Lawlike

ID says that the explanation it offers for life is one which is familiar to us all – it is nothing but "intelligence", a cause that is "directed" by some mindful entity (rather than a lawlike entity). ❋ Unknown (2008)

But since computers are lawlike and intelligent, it makes no sense of ID Theory to claim to be able to distinguish intelligent cause from lawlike cause. ❋ Unknown (2008)

In order to see if ID is true, we all need to know how mental (intelligent) cause is supposed to be different from physical (lawlike) cause. ❋ Unknown (2008)

You are missing the fact that since intelligent cause is indistiguishable from lawlike cause, then when ID say "The best explanation is intelligent cause, rather than blind, lawlike cause …" it is nonsense. ❋ Unknown (2008)

And my claim has been that such a lawlike mechanism (in this case, 'personified' by a computer), whether or not it is or is not an intelligent agent, could still have an actual agent operating directly behind it (Hofstadter example) or preplanned in advance (timing examples). ❋ Unknown (2008)

What you obviously means is that a computer operates according to deterministic law (or law+chance), and so for all we could ever know, the intelligence responsible for life might have been a blind, lawlike process. ❋ Unknown (2008)

OK (but of course a Turing machine is not a "glorified calculator"; it is everything that can result from lawlike cause). ❋ Unknown (2008)

You are trying to negate my proposition ( "No lawlike mechanism can be an intelligent agent") and so a single counter example does nothing for you, because "no" is a universal quantifier. ❋ Unknown (2008)

Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. ❋ Unknown (2008)

My claim was some lawlike mechanism could have intelligence (in the sense of designing, learning, etc). ❋ Unknown (2008)

If the right answer about causation is along the general lines of, 'There's a lawlike observed correlation between A things happening and their soon being followed by B things happening', how would that account of causation rule out God's mental state causing physical states? ❋ Unknown (2007)

A theory is a systematically related set of statements, including some lawlike generalizations, that is empirically testable.... ❋ Daniel Little (2009)

It is a sociology that attempts to understand society as a system, that expects social phenomena to be lawlike, and that abstracts almost entirely from history as context or process. ❋ Daniel Little (2009)

Naturalism and positivism -- the idea that the social sciences ought to resemble the natural sciences, and the idea that the goal of science is the discovery of empirically supported lawlike generalizations -- constituted a powerful folk philosophy of science that was shared by Durkheim, Mill, and Comte. ❋ Daniel Little (2009)