All variants of ID, however, share a common underlying assumption. Either unable to imagine, or preferring to reject, the possibility that physical systems possess intrinsic capabilities for organizing themselves into complex structures, an externally imposed source of order is held to be a sine qua non for explaining non-randomness in the universe. The metaphors of the clockmaker and the potter were popular in the Middle Ages among those who felt that the magical "Let there beŠ(whatever)" was too simplistic, although more sophisticated minds even then preferred to imagine God as a mathematician working from a blueprint of his own making. The same assumption of the intrinsic poverty of physical systems is present in several modern attempts to make a disguised variant of ID sound scientifically respectable. Thus, Rupert Sheldrake's 'morphogenetic fields' (see A New Science of Life) involve the emergence of organic forms under the guidance of poorly defined non-material influences, while according to David Bohm's 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' the entire universe as we (can) know it results from a read-out of already existing pre-patterns. Despite the now subsided resistance to Ilya Prigogine's once revolutionary idea (of Order out of Chaos) and the ready availability nowadays of computer programs which demonstrate how easily complex forms can be generated (see Stuart Kauffman's The Origins of Order and Richard Dawkins The Blind Clockmaker), the concept of matter/energy being capable of self-organizing into complex forms appears to be the common anathema in all of the above mentioned examples. Even the widespread misunderstanding that the information for specifying organismic or cellular phenotypes is to be found within DNA molecules constitutes a gross underestimation of the self-regulating power of protoplasm, not in the least as concerns cytoplasmic control over how the genome itself is expressed (see Corner 1994).

Closer examination reveals that, far from presenting a testable alternative mechanism for explaining natural phenomena, such hypotheses in fact constitute a denial of the possibility - how often haven't we heard that before! - of ever coming up with any plausible 'mechanistic' model whatsoever. 'Intelligent Design', in particular, provides no compelling or coherent explanation for the vast body of evidence that theories of evolution try to make sense of, but contents itself with denying the possibility of arriving at any satisfactory naturalistic interpretation at all. Worse, the polemic strategy often resorted to is to assert without proof that, not only are specific unexplained features theoretically impossible to account for by a process of matter/energy self-organization, but the existence of such problematic examples negates an evolutionary explanation for all other features as well.

It turns out that, in the psycho-physiological domain, there lurks a striking but generally overlooked parallel to the notion of 'intelligent design'.

I. Neurophilosophy of free will: from libertarian illusions to a concept of natural autonomy -an essay on freedom, responsibility, insight and compassion. In 2001 an ambitious book by Dr. Henrik Walter, a philosophically inclined neuro-psychiatrist, was published by the MIT Press under the above title. Since this is a serious work which has the goal of examining whether or not the hitherto intractable concept of 'free will' can be understood within a purely 'naturalistic' world-view, yet winds up being a compendium of the historical sources of confusion surrounding this question, it serves as an excellent template for examining the logical pitfalls which have prevented generations of thinkers from resolving it. By naturalism in this context is meant, reasonably enough, that all events are causally determined by underlying 'mechanisms' unaided by supernatural powers.

The concept of freedom (of the will), on the other hand, conventionally implies a degree of independence from physical, i.e., physiological processes. The irreconcilability of these two requirements is what has hamstrung previous discussions, and is what authors with a unifying bent of mind have courageously - but invariably unsuccessfully - always attempted to overcome. Clarification of the reasons for this perennial failure is the raison d'etre of the present essay, which will pinpoint five major misconceptions or presumptions - which I have called, respectively, the semantic, atomistic, perceptual, psychological, and sociological fallacies - that constitute the traditional stumbling blocks.

The first order of business, naturally, needs to be a satisfactory semantic formulation which, in contrast to common practice, I propose to base on the question, 'freedom from... (from what, exactly? also see Arthur Schopenhauer's On Freedom of the Will for an extensive discussion of this definition)', instead of the traditional 'freedom to ... (do whatever)'. The use of the more passive word "from² provides the key for transcending a centuries long heritage of confusion and misunderstanding, which is documented in, for instance, the 1999 special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted to 'The Volitional Brain'. Following conventional practice, Dr. Walter's summary of possible definitions of ³free will" consists of the following three 'terrible to's': (i) to be able to have acted otherwise; (ii) to act in an intelligible fashion, and (iii) to be the originator of one's own actions. These will be disposed of en passant in the course of this essay. The book can nevertheless be highly recommended for its exhaustive examination of every conceivable argument for and against a 'libertarian' interpretation of voluntary action although it reaches the inevitable tautological conclusion that, while a strict interpretation of the concept of free-will is incompatible with a perfectly deterministic universe, the concept of indeterminacy is unsatisfactory as a synonym for freedom (except, of course, in a trivial statistical sense).

I might add that also the concept of self-determination by multiple 'prime movers' (viz., individual wills, human or otherwise) which are capable of initiating actions independent of external causation - an idea occasionally put forth in support of the proposition, which I'll brand the semantic fallacy, that the neuro-psychological concept voluntary is synonymous with the logico-philosophical concept free - fails spectacularly as an explanation of how such immaterial 'voluntary' decisions could actually be implemented. What physiologists call voluntary behaviors, in fact, are simply those which appear to be characterized by consideration of available sensory information before an organism decides upon a course of action, as opposed to reflexively responding to 'releasing stimuli' in a pre-programmed manner. In this sense, it is truly the system itself which 'chooses' its own course of action, but it is a verbal trap to suppose that such 'free' choices imply independence from physiological determinants (the same point was made long ago by C.J. Herrick in The Evolution of Human Nature, but it apparently needs to be reiterated from time to time!). Basic to a biological interpretation of volition is the brain's ability to speed up learning processes by calculating and testing possible appropriate responses, rather than waiting for trial-and-error conditioning to do the job 'naturally'. It is this capacity for accelerated learning by applied mental effort which implicitly sustains the notion of 'internal freedom', on the basis of which a putative consciously experienced 'self' (see part II of this essay) can be exhorted to struggle against the dictates and limitations of its own biological nature without such an imperative appearing to make no sense. To the extent that intelligent higher brain systems operate in any sense 'independently', however, their freedom is from domination by hard-wired 'lower' automatic response mechanisms, not from the 'laws' (see below) governing biophysical processes.