OK, here's another way of stating it: The proposition that nature-as-it-is requires intelligence to create it does not follow from the premise that we use intelligence to describe it. Using the term "laws of physics" to mean both the way nature behaves, and our description of how nature behaves is an equivocation - they are not the same thing. Simple as that.
First of all…I did not claim that nature requires intelligence to create it, I said there is very convincing evidence that implicates the existence of intelligence in / as reality. Nature isn’t created by intelligence…it is intelligence. There is evidence to support the conclusion that nature / reality IS information. There is evidence to support the conclusion that the ‘laws of physics’ exist in /as nature / reality. There is indisputable evidence that supports the conclusion that ONLY intelligence can generate ‘laws of physics.’
It may well be an equivocation to claim that the ‘laws of physics’ are both how we describe nature AND nature itself…but, as I said…it is generally agreed that the ‘laws of physics’ are, in fact…discovered. And if reality is, in fact, some manner of ‘information’, then it is ‘information’ within which these laws of physics occur and out of which they are resolved by the consciousness / intelligence we call human beings.
The laws of physics are, themselves, referred to as ‘information’ (a rather vaguely defined term but to the degree that we ‘know’ what it means, no one is going to dispute this conclusion […meaning…the statement “the laws of physics are not information” would be regarded as normatively incoherent]). So…the information of the laws of physics are derived from the information of reality.
Nobody, of course, has ever actually explicitly identified a ‘law of physics’ anywhere in reality. But there are few who doubt that they somehow occur there if for no other reason than everything seems to implicate this very conclusion. We derive them from the reality of neural / cognitive activity (which itself can be regarded as a direct function of them). Everything follows them. Everything can be described by them. Everything can be predicted by them. There are skeptics who are posting on this very thread who go further and insist that they literally exist in reality.
If they exist in / as reality…or, at the very least (as ALL the evidence seems to suggest)…they seem to exist in /as reality…then that, by definition, implicates intelligence. Every paradigm of logic and reason that we possess generates the conclusion that something with the capacity to generate meaning of that degree of complexity cannot be anything but intelligent.
…simple as that.
All-but-indisputable? Not INDISPUTABLE this time? Well I dispute it. The evidence seems to support the idea that intelligence is an emergent property of nature, not its cause.
If you agree that the laws of physics are discovered (the consensus amongst skeptics), if you agree that everything (as we know it) follows, is described by, and can be predicted by…the laws of physics…(also the consensus amongst skeptics) then it is impossible to come to any other conclusion but that the evidence suggests that the laws of physics are instantiated in nature. And given that it is turning out that ‘nature’ is, in fact some manner of information…and the laws of physics themselves are that very thing (to the degree they can be described as having any variety of inherent phenomenology)…this all seems entirely consistent.
….nature is the laws of physics.
If this is accurate…then it is impossible to come to any other conclusion but that nature is intelligent.
What is interesting…is that this conclusion is not entirely unintelligible. There is evidence throughout history of human beings recognizing the ‘intelligence’ in everything around them. IOW…our own intelligence seems to possess within it the emergent capacity to recognize the intelligence of the world we occupy.
This conclusion cannot, of course, be empirically confirmed. But then again, there isn’t a single statement within the epistemology of science that can be empirically confirmed either.
…it’s all faith. We accept that our intelligence provides us with these insights and abilities. Nobody has yet come within light years of explaining how any of it happens.
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