Rationality: From AI to Zombies

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

To plausibly argue that “humans” were intelligently designed, you’d have to lie about the design of the human retina, the architecture of the human brain, the proteins bound together by weak van der Waals forces instead of strong covalent bonds . . . Or you could just lie about evolutionary theory, which is the path taken by most creationists. Instead of lying about the connected nodes in the network, they lie about the general laws governing the links. And then to cover that up, they lie about the rules of science—like what it means to call something a “theory,” or what it means for a scientist to say that they are not absolutely certain. So they pass from lying about specific facts, to lying about general laws, to lying about the rules of reasoning. To lie about whether humans evolved, you must lie about evolution; and then you have to lie about the rules of science that constrain our understanding of evolution. But how else? Just as a human would be out of place in a community of actually intelligently designed life forms, and you have to lie about the rules of evolution to make it appear otherwise; so too, beliefs about creationism are themselves out of place in science—you wouldn’t find them in a well-ordered mind any more than you’d find palm trees growing on a glacier. And so you have to disrupt the barriers that would forbid them.