In the ‘Moderation’ thread, William J Murray tried to make a case for ideological bias among evolutionary scientists by referencing a 2006 Gil Dodgen post, in which numerous authors emphasise the lack of teleology within the evolutionary process. I thought this might merit its own OP.
I disagree that authors are showing a metaphysical bias by arguing against teleology. I wrote
Evolutionary processes, conventionally defined (ie, variations and their changes in frequency due to differential survival and reproduction), do not have goals. If there IS an entity with goals that is also directing, that’s as may be, but the processes of evolution carry on regardless when it isn’t. It is important to erase the notion of teleology from a student’s mind in respect of evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation, and most of those quotes appear to have that aim. Organisms don’t, on the best evidence available, direct their own evolution.
To which WJM made the somewhat surprising rejoinder: “how do you know this”? Of course the simple answer is that I qualified my statement ‘on the best evidence available’ – I didn’t claim to know it. But there is a broader question. Is there any sense in which evolutionary processes could, even in principle, be teleological? I’d say not. You have a disparate collection of competing entities. Regardless whether there is a supervening entity doing some directing, the process of differential survival/reproduction/migration cannot itself have goals.
An example of evolution in action: the Chemostat.
The operator of a chemostat has a goal – often, to create a pure cell line. The process by which this is achieved is by simultaneous addition and removal of medium, which causes purification by random sampling, which is evolution (a form of genetic drift). How can that process have a goal? There is no collusion between the cells in the original medium to vote one to be the sole ancestor of all survivors. How do I know this? That would be a pretty daft question. I think it would be incumbent on the proponent to rule it in, rather than for me to rule it out.
Mung,
My sentence was ambiguous, so perhaps you are parsing it differently than I intended. Let me rephrase it:
Claim #1 is correct, and since I didn’t make claim #2, there is nothing to retract.
What is evolution guided towards?
What is the “end” of evolution?
The flow of spilled coffee over the edge of the table and onto the floor is a process. But it has not goal.
Mung,
It doesn’t. I was addressing faded_Glory, not you. His comment relates to the failure of your earlier claim:
It has a purpose of keeping the system running efficiently. But there is no goal, no end point. An operating system that reaches an end point has failed in its purpose of keeping the system running efficiently.
keiths,
The alleged existence of exculpatory material that may or may not exist outside of this thread has not been entered into evidence. Until such exculpatory material has been entered into evidence I have no choice but to proceed as if it does not exist.
Best wishes in your search.
You really should pause and listen to yourself.
An operating system has a purpose, this seems to be something to which all of us can agree. But then to say that the goal of an OS is not the same as the purpose of an OS, where does that come from?
Your response is that if an OS meets it’s goal, it cannot have met it’s purpose. And that is just bizarre.
Or perhaps you are just confused.
Let’s try again. What is the goal of an operating system?
A meteor strike might interrupt the processing of the OS and bring that processing to an end. So any “end” that I can conceive of that might bring an “end” to any process should be accepted as proof that the “end” of a process should not be confused with the purpose of a process.
That’s your argument?
Oh, you definitely have a choice, but your desire is to proceed as if you didn’t. You are Mung, after all.
It is reasonable, and def 2) of process covers this point nicely:
a continuous action, operation, or series of changes taking place in a definite manner
A one-off incident doesn’t fall under this definition and is therefore not a process. The distinction is not necessarily one of purpose/no purpose, but one of continuity vs. incidental.
Again, under def 2), a sequence of events can be called a process if there is a ‘definite manner’ to it. Although this sounds a bit vague, I think it alludes to the existence of a larger context in which the series of events is placed. A specific outcome, not necessarily preconditioned, would be part of such a context. Teleology is not necessarily required.
Anything is susceptible to teleological explanation. For teleology to be useful in science the challenge is to come up with criteria to distinguish teleology from non-teleology in a way that is objective and repeatable. Tabling a dictionary won’t cut it, especially when it contains definitions that go either way.
fG
Judged. You lose. It’s the sort of thing you do all the time. Not in this thread, granted, but that was not the claim however hard you try to make it that.
William J. Murray,
You brought up some phenomena that were historically incomplete because they lacked a causal mechanistic explanation. Turns out the mechanistic explanation was material. And this is very much the common pattern. There is, as yet, no known exception. This is not to rule it out completely, but it’s a perfectly rational rule of thumb when the possible space of research topics has to be reduced to the practical, and research funding is finite. All known intervening causes are material causes. And there is a reason for that. You switched to deeper, underlying causes, which is a different category from the causal-chain explanations to which I was referring.
I think that’s pretty incoherent, to be honest. It’s material all the way down. It would make no sense to say that the material is made of the immaterial. Where is the dichotomous boundary?
In the case of plate tectonics (say) there is a material interposition between cause and effect. But now you are arguing that materialists can’t say ‘it’s material all the way down’ – that if we agree that particles are material, we cannot say that “what-makes-a-particle-a-particle-a-particle” is material because we don’t know what really causes that. Well, what else is it? How can the reductive components of the material not be part of the ‘material world’? It doesn’t even make sense.
As well as your curious hierarchy where the material can (in principle) be underpinned by the immaterial, you are conflating two different things – ‘basic cause’, and ‘intervening cause’, one could call them. The material basis of plate tectonics or germ theory is an example of intervening cause – a mechanistic pathway of material cause and effect. But if one chooses to regard as ‘material’ only those components of matter-energy-space-time that have a solid theoretical foundation, there was a time when Lewontin’s door would have been made only of wood. Now, it turns out, it’s made of atoms, and they are made of fermions and bosons, and they … well, we don’t know. But it would have been nonsensical to determine that the substructure of wood was only regarded as ‘material’ on ideological grounds, pending finding out what it ‘really’ was. The quantum world is strange, but it is still within the realm of the material. If you wish to escape the material world via that route, you have left yourself a very tiny hole!
And also (to borrow your own ‘tired refrain’) not what I said.
Allan Miller,
Perfect, what I’ve wanted to say to WJM but just don’t have the words for.
Does a hammer have a goal? In ordinary speech it has a purpose but not a goal. The same could be said of an operating system.
Much more important than “goal” vs “purpose” discussions, it seems to me, is whether the goal/end/function/purpose is extrinsic or extrinsic.
I might breed a llama (as I’ve said before, although I don’t) with the goal of her carrying my pack. The llama, however, has her own goal, which is to eat the hedge. Her digestive system has its own goal, which is to fuel the llama. Her stomach has its own goal, which is to get the hedge digested and into the gut. Her stomach acid has its own goal, which is to react with the hedge stuff.
At which point does the “goal” start, or stop being a “teleological” one?
Allan Miller said:
No, I did not. I brought up some examples of scientific progress being historically, factually impeded because the empirical evidence did not fit the materialist ontological narrative at the time.
What does it mean to say “The mechanistic explanation was material?
Looking over my comments to this point, I’ve made it pretty clear that I take the term “material” to mean deterministic, stochastic, or chaotic models of behavior – IOW, mechanistic models. Let me know if you mean something else by the terms “mechanistic” and “material”.
Whatever causes gravitational effects and other laws/forces/energy-transfers produce predictable effects in interacting “matter” (whatever matter is) cannot be said to be themselves caused by the mechanistic patterns that they are causing. So, fundamental causes cannot be said to mechanistic/material (by the above view of those terms); <strong.only the patterns they produce in interacting matter can be said to be mechanistic/material. We then reify those patterns as secondary causes themselves when we say something like “gravity caused the rock in space to change trajectory.”
By this reasoning, your statement is tautological. All mechanistic models are material models by definition.
I certainly agree, in light of the above framework, that all mechanistic models are material models and that there is no exception. That’s tautological. If you mean something else by the term “material”, let me know.
I think that even a theory of spiritual manifestation (after intention) would be material in this sense; that which is ordered around one’s intention mechanistically manifests into reality according to the parameters of all applicable intentions and logical constraints. Essentially, I think everything other than intention itself is ultimately mechanistic/material, abeit through many different kinds of mechanisms and kinds of matter.
Man I really appreciate this line of dialogue. Some very compelling ideas have occurred to me during this exchange.
What do you mean by “material” and “immaterial”? I’ve been talking about “materialsm” in terms of ontological narratives, and about “material” in terms of mechanistic descriptions of things; for the former, I’ve been advocating less investment in ontological narratives for better (and more practical) scientific progress, and for the latter, I’ve pointed out that what are referred to as “material causes” are no such thing. They are material (mechanistic) descriptions reified as secondary or tertiary causes. Even germ theory and plate tectonics are ultimately descriptions of descriptions – as EL says, “models all the way down”. We are, ultimately, just describing behaviors that are stacked upon other descriptions of behaviors and labeling them a material because those models are mechanistic.
What I’m looking at now, thanks to this discussion, is a breakdown of known existence into two commodities; intention and mechanism. I think the terms “matter” and “material world” and even “materialism” are just not well defined enough and have too much baggage to have a sound argument about any more. The real debate is intention-ism vs mechanism. I can easily see real intention producing real mechanisms; I don’t see how mechanism, however, can possibly produce anything other than an illusion of intention.
Only one is derivable from the other.
OK, that’s interesting. So a psychological model would not be a materialistic model, in your view?
ETA: re-reading your post I guess you’d say it’s a “reified” model. I would probably use the word “emergent”. I’m not sure that there is a difference in meaning here, so possibly we agree.
This is interesting too. I’m glad you are finding the discussion rewarding.
William J. Murray,
Uh, these are not exclusive. Fact: they were historically incomplete because they lacked a causal explanation. Fact: scientific progress was (arguably) impeded because a mechanism was not forthcoming. I don’t see how cavilling because I didn’t echo your precise reason for you bringing them up as relevant. “I didn’t bring up tennis, a game involving raquets, balls and nets, I brought up tennis, a passionate celebration of the competitive human spirit”.
The existing ‘materialist ontological narrative’ was impeded? Guess what? Progress was made. Was the ‘materialist’ part of ‘materalist ontological narrative’ in any way rendered suspect? No. The explanation when it came was entirely within the realm of the material.
I consider it possible for a mechanism to be non-material. For example, a God not made of matter-energy nor existing in space-time could (I guess) have some effect on matter-energy-space-time. But its effects would need to be distinguishable from those occuring within matter-energy-space-time to be anything more than a means to while away a few hours in discussion. There is a clear distinction between the position that ‘material”s underlying regularities must themselves be classed as material, and one that material cannot be impacted, in some way, by something that is not material. A ‘supernaturally-caused’ OoL, assembling a functional cell using what happens to be lying around, is not in the same class of phenomena as the planets, or electrons, being held in place by angels else they would fly away. Holding together or underpinning the fabric of material is not the same as causing it to be rearranged.
Anyway, if ‘material’ is such a labile concept, are you planning to drop the label ‘materialist’ any time soon?
William J. Murray,
1) What’s difference does it make, for any given intentional agent?
2) See evolution by Natural Selection.
It has no goal. Said differently, it has nothing that could be said to be a final cause.
Allan Miller said:
No, scientific progress was impeded, in terms of pragmatic implementation based on provable results. Medicine was impeded. Lives were lost.
To “impede” doesn’t mean to “stop altogether”.
It doesn’t seem to me that you are comprehending my point because you keep saying things that are entirely irrelevant to it as if they contradict it. The materialist ontological narrative at the time was that there was no material medium or material explanation available within which to frame the empirical evidence that hand washing could help prevent disease & death.
The ontological narrative (as per what is scientifically possible or reasonable) changed later. I’m not arguing that there was no material cause (in terms of a model), obviously. I’m not arguing that eventually the materialist narrative didn’t change after later discoveries – it does all the time.
In fact, that underscores my point – my actual point. Not that materialism is false, or that materialism ultimately proved false in those particular cases; but rather that what “materialism” meant, and the narrative derived from that ontological commitment, had to change first before empirical evidence could gain any widespread acceptance and use.
I’m not arguing against materialism here, Allan. I’m arguing against ontologically-committed narratives that ignores evidence because the evidence doesn’t fit the current ontological narrative.
What does it mean to say something is made of matter and energy or even space-time, if one is not actually talking about mechanistic models – descriptions of how observables behave?
Maybe. I might need a new set of terms here. Got any suggestions? Intenders and Mechanists?
Allan Miller said:
Well, if it makes no difference to you, then it would make no difference to you. However, if I accepted that my intentions are illusive and all that is going on is mechanism, I would behave entirely differently. And that’s not speculative; I lived through it.
EL said:
Well, that’s where it gets interesting between those committed to ontological
materialismmechanism and those not so committed. Those who are committed, I would believe, think that all things can ultimately be modeled mechanistically, including a person’s behaviors, thoughts, intentions, psychology. It would be “mechanistic models all the way down”.I think this also draws a line between those who insist all apparent teleology is ultimately a mechanistic model riding other mechanistic models, even if those models are largely unpredictable and non-determined, they are still held as – ultimately – mechanistic. IOW, all teleology/intention is ultimately caused by and is subsumed by more-or-less-predictable mechanism.
Maybe we can better frame the term “emergent” here wrt ontology. In your view, are all emergent systems mechanistic in nature (combination to whatever degree of deterministic, stochastic and chaotic patterns of behavior)?
The llama is a living organism which meets the criteria I’ve posted above for intrinsic teleology.
If you are using it as a tool to meet your needs, that could justify saying it has extrinsic teleology in that context. KN would say that is not real teleology.
Digestive systems are not closed causal systems: they depend (eg) on blood pumped by the heart to survive. Further, their constraints — to prepare food for the rest of the organism — are not imposed by themselves, but as part of the closed system that is the whole llama. So they don’t have intrinsic teleology.
I would say digestive systems have extrinsic, as-if teleology since their function was selected by evolution, which acts as-if it is a tool designer. YMMV.
Count me as one of those not committed to mechanism.
I see a computer (and computation) as mechanistic (as distinct from “mechanical”). But I see biological organism as adaptive rather than mechanistic. In my opinion, “adaptive” and “mechanistic” are quite different.
Here’s the link on Academia.edu, but you need to sign in through Facebook or Google to access it.
Anyway, I’ll copy, paste and comment as the spirit moves me.
As a first pass, it’s because Bacon, Galileo, Descartes et al, were right about (at least) one thing: positing immanent finality in non-biological physical processes is redundant; it doesn’t explain anything. Given a purely mechanistic explanation of how, say, water erosion leads to the formation of limestone caves, there doesn’t seem to be anything left over that needs to be explained. (Except in the sense, as Murray has pointed out, that we don’t yet understand how mass distorts space-time.)
Secondly, and I think this is important, a living being is fighting a constant battle against entropy (and one that it eventually loses, of course). It is endeavoring to maintain itself, or to persist in being. The organism-environment relationship is less one of homeostasis and more one of “allostasis” (a term coined by Jay Schulkin): “the equilibrium required for life need not be merely a return to some pre-set stable state, but rather involves the dynamic generation of new set-points for equilibrium, as the organism engages new aspects of its environment” (Mark Johnson, “Keeping the Pragmatism in Neuropragmatism”).
Similarly, organisms exhibit a kind of “biological autonomy” — they cause their own movements, at a bare minimum — and exist in a condition of “needful freedom” (citing Jonas) in relation to their environments. The organism-environment relation is one in which the organism is both distinct from the environment and needs its relation to the environment in order to maintain its being, its distinctiveness.
That’s why we need to think about philosophy of life in terms of the whole organism-environment relationship, which is to say, to think holistically rather than in atomistic or reductionist terms.
(Though the point nicely generalizes once we give up on atomism altogether and think about non-biological systems as complex dynamical systems, and then think of autopoietic systems as a special class of complex dynamical systems, cognitive systems as a special class of autopoietic systems, and socio-linguistic systems as a special class of cognitive systems.)
William J. Murray,
But it does not follow inevitably that one’s behaviour would be any different. Behaviour itself would be part of the illusion. You can’t step in and out of the illusion at will, if will itself is an illusion. If all intention is illusion, then so is the intention to behave differently because you think it is illusory. Whatever you chose – to behave as if it was, or behave as if it wasn’t – would be equally illusory.
Of course we neither think nor act as if intent is illusory, even if we think it is illusory. I don’t know if it ‘really’ is or not, but I see no more point in enduring illusory hardships than ‘real’ ones.
Exactly. Though I think you meant for one extrinsic to be intrinsic. 🙂
Allan Miller said:
To be fair, I never said it followed inevitably. You asked what difference it would make to any particular intentional agent. To you, perhaps none; to me, a great deal.
That doesn’t change the fact that I will behave differently. IOW, it made a difference to me; it makes a difference to me; it will make a difference to me, inasmuch as I understand my patterns of behaviors based on different views I have held.
Unless you’re going to assert that beliefs (as mechanistic models) have no causal impact on behavior whatsoever, then it stands to reason that at least for some (or many) people, altering that belief can – and would – change behavior. That is the difference it would make for at least some people.
Yeah. boy, I’m getting old….
William J. Murray,
The more you home in your your ‘actual’ point, the less it looks like ‘materialism’ has much to do with it. Science proceeds death by death and so on.
One learns a set of ‘rules’ about the current state of scientific knowledge. To overthrow a current paradigm is not easy, because you have to give people reasons to set aside the old rules, and some people have been working with them for 50+ years. But scientific progress, on the big questions (which very, very few people get to work on), demands the capacity for such paradigm change – mainly upon flashes of inspiration rather than a methodological shift, though.
I’m not sure what is being done badly that could be done better by setting aside current ‘ontological commitment’. The revolutionaries – Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Planck, Dalton, let’s say to pick a few at random – were pretty good at that. But they were all fairly committed to ‘material’ explanations.
That’s interesting. Can you elaborate?
Let me give an example.
Suppose a house with thermostatically controlled temperature. Let’s say that the house is vacant at present, so we are only looking at the thermostatic controls.
They do depend on accessing external energy sources. But so do biological organisms.
The thermostat has an internal thermometer.
I say that the thermostatically controlled house has an intrinsic purpose of maintaining the reading on that internal thermometer at around 70.
Notice that I talk of the thermometer reading rather than temperature. That avoids any dependence on external calibration of that thermometer. Looked at that way, it seems entirely self-contained except for the use of external energy sources.
I think most of us take extrinsic finality to be real teleology else I don’t think we’d be having this debate. True?
FWIW, “mechanism” in philosophy of science has a generally accepted definition:
Some key points:
1. we start with the phenomena, then look for mechanisms to explain them
2. the organization, inter-component causal relations, and context of operation of the mechanism are just as important as the material components in explaining how it is involved in the phenomena
3. interesting mechanisms show (weakly) emergent properties in the sense that the causal properties of the whole cannot be predicted from first principles; at best they can be seen in simulations (but such emergent properties remain constrained by physics)
4. biological mechanisms can be said to show autonomy when they act to maintain their thermodynamic status, which is far from equilibrium with the environment, rather than simply responding causally and moving to equilibrium
5. by having the ability to move and to formulate goals for movements, an organism can increase its ability to maintain such autonomy
Mostly from Biological mechanisms: organized to maintain autonomy (Bechtel) pdf
It seems to me that adaptive systems have something in the way of self-measurement which they use to adjust their own behavior. I expect this quite primitive in bacteria, but becomes a full fledged perceptual system in more advance organisms.
For a biological population, this self-measurement is in the form of producing variants (mutants) to test the performance of such variants in the current environment.
The basis for human learning appears to be perception, particularly self-perception (proprioception). A golfer isn’t great because he has all of the mechanisms setup for a great shot. Rather, the golfer is great because his self-perception detects whether he is making a good stroke and corrects it as appropriate.
What is the purpose of an OS? Depends on the OS I’d say…
http://www.templeos.org/
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer
BruceS,
My worry about Murray’s position — and I don’t think I’m entirely alone on this point — is that if one contrasts “intention” and “mechanism” as a premise, and then expands the sense of “mechanism” to mean “all testable models of causal processes” (or similar), then “intention” comes to mean, basically, magic.
But in what sense is self-measurement not accomplished by mechanisms? I’d have said it was. And indeed my job is trying to figure them out.
Which is related to my question to Neil above.
After a good deal of searching, and then searching again (re-searching?) I finally found “Bio-agency and the problem of action” (PDF) by Skewes and Hooker.
Abstract: The Aristotle-Kant tradition requires that autonomous activity must originate within the self and points toward a new type of causation (different from natural efficient causation) associated with teleology. Notoriously, it has so far proven impossible to uncover a workable model of causation satisfying these requirements without an increasingly unsatisfying appeal to extra-physical elements tailor-made for the purpose. In this paper we first provide the essential reason why the standard linear model of efficient causation cannot support the required model of agency: its causal thread model of efficient causation cannot support the core requirement that an action is determined by, and thus an expression of, the agent’s nature. We then provide a model that corrects these deficiencies, constructed naturalistically from within contemporary biology, and argue that it provides an appropriate foundation for all the features of genuine agency. Further, we provide general characterisations of freedom and reason suitable to this bio-context (but that also capture the core classical conceptions) and show how this model reconciles them.
KN, thanks for the great links!
Fair enough.
I posted on mechanism in philosophy in response to WJM just to add that standard meaning to the debate, not so much to comment on his position.
I do not agree with him attributing ontological positions to science instead of philosophy, as I’ve detailed above. QM is a great counterexample: said by many to be our most successful scientific theory, but there is no consensus on what it says about reality, thought lots of philosophical arguments about that.
WJM also rightly points out that scientific explanation can be intuitively unsatisfying. Have you seen Price’s paper Should we expect to understand consciousness?. Price argues, based on psychological studies of people’s use of causation, that there are four ways people intuitively accept causation as being explained:
(1) a property can be seen to be transferred from ground to outcome
(2) we see agency in the ground
(3) ground and outcome as seen as same entity
(4) outcome is property of category to which ground belongs
He provides reasons why none these might work for scientific explanations of consciousness.
Dull, rainy day here so I worked my way through the Kukla paper you cited. I’ll post some thoughts in a day or so. (Not that the dullness of the day is meant to imply anything about the paper).
While I am talking explanation, a couple that may interest you:
Craver describes when mechanisms explain (pdf). Trigger warning: he dumps on some DST models.
Woodward details when mechanisms don’t explain. I did find a downloadable copy somewhere to review but lost link.
Let me try this differently.
Mechanism is strict rule following. Adaptation is making up rules as you go along, typically based on pragmatic judgment.
If everything is mechanism, then where do the rules come from?
Neil,
Mechanism. 🙂
To elaborate on that, the fact that a system is based on strict rule-following at a low level does not prevent it from being quite flexible at a higher level.
Well, the same place as they’d come from in a deterministic (“strict rule-following”) system with a bit of stochastic noise.
i.e. from the laws that govern, from the bottom up, fundamental particles up through atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, societies. What changes, I suggest, is the level at which we attribute agency, not a change from mechanistic to non-mechanistic.
William J. Murray,
And, to be equally fair, I didn’t say you did. This is a problem with written exchange – nuance one might apply to speech is difficult to convey. Perhaps I could have italicised. “But it does not follow inevitably that one’s behaviour would be any different.”
Sure, altering beliefs can change behaviour. The point, I think, is that there s something of a paradox if one determines that there is no such thing as ‘real’ intent but then chooses – intentionally – to change one’s behaviour on account of that new information. We are not immune to paradox, but if one is interested in ‘logically consistent premises’, that seems a bit of a hole. If you can’t choose, why are you choosing? If the choices you couldn’t help but make lead to bad consequences, perhaps you need some other choices you couldn’t help but make …
The way out is not necessarily to decide you must believe that intent is real, and stuff any considerations of what is. It is equally valid to accept that – since you don’t know anyway, and it seems real – it’s real enough for the pragmatic purpose of getting through life.
I’d liken it to pain. Pain is ‘only’ nerve impulses. But someone chops off my foot, I would have a hard time getting “it’s not real it’s not real” to compete with “OW OW OW OW OW” up in the executive centres of my brain. So I deal with pain in a pragmatic manner, and avoid it. Intentionally.
Okay, fair enough.
I see no evidence that there are rules that govern. I only see rules that we make up to help us better understand nature.
So I guess we disagree.