Well that's the problem isn't it
Yes ... that's why I've been asking the question.
Now if we have some idea of the capabilities and intentions of a possible designer we can use those to make predictions as to what we expect to see
That doesn't really work either, and for a reason that you
have already suggestion in a different context.
Any entity that could create the univers and everything in it
would, necessarily, be so different to us that we couldn't
possibly discern what their intentions/capabilties might be.
Another problem is that we could conceive of an entity that
matched what we saw (perhaps without realising that is
what we had done).
the current SETI effort made assumptions about possible designers to decide what to look for
I thought they made assumptions about what would constitute
a data bearing signal -- some statistical measure or randomness
measure.
The ID movement likes to compare itself to SETI but they won't do that.
I have not seen ID definitions for intelligence, design, nor
any assessment criteria for intelligent input. The design
inference doesn't work either since the terms within it are
not clearly enough defined or are too subjective to be of
any real use.
For intelligence the problem is even worse. If we can show
that something that appears to be designed can come about
from non-intelligence-led processes then design cannot
be used to infer intelligent design.
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