Extrapolation

Extrapolatation

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Casey Tuesday, January 14, 2014 4:13 PM: I am not sure if I understand your argument. We can understand how intelligent agents act by observing humans. We observe that they generate high CSI. So when we find high CSI in nature, we can infer that a humanlike intelligence was involved.

Scott 1/14/14: Oh, brother. You can no more understand the intelligence of a deity by analyzing a Boeing Engineer than you can understand a human by looking at the intelligence of an ant or an ameba or perhaps even a virus. To make that argument stronger, you can hardly understand the intelligence of an Einstein by looking at a Scott Vigil or a Casey Luskin! Study extrapolation techniques and you will understand what I’m talking about.

Scott 5/6/14: I’d love to go into all the limitations in making generalizations from specific experiences. I’d love to go into the math… Extrapolation has another really great example. Imagine looking at the American stock Market activity for just one second and then trying to use that to estimate the exact and precise values and fluctuations for the next thousand million years. That’s a great example to the virus/Boeing engineer extrapolation.

Here’s another. We used to use canon to shoot something far away. But for the longer range targets, we turned to guided missile technologies that make corrections along the way. And that same approach has been used to guide rockets to Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, the rest of the planets and many moons. Theoretically, we could aim a single shell including all the necessary equipment out into space and fire with a giant canon and visit all the planets and moons just using gravity. But the precision necessary, would be impossible. ‘cool idea… but we will never ever do it that way.

Similarly, estimating what an omnipotent God or some mighty intelligent agent might do by observing what mere mortal engineers might do in the design process… you gotta’ have some cojones to make an estimate like that. I mean, I am one of those engineers, and I can barely get a Problem Report through the darned process to solve a problem I know I have solved! And I can barely do the Tango! So a god or an intelligent alien or some other agent is probably going to approach design just a little different than me or my co-workers.

And let’s take this step just one further cause it’s so fun. If I was estimating the stock market for a thousand million years based on one second of experience or if I was aiming a cannon ball to pass all the planets and all the moons from a single shot, I would have to be the best stock market analyst or the best canon ball shooter the universe has ever seen or will ever see.

So, what kind of design experience does Casey have that’s going to help him figure out what processes and methods a deity or a space alien is going to use to design life here on earth?

I don’t think we have an answer on that. But he’s a comedian :^))