection.
Natural computers exploit the emergent properties and massive parallelism of interconnected networks of locally active components. Evolution has resulted in systems that compute quickly and that use energy efficiently, utilizingwhatever physical properties are exploitable. Man-made computers, on the other hand, are based on circuits of functional units that follow given design rules. Hence, potentially exploitable physical processes, such as capacitive crosstalk, to solve a problem are left out. Until now,designless nanoscale networks of inanimate matter that exhibit robust computational functionality had not been realized. Here we artificially evolve the electrical properties of a disordered nanomaterials system (by optimizing the values of control voltages using a genetic algorithm) to perform computational tasks reconfigurably. We exploit the rich behaviour that emerges from interconnected metal nanoparticles, which act as strongly nonlinear single-electron transistors, and find that this nanoscale architecture can be configured in situ into any Boolean logic gate. This universal, reconfigurable gate would require about ten transistors in a conventional circuit. Our system meets the criteria for the physical realization of (cellular) neural networks: universality (arbitrary Boolean functions), compactness, robustness and evolvability, which implies scalability to perform more advanced tasks. Our evolutionary approach works around device-to-device variations and the accompanying uncertainties in performance. Moreover, it bears a great potential for more energy-efficient computation, and for solving problems that are very hard to tackle in conventional architectures. [Emphasis added.]
To their credit, the authors do identify their work as "artificial" selection, but they see it on a continuum with natural selection, never making the distinction between unguided natural processes and intelligent processes. They merely assume that intelligence was, at some point in natural selection, an emergent property that allowed their physical brains (which presumably emerged millions of years ago) to "optimize" the properties of "disordered" elements (like the raindrops) into Boolean logic computers (like the waterwheel).
Design is written all over their materials and methods:
The technique employed to fabricate the NP network is dielectrophoresis, whereby a non-uniform electric fieldapplied across the electrodes drives the suspended NPs to the area in between the electrodes. Before the trapping procedure, the Ti/Au electrodes were cleaned with an oxygen-plasma surface treatment followed by an ethanol rinse and dry. The 11 × 11 mm2 chip that contained several eight- and twelve-pin geometries was placed inside a probe station, and a drop of Au NPs suspended in ethylene glycol wasdispensed on it. The trapping was done sequentially with pairs of diametrically opposed electrodes, by contacting the pads with the probes....
(You get the picture.) Yet they persist in claiming there is no design involved. "That our system is truly designless and reconfigurable makes our approach fundamentally different from the designed circuits" of previous attempts, they say. New Scientist falls headlong into the fallacy, comparing what the programmers did with what Darwinian evolution does:
Traditional computers rely on ordered circuits that followpreprogrammed rules, but this limits their efficiency. "The best microprocessors you can buy in a store now can do 1011operations per second, and use a few hundred watts," says Wilfred van der Wiel of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. "The human brain can do orders of magnitude more and uses only 10 to 20 watts. That's a huge gap."
To close that gap, researchers have tried building "brain-like"computers that can do calculations even though their circuitry was not specifically designed to do so. But no one had made one that could reliably perform calculations.
Van der Wiel and his colleagues have hit the jackpot, using gold particles about 20 nanometres across. They laid a few tens of these grains in a rough heap, with each one about 1 nanometre from its nearest neighbours, and placed eight electrodes around them.
When they applied just the right voltages to the cluster at six specific locations, the gold behaved like a network of transistors -- but without the strict sequence of connectionsin a regular microchip. The system not only performed calculations, but also used less energy than conventional circuitry.
Nothing about the particles told the researchers what voltages to try, however. They started with random valuesand learned which were the most useful using a genetic algorithm, a procedure that borrows ideas from Darwinian evolution to home in on the "fittest" ones.
Neural Nets
It's interesting that the authors compare their disordered electrical circuits to neural networks. These are all the rage now, as intelligent designers seek to improve computers by mimicking the networked architecture of biological brains. Traditional computers are predominantly linear in operation: one calculation's output is input for the next. Neural networks, being nonlinear, give the advantage of simultaneous operations.
Deep neural networks mimic the brain by creating hundreds of millions of connections between "artificial neurons" organized in layers. "These types of networks can be trained to perform hard classification tasks over huge datasets," PhysOrg says, "with the remarkable property of extracting information from examples and generalizing them to unseen items." The article explains the advantages:
The way neural networks learn is by tuning their multitude of connections, or synaptic weights, following the signal provided by a learning algorithm that reacts to the input data. This process is in some aspects similar to what happens throughout the nervous system, in which plastic modifications of synapses are considered to be responsible for the formation and stabilization memories. The problem ofdevising efficient and scalable learning algorithms for realistic synapses is crucial for both technological and biological applications.
But are biological neural networks "emergent" properties of cells that were not designed for learning? A primer in Current Biology examines neural nets from the simplest worm to the human brain and tries to see if Darwinian evolution connected the dots.
With the aim of discussing the evolution of neural nets, we focus here mainly on animals in which nerve nets form a major part of the nervous system and that have positions in the animal tree of life that are informative for considerations of how nervous systems have evolved (Figures 2 and 3).
In the article, we learn about the simplest of animals, like jellyfish and hydra (phylum Cnidaria), which possess "simple" nerve nets connected to muscle sheaths that allow them to respond to stimuli. Figure 2 compares nerve nets in various animals. We find in Figure 3 a phylogenetic diagram showing the distribution of nerve nets in the animal kingdom. The authors show a sequence of increasing complexity, from earthworms that use nerve nets to perform rhythmic movements like peristalsis, to fruit flies and vertebrates, whose nerve nets are organized into more complex structures like nerve cords, onward and upward to central nervous systems.
At a gross scale, it seems reasonable to connect the dots between hydra and Hyracotherium. "We see that nerve nets are good for many things and are quite versatile systems that can be integrated in varied ways into animal bodies," the authors say. "...Assuming the nerve net is theearliest neural tissue in which interwoven neurons connect with epithelial sensory cells and internal muscle cells, we might be able to postulate a pathway leading to derived nerve condensations, such as neurite bundles, medullary cords and brains."
Problems for locating a Darwinian pathway, however, mount as we consider the details:
Convergence. The recently-deciphered genome of a comb jelly (phylum Ctenophora) has led to a "robustly debated" notion that it is the basal metazoan. "Sponges (Porifera) and placozoans lack neurons, so if comb jellies are a sister taxon to all other metazoans, then either those two taxa have lost neurons during evolution or neurons (and nerve nets) evolved twice independently (see Figure 3)." Either way, how did the first neurons appear?
Parallel emergence. "In some animals with prominent subepidermal longitudinal nerve cords -- for example, vertebrates, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the annelidPlatynereis dumerilii -- the molecular and functional organizationof the nerve cord show very striking similarities, which has been argued to reflect an ancient origin of the nerve cord. In contrast, comparative morphology and recent advances in solving animal relationships with molecular tools suggest that internalizations from a basiepidermal to a subepidermal condensationhappened multiple times independently, for example inside the ribbon worms (Nemertea) and segmented worms (Annelida)."
Cell complexity. Neurons are not simple. They have specialized ion channels, genes and enzymes. Moreover, they have to know how to connect to one another and understand each other's signals. "Recent studies indicate that differentially expressed molecular markers -- transcription factors as well asneuropeptides and neurotransmitters -- assign specific neuronsto different identities and functions." How did neurotransmitters emerge to carry the electrical signals across synapses? Additionally, the muscles they connect to have to interpret the signals and respond appropriately.
Development. Nerve nets do not just appear in the adult fully formed. They have to develop in the embryo: meaning, specialized neurons have to diversify from stem cells then migrate into position and make connections. "Thus, theformation of nerve nets presents specific challenges at several levels and it appears that different organisms employ different developmental mechanisms to overcome these challenges andeventually end up with a nerve net-like nervous system." The authors imply that a simple progression is lacking.
Unknowns. "It will also be important to acquire a better understanding of the functional properties of different nerve nets. What types of behaviour do they allow, and what advantages might this confer for life in a particular environment? Only by such a multiplicity of studies on a broad range of species will it be possible to understand how nerve nets can be transformed during evolution into more complex architectures, and whether there might be a common mechanism that can explain how similar-looking central nerve cords evolved independently several times." Clearly this is not understood today, despite a century or study since G.H. Parker proposed in 1919, "The nerve-net of the lower animals contains the germ out of which has grown the central nervous systems of the higher forms."
Promissory notes: "The biology of nerve nets remains a fascinating and poorly understood topic and it is clear that comparative studies of neural development and physiology of non-model systems embedded in an ecological context are paramount to finally understand nervous system evolution."
In other words, someday evolutionists might connect the dots. Right now, even simple nerve nets in jellyfish and hydra are remarkably well designed for what they do.
This paper could not find an evolutionary pathway in biological neural networks. The other had to impose intelligent design on an artificial neural network to claim it was like biological evolution. Perceptive readers detect intelligent design through it all.

Stumbling over nothing?

What Part of "Nothing" Does Lawrence Krauss Not Understand?
James Barham February 27, 2012 6:00 AM

The latest in a series of book trumpeting a supposed solution to the mystery of existence, Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing (Free Press, 2012) is basically a superior and accessible rehashing of the concept of the "landscape." Also known as the "multiverse," that is the idea that our universe is embedded within an ensemble of other universes.

Though according to this hypothesis our universe is a "part" of the landscape in some sense, it has no spacetime connection with any of the other universes. This means that they can have no causal influence on us, or we on them.

That makes it tough to gather evidence that these other universes actually exist -- but let that pass.

I won't go into the details of the arguments for and against the landscape hypothesis here. There is no lack of popular books covering this material.1

The point of greatest interest is the extent to which the proposal is ad hoc speculation -- as opposed to a genuine inference from hard facts -- and on this point, expert opinion is divided.

In any event, it's irrelevant to Krauss's extravagant principal claim in the book -- that the problem of the mystery of existence has been solved (more on that in a moment). With respect to this claim, it is pretty obvious that the landscape (if it exists) is no closer to being nothing than the visible universe we observe around us. Rather the contrary, I'd have thought.

But more to the point, the landscape idea as such is not even directed at the mystery-of-existence question. Rather, it is directed at the fine-tuning problem.

This is the problem of explaining why there seems to be no good reason why a large number of physical constants take the exact values that they do. What makes this problem more interesting is the fact that if the values in question had been only slightly different, then various conditions necessary for the presence of life would not have been fulfilled.

This leads, naturally enough, to the idea that the universe is a "put-up job," in the memorable words of the late Fred Hoyle, a distinguished astrophysicist who valued plain speaking.

The reason why the landscape idea seems to solve the fine-tuning problem is that it makes room for the thought that the values of the physical constants of all the different universes are set as they are at random.

In that case, it is hardly surprising that we find ourselves living in the universe with the values that make our existence possible. So, the theory does seem to address the fine-tuning problem -- assuming, that is, the landscape exists and the random-constant concept makes sense (and those are big assumptions).

But none of this has anything to do with Krauss's principal claim about science's now having explained the mystery of existence. So, let's take a look at that.

If you haven't encountered it before, the idea can be a little elusive. Indeed, it seems to have eluded Krauss.

The basic idea is traceable to Antiquity. More specifically, it is one of those respects in which Athens had to go to school to Jerusalem, for it was only in the highest reaches of the monotheistic tradition of thought -- Augustine, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Anselm of Canterbury, Maimonides -- that the problem of the mystery of existence finally became clearly articulated.

In a nutshell, it's this: There is no contradiction involved in supposing that the universe never existed.

In other words, while I cannot consistently imagine a square circle, I can consistently imagine that nothing at all ever existed.

This means the universe is what philosophers call "contingent" (meaning not logically necessary).

This means that, since the universe apparently did not have to exist, we are entitled to ask why it does in fact exist.

Note that it does not help to say that the universe had to exist according to the laws of nature -- by physical necessity as opposed to logical necessity -- because the concept of natural law already assumes the existence of nature. Or, if one prefers to take a Platonist view of natural law, then one can simply move the question to that plane and inquire into the reason for the existence of Plato's heaven. Therefore, invoking the laws of nature in this context is question-begging.

As an aside, one might well wonder: How is God an improvement over the laws of nature, in this respect?

Theologians speak of God's mode of being as "necessary," unlike the world's, which is contingent, as we have seen. So, it is a crude mistake simply to ask, as atheists are wont to do: "Who made God?"

However, it is not clear (to me, at any rate) that the concept of necessary being is fully intelligible. The question is: What sort of necessity are we really talking about? It certainly seems like we can imagine that God doesn't exist without contradicting ourselves. But if that is so, then all really existing things -- not just the universe, but God as well -- turn out to be contingent.

There are several ways to go here, for the theist. One is to distinguish a third type of necessity, stronger than physical necessity, but weaker than logical necessity. Another is to distinguish among different modes of being. For instance, one might argue that God -- as the source of Being (upper case) itself -- must be distinguished from all individual beings (lower case), including the universe as a whole. And if that is right, then it is easier to see how the former can be necessary, whereas the latter are contingent.

This is a vast subject. Luckily, though, it need not detain us further here. For, I am not defending the claim that God is a sufficient solution to the mystery of existence.

What I am doing is attacking Krauss's claim that science provides such a solution.

To return, then, to the main thread of my argument: It seems a perfectly coherent question to ask why the universe exists, and if that is so, then we evidently have every right to seek an answer to the question.

The late-antique and medieval Christian and Islamic thinkers who first clearly saw all this liked to express the point slightly differently: Creator and creation are two radically distinct things.

As Robert Sokolowski, a distinguished philosopher at the Catholic University of America, has put it:

[T]he Christian understanding introduces a new horizon or context for the modes of possibility, actuality, and necessity . . . [it] distinguishes the divine and the world in such a way that God could be, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if everything were not.2
The idea received its classical modern statement in a little essay by Leibniz called "On the Radical Origination of Things" (1697). Here is how he put the problem:
For a sufficient reason for existence cannot be found merely in any one individual thing or even in the whole aggregate and series of things. Let us imagine the book on the Elements of Geometry to have been eternal, one copy always being made from another; then it is clear that though we can give a reason for the present book based on the preceding book from which it was copied, we can never arrive at a complete reason, no matter how many books we may assume in the past, for one can always wonder why such books should have existed at all times; why there should be books at all, and why they should be written in this way. What is true of books is true also of the different states of the world; every subsequent state is somehow copied from the preceding one (although according to certain laws of change). No matter how far we may have gone back to earlier states, therefore, we will never discover in them a full reason why there should be a world at all, and why it should be such as it is.3
In modern parlance -- following Leibniz's lead -- the problem of the mystery of existence is most often expressed by means of the formula: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" This phrase also forms the subtitle to Krauss's book.
Put like that, the idea does not seem so difficult to grasp. In fact, it can be reduced to three little words:

Why not nothing?

Nevertheless, Krauss doesn't get it. He titles one of his chapters "Nothing is something." What does he mean by this?

Just the familiar idea that according to quantum field theory, the vacuum state has complex properties such that matter can be created through quantum fluctuation events. As Krauss puts it in the title of another chapter: "Nothing is unstable."

But the properties of the quantum vacuum are simply irrelevant to the question under discussion -- the reason for the existence of anything at all -- which Krauss has brazenly claimed to have solved in the title of his book. For, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, the quantum field is obviously not nothing in the relevant sense.

What, then, is the final verdict on Dr. Krauss's latest book?

Yet another example of a perfectly good scientist out of his philosophical depth.4


References cited:

(1) Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010); Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford, 1997); Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape (Little, Brown, 2005); Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One (Hill and Wang, 2006).

(2) Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason (University of Notre Dame, 1982); p. 41. See, also, Lloyd P. Gerson, God and Greek Philosophy (Routledge, 1990).


(3) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. by Leroy E. Loemker (Kluwer Academic, 1989); p. 486.



(4) For further discussion, see John Leslie, Universes (Routledge, 1990); Milton K. Munitz, The Mystery of Existence (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965); and Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Harvard, 1981).

On the mech and tech of the designer

More on the "Mechanism" of Intelligent Design
Ann Gauger November 14, 2015 3:56 AM

Following on my post yesterday ("What's the Mechanism of Intelligent Design?"), here as promised is a helpful passage from Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, pp. 393-398. Biochemist Larry Moran kindly asked how Stephen Meyer thinks design in biology was instantiated. Meyer writes there:

According to [University of Cambridge paleontologist Robert] Asher, the inference to intelligent design is actually "anti-uniformitarian" because it doesn't provide a "mechanism." As he puts it, "by attempting to replace a causal mechanism (natural selection) with an attribution of agency (design), ID advocates such as Meyer are decidedly anti-uniformitarian. What process of today could possibly lead to his understanding of the past?"

The answer to Asher's question seems pretty obvious. The answer is: intelligence. Conscious activity. The deliberate choice of a rational agent. Indeed, we have abundant experience in the present of intelligent agents generating specified information. Our experience of the causal powers of intelligent agents -- of "conscious activity" as "a cause now in operation"-- provides a basis for making inferences about the best explanation of the origin of biological information in the past. In other words, our experience of the cause-and-effect structure of the world -- specifically the cause known to produce large amounts of specified information in the present -- provides a basis for understanding what likely caused large increases in specified information in living systems in the past. It is precisely my reliance on such experience that makes possible an understanding of the type of causes at work in the history of life. It also makes my argument decidedly uniformitarian -- not "anti-uniformitarian" -- in character.

Asher confuses the uniformitarian imperative in historical scientific explanations (the need to cite a presently known or adequate cause) with a demand for citing a material cause, or mechanism. The theory of intelligent design does cite a cause, and indeed one known to produce the effects in question, but it does not necessarily cite a mechanistic or materialistic cause. Proponents of intelligent design may conceive of intelligence as a strictly materialistic phenomenon, something reducible to the neurochemistry of a brain, but they may also conceive of it as part of a mental reality that is irreducible to brain chemistry or any other physical process. They may also understand and define intelligence by reference to their own introspective experience of rational consciousness and take no particular position on the mind-brain question.

Asher assumes that intelligent design denies a materialistic or "physicalist" account of the mind (as I personally do, in fact) and rejects it as unscientific on that basis. But he offers no noncircular reason for making that judgment. He cannot say that the principle of methodological naturalism requires that all genuinely scientific theories invoke only mechanistic causes, because the principle of methodological naturalism itself needs justification. And asserting that "all genuinely scientific theories must provide mechanisms" is just to restate the principle of methodological naturalism in different words. Indeed, to say that all scientific explanations must provide a mechanism is equivalent to saying that they must cite materialistic causes -- precisely what the principle of methodological naturalism asserts. Asher seems to be assuming without justification that all scientifically acceptable causes are mechanistic or materialistic. His argument thus assumes a key point at issue, which is whether there are independent -- that is, metaphysically neutral -- reasons for requiring historical scientific theories to cite materialistic causes in their explanations as opposed to explanations that invoke possibly immaterial entities such as creative intelligence, mind, mental action, agency, or intelligent design.

In any case, he confuses the logical requirement of citing a vera causa, a true or known cause, with an arbitrary requirement to cite only materialistic causes. He confuses uniformitarianism with methodological naturalism. 38 He then critiques my design argument for rejecting the former, though it only rejects the latter. In so doing, he imposes an additional requirement on explanations of past events that leads him to mistake my argument as anti- uniformitarian and to miss the evidence for intelligent design. His implicit commitment to methodological naturalism makes the evidence for intelligent design -- "the postman," as it were -- mentally invisible to him.

Nevertheless, the concern that he raises about the theory of intelligent design not citing a mechanism still troubles people. In fact, I frequently get questions about this issue. People will ask something like this: "I can see your point about digital code providing evidence for intelligent design, but how exactly did the designing intelligence generate that information or arrange matter to form cells or animals?" Or: "How did the intelligent designer that you infer impress its ideas on matter to form animals?" As Asher puts it, "How could a biological phenomenon, even if designed, be simply willed into existence without an actual mechanism?"

To help clear things up, several points need to be considered. First, the theory of intelligent design does not provide a mechanistic account of the origin of biological information or form, nor does it attempt to. Instead, it offers an alternative causal explanation involving a mental, rather than a necessarily or exclusively material, cause for the origin of that reality. It attributes the origin of information in living organisms to thought, to the rational activity of a mind, not a strictly material process or mechanism. That does not make it deficient as a materialistic or mechanistic explanation. It makes it an alternative to that kind of explanation. Advocates of intelligent design do not propose intelligent causes because they cannot think of a possible mechanistic explanation for the origin of form or information. They propose intelligent design because they think it provides a better, more causally adequate explanation for these realities. Given what we know from experience about the origin of information, materialistic explanations are the deficient ones.

There is a different context in which someone might want to ask about a mechanism. He or she may wish to know by what means the information, once originated, is transmitted to the world of matter. In our experience, intelligent agents, after generating information, often use material means to transmit that information. A teacher may write on a chalkboard with a piece of chalk or an ancient scribe may have chiseled an inscription in a piece of rock with a metal implement. Often, those who want to know about the mechanism of intelligent design are not necessarily challenging the idea that information ultimately originates in thought. They want to know how, or by what material means, the intelligent agent responsible for the information in living systems transmitted that information to a material entity such as a strand of DNA. To use a term from philosophy, they want to know about "the efficient cause" at work.

The answer is: We simply don't know. We don't have enough evidence or information about what happened, in the Cambrian explosion or other events in the history of life, to answer questions about what exactly happened, even though we can establish from the clues left behind that an intelligent designer played a causal role in the origin of living forms.

An illustration from archaeology helps explain how this can be so. Years ago explorers of a remote island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean discovered a group of enormous stone figures. The figures displayed the distinctive shape of human faces. These figures left no doubt as to their ultimate origin in thought. Nevertheless, archeologists still don't know the exact means by which they were carved or erected. The ancient head carvers might have used metallic hammers, rock chisels, or lasers for that matter. Though archaeologists lack the evidence to decide between various hypotheses about how the figures were constructed, they can still definitely infer that intelligent agents made them. In the same way, we can infer that an intelligence played a causal role in the origin of the Cambrian animals, even if we cannot decide what material means, if any, the designing intelligence used to transmit the information, or shape matter, or impart its design ideas to living form. Although the theory of intelligent design infers that an intelligent cause played a role in shaping life's history, it does not say how the intelligent cause affected matter. Nor does it have to do so.

There is a logical reason we cannot without further information determine the mechanism or means by which the intelligent agent responsible for life transmitted its design to matter. We can infer an intelligent cause from certain features of the physical world, because intelligence is known to be a necessary cause, the only known cause, of those features. That allows us to infer intelligence retrospectively as a cause by observing its distinctive effects. Nevertheless, we cannot establish a unique scenario describing how the intelligent agent responsible for life arranged or impressed its ideas on matter, because there are many different possible means by which an idea in the mind of an intelligent agent could be transmitted or instantiated in the physical world.

There is another even more profound reason that intelligent design -- indeed, science itself -- may not be able to offer a completely mechanistic account of the instantiation of thought into matter. Robert Asher worries about how "a biological phenomenon, even if designed," could be "simply willed into existence without an actual mechanism." In Asher's understanding, the uniformitarian principle asks for a precedent, a known cause that not only generates information, but translates immaterial thought into material reality, impressing itself on and shaping the physical world. Asher complains that the argument for intelligent design cannot cite such a precedent and is thus "anti- uniformitarian."

Yet a precedent comes very readily to mind, an intimately familiar one for us all. At present no one has any idea how our thoughts -- the decisions and choices that occur in our conscious minds -- affect our material brains, nerves, and muscles, going on to instantiate our will in the material world of objects. However, we know that is exactly what our thoughts do. We have no mechanistic explanation for the mystery of consciousness, nor what is called the "mind- body problem" -- the enigma of how thought affects the material state of our brains, bodies, and the world that we affect with them. Yet there is no doubt that we can -- as the result of events in our conscious minds called decisions or choices -- "will into existence" information-rich arrangements of matter or otherwise affect material states in the world. Professor Asher did this when he wrote the chapter in his book -- representing his ideas impressed as words onto a material object, a printed page -- attempting to refute intelligent design. I am doing this right now. This example, representative of countless daily experiences in life, surely satisfies the demands of uniformitarianism.


Though neuroscience can give no mechanistic explanation for consciousness or the mind-body problem, we also know that we can recognize the product of thought, the effect of intelligent design, in its distinctive information-rich manifestations. Professor Asher recognized evidence of thought when he read the text in my book; I did so when I read his; you are doing so right now. Thus, even though it remains entirely possible that we may never know how minds affect matter and, therefore, that there may always be a gap in our attempt to account for how a designing mind affected the material out of which living systems were formed, it does not follow that we cannot recognize evidence of the activity of mind in living systems.