(from http://www.singularitywatch.com )

In recent decades, science has uncovered an impressive and ever-growing list of elements of universal 'design' which appear to be specifically conducive to the emergence of life. This deep and valuable concept, the anthropic principle, exists at the interface between cosmology and theology, and is aiding the growing rapprochement we are observing between science and spirituality. In its most interesting developmental variant, this principle proposes that the fundamental parameters of this universe have somehow become "tuned" for the ever-accelerating local emergence of computational complexity.

In considering this proposal, it is important to realize that careful universal design, if true, does not require the embodied existence of a specific universal designer. As an alternative and conceptually simpler explanation, the universe we are in appears more likely to have been self-designed, very probably over many successive cycles, as has occurred with all other known replicating complex adaptive systems within the universe.

Fortunately, the new scientific paradigm of evolutionary development may provide powerful insights into this issue. In the biological domain, living organisms have required many successive cycles to develop their own special initial parameters, which are carefully tuned for emergent form and function within the lifecycle of any particular organism. Likewise, if we consider the universe as a developmental process, we can propose that a number of natural phenomena, such as the emergence of life, biological intelligence, or electronic consciousness (the technological singularity), may also be highly predictable future events. We can even testably propose that certain emergences are a "destiny" that the universe must locally (or multi-locally) arrive at, failing developmental catastrophe. Such predictions are not at all equivalent to a theology (a religious faith), though some would attempt this connection.

The words "design," "destiny" and "predestination" make some (but fortunately, not all) scientists cringe, for important historical reasons. Let's review those reasons now, and discover the way new theories of self-organization and evolutionary development are allowing us to finally move beyond our historical prejudice.

First, those words are occasionally used in religious contexts in somewhat unscientific ways. Indeed, many current "Intelligent Design" (I.D.) theorists of various religions mistakenly assume that design implies designer, and this also has kept some scientists from confronting these important issues—or worse, caused them to dismiss the mounting evidence for carefully tuned universal 'design.' Fortunately, not all I.D. advocates assume an embodied designer. Increasingly, they are beginning to understand the possibility of cyclic self-design, as occurs in biological systems.

Second, there has long been a misconception that the idea of predestination of a complex system must somehow oppose the idea of a perceived "free will" within that system. In actuality however, these are nonexclusive concepts. Developmentalists (not chaos theorists, who occasionally muddy the issue) have shown us that complex systems built on special, tuned, and iteratively self-designed initial conditions will utilize evolutionary chaos (strange attractors) in the process of creating a long chain of statistically predetermined developmental events (ordinary attractors). These two parallel perspectives on physical process allow us to understand how human and other complex adaptive systems can simultaneously contain two apparently contradictory qualities. Those qualities are both an irreducible evolutionary "freedom" (essential pseudorandomness to self-observation, of one's own thought and behavior) as well as an inherent developmental "predictability" (statistically predictable psychological and behavioral trajectory, based on physical contraints of the interacting systems).

Third, and perhaps most importantly, design- or destiny-averse scientists may have come to their perspective because they have focused on the well-known, well-studied findings of the randomness of evolutionary processes, but have completely overlooked the potential applicability of the deterministic phenomenon of biological development. It is clear, for example, given a permissive environment, that a fertilized human egg is "destined," 13 years later, to become a fully developed adult organism with very specific features, and the ability to pass on its own mature sperm or egg in an iterative evolutionary developmental cycle. It is also clear that such eggs or "seeds" must pass through a whole series of time and structure-specific future events in their unfolding.

What is not known to a surprising number of scientists is that all known developmental processes incorporate countless random, chaotic phases of evolution within their unfolding developmental plan. Discovering the way that chaos is used in self-organizing developmental systems will clearly be one of the keys to the puzzle of growing autonomous adaptive technological systems on silicon substrates in coming years. If you are interested in building biologically inspired computers and are looking for a grand theoretical and experimental challenge, there may not be a better one than understanding developmental biology, at the present time. The predominant randomness seen at low levels (molecular, genetic, cellular, signalling systems, etc.) is productive, is constrained by, and informs the future expression of the overarching developmental program.

The paradigm and process of evolutionary development thus incorporates evolution, but in a manner that does not disrupt the larger program of developmental emergence. So it is with any developmental system that a special subset of future events—a small but very significant minority—will be highly "statistically predestined." One of the most famous modern proponents of this perspective was the philosopher Tielhard de Chardin, who coined the elegant, profound, and still-little-used term, "cosmic embryogenesis," (only four Google hits in 2003) to propose that universal cosmology is apparently developmentally programmed to proceed through a series of inevitable emergent stages of information processing while also searching out a large number of locally unique evolutionary paths in the process. Tielhard's stages, geosphere, to biosphere, to noosphere, remain intuitive and relevant today. Yet like models of human consciousness itself, developmentalist models of universal change are still weak and recently emergent in the scientific community.

In Destiny of Species, I propose that our universe exhibits all the features of an evolutionary developmental system as it unfolds within the multiverse. Developmental systems such as biological organisms use the learning they acquire during their lifespan to reorganize (carefully tune, across multiple iterations) their initial developmental parameters less randomly in subsequent cycles. Thus, keeping learning (adaptation) central to our discussion will help us understand the evolutionary value of assigning individual responsibility wherever possible in what also appears to be, on a developmental scale, a statistically deterministic universe.

It is also worth noting that even though we may find evidence everywhere for intelligent (e.g., anthropic) universal design and apparent "destiny," such as the singularity, any speculations we may have regarding an intelligent designer remain in the realm of our own personal theology. None of this is to denigrate theology, which has its own unique place in the consciousness of humanity and is a computational choice that must be faced by all who contemplate the reasons behind the splendid design we observe. Agnosticism, Humanism, Atheism, Animism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity, or any of the other myriad perspectives we may consider, even Nihilism, are all personal theological choices, based on faith (even an assessment of the incompleteness of data is still a faith) and ultimately defensible only to ourselves.

Some authors (see Kurzweil, Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999) equate spirituality with the evolutionary processes of consciousness itself, thus capturing it within a potentially scientific framework. But theology goes even beyond spirituality, involving not only the paths we choose to take to live better, more "spiritual" lives, but also including the otherwise unknowable structure of reality. If, like transcendentalist philosophers, we see conceptions of God as essentially extrapolations of the utilitarian and scientific concept of infinity—defined as an "unending process" in our discrete mathematics—we may suspect that theology will remain with us and our electronic successors indefinitely, as a productive and personal counterpart to scientific investigation. They are two separate domains, the first based on a personally revealed faith in universal process and outcome, and the second perhaps as fundamentally axiomatic, but more restricted in its application, and more rigorously attempting to eliminate those axioms over time. This helps clarify that speculations on the nature of the singularity, in all its forms, are well within the domain of critical and scientific investigation, and must be considered separate and apart from personal theology.

Thanks for this - I can use it.