Daniel c dennett intuition pumps and other tools for thinking

A healthy young man can walk, carrying all the food and water he needs to survive, for about a week, stopping and resting whenever he chooses, traveling perhaps 150 miles. (Water is the key burden: carrying fifty pounds of water and sixteen pounds of food and ten pounds of gear makes a very heavy pack; if he could find water on the way, he could go for months.) For comparison, consider the brainchild of Cornell University roboticist Andy Ruina and his colleagues, who have built by far the longest walking robot, Ranger, which traveled nonstop 65.2 kilometers (40.5 miles) in a robot ultra-marathon in Japan on May 1–2, 2011. Ranger’s designers take advantage of the dynamical properties of limbs to create a superbly energy-efficient walker (around and around on a flat track for hours on end, guided by a human being with a joystick). Another magnificent four-legged walker robot, Big Dog, is about fifteen times less energy-efficient, but has much more impressive capacities to accommodate difficult terrain. Humans are still considerably more efficient transport devices than Ranger by a factor of four or five, and unlike Ranger, they can respond autonomously to all manner of features in the world. (See Ruina, 2011.)

Something has to give. Either we define “design” as the product of an intelligent designer, such as a designer of poems or cars, for instance, or we acknowledge that there can be design—genuine design —without an intelligent designer. Tradition and etymology might seem to favor the former course, but consider this: atom—from the Greek a [without] + tomos, from temnein, to cut or slice. Atom originally meant “unsplittable thing,” but science discovered that splitting the atom, after all, was not a contradiction in terms. Science has also discovered, I submit, that design without a designer (lacking a designer with a mind, with foresight and intention) is not only possible but all around us.

Design-by-evolution is a real, well-understood process. It differs in interesting ways from design-byengineer, but it is also deeply similar, capable of humbling “ingenuity.” Time and again, biologists baffled by some apparently futile or maladroit bit of bad design in nature have eventually come to see that they have underestimated the sheer brilliance in one of Mother Nature’s creations. Francis Crick mischievously baptized this trend in the name of a colleague, Leslie Orgel, speaking of what he called Orgel’s Second Law: “evolution is cleverer than you are.” (This apparently reckless tactic of personifying the process of natural selection as Mother Nature, this in-your-face anthropomorphizing, will be defended in due course. It is not just an entertaining metaphor; it is a thinking tool in its own right.)

Back to Design Space, the multidimensional space of all possible designs, including not just the actual organisms and automobiles and poems, but—like the books in the Library of Babel—all the