Interesting thread, though it has ranged broadly from the starting point of consciousness. I have a couple things to chime in on: First, consciousness. Second, "ID."
I will credit a couple of things.
A. All brains are highly complex networks.
B. The human brain and consciousness appears to many to be the most complex, though this is not a brute fact.
C. Consciousness studies are a modern scientific pursuit and much is unknown.
However I stand strongly by both the weak and strong following positions:
1. There is no good reason to believe that anything we know and/or all we don't know about consciousness implies anything metaphysical.
2. There are many good reasons to believe in a functional, material, conscious brain arising naturally.
I would refer the readers to some modern books on the subject. A fine philosophical article is available in the "new" section on infidels.org, complete with rebuttal and rejoinder from the theistic side. Also, books by Daniel Dennet & such are helpful for the science involved. You can trace this discussion back a long way, all the way to Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's codiscoverer of many aspects of the original evolutionary theories. Wallace found it hard to conceive of the higher human brain as evolving. Dr. Michael Shermer who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Wallace has many lectures available relating to this subject as well. Anyone invovled in ID may do well to research Huxley/Wilberforce, Paley, etc. I was just reading an article by Gould last night referring to an 1820's classic on the anatomy of the hand and the argument for design.
Leaving off 1 and 2 above for the moment (if anyone wants to delve into these, I'm more than happy to oblige having just finished a three part debate vs deism and the problem of consciousness, me taking the natural materialist position) I'll point out a couple of classic errors in the teleological argument, now disguised as ID.
The teleological argument as expressed by ID etc, has several traditional logical fallacies:
1. The error of false/weak annology resulting in circular reasoning and "begging the question". The phrase "Design iplies a designer" is highly misleading. The question at stake is the existance of a designer, not the presence of design in an instance. You could say "To the extent that an object X has properties belonging only to the set of designed objects, one can infer that X is, to that extent, designed."
1a. Reification of abstract concepts such as design and complexity. Design as an abstract concept is equally relevant to evolution. The common word design implies the word designer. But the entailment of a biological network or anything complex only implies a process by which that entailment came to be. Most modern people accept that many complex states come into existance by natural means. So the question then, linguistic foolishness aside, is "Which explanation for biological complexity has the most truth-value."
2. Explaining something little explained (complexity) with something less explained (the supernatural or unknown agency.). This is the traditional reverse. Even if it were given as a brute fact that a God or gods existed, the logical inference from "apparent complexity" would not follow to the identity of a designer.
3. Infinite regress to higher complexity. A poster already mentioned this in the sense of "who designed the designer?" rebuttal.
I could go on to irreducible complexity, but will wait to see where the discussion goes.
