There are three different but closely related strategies or stances we can adopt when trying to understand, explain, and predict phenomena: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance (Dennett 1971, 1981, 1983, 1987, and elsewhere).

What Darwin and Turing did was envisage the most extreme version of this point: all the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more competent—and hence comprehending—systems.

That’s a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.

Intelligent design of this sort starts with a goal (which may well be refined or even abandoned along the way) and works top-down, with the designers using everything they know to guide their search for solutions to the design problems (and sub-problems, and sub-sub-problems …) they set for themselves. Evolution, in contrast, has no goals, no

Darwin understood this: The term “natural selection” is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity. No one objects to chemists speaking of “elective affinity”; and certainly an acid has no more choice in combining with a base, than the conditions of life have in

Luciano Floridi, in his useful primer (2010), distinguishes economic information as whatever is worth some work. A farmer is wise to take the time and trouble to count his cows, check the level of the water in the well, and keep track of how efficiently his farm-hands labor.

The rule of attribution must be then, if the competence observed can be explained without appeal to comprehension, don’t indulge in extravagant anthropomorphism. Attributing comprehension must be supported by demonstrations of much more intelligent behavior. Since stotting is not (apparently) an element in a more elaborate system of interspecies or

Semantic information, then, is “a distinction that makes a difference.” Floridi (2010) reports that it was D. M. MacKay who first coined this phrase, which was later enunciated by Gregory Bateson (1973, 1980) and others as a difference that makes a difference.

Survival, in short, depends on information and, moreover, depends on differential or asymmetric information: I know some things that you don’t know, and you know some things that I don’t know, and our well-being depends on keeping it that way.