Mechanism versus teleology in a probabilistic universe
When we think about time progressing as a sequence of events say, A ? B ? C its tempting to seek explanations for why things happen the way they do. In deterministic systems, this can seem straightforward. But what about probabilistic systems? Can we meaningfully talk about teleology that is, events happening for the sake of future outcomes when the future is inherently uncertain?
Lets start with a deterministic case. If A causes B, and B causes C, we can describe B in two ways:
In deterministic contexts, both descriptions are possible.
Now, consider a probabilistic system. In this case:
A leads to a set of possible events: {B, B?, B?}, each with its own probability.
Whichever of these happens, say B, leads in turn to another set: {C, C?, C?}, again probabilistically.
The crucial difference is that no particular outcome is necessary. From B, many futures are possible, and C is just one of them.
This undermines the teleological picture. In a probabilistic system:
Put simply: Teleological explanation requires a fixed end or final cause. But in a probabilistic system, the future is open at every step. To say that events are happening as a means to reaching some future state C, is nonsensical considering state C isn't even guaranteed.
What remains coherent, then, is the mechanistic explanation:
Theres no need and no real basis to speak of purpose or final causes. We cannot say things like "event B happened due to it being attracted towards state C", since state C isn't even guaranteed.
Lets start with a deterministic case. If A causes B, and B causes C, we can describe B in two ways:
- Mechanistically: Event B happens because it was triggered by A. The causal chain flows forward.
- Teleologically: We might say B happens in order to bring about C. Here, C functions as the "goal" or "purpose" toward which the system is directed.
In deterministic contexts, both descriptions are possible.
Now, consider a probabilistic system. In this case:
A leads to a set of possible events: {B, B?, B?}, each with its own probability.
Whichever of these happens, say B, leads in turn to another set: {C, C?, C?}, again probabilistically.
The crucial difference is that no particular outcome is necessary. From B, many futures are possible, and C is just one of them.
This undermines the teleological picture. In a probabilistic system:
- Theres no guarantee that C will follow B.
- It seems absurd to think that C could somehow attract B or serve as its purpose, when C isnt even certain to occur.
Put simply: Teleological explanation requires a fixed end or final cause. But in a probabilistic system, the future is open at every step. To say that events are happening as a means to reaching some future state C, is nonsensical considering state C isn't even guaranteed.
What remains coherent, then, is the mechanistic explanation:
- A sets the probabilities for what might follow.
- B arises within that space of possibilities.
- B then sets the stage for the next set of probabilities.
Theres no need and no real basis to speak of purpose or final causes. We cannot say things like "event B happened due to it being attracted towards state C", since state C isn't even guaranteed.
Comments (73)
So, although the teleological explanation doesn't guarantee that C rather than C' or C'' (etc.) will occur, it explains why it is that whichever final state is realized will (likely) be such as to non accidentally realize the general aim of the functionally organized system.
Yes, very good. The indeterminacy doesn't carry over to the functional level, so to speak, where all As and Bs and Cs have the same function relative to that system.
Q: Why did Alice go out?
A: To buy bread.
Q: Why is the overpass being constructed?
A: To relieve traffic congestion.
We make up these explanations, regardless of how certain the outcomes are. Alice may or may not buy bread. The overpass may or may not be completed. That does not in any way change the fact that the actions were goal-oriented in the first place. Of course, in a world in which the future is so wide-open that any fixed outcome is extremely unlikely teleology would not be possible, so you have a point there. But fortunately, our world is not like that. A lot of things are fairly predictable, and so we set goals with a reasonable expectation of achieving them.
No naturally occurring sequence of events happens this way and only the extremely simplest artificial ones do, e.g. billiard balls. Nothing real is ever caused by just one thing and nothing ever has only a single effect.
As for teleology, how does that fit into this at all? It seems like it is a complete non sequitur. Are you saying that something in the future reaches back and causes something in the past? As I see it, the only way to make teleology plausible is to assume there is a God.
That's not what teleology is.
Quoting T Clark
This is a non sequitur, even to your own caricature of teleology.
Proponents of naturalized teleology have something less contentious in mind. See for instance the two SEP entries about teleological notions in biology or in theories of mental content. @SophistiCat provided two neat examples. When one provides a teleological explanation of an event or phenomenon, it's not an event in the future that is claimed to be the cause. Not even Aristotle really was claiming this when he distinguished final causes from efficient, material and formal ones, since his notion of ????? that we now translate as "cause" was referring to the "why" or explanation of something. It's rather the identification of the aim to be realized in the future that is provided as the explanation of a natural phenomenon, behavior or rational action.
Of course, some thinkers like Ernst Mayr have resisted the introduction of teleological notions in science. But the fault line seems to be between reductionism and strong (nomologically irreducible) emergentism rather than between naturalism and supernaturalism (or natural theology).
This is what Wikipedia says about teleology:
I think its perfectly accurate to describe that the way I did - as the future, reaching back to influence the past.
Quoting SophistiCat
Can you specify a mechanism other than God that could establish a goal or purpose for the universe?
If I may jump in... Individual things in the world, like plants, animals, persons and thermostats, can have goals and functions without there there being an overarching goal for the whole universe.
Thermostats, sure. They are designed by people for a particular purpose. People have goals, e.g. I'm saving money so my children can go to college. Do animals and plants? Some higher animals clearly do. Do amoeba have goals? No, they have reactions to stimuli that evolved by mutation and natural selection. I guess the same would be true of plants. A function is not the same as a goal.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I scanned the two articles in the SEP you, although I didn't read all of them. In both cases, there seemed to be confusion between cause and function. Yes, the function of the heart is to pump blood, but that's not why it developed. Again, it developed in accordance with the principles of evolution by natural selection. There are many examples of organs and tissues that evolved for one function but later evolved for other functions. A common example is the evolution of the bones in the inner ear from the jaw bones of fish.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Yes, I was wrong. There are things other than God that can apply goals - humans and some higher animals. The examples @SophistiCat were the results of human planning.
I don't think you were wrong but that you and @SophistiCat were thinking about different things?namely local purposes and global purpose.
I think youre right, but my original response was to the OP, which appeared to describe a more general form of teleology. If Im wrong about that, @Tim111 can let us know.
Yes, you can make this distinction, but both (1) the functional explanations of the behaviors of artifacts and (2) the purposive explanations of intentional behaviors of humans (or of non-rational animals) are species of teleological explanation. They both appeal to the end state that the system or organism is non-accidentally structured to achieve rather than appealing to laws of nature. For sure, there also are explanations why those artifacts or animals came to be teleologically structured in the way that they are. Those explanations can indeed appeal to natural selection, cultural evolution or artificial design.
Nevertheless, the proximal explanations of the behaviors of such systems often appeal to norms rather than laws. Norms and laws have opposite directions of fit. If some objects are seen not to follow the laws of nature that we took them to be obeying, then either we were wrong about some auxiliary hypotheses or we were wrong about the law. If an artifact or person fails to act in accordance with a norm of behavior (norms of rationality, in the case of human behavior) then there is something wrong with them (e.g. they may be sick, broken, irrational or misinformed) rather than with the norms themselves.
I think it can naturally be argued that fulfilling its ability to pump blood is indeed why the heart developed. The genomic variations that favored its effectively carrying this function were selected for that reason, because fulfilling this function increased the fitness of the organism.
The process of exaptation that you mention also is teleological. An organ that was fulfilling one function came progressively to be restructured (as well as the other parts of the organisms that function synergistically with it), though the process of natural selection, to fulfill its new function precisely because the selected genomic variations favored the fulfilling of the new fitness enhancing function.
Natural selection isn't a mechanism that renders teleological explanations otiose. It is rather a general mechanism that explains how the development of teleologically structured organisms is enabled by random mutations and selective pressures. The suggestion that Darwin's theory explains natural teleology rather than replace it was made to Charles Darwin by one of his contemporaries and Darwin agreed. I can dig up the reference if you wish.
In any probabilistic system of interest ie: one that has the regularity to qualify as a system composed of its degrees of freedom its destiny will be constrained by a global structural attractor. So shake any bag of degrees of freedom and they will arrive at some equilibrium value where continued change ceases to be meaningful change. You can describe the system simply in terms of its macrostate its pressure and temperature, for example.
So roll the dice one time and its free individual action seems to have no teleology imposing on the randomness of its outcome. But in the long run, the statistics have to conform to a macroscopic attractor state. The casino always wins in the end as local randomness winds up as global order.
Frank's Common Patterns of Nature is a great paper on this https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3507
Whether you consider the local degrees of freedom to be "random" or "mechanical" in some metaphysical sense, it doesn't make a difference. Change is only change until it thermalises. After that it becomes change that makes no further difference from the higher perspective which is the "system" that is the embodiment of some set of constraints imposing on the degrees of freedom.
That might then be not what you mean by "teleology" of course. But tough. Systems metaphysics trumps Newtonian metaphysics precisely by making teleology make natural sense.
If Nature is probabilistic at root, the usual way of thinking about causality is up for a more sophisticated rendering. :grin:
No. We are clearly not going to get any further with this discussion. Your understanding of teleology makes the whole thing trivial. Of course the heart has a function.
I guess we should just leave it at that.
Sure, you don't have to discuss it if you think it's trivial and not worth your while. But the very notion of function was precisely what some early critics of teleological explanations in science were targeting. Both Ernst Nagel and Carl Hempel sought to subsume functional explanations under the deductive-nomological model. The biologist Ernst Mayr, although critical of scientific reductionism, also was wary of teleological explanations and proposed the idea of teleonomy instead: a sort of as-if notion of goal directed behavior meant to replaces the abstract idea of function with the concrete notion of a physically instantiated program (such as, but not limited to, a DNA instantiated genetic program). This is meant to deal with causality by referring to the physically instantiated program as the efficient cause, as it were. I don't think either of those reduction programmes were successful, but they were attempts to cope with the non-trivial problem (according to those thinkers) of dealing with the scientific probity of the notion of function in biology.
(My first draft philosophy paper was titled Autonomy, Consequences and Teleology. It included a critique of such reductions as attempted by Nagel, Hempel and Mayr although I wasn't acquainted with either one of them specifically! I was rather drawing on ideas in the philosophy of biology from Michael Thompson and Anthony Chemero.)
But the above remark shouldn't be confused with the examples associated with Aristotelian teleology, which seems to concern circular causality rather than linear causality, as in examples like "the purpose of teeth is to help digest food". Such examples can be unpacked by unwinding the causal circle backwards through time (in this case the cycle of reproduction) so as to reduce a supposedly forward looking "teleological" explanation to a standard Darwinian explanation.
That is a good point. But the idea applies when the events under consideration are taken to be "caused" or determined by "events" in the past or future that encompass the full intersection of the determined event's light cone with a space-like surface at that past or future time. This is because, of course, a physical event is determined jointly by everything that can influence it through forces propagating no faster than the speed of light. Another assumption is that we identify those spatially extended "events" from a God's-eye-view perspective, considering them in all their glorious microphysical details, and without perturbing them through our means of observation.
In physics, however, the idea of the arrow of time (from past to future) is generally taken to be linked to the direction of increasing entropy and is dependent on the contingent fact of the "past" having low entropy (by definition). Carlo Rovelli neatly explains how our conception of time asymmetrical concepts of time (our ideas of ordinary present, past and future events) and hence also of our (correct) belief that our actions can causally influence the future but not the past, is linked to the time-asymmetrical thermodynamical process by means of which our memories must be formed, and how those memories can only encode information about past events and not future ones. He does this in this paper, although there also are YouTube videos where he explains those ideas informally.
That's an interesting way to characterise an attempted reduction of holistic (or organismic) teleological explanations of organisms and of their function to a linear process of adaptation through random variation and selection. But I think, rather than constituting a reduction of the teleological explanation, the proposed evolutionary explanation answers a different question. We can ask why did the individual animal grew teeth. And the answer that the teeth help digesting food locates the explanation within a holistic (or circular) network of inter-dependent functional features of the specific organism (i.e. of the species that it belongs to). The attempted reduction, through peeling off the circular onion over the course of its past evolutionary history, however, answers a different question: why has the organism come to be functionally organized, over a phylogenetic times scale, in precisely the way that it now is? This is a perfectly good explanation to a different inquiry than the one the functional explanation was meant to address.
On edit: one clear way to highlight the distinctness of the two questions it to attend to the fact that the functional explanation can be known to a fairly high degree of accuracy and certainty, by means of observations of the organisms present behavior in a wide range of circumstances, while the evolutionary explanation can be greatly elusive.
Is there any evidence that the universe is probabilistic?
For example, the equation [math]{d = 0.5 * g * t^{2}}[/math] gives the distance an object falls under gravity from rest. No probability is involved.
I may not know how far the object will fall in a certain amount of time, and it is true for me that the future is uncertain. For me, the future is about probabilities
But where is the evidence that the universe is probabilistic?
The OP is inquiring what happens to teleology if the universe is probabilistic. As for evidence that the laws of physics are probabilistic, this appears to be the case with quantum mechanics.
Thats not it. I dont want to discuss it any further here because this whole discussion grows out of the fact that were using the word teleology in different senses. I think my usage is correct, and I dont think theres any chance that we will come to further agreement.
I thought about a future state that was not going to come about without my envisioning it, my intent to bring it about, and my work to bring it about.
(It turns out it takes a minute to get the one on top to stay, because the cap of the one below is not a flat surface with sharp edges. In case anyone was wondering. :grin:)
Agreed, but I would say only where there is intention. I guess that means human or other outside intervention.
This looks like a great paper. Thanks.
I would underline this as the key point in the discussion: If it's true, which I think it is, then it allows us to say that "birds gather twigs in order to build a nest" is explanatory. The role of natural selection arises at a different level of description, having to do with how such bird-intentions wind up being chosen and facilitated. (And of course we mustn't read this as saying that a bird "knows what it's doing" under the same description we would use.)
To simplify what others have said: final causes are not ordered ad unum (to just one thing). For example, a cow will eat vegetation, but it is not "deterministically" ordered to eat just one kind of vegetation, and therefore it is probabilistically ordered towards many different kinds of vegetation.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I would go further and say that natural selection is itself a teleological explanation. It is a teleological explanation that covers all species instead of just one (i.e. it is a generic final cause). I would even venture that if an ur-cause like natural selection were not teleological, then the subordinate causal accounts could not be teleological, and perhaps this is the principle that some are grabbing onto (i.e. "Natural selection is not teleological, therefore the subordinate causal accounts cannot be teleological.").
The common objection would be, "But natural selection is not consciously seeking anything." The response is, "It doesn't have to. Such a thing is not required for teleology."
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But then the question arises:
Quoting apokrisis
If natural selection were reducible to non-teleological partssuch as "random mutations," for examplethen how is it that "the bag shakes out" into a teleological phenomenon? If one wishes to opt for random mutations, then one simple answer would be that once the "life" or "survival" criterion is introduced, the "random" mutations actually end up "favoring" life, even if only by "accident."
More simply, a god could create species by means of random mutations + a distinction between death and life, where the death/life criterion is the sieve through which the random mutations are filtered. From the vantage point of the isolated mutations, they are random. From the vantage point of the sieve, they are not.
Quoting T Clark
Again, a bizarre non sequitur. Even accepting your caricature, what does this have to do with establishing a goal or purpose for the universe?
Evolution by natural selection is a good example of a teleological explanation that is indeterministic at every scale. It is teleological because evolution is directed towards a future state of greater fitness. However, success is not guaranteed, and many do fail, at species, population, and individual level.
As I said to Pierre-Normand, theres no way you and I are going to come to a common understanding on this.
Indeed. We could also say that natural selection occurs at the level where various tendencies (and the material enabling conditions if those tendencies) progressively become interlocked in such a way as to promote the flourishing of the organism, as a means to enhance their fitness. But this fitness always is relative to the particular niche that they construct and that co-evolves with their endogenous behavioral tendencies. This is what makes the process of natural selection teleological. It's not just a passive "physical" environment that exerts a selective pressure. It's the already structured part of this environmentthe constructed nichethat pushes back against, or facilitates, the organisms already active (and teleologically oriented) attempts to thrive (most often exercised unknowingly, as you noted).
I added a few things to that post, but what do you mean when you say that it is "indeterministic at every scale"? Is it just that it is defeasible or fallible?
Yes, I agree. The dependency seems rather indirect since the telos being appealed to in the subordinate causal account (i.e. the organism's seeking to flourish/survive in this or that specific way) emerges from but isn't derived or determined by the ultimate one (i.e. the organism's aims at reproducing/perduring). But, as you seem suggest, if, indeed, the action of the sieve on the raw material provided by random mutations was a non-teleological process, then we would have to conclude that the emergence of the (apparently) functional organisation of the organisms was an accident, or a happy sequence of accidents. And, of course, it's not an accident. Ordinary evolutionary explanations of the emergence of complex traits, which supply sufficiently rich descriptions of the environmental/ecological context, make clear how those complex traits didn't arise accidentally.
I'm not completely convinced it's a dependency relation, but something in the neighborhood for sure, and I could be persuaded. Other than that, both you and @Leontiskos are drawing the right conclusion from Darwinism, seems to me. Surely Darwin would agree?
Possibly! Asa Grey was an American botanist who wrote in an article in Nature: "[...] let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology; so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology." In response to this, Darwin wrote to Gray: "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that. I have always said you were the man to hit the nail on the head." (June 5, 1874)
Physics is based on the triad of Planck constants, c, G and h. So add h to cG to complete the picture here. What happens to the classical description of an object falling under gravity when the scale of the world becomes either extremely hot or extremely small? Any certainty dissolves into the vagueness of quantum foam.
Yes. Our world seems to be fundamentally stochastic ; at least on the quantum level. So the pre-set mechanistic A> B> C> type of evolution doesn't fit the evidence. But your Probabilistic process implies a positive direction without specifying the end state. This is how Evolutionary Programming*1 works : to reach, not a pre-specified goal, but an optimum set of properties.
As someone noted, the physical universe out there does not appear Teleological, except in one dark corner of a spiral galaxy. Where intentional creatures have emerged from the mud, and set about modifying their Natural environment to suit their species' needs for both physical (natural) and metaphysical (cultural) habitat.
I'm not sure what to call that process of artificial evolution, but "stochastic teleology"*2 sounds a bit too erratic & accidental. However, A.N. Whitehead labeled his Probabilistic Process as "Open-Ended Teleology"*3. Does that sound like a fit with your Probabilistic Teleology? :smile:
*1. Evolutionary Programming :
Special computer algorithms inspired by biological Natural Selection. It is similar to Genetic Programming in that it relies on internal competition between random alternative solutions to weed-out inferior results, and to pass-on superior answers to the next generation of algorithms. By means of such optimizing feedback loops, evolution is able to make progress toward the best possible solution limited only by local restraints to the original programmers goal or purpose. In Enformationism theory the Prime Programmer is portrayed as a creative principle (e.g. Logos), who uses bottom-up mechanisms, rather than top-down miracles, to produce a world with both freedom & determinism, order & meaning.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
Note --- This may be what Leibniz meant by "best possible world" ; that sounded absurd to Voltaire.
*2. Stochastic teleology refers to the idea that goal-directedness (teleology) can arise from systems governed by randomness (stochasticity). It challenges the traditional view that teleology requires a predetermined plan or purpose by suggesting that complex, goal-oriented behavior can emerge from probabilistic processes.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=stochastic+teleology
*3. Open-ended teleology :
Whitehead's teleology is not about a single, predetermined goal. It's a dynamic process where new possibilities are constantly emerging and being realized. This means that while there's a direction towards something (e.g., beauty), it's not a fixed or predetermined path.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=whitehead+teleology
Yep. This is a hierarchy theory point that is almost universally overlooked.
A hierarchy in the natural philosophy view is a system of constraints that is producing or shaping up its own degrees of freedom. So it takes the messy world and simplifies it in ways that create the grain of action which then exhibits the unrelenting tendency of recreating the system of constraints which are forming that grain of action.
It is a self-organising feedback loop between the top-down formal cause and the bottom-up constructive cause. The fit between the two starts off loose and sloppy at first, but if it has any "competitive advantage", it will keep evolving towards a tighter and tighter connection.
A simple example is turning people into soldiers so that there can be an army. The army exists as some accumulated set of constraints on human behaviour. History has shown that the better organised the army the more it has the "right stuff" in terms of its component parts the better it serves its function. And so as an ecological niche, it is shaped to prune away all the rich free variety of each fresh intake of raw recruits so as to mould them into the kinds of folk that just can't help recreate a militaristic environment when they come together.
So hierarchies exist in nature by being able to shape their own simple parts. And in mass producing these functional units, they remove all the larger free variety that may have existed beforehand. They erase their own past when it comes to the question of what causes them to be the way that they are. A recruit may have a childhood, a past life, but Newtonianism can't just model that and show how all that determined the person's future path after they were put through the transforming machinery which wanted to turn them into something else just a general purpose unit of a higher level of human social organisation.
In physics, we call this erasure of initial conditions a phase change, or topological transition, or spontaneous symmetry breaking.
Norton's dome is the classic illustration of where determinism breaks down in the usual Newtonian notion of causal determinism. The question of what fluctuation nudged the ball down the slope becomes flipped to the other question of what fluctuation could not have knocked the ball off its precarious perch. The future outcome was always definite and foretold, the initiating event always as mysterious and uncertain as it could get.
So in general, nature has a hierarchical causality. It is a confluence of bottom-up construction and top-down constraint. And the top-down really matters as it is what shapes up the parts making the whole. It is what makes the atoms that compose the system. Precisely as quantum field theory tells us as a story of topologically emergent order.
This is all very nicely put and I find it quite serendipitous that you would make to connection to the case of Norton's dome since, following our discussion in your stimulating OP of seven years ago, I had then raised the issue again (a few days ago) with GPT-4o. The AI on its own brought up the relevance of "the idea of dynamical bifurcations in phase space."
I also was thinking about this idea when a video about joseki patterns appeared in my YouTube feed. Josekis are common patterns of play, usually occurring in corners, in the Asian game of Go/Weiqi/Baduk. They're analogous to theoretically sound openings in the game of Chess: usual sequences of moves that are known, empirically and through analysis, not to confer a significant advantage to either players leading into the middle-game. This is of course relative to the state of play, and current theoretical knowledge and development of strategic and tactical skills, of the strongest players, at any specific time in chess history.
What struck me about josekis is how the patterns develop in a sort of fractal like manner obeying not just the global constraint that good moves should maximize the chances of winning the game (which now can be quantified fairly accurately by neural-networks like AlphaGo) but, at intermediate levels of analysis, by carefully, and in contextually sensitive ways, balancing the proximal goals of securing territory, creating thickness, gaining influence, maintaining access to the center, getting sente (that is, being the first player able to abandon the local fight and take a big point elsewhere on the board), etc.
The evolving practice of playing Go, exemplified in the opening phase by the players' knowledge of josekis, evolves similarly to living organisms. And the replacement of those patterns by new ones, when flaws are discovered and exploited, in addition to the initial development of those patterns, are quite analogous to thermodynamically driven phase transitions. The emergence of the contextual embeddings in neural networks like AlphaGo, that effectively rediscover those patterns through self-play (and reinforcement), also has been characterised by computer scientists as them undergoing phase transitions as the network learns how to play autonomously and latches on those stable patterns.
Isn't what you are describing all about evolving the board to a state of balanced criticality critical opalescence or the edge of chaos?
So game starts in a neutral state where neither side can make big wins and just want to get their pieces out onto the board in a way that minimises the risk of big losses. The aim is to work everything towards a state of sweeping dynamism after it starts in a state of minimal strategic advantage.
You build up a position to the point that it is extremely tense and one right move can send your opponent's position crumbling.
Fractal statistics describes this state of affairs. One grain of sand can spark the landslide. The world has to be made tippable, and then you start trying to tip in. We are back to dynamical bifurcations in phase space.
In Nature, it is instability that is the resource that life seeks. Gasoline is great as it explodes. Or rather, it can explode in a really bad way if it goes up in your face, and a really good way as it is a cheap and concentrated energy to power your car.
So again, this highlights the contrast between the usual mechanical notion of natural cause and the physical reality of natural cause. The Newtonian view prizes stability of atoms, of void, of law while the Darwinian understands that scalefree criticality randomness on all scales is the secret sauce of existence.
A system is dead when it has gone to Gaussian equilibrium. It is just a passive and exhausted stuff that fluctuates around its mean. But any living or dynamically evolving process is balancing itself on the knife-edge of growth represented by the fractal or powerlaw attractor that is scalefree criticality.
In a critical state, small things are always happening but really big things as well. And that leads to rational strategies in the kinds of games where we must steadily develop positions that tilt the odds in our direction. At first, mimimise the errors. Later, be ready to pounce with the big risks.
Kauffman spent a lot of time modeling this kind of connectivity story with his critical Boolean networks.
But the point here is about our metaphysics of causality.
Newtonians believe in stable foundations that are then rather mystically caused to move, change and evolve.
Darwinians take the opposite tack of believing that radical instability is what grounds the semiotic possibility of constraints being imposed on a system to give it a desired direction or tendency. Life and mind evolve to live on the scalefree knife-edge as that is where the maximum power to act is to be found.
An organism exists because it can put itself back together just slightly faster than it falls apart. The second law says the body must erode. But the larger view of thermodynamics taken by biosemiosis says that this just means the contrary purpose thus taken by Nature is to out-grow the erosion. To become, in a word, a dissipative structure operating as far away from equilbrium as it can get.
DNA [I]is[/I] two complimentary strands of nucleotides running along sugar phosphate backbones, and joined by hydrogen bonds. DNA [I]means[/I] chains of amino acids and proteins. It is encoded information. In an extremely simplified description, helicase unzips DNA so that mRNA can make copies of that information, which it takes out of the nucleus to the ribosomes, where tRNA molecules each take one codon of information to the molecule aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, which knows which amino acid the tRNA's codon represents, which it gives to the tRNA, so the ribosome can stick them together into proteins.
A lot of work is being done by a lot of different molecules to construct something that will not come to exist in any other way. Is there not intent.. Not thoughts of intent. But the system works toward something in the future. If there is intention here, then human or other outside intervention is not needed for intention.
If there is NOT intention, it is still a lot of organized work from different players using encoded information to bring about a specific future. So teleology.
There is no certainty that there is a quantum foam. Quantum foam is only a theory (Wikipedia - quantum foam).
Some interpret quantum mechanics as describing an indeterministic universe, but others believe there is an underlying deterministic process.
For example, "Quantum mechanics in an entirely deterministic universe" by László E. Szabó published 1995 in the International Journal of Theoretical Physics.
There is no current certainty that the theory of quantum mechanics implies an indeterminate universe.
Again, this is a bit off topic since the OP inquires about the validity of teleological explanations in the case where the laws of evolution of a system would be indeterministic.
In classical mechanics, the evidence is that this universe is deterministic. In a deterministic world, it seems clear that teleology is not a valid theory.
In quantum mechanics, some believe it is compatible with a deterministic universe and some believe it is compatible with an indeterministic universe. In an indeterministic universe, I agree with @Tom111's conclusion that teleology does not seem to be a valid theory.
So yes, it seems that quantum mechanics does not affect the question as to whether teleology is a valid theory or not.
Yes, I meant it in the way the OP problematized the issue: "no particular outcome is necessary." A species may experience selective pressures, but its successful adaptation is not guaranteed - it may just die out instead. Some individuals carry favorable variations, others don't, and even those who do will not necessarily leave more and more successful progeny.
Fair enough. I would say that this is how all teleology works, namely that it is a final cause and not an efficient cause. The end-directedness produces no guarantee that the end will be reached.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Very interesting.
- :up:
Sounds like a computer program, for which the intention*2 is in the mind of the Programmer. But signs of intention can be found in such directional instructions as "if-then". :smile:
*1. Information is :
[i]Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such : revealing the intention of the programmer.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
*2. Intentional Programming : This is a programming paradigm that aims to capture the programmer's true intentions directly in the code, making it more understandable and easier to modify.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=computer+program+intention
If I assemble architects, framers, plumbers, carpenters, landscapers, etc to build me a house, can we not say the teleos of the enterprise is to erect a house, even though the probability of the house coming to be is uncertain?
I don't think that the question of determinism vs indeterminism is relevant to teleology. Again, if you think of the most ordinary examples, although in theory, nothing is absolutely certain, when it comes to simple, immediate actions like reaching to grasp an object or striking a key, we treat them as certain to succeed. It is still a goal-directed behavior, though. There is both intension (outward-directedness) and intent (future-directedness) in these actions.
I agree. :up:
I looked at a few definitions of intention on the web. They fell into two groupings 1) as a near synonym for goal or purpose 2) as a mental state. The first definition is no help, since the presence of a goal or purpose is the question on the table here. The second definition clearly does not include the actions of DNA.
Its pretty clear that human actions often have goals and purposes. By my reading, the OP raises a broader question of teleology as it applies to the universe as a whole and even to logic.
Positing a final goal isn't less logical than positing a first cause. All events follow the first cause, yet we can't have a first cause without a preceding one, so we're left with an infinite regress. Teleologically, we say every event is for a purpose, yet you can't have a final event that lacks purpose either.
Or you can make each finite and posit a first cause (big bang) and a last goal (the ultimate purpose). The former is chosen by those with scientific bias. The latter, religious bias.
My response to the OP only suggested that probability theory can be applied to make predictions based upon what we know of prior causes as well as the competence of the planner.
The OP references "attracted to" language to explain teleos, but that's scientific talk, denying a designer, comparing teleos to magnetic pull. The OP is just a restatement of scientific secularism.
My position throughout this discussion has been that teleology does not mean just that one event leads, through a chain of events, to another event. Here is the definition that matches my understanding of the meaning. Its from Googles AI summary, so Im not saying its definitive or correct necessarily, but it is my understanding.
Teleology, in philosophy, is the study of purposiveness or goal-directedness. It examines how phenomena, whether natural or human-made, are explained by their ends, goals, or purposes rather than their causes. The concept suggests that things exist or occur for a specific reason, implying a design or intention behind their existence.
I think intention is the right word to use here. Teleology implies that an event took place because it was intended. Its my position that intention is a mental state. You need a mind for there to be a goal or purpose.
Many people here in this thread dont see it that way and Ive mostly given up trying to come to any common understanding with them.
But then you have Don Lincoln saying...
Quoting RussellA
One can always concoct conspiracy theories about how quantum theory is secretly deterministic, but you have to go to rather silly extremes these days. Like superdeterminism.
Much better to accept that it is the indeterminism that means there is something to then become the determined. Everythingness can be constrained to somethingness. Reality can be thermodynamically decohered to the point where it seems perfectly determinate to us in the classical limit.
So what is metaphyically fundamental about reality is not that it is either determinate or indeterminate. It is that it in fact can speak to these two extremes as its dichotomous limits of Being.
And science then frames that in usefully measurable ways. As it does with Heisenberg uncertainty and Planck's constant. We can be certain about where on the spectrum of certainty~uncertainty we might currently place some object or process. Such as even the start and end of the Cosmos itself.
The etymology of the word "Intention" seems to imply teleology*1. But a mere "tendency" refers to an apparent direction, e.g. toward future fitness & survival, yet without specifying any motivating purpose or end goal. So, was the eventual emergence of Life & Mind, after 14B years of non-life & mindlessness, A> an accident, or B> an afterthought, or C> sudden change from physical tendency to metaphysical entities, or D> a developmental Purpose realized?
Darwin's mechanism of Evolution (variation + adaptation) was intended to avoid any notion of divine purpose. But his model of Artificial Evolution*2, of plants & animals by human farmers, necessarily involved intentional Selection with a long-range Purpose --- long or short legs ; larger fruit, etc --- and the future goal was pre-imagined in the mind of the Selector.
Darwin's Natural Selection analogy, simply referred to the Selector (chooser ; specifier) as Nature. But any selection or choice is by definition non-random, so some directional intention or "force"*3 is logically necessary, even when not specified. So, the question remains : is Nature intentional & teleological? :smile:
*1. The word "intention" originates from the Latin word intentio, meaning "a stretching out, straining, exertion, effort" or "attention". It evolved from the verb intendere, which meant "to turn one's attention, to stretch out". This ultimately traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root *ten-, meaning "to stretch". In essence, the concept of intention, as we understand it today, involves a mental stretching or aiming of one's thoughts or actions toward a specific goal or purpose.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=intention+etym
*2. Darwin used artificial selection as a key analogy in developing his theory of natural selection. He observed how humans selectively breed plants and animals for desired traits, demonstrating that traits can be modified over generations. This process, where breeders choose which individuals reproduce, served as a model for how nature could also select for advantageous traits, leading to evolutionary change.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=darwin+artificial+selection
*3. Natural selection is not a random process. While the genetic variations that arise through mutation may be random, the process of natural selection itself favors certain traits that enhance survival and reproduction in a given environment, making it a non-random, directional force in evolution
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=natural+selction+not+random
COMICAL ACCIDENT OR INTENTIONAL DIFFERENCE ?
I'd agree with that.
Interestingly enough, while beginners are encouraged to play safe moves, ensuring the security of their groups, stronger players and professionals understand that they, indeed, can't win without walking closer to the edge, and without carefully balancing safety with ambition. Like chess, Go is a game of errors. When neither player makes any gross error, the final scores tend to be very close (and many draws are achieved in chess, which is not possible in Go due to half-point komi). When a player's position crumbles, because, for instance, a big group died with no foreseen compensation being realized, then the game ends with a resignation.
I think one lesson that can be drawn from such structural features of the game of Go is that the teleological organization of the sets of strategic principles being understood by strong players (and tacitly understood by AIs like AlphaGo) explain normal play until one player makes an error. The occurrence of those errors, and reflection on them in post-mortem analysis of the games, drives further progress and enables the players, as their skills improve, to indeed skirt ever closer to the edge of chaos. Maybe a sharp eye might caught glimpse of the stones becoming opalescent in some historical professional games ;-)
And then you have Eddy Keming Chan saying...
Dr. Don Lincoln is a Senior Scientist at Fermilab and Eddy Keming Chen is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego.
What makes a Senior Scientist right and an Associate Professor wrong?
===============================================================================
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think that the debate about whether the quantum theory implies determinism or not is a secret plot by powerful conspirators (Merriam Webster - Conspiracy Theory)
I don't think that is something Scientific American would engage in.
Does Quantum Mechanics Rule Out Free Will?
The article by John Horgan notes "Physics as a whole, not just quantum mechanics, is obviously incomplete."
Do you view all that in some other way?
My answer is no. [edited]
Quoting Patterner
I think theyre both exactly the same except that one is much more complex than the other. In addition, the DNA reaction ends up producing something thats important to humans whereas the vinegar one does not. I think that is what gives the illusion of purpose. People like to tell stories and goals and purposes are stories that People are particularly good at.
Quoting Patterner
Clearly, yes. And just as clearly, this is a difference of opinion were not going to be able to resolve.
Oops, my answer is no.
Quoting T ClarkI think DNA produces the environment in which it can reproduce. Doesn't matter what species, it's what all life is. I'd say that's the definition of life - DNA builds the environment in which it reproduces.
Quoting T ClarkLikely not. :rofl: But if modify posted her about things they didn't agree on... But what about information? Do you think DNA is encoded information? Or is it just... I don't know how to word it. It just happens that the order of the bases happens to to lead to proteins being assembled.
Richard Dawkins has claimed that reproduction is just a way for genes to replicate themselves. I think thats a question of perspective and not definitive statement of fact. Dawkins might disagree with me on that.
Quoting Patterner
I think you have to be careful when you talk about information. It has a very specific technical meaning in information theory, which I dont understand very well.
What is your perspective?
Quoting T ClarkGoogling "information theory and DNA" gave me this:
And there are many links that discuss it.
Yes, I believe that is Dawkins book on this subject. I havent read it. Ive only read what other people say about it. He certainly knows a lot more about evolution than I do but I guess I dont get it. Evolution of organisms, and humans in particular, is what I am interested in. Its not clear to me whether Dawkins perspective would add anything to that.
Quoting Patterner
OK. As I tried to make clear, I dont know enough about this to have a worthwhile opinion.
Well one is a working physicist and the other is a jobbing philosopher. :grin:
But I'm not rely on single data points. And have you even read Chen's paper?
He is supporting the systems stance I outlined. The problem for classical determinism is that its equations can't predict future states once chaotic complexity or hierarchical information loss intrudes.
If the errors in the prediction increase in exponential time and its accuracy only increases in polynomial time, it is easy to see why classical deteminism falls apart.
This was the lesson of chaos theory. The maths has to switch to the teleological tactic of saying well we just have to understand such systems in terms of their finality their attractors. The failure of determinism gets excused as a "sensitivity to initial conditions" and swept under the carpet as a measurement problem.
As Chen argues, QM can flip things around as it starts indeterminate but can follow all possible paths to arrive at a collectively determined state. In Darwinian self-organising fashion, the system just finds its own way to where it was always meant to go.
Of course, Chen also then wrongly calls that evidence that quantum theory is "strongly deterministic". Really he should have said it is "strongly finalistic". :wink:
Quoting RussellA
The debate ain't no secret. It is tiresomely dominating for cultural reasons that are rather too obvious.
We got locked into this black and white thinking on causality at the point in history when the Scientific Revolution collided with Catholic Church. One side had to defend the sanctity of the imperishable human soul, the other was defending the new holy order of reductionist engineering. Freewill is the banner folk fly so you know which team you are meant to rally around as the true faith.
As a debate, it destroys all that is actually interesting about Nature from a well-informed metaphysical point of view.
Folk line up to chant their chants at every opportunity. I'm already bored and over it. :yawn:
Quoting apokrisis
Perhaps that is exactly why we need "jobbing philosophers", to help us work through the metaphysical maze.
An interesting relates to this issue.
I think you have identified an important distinction between a scientific (mechanistic) and a philosophical (probabilistic) worldview. Classical physics was based on mathematical logic, in which an effect necessarily follows a cause. But Quantum physics revealed a statistical logic, in which there is an element of uncertainty between Cause & Effect. As you implied, a Teleologically-evolving system must have a pre-defined goal. But a Teleonomically-progressing*1 world can explore many options as it proceeds, not to a fixed end, but toward an optimized solution to a general problem, or question.
For example : self-adjusting Evolutionary Programming*2, using digital computers, can emulate analog evolution and even quantum computing, by utilizing the near-infinite options of random code variations to add flexibility to the rigid mechanical operations of older two-value (1 or 0) information processing. Ironically, Darwin's evolution assumed god-like pre-selection of criteria for success. For instance, sheep would be bred for maximum wool production : an empirically measurable goal. But Natural Selection may be more open-ended ; as illustrated by Evolutionary Programming : "EP algorithms can adjust their own parameters (like mutation rates) during the search process". The code itself is modified by the transformative procedure.
I don't know if your OP was intended to apply to the initiation and evolution of our physical universe. But my own worldview interprets the Big Bang as a creation event. In which case, the question arises : who or what caused the Bang? And to what end? The Genesis myth may have made sense 3000 years ago. But a modern explanation for Being (Ontology) and Purpose (Telos) would have to take 21st century science into account. Hence, the new definition of natural evolution would be Probabilistic instead of Deterministic. :nerd:
*1. Teleonomy :
[i]# Although evolution is obviously progressing in the direction of Time's Arrow, it is treated by Science as if it is wandering aimlessly in a field of possibilities limited only by natural laws and initial conditions. But philosophical observers over the centuries have inferred that evolution shows signs of rational design, purpose, and intention. Traditionally, that programmed progression has been called "Teleology" (future + reason), and was attributed to a divine agent.
# Teleonomy (purpose + law) is another way of describing the appearance of goal-directed progress in nature, but it is imagined to be more like the step-by-step computations of a computer than the capricious interventions of a deity. Since the Enformationism thesis portrays the Creator more like a computer programmer than the Genesis wizard who creates with magic words (creatio via fiat),"Teleonomy" may be the more appropriate term to describe the creative process of a non-intervening deity.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page20.html
*2. Evolutionary programming (EP) [i]is a computational method that mimics biological evolution to solve optimization and search problems. It's a type of evolutionary algorithm (EA) that uses mutation as the primary operator to evolve a population of potential solutions. Unlike genetic algorithms, EP traditionally emphasizes mutation over crossover.
1. Initialization:
A population of solutions is randomly generated or initialized with some prior knowledge.
2. Evaluation:
The fitness of each individual is assessed based on the problem's objective function.
3. Variation (Mutation):
New solutions are created by applying mutation to the existing individuals. In some cases, a small amount of crossover (combination of solutions) might be included.
4. Selection:
Individuals are selected based on their fitness, with better solutions more likely to survive and reproduce.
5. Repeat:
Steps 2-4 are repeated for a set number of generations or until a satisfactory solution is found.[/i]
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=evolutionary+programming
That's an interesting observation, since deniers of end-driven processes feel confident that Darwin's randomized mechanical procedure*1 obviates the need for First & Final causes. Just as Quantum processes are statistically randomized, biological mutations seem haphazard, going nowhere.
As you noted though, Natural Selection (choice, election, preference) gives direction to what is otherwise an erratic path of cause & effect. So, the question arises : whence the criteria for fitness that determine the survival of an organism? If you trace evolution back to its origin in the Big Bang, the Primary Measure of fitness seems to be inherent in the laws of thermodynamics : Energy ~= Life : Entropy ~= Death. And some thinkers have extended the coasting mechanical chain to its fated eventual End in "heat death".
Yet, they fail to explain how a small blue planet, on the cusp of an ordinary spiral galaxy has somehow evaded the Second Law Sword, and produced Living & Thinking lumps of animated matter. How to account for that side-track from a one-way trip to Frozen Hell? :wink:
*1. [i]The relationship between Darwin's theory of evolution and teleology is complex and debated. While Darwin's theory is often seen as replacing teleology (the idea of goal-directedness in nature) with a mechanistic explanation of natural selection, some scholars argue that he actually re-invented or adapted teleological thinking. . . . .
While using teleological language, Darwin's theory does not imply a pre-determined direction for evolution[/i]
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=darwin+teleology
Note --- Teleology is based on the inference from emergent examples of orderly & organized anti-entropic features, such as Life & Mind that should not be possible if chaotic Entropy ruled the world. The observed direction of Time' Arrow seems to be pointed toward increasing structural order & functional complexity, such as the human brain.