So recently I was making the argument that the average Englishman likely has no sapience, they are more akin to a computer, a robot, or at best an animal, who is only able to react to input or stimuli, but they lack the mental capacity to question or interrogate their visceral programming.

In this it is a lot like a chess program. There are doubtless a lot of brilliantly designed chess programs which can defeat chess masters, however, it could be argued that this process is completely “mindless”, they are just churning outputs from inputs according to some preset algorithm. You cannot, for example, ask or input to the chess program, “Why play chess at all? What’s the point of playing chess?” It is simply not in the programming of the chess program to be able to process such questions or interrogate its own algorithm, it would just mechanically output “input not recognised” or “invalid move” or something.

The average Englishman as I have argued is very much like this. They simply viscerally react to certain moral claims or arguments, but if you were to ask, “But why is marital rape “wrong” or what does it even mean?” Their minds go as blank as a chess program, they cannot interrogate their own mental programming and they just mechanically generate various outputs of outrage, and posturings.

We might as such infer that the average English man has no sapience, perhaps they only have a sort of animal sentience, a parrot who mindlessly squawks words on command. However, I think that even if the computer chess program may not have sapience in itself, it clearly bears the mark of Intelligence, clearly an intelligence programmed the chess program itself and imprinted itself on it. Likewise the average English man may lack sapience or intelligence, but as I have argued before, English society is still very stratified by class, clearly there remains the intellectual and men of letters class capable of interrogating, reasoning, and deducing the mores and morals of the society and then inculcating it into culture and education of the English. The literati remains as it were the programmers of English society.

I would as such suggest a like analogy to nature. Nature like a computer program or the Englishman, does operate with staggering mechanical regularity and greater precision, according to the laws and formulas discovered by physicists. Now this doesn’t mean of course that nature is intelligent or has sapience, anymore than the Englishman’s ability to mindlessly posture outrage when they are challenged on their visceral convictions imply that they possess intelligence or sapience. However, this programming itself is clearly bears the mark of intelligence in that someone else has done the mental heavy lifting of reasoning and deducing the moral conclusions and outcomes which they have programmed into the average Englishman. Likewise, nature itself bears the mark of an intelligent Creator who framed the laws of physics in the first place.

On the other hand, we can take the route of Raymond Smullyan in his defence of a Taoist conception of God that intelligence and mentalness comes in degrees, depending on computational complexity, thus, every organised unit, from trees to animals to computer programs, are intelligent in some sense. Daniel Dennett in his functionalist conception of the mind argued likewise that a mind just is defined by a functional system, so even the Englishman, on this definition, could be said to have intelligence.

I think there are merits to the Taoist conception of God, but my point here generally is that there is an analogy between how mechanical systems like the Englishman’s visceral reactions, while could be argued not to be intelligent behaviour, nevertheless can bear the marks of Intelligence, and that of Nature’s mechanical reactions bear the marks of divine intelligence.