"Chance" in Evolutionary Theory
It is evident that chance, is understood by many to be play an important part in the evolutionary process, especially in relation to genetic mutations. But chance is not necessarily integral to evolutionary theory. If we consider the evolutionary theory of Darwin's predecessor, Lamarck, we find a theory in which behavioural habits are the cause of physical variations. Due to the close relationship between behaviour and genetic disposition, speculations such as Lamarck's would be extremely difficult to falsify, or verify. Darwin opted for a scientific, objective theory, which stated the facts of variation, without speculating as to the cause of variation. Modern proponents of Darwinian evolution posit random (chance) mutations as the cause of variation, and this is directly opposed to Lamarck's position of habituation.
I believe that the art of husbandry demonstrates to us that physical variations are most likely not the effect of chance. Domesticated plants and animals evolve in ways which are desirable to us, not in ways dictated by chance. If we had to wait for random mutations to produce the desirable changes which have resulted in the many varied domestic species, we would still be waiting. No, these changes were actually caused by human manipulation rather than random mutations which were selected for by those who were practising husbandry.
We find this in human evolution as well. Philosophers, religious leaders, moralists, have long ago produced ethical principles, which were followed religiously by human societies. Consistently adhering to such moral principles, over centuries of time, has produced the disposition of well-mannered human beings which we take ourselves to be. The substance of the issue is not that we cause ourselves to be a certain way, by trying to be that way, but that we are trained to select for desirable individuals in our breeding practises.
Now the principle of natural selection is where Darwinian evolutionary theory is really deficient. Survival is defined in relation to a species, or variation of a species, not in relation to the individual. This places survival as a function of reproductive capacity rather than as a function of an individual's capacity for subsistence. The conclusion which should be drawn from this, is that the behaviours, and physical traits, which are selected for, are the ones which are conducive to reproduction, not the behaviours and traits which are conducive to survival. Reproduction is more substantive as an element of evolution than survival of the individual is. This means that the substance of evolutionary change is to be found in those physical traits and behaviours which prove to be desirable to a reproductive partner, or in the case of asexual reproduction, desirable for reproduction in general. Instead, Darwinian evolutionary theory concludes with natural selection, or survival of the fittest, which states that the substance of evolution is survival, rather than reproduction. This is an invalid conclusion. Continued existence of a variation or species is dependent on its capacity to reproduce. Nature does not select which variations will carry on with the act of living, by selecting the fittest, through natural selection, the reproducing organisms make this selection themselves, in the act of reproduction.
The notion of "chance" within evolutionary theory is simply a myth. It is a myth propagated by the scientific community in its refusal to face the difficult subject which we know as the facts of life. Rather than accept the facts of life as real brute facts, the scientific community would rather hide behind the myth of "chance".
I believe that the art of husbandry demonstrates to us that physical variations are most likely not the effect of chance. Domesticated plants and animals evolve in ways which are desirable to us, not in ways dictated by chance. If we had to wait for random mutations to produce the desirable changes which have resulted in the many varied domestic species, we would still be waiting. No, these changes were actually caused by human manipulation rather than random mutations which were selected for by those who were practising husbandry.
We find this in human evolution as well. Philosophers, religious leaders, moralists, have long ago produced ethical principles, which were followed religiously by human societies. Consistently adhering to such moral principles, over centuries of time, has produced the disposition of well-mannered human beings which we take ourselves to be. The substance of the issue is not that we cause ourselves to be a certain way, by trying to be that way, but that we are trained to select for desirable individuals in our breeding practises.
Now the principle of natural selection is where Darwinian evolutionary theory is really deficient. Survival is defined in relation to a species, or variation of a species, not in relation to the individual. This places survival as a function of reproductive capacity rather than as a function of an individual's capacity for subsistence. The conclusion which should be drawn from this, is that the behaviours, and physical traits, which are selected for, are the ones which are conducive to reproduction, not the behaviours and traits which are conducive to survival. Reproduction is more substantive as an element of evolution than survival of the individual is. This means that the substance of evolutionary change is to be found in those physical traits and behaviours which prove to be desirable to a reproductive partner, or in the case of asexual reproduction, desirable for reproduction in general. Instead, Darwinian evolutionary theory concludes with natural selection, or survival of the fittest, which states that the substance of evolution is survival, rather than reproduction. This is an invalid conclusion. Continued existence of a variation or species is dependent on its capacity to reproduce. Nature does not select which variations will carry on with the act of living, by selecting the fittest, through natural selection, the reproducing organisms make this selection themselves, in the act of reproduction.
The notion of "chance" within evolutionary theory is simply a myth. It is a myth propagated by the scientific community in its refusal to face the difficult subject which we know as the facts of life. Rather than accept the facts of life as real brute facts, the scientific community would rather hide behind the myth of "chance".
Comments (254)
I think a rigorous overall statement of that approach is given in Richard Dawkin's book The Blind Watchmaker. In that, he argues that the combination of randomness with cumulative selection, can account for the development of very complex organisms or organs, such as the eye, which appear to be designed, but which is actually understandable solely in terms of a process of increasing complexity evolving from very simple beginnings.
A quotation from the book:
I have some reservations about Dawkins' model, or rather, the philosophy behind it, but at the same time, I think that, as far it as goes, it is quite a good depiction of what really is meant by 'chance' or 'randomness' in respect to evolutionary processes.
You're discounting the vast numbers of individuals that are discarded in the process of selecting for an individual with desirable traits, over many generations. Gene modification by mindful selection does take a while as one is growing out plants and or animals which would not otherwise be selected for because of any number of possible chance variables.
In some sense you can pile on the unlikelihood of human husbandry in the universe as a chance event in selecting the Washington Navel clone.
Evolutionary biologists agree with you that evolution is not random and is not a matter of chance, but crucially this doesn't entail either that chance has no role in the process, or that there is any purposeful direction of the process.
I think it is better to restrict the interpretation of 'random' to meaning 'not purposeful' since the posited lack of telos is the cornerstone of Darwinian theory, and in my view its only real innovation, along with the hypothetical model of 'natural selection' that is used to replace telos. In some ways I think something like Lamarck's model, that involves the possibility of the directive influence of acquired characteristics is looking more likely these days due to advances in epigenetics.
How keen we are to find purpose on the nature of things!
I'd say that the notion of "chance" within evolutionary theory is NOT a myth, but indeed an indication of what is still unknown. (if anything, it is an admission of humility and an indication of limits)
( EDIT:
I have the notion that Wayfarer put it a bit better in stating 'causes yet discovered' than simply stating it as unknown. )
What appears to happen by chance does indeed have determining factors. Problems arise in establishing certainity in that when there are simply too many determining factor or factors we are simply not in the position to take into consideration (those we cannot detect or cannot understand or simply have far too little time to take into consideration due to limitation of our lifespans) we simply look at that particular as being the result of chance. In short... we don't know.
The term in evolutionary theory functions much like the term "luck" funtions in our everyday activities.
Luck is more or less an unanticipated action/event/outcome that indeed does have determinging factors, but we are either unaware of them or simply do not particularly care to make an investigation into why it played out as it has; thus we attribute it to luck.
Chance is an admission of there is more to discover.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm not really sold that science is rejecting facts, but it's more that science is a continual investigative process of accumulation/adaptation leading to refinement rather than a static point of absolute certainty to on sitting upon dogmatic positions as "real brute facts" that are to be unchallenged.
Chance is an indication that the investigative process remains a process rather than live within a refuge of absolute universal brute facts... which might well be answering the unknown with the unchallengable unknowable that indeed is no answer at all.
Meow!
GREG
Sure, "modification by mindful selection" takes a while, as Nils Loc indicates. But how much time is necessary for random mutations to cause the changes we observe, as compared to the time over which these changes have actually occurred? It appears to me like domestication causes radical changes over very short periods of time. Look at the many variations of dogs for example.
As Wayfarer says, random genetic mutations "can account for the development of very complex organisms or organs", but the question is whether this is the correct account. The problem with "chance" is that it doesn't decisively rule out anything, so that something which appears to be against the odds could still be ruled as chance. If your neighbour is winning millions in the lottery every five or ten years, he might claim that he is just lucky, but wouldn't you think that something other than chance is going on?
The question of chance is not an issue of whether the likelihood of mutation is affected by its beneficence because this draws us into the question of beneficial for what, diluting the objectivity which we desire. Is it beneficial to an individual's survival, or is it beneficial to reproduction, and therefore beneficial to the survival of the trait, or is it beneficial for something completely different than these two?
The question has to do strictly with the cause of such mutations. Beneficial mutations occur, that is an undeniable fact. What is the cause of them? It is wrong to single out "beneficial to survival", and claim that such mutations appear to be random amongst the multitudes of other mutations, because plants and animals are engaged in multitudes of activities and a particular mutation may be beneficial to any one of these activities, while the activity itself is not necessarily beneficial to survival. Thus the proportion of mutations which are actually beneficial is much higher than those which are "beneficial to survival", because they are beneficial to activities which are not conducive of survival. So when determining the proportion of mutations which are beneficial, we must determine all possible forms of benevolence. This means we have to look at the question in a different way, removing the subjective goal posts of "survival" which we have installed. The question is, is a plant or animal's own behaviour capable of influencing genetic modifications so as to support that behaviour in future generations. That is the point of Lamarckian evolutionary theory. And if this is the case, then words such as "chance" and "random" should be removed from our understanding.
We know that many genetic changes have identifiable causes, so they are not completely random. As John says, to think that "interactions with the environment in general cannot influence the occurrence of mutations" is an outdated idea. So why propagate this myth that mutations are random? If it's the case, as Mayor of Simpleton says, that "chance" just stands in for "unknown", then this is outright deception. To replace "I don't know the cause of X" with "X is a chance occurrence", is to claim that X is known to be a chance occurrence, when the individual making this claim truly believes that the cause of X is unknown.
If your neighbour invest hundreds of thousands of dollars buying lottery tickets, and you buy the occasional one, then her chances are going to be much greater than yours. Chance is still an element in both cases, but it's not the only factor.
"Random change" doesn't mean without cause. It means "without reason." Why is that horses got bigger and bigger? We might say "natural selection" or "directed changes" (and that is, causally, true), but it still leaves the "why" unanswered. How come horses existed rather than not? And how come the existed with pressures which made them bigger (as opposed to anything else)? Why were these particular states necessary as opposed to any other?
"Chance" is to say there is no answer to this question. There is no purpose or logic which made horses and their environment exist like this. It's just what happened. It was arbitrary "chance" that these horses existed, were naturally selected and directed the way they were, as opposed to any of the other countless options which might have occurred-- "chance" is not opposed to the determinism of causality but an expression of it.
The issue here is not "design" specifically, because design implies some external agent as the designer and cause. What I am addressing is the cause which is within oneself. Do creatures, through their own choice of actions, consequently behaviour, influence the physical traits of their future offspring, as Jean Lamarck assumes? I believe that choice in sexual reproduction is an extension of this principle. Choice in this activity is a valid example of how one's behaviour influences the genetic traits of the offspring.
Well...
I have the notion that Wayfarer put it a bit better in stating 'causes yet discovered' than simply stating it as unknown. (not to mention that Wayfarer sort of liked something I said... hasn't really happened all too often; thus I must have accidentially said something that might have a tiny bit of merit... poker tells in philosophy)
Anyway (for what it's worth here)...
One thing I usually consider is that evolutionary theory isn't termed evolutionary law. I feel that this reflect the difference between scientific theory and scientific law.
To my knowledge, scientific laws differ from scientific theories (or hypotheses) in that laws do not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena. A scientific law always applies under the same conditions and implies that there is a causal relationship involving its elements, thus they are merely distillations of the results of repeated observation.
In any event scientific laws, as with theories and hypotheses, can indeed make predictions, but can be falsified if they are found in contradiction with new data accumulated.
Perhaps if someone would suggest that "chance" is a force of nature or a guiding hand or a metaphysical construct in the manner that luck is thought of by some (especially gamblers or the superstitious), then we might have a beef that chance is a form of deception.
I still find that chance is a check to any and all scientific theory, especially when one is compelled to view theory as the notion of absolute/universal/static certainty; thus chance is a fuel to the fire of investigative process rather than a bucket of water to extinguish this flame.
Meow!
GREG
The only thing deficient, is you knowledge of evolutionary theory. Had you taken the time to read Darwin's work, you would have seen that what you call "husbandry" is fully covered under the chapters about "Domestic Selection", and was by the reflection on these matters that natural selection came about.
When it is believed that there is a cause or reason for a particular occurrence, the cause or reason being unknown, yet the believer claims "chance" for this occurrence, this claim is deceptive. It is deceptive because what is claimed, "chance" is inconsistent with what is believed, "cause, or reason". When an individual claims "X is the case" while believing X is not the case, this is deception. There is no place for such deception in science.
Lamarck (and Darwin by the way) assumed that traits acquired by parents were transmitted to their young. Epigenetics aside, we know that isn't true. But of course genetically determined successful behaviours and preferences are selected for, and sometimes, when preferences are the main selection pressure you get peacocks etc.
I think there has been recent research that demonstrates that for a large number of species, males are subject to immense selection effects by females. Of course in all non-human animals, it is the genes of females who have chanced upon the right selection criteria that propagate. The behaviour of the females being genetically determined.
Epigenetics aside? You mean, the rule holds as long as we put aside the vast quantity of evidence which goes against the rule. OK, so "that isn't true", so long as we ignore the overwhelming evidence that it is true. That doesn't make sense to me, does it make sense to you?
Epigenetics aside, because there is a huge amount of confusion and misunderstanding associated with it. Neo-Darwinism may indeed have evolved a mechanism by which certain changes to offspring are brought about as a temporary measure for a generation or two.
Fine...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The claim is not deceptive, the claim is ignorant.
The claim is only deceptive when one wishes to claim chance as a "natural force" or an "agent of cause".
Also... please note... you called chance "unknown". I didn't call it that, so in a way this position you have thrush upon me is well... deceptive.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not sure what to make of that...
... I still view chance as more an result that can be known if one can make an investigation in to all the determing variables, but one either does not or cannot make this investigation.
In any scientific investigation there are degrees of freedom involved. There are factors that one does not and indeed cannot take into consideration. In spite of the deficit one can still know some things with a reasonable degree of certainty.
Here might be the problem. By calling chance the "unknown" it seems as if there has been an assumption that what is here unknown is indeed unknowable. I really cannot agree with that, nor is what I would suggest.
Another point to make here would be regarding standards of measure.
At what point is something considered to be reliable?
At what point is there enough investigation to indicate that something may very well be a cause or a reason beyond any reasonable doubts?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Here we can agree. There is no place in science for this sort of deception, but I don't think it is very often the case in scientific investigation.
Such a deception as you mention is very rampant in other non-scientific pursuits... often in the fields of religion, metaphysics and politics... fields where they have a great tendency to use non-scientific approachs to forming a worldview, in that they start first with the answer and then work toward forming a universe of questions where the pre-assumed answer remains unchallenged.
I can remember a member of PF (psychotick I believe) who refered to this as "top-down thinking". (...as if science was "bottom-up thinking". Personally I feel science has no top or bottom, but rather expands in a multitude of directions without a pre-assumed directionality as a bias.)
Anyway...
... I can't really say I agree with you here, nor was I the one who stated "chance" is unknown.
Meow!
GREG
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Indeed...
... proof that postions can refine.
Meow!
GREG
Neo-Darwinism requires the mechanism of variation to be non-systematic. So, no there can be no "causes yet undiscovered" only particular historical accidents.
That's cool, but I was refering to my statement. (which I suppose needs more refinement)
Indeed I did start out with "unknown", but refined that to something far less misleading. (or so I thought)
I'm not too sure how Neo-Darwinism resulted in my changing the notion, as I feel it had more to do with Wayfarer's reply..and knowing the relationship I've had with Wayfarer that deserves a WOW! ;)
Meow!
GREG
" males are subject to immense selection effects by females."
Indeed, and the main case often used to express Lamarkian evolution; the length of giraffe necks has little or nothing to do with reaching for the leave of trees. In fact giraffes mainly and very uncomfortably graze grass from the ground. The reason they have such absurdly long necks is the fact that males engage in fierce competition for females by using their heads as war hammers and throw themselves against other males with their long necks.
Sadly, like males have nipple, both males and females are burdened with this absurd adaptation and struggle to get blood pressure enough for their brains, and have to contort themselves to eat, from the ground.
I think the problem with the OP is that it doesn't really identify what 'chance' means in relation to biology. I understand 'chance' to be a factor in evolutionary biology, in that it operates on the level of cell division and reproduction: the process by which DNA governs mitosis is subject to transcription errors, which are the source of mutations. Most mutations are harmful and result in changes which are fatal for the organism, but some are beneficial in that they cause a change in the organism which provides a selective advantage (the proverbial longer beak, or whatever). The cumulative effect of a number of these mutations gives rise to speciation - that is the sense in which 'chance' is causative in this contet.
I think on the level of micro-evolution that makes sense. I think where the philosophical questions come up is, whether the existence of life in the first place, is a matter of the 'chance collocation of atoms' (per Russell); and also whether the processes of evolution are indeed teleological, i.e. directed by a development towards such attributes as higher intelligence, for reasons other than those of survival. Rejection of those ideas leads to 'biological materialism', which is the view that life itself really is nothing other than the fortuitous combination of complex molecules. And that view is presented as being a scientifically superior alternative to any suggestion of 'top-down causation', whether that be depicted as special creation, intelligent design, or theistic evolution or whatever.
The most robust statement of chance in the above sense, is the 1970 book Chance and Necessity, by Jacques Monod. Monod was a Nobel laureate in biochemistry and the book is the most rigorous and uncompromising presentation of biochemical materialism that has ever been written. And I think that is the sense in which "Chance' is being referred to by the OP - that life itself got started because of a roll of the cosmic dice, simply because things came together in a certain way. That has philosophical implications, as Monod himself said:
That is very similar to the 'blind watchmaker' quote above, which is not a coincidence. So it underwrites a particular kind of mentality, or mind-set, which is writ large in Richard Dawkin's anti-religious polemics, and is implicitly or explicitly visible in a lot of other modern secularism.
So as soon as the conversation starts to involve the application of theory to biology itself, it actually misses the metaphysical point, which is in some basic way prior to the consideration of the particular processes by which species develop.
I have the feeling that this "at odds with another" was in a different time, in a different space (well... different forum) under a different name. I'm kind of mellowing with time. ;)
Off-topic indeed, but so what!
Meow!
GREG
I think the key popular books here are The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins, which @Wayfarer has mentioned already, and Gould's Full House (re-titled "Life's Grandeur" in the UK). Though they disagree, both books are thoroughly Darwinist.
This is useful too: http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/5/451.full
It has also been expressed that Darwin, although presented natural selection as one of the means of evolution, did not reject the idea of Lamarck - acquired characteristics. And together with his cousin Francis Galton tortured 100s of rabbits in order to prove the case. He fondly wished for the improvement of mankind and being embroiled in inheritable determinism hoped that what a person did in his own life could be passed to his children, especially in the matter of the improvement of slave families.
He and Galton gave up the failed experiments in 1871, and Darwin broken by his own "genetic" determinism looked at the horror of his own conclusions. It is sad that he did not give more credit for learning, as his own experience with Jemmy Button and his acquaintance with other black people offered him a very modern view of equality.
I agree, Darwin did not flatly reject Lamarck's ideas of habituation. But Darwin was producing a refined scientific theory, adhering to empirical facts, unlike the speculative theory of Lamarck. So the evidence for variation through habituation, just wasn't there.
Suppose that someone wanted to prove, through empirical evidence, something like chance, or the randomness of random genetic mutations, how would one proceed?
The question is why the existing empirical evidence doesn't satisfy you. I mean, considering the fact that significant work and thought have gone into these issues since Darwin, I would think the most fruitful approach here in tackling the philosophical problems is to discuss what the existing evidence does and does not prove.
But neo-Darwinism does not require "randomness" or "chance", but simply that there is no mechanism for systematically feeding back to the genome. It is essentially a mechanism of trial and error. How the trials are achieved is not specified beyond the fact that they are unrelated to the phenotype, the success or failure of the animal. How the error correction is performed *is* specified.
You seem to be forgetting that nothing can be proved in science. Testing for "randomness" in any particular field is fraught with difficulty. I believe that any finite sequence of numbers will fail some test of randomness.
Anyway, it is not just change neo-Darwinism has to explain, but stability. Don't scientists believe that the Nautilus has remained unchanged for 500 million years?
That might seem trite, but during a televised debate on Religion and Atheism, this exchange occured between a bishop of religion, and of atheism, respectively:
Plainly, Dawkins doesn't understand the sense in which there could be a 'reason for existence', in that broader, and indeed teleological, sense.
Now to say that, is not therefore to say 'well there's a reason, namely, that God made it so' (and for that matter, I was certainly not impressed by the performance of the actual bishop in that debate.) But regardless, I don't think that the religious attitude is something so trite as the dismissive ''cause God did it' (much less it being simply an outmoded scientific hypothesis). It is more that the religious view, of which 'creation' is one aspect, constituted the fulcrum around which all the thinking about the meaning of human existence turned throughout the history of culture. Remove that fulcrum, and a great deal else is removed with it. Existentialism understands this; Dawkins just thinks it's a silly question.
I suspect that is the sense of 'chance' which the OP is driving at - chance as distinct from intention, chance in the sense of saying that life has no cause or raison d'etre other than those which can be characterises as 'antecedent factors'. Like, if we find a cause, it will be in the composition of the mud of undersea vents, or the residue of a comet, or something of that ilk.
To what extent evolutionary theory lends weight to the dethronement of meaning as understood in Christian faith and doctrine is another matter. I happen to think it does, but there have been Christian evolutionary scientists.
Lamarck was wrong about the basics of evolution. Darwin was right. Epigenetics is an interesting addition to modern evolutionary theory that demonstrates that Lamarck's approach was not entirely misdirected (although there's no consensus on the significance of epigenetics to evolution or whether it can even truly be considered Lamarckian) but the discovery in no way invalidates neo-Darwinism according to which chance genetic mutations are a necessary ingredient of the evolutionary process. And no respected scientist in the world would claim it does.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Chance mutations in domesticated plant and animals provide a pool of genetic variation from which human agents select desirable changes. It's not clear to me why you think that random mutations accreted over time through human selection are not enough to produce the changes we see in husbandry. It sounds simply like an argument from incredulity, and your alternative that we produce the mutations from which we then select makes no sense to me. Can you explain?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's hard to unpack what you are trying to say here but we are genetically virtually indistinguishable from the humans that were around before philosophy and religion developed as disciplines. And a quick look at the recent violent history of the 20th century should dispel the notion that we are somehow less genetically disposed to savagery than we were previously. Also, we don't on the whole select for more "desirable" individuals in our breeding practices where "desirable" means well-mannered. As a crude approximation, men select primarily for physical attractiveness in terms of sex and females for status.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As has been pointed out already, this represents a serious misunderstanding. Suffice to say that the mechanisms of sexual selection are well understood and covered in modern evolutionary theory.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The notion of chance within Darwinian evolutionary theory is as much a myth as the notion of gravity is in Einstein's general theory of relativity. And the attempt to deny its essential role is honestly not worthy of serious discussion (unless you want to completely ignore the science). What is worth debating for a variety of reasons is the extent chance plays in evolution. That's a huge area though and probably too much for one thread.
Apart from the fact that there is no force of gravity in GR. Instead objects follow geodesics in space-time in the *absence* of a force.
Also, if you invoke "chance", though I'm sure you only have a vague idea what you might mean by the word, you are proposing that Evolution and General Relativity are incompatible theories.
Evolution does not require "chance", rather it demands no systematic mechanism for variation exists, which by the way, maintains the theory's compatibility with GR.
What a silly nit-pick. I didn't use the word "force". General relativity is a theory of gravitation. The notion of gravity is obviously essential to it.
Quoting tom
No, I'm clearly not doing that.
Quoting tom
I was using the word "chance" in the sense it was invoked in the OP referring particularly to random mutation (as opposed to design or other forms of directedness) as the major cause of variation. I hadn't got on to your posts yet, but I will in due course.
.
This is incompatible with a theory that relies on "chance", "randomness", or stochastic processes.
If by "chance" or "randomness" you *mean* the absence of design, well of course design is absent under neo-Darwinism.
Quoting tom
I'll explain why the existing evidence doesn't satisfy me. Any so-called random occurrence only happens within very specific parameters. This is necessarily the case, or else any form of randomness would be absolute randomness A coin toss is constrained to two possibilities. A toss of a die is constrained to six. A draw in a lottery is constrained to the number of possible combinations.
If the parameters are defined, and the method of randomly choosing one of the numerous possibilities is verified as truly random, then we have evidence that the possibility which actually occurs is truly a random occurrence. But when the parameters of possibility are unknown, and the method by which one possibility out of the numerous possibilities is produced, is unknown, then where is the empirical evidence of randomness? Randomness is proven by knowing the parameters and the method. The unknowns here act as evidence against the likelihood of randomness.
Quoting tom
Trial and error consists of a number of essential elements:
1. The choice of a trial
2. Associating the effects of the trial toward some intention, or judgement of the effects, concerning good and bad.
3. Remembering the association mention in #2
4. Applying what is remembered in #3 toward the choice of a future trial.
If your claim is that genetic mutations are typified as trial and error, then clearly there is a mechanism for systematically feeding back, as this is an essential aspect of trial and error. In trial and error, we learn from the mistakes, such that we do not repeat them. This is facilitated by memory. What is a gene other than a basic form of memory? And what is it remembering other than a past successful trial? So why do you not believe in #4? Why do you not believe that the gene itself, as #3, would influence the choice of a future trial (mutation). .
If this is the case, then the mutation is not random, the parameters of possibility for mutation, and the means for choosing one possibility out of the many, are directed by a process of trial and error.This is what we can call "progress". But this necessitates that the trials (random mutations) are not actually random. The parameters of possibility, and the process of selecting a possibility are evolving.
Quoting Baden
I dislike how you make the unqualified assertion, "Lamarck was wrong", then you proceed to qualify this with "Lamarck's approach wasn't entirely misdirected". Why make such an assertion when you're only going to back it up with such indecisiveness?
Quoting Baden
Let me get back to some examples then. I mentioned the horse. The horse didn't suddenly get much bigger than it was, with one sudden chance mutation which was selected for. The horse evolved in a way that it continuously got bigger over an extended period of time. If changes were random, and selected for, it would have gotten bigger, then all the other billions of random possibilities would pass randomly, as we would expect according to odds, before it randomly got bigger again. Instead it continuously got bigger and bigger. Either the possibilities for change were severely restricted, such that getting bigger kept coming up over and over again, or the method for choosing a possibility was not truly random, such that getting bigger kept being drawn in the lottery an unusually large amount of times.
There are many examples, the root of the beet got bigger, the kernel of the corn got bigger. Now we have dogs, and breeders can increase particular traits at an extremely rapid pace. These are not one time random changes, but continual increases over generations. In the case of pit bulls, a relatively small number of dog breeders have produced traits so strong over a small number of generations, that they have become undesirable to the human population in general.
It's like I said to Wayfarer, if your neighbour kept winning the lottery on a fairly consistent basis, wouldn't you think there was something other than random selection going on.
Quoting BadenHuh, jamalrob said the opposite, that it represented a fair understanding of the mechanisms of sexual selection. Why the adversity?Quoting Baden
I intentional avoided the topic of "the role" that chance plays, because "role" implies purpose, and purpose implies intentional design. This would draw us directly into the issues which Wayfarer brings up, without first obtaining a fundamental understanding of what chance and randomness actually are.
Suppose I am to flip a coin, there is a random chance, 50/50, heads or tails. This random occurrence only plays a role if I act, or make a decision to act, based on the outcome. The coin flip itself is just a coin flip, it doesn't play a role in anything, on its own. However, the case is that I choose to flip the coin, and I choose to do this for the purpose of making a random choice. Now the coin flip plays a role in something, it is a designed act, and the outcome of that act has an influence on my future behaviour, and therefore all that follows from this. Without purpose, direction, the random act cannot play a role.
If I wanted to choose one out of six possibilities, I'd roll a die. If I wanted to choose one out of a large number of possibilities, I'd choose a random number between one and whatever number of possibilities I wanted, through a draw, or random number generator. In each case, the random, chance, occurrence is designed for a specific purpose, to choose one specific number out of a specific number of possibilities. And so the act which produces the random number plays a role in some bigger intentional act.
That is why I wanted to avoid the question of the role that chance plays. Once we assume that an occurrence is chance, or random, it necessarily follows that the parameters under which the chance occurrence occurs, were designed, or else the chance occurrence could not be playing a role in something. If instead, we look first to understand the parameters of possibility, and the act by which the one possibility is "chosen", out of the many, then we can come to understand if any aspect of evolution is truly "chance", and therefore necessarily designed.
The second source of chance in evolution has to do with genetic mutation. We can call this internal chance. In this case, changes at the level of the geneotype occasionally produce evolutionary advantages at the level of the phenotype (and sometimes evolutionary disadvantages). The question to is what degree 'chance' is at work here. In the classical view, these changes were put down to random coding errors during the processes of transcription (DAN to RNA), splicing and editing (RNA to mRNA), and translation (mRNA to protein). Modern evolutionary theory today however recognizes that these changes aren't all entirely random; that in fact, there are mechanisms of mutability that in certain circumstances, force or otherwise increase the chances for variation. Another way to put this is that evolution has evolved mechanisms to increase evolvability; it's the ability of evolution to feedback upon itself that accounts for the relative 'rapiditiy' of evolution.
At this level, the role of chance is of the second-order. While part of the capacity to produce variation is not 'random' (it is a result of evolution), this mechanism itself is. In fact, we're able to simulate this 'evolution of evolvability' without 'pre-progamming' it in. Here is Evelyn Fox Keller: "New mathematical models of bacterial populations in variable environments confirm that, under such conditions, selection favors the fixation of some mutator alleles and, furthermore, that their presence accelerates the pace of evolution. Recent laboratory studies of bacterial evolution provide further confirmation, lending support to the notion that organisms have evolved mechanisms for their own “evolvability. ... 'Chance,' as one of the organizers of a recent conference on “Molecular Strategies in Biological Evolution” puts it, 'favors the prepared genome.'"
Third and finally, there are the contingencies involved in sexual selection, which account for another level of 'chance' operative in evolution. I confess I can't made heads nor tails of the OP - which doesn't seem to actually discuss any science whatsoever - but hopefully this contributes to clearing up some of the discussion here.
Why would you call this "chance", something which has deterministic causes. If the weather forecaster forecasts no rain for tonight, then it rains, would you say that this was a chance event, even though there are identifiable causes for why the forecast was wrong. Why would you say that changes to an organism's environment are chance events? Quoting StreetlightX
If there are mechanisms of mutability at work here, which are assumed to act in a way to minimize randomness, why assume that these came about through some random process? It doesn't make sense to assume that a non-random process evolved from a random process.
According to the way that I laid out the principles of trial and error, even if the first trial is a random choice, the mechanism to judge, remember, and produce the next trial, must already be in place. And if this is the case, then the first trial is not actually random, it is chosen by that mechanism.Quoting StreetlightXWhen the two possibilities are heads and tails, the third option is to not flip the coin, or not read the results. Your so-called inability to make heads nor tails of the op is an expression of that third option, refusal.
What are 'deterministic causes' even supposed to mean? As distinct from 'non-deterministic causes'? Just another example of why your OP seems so confused to me. Then again, this is perhaps why you're making the claims you do - 'chance' is not opposed to causality (as if chance simply means 'uncaused' or some such nonsense); chance is a modality of causality - contingent causality, to be contrasted with necessary causality. The whole success of the theory of natural selection is precisely in it's ability to give an account of the kind of causality at work in evolution - it specifies one of the mechanisms by which evolution takes place. One of it's corollaries is that it says that there is nothing necessary about the evolutionary advantages conferred upon the peppered moth, say; the causes themselves are contingent.
As for the idea that it doesn't 'make sense' to assume that 'a non-random process evolved form a random process', all I can do is point you to the evolutionary modelling that says not only does it make total sense, but that it can and in fact has happens. Again, I refer you to the Fox Keller quote where she says that the studies done confirm that selection for mutability is not only possible, but incredibly likely. So if it doesn't 'make sense' to you, then what you require is a renovation of your sensibilities.
Finally, mutability does not 'minimise randomness' - it does almost the exact opposite: it encourages variation for the sake of proliferating differences. Again, if you can't get these simple facts right, its hard to take much of what you say serioisly.
Even determined (or selected) events (ie. you deciding to brush your teeth this morning) are chance events in the sense that they are contingent (subject to chance) upon unknowns.
If your tooth brush falls in the toilet by accident and you don't have a back up, what is the "chance" (probability) you'll brush your teeth?
What is the chance (probability) I will die from a coconut falling on my head today?
We don't yet have Laplacian-Demon computers to tell us the grand unalterable choreographed nature of life.
The principal use of the word, is to refer to something which is possible. "There is a chance that X will occur." This use lends itself to the concept of contingency, a contingent event being one which is dependent on something else, possible. The contingent event is one which is possible, it may or may not occur. Therefore there is a chance that it may occur. Notice that "chance", and "contingent", when used in this way, refer to something which is possible, in the future.
That is not the way that I used "chance" in the op. I used it in another way, which is defined as "the absence of design or discoverable cause". When we talk about existing things, and occurrences which have taken place in the past, and call them chance events, this is the way "chance" is used.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
StreetlightX appears to desire confusing the issue through equivocation, first using "chance" in my way, in one post, then using it in the other way in the following post. Failing to properly distinguish these two uses of "chance" only propagates the myth of chance, through the apparent contradiction that something with an "absence of design or discoverable cause", is also caused. This allows those who support "chance" to argue that there is no design or discoverable cause behind things such as some specific mutations, yet these things are still caused. Does this indicate that there is a belief within the scientific community that there are causes which are undiscoverable? What type of causes would these be, final causes?
The point there is no contradiction: states of causality are without design but the cause. In the end, there is no final cause. Any causal relationship if defined by a prior state and the states it causes.
Whether there is unknown cause or not doesn't matter to this point. No matter what causes we find, the "why" question is never answered. If we find cause to specific mutations, we still don't have the desired answer because there's the question: "Why those specific mutations and not something else?"
What's at stake is not unknown causes, but the logical necessarity of causal relationships. The point is final cause is incoherent. No casual relationship is logically necessary. States are themselves, rather than present out of design.
Yeah. There is an issue here as SX is promoting a reductionist paradigm - one that is antithetical to the reality of formal/final cause. So what he says is a good way to think about it from that particular view, but a holist would want a fuller view of "chance".
So for example, where SX wants to treat peppered moths and the soot blackened trees of the industrial revolution as a kind of contextual accident - a contingent fact - I would instead see it as a global constraint and so a source of teleomatic necessitation.
Predators have eyes because they need to eat. Prey has camouflage as they need to hide. This is the relationship that captures to necessary aspect when it comes to evolutionary causality. There are real desires in play. Then changes in the wider world that are unpredictable from that point of view are contingent in a sense, but not in the sense that the relationship itself is already developed to a point where it must track any such change.
So SX focuses on the contingency of the situation. But there is also another view that can be developed by focusing in the necessity and teleology involved.
But even so, SX is right in drawing out how chance and determinism are not cleanly separated in the way most people imagine from, for example, mechanics. Really, they are two ends of a spectrum - a spectrum which I, as a holist, would describe as the difference between the strongly constrained (the most mechanic) and the weakly constrained (the most randomly free).
For example, one naturalistic way of talking about this is common cause vs special cause....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cause_and_special_cause_(statistics)
The causes of things going in some direction might be strongly identifiable - a strong constraint or special cause. The tree fell because the axeman chopped away at the base. Conversely, the causes might be due to "noise" or random fluctuation. This is saying that the small things that can't be constrained, or prevented happening, can accumulate in a way that makes a difference. A tree might get so rotten that any breeze at any moment becomes the fluctuation that proves its final straw.
So there is always some event that "is the triggering cause". And yet there is a spectrum that runs from the highly purposeful kind of directed action - the woodsman - to the highly unconstrained and unpredictable outcome that is a rotten tree suddenly giving way.
And so overlaying this apparent tale of efficient cause determinism is a counter-tale - a teleological tale - of a well-formed state of desire (the woodsman) vs a well-formed state of indifference (the decay). The holist view presumes there is always a well-formed state of teleology of some kind. And indifference is marked by the point where a system ceases to care about the detail. Desire just has no reason to control events beyond the limits of having its desires generally serviced. Noise is defined by the fact it can be safely ignored.
This constraints-based view of chance makes better sense of the proven evolvability of evolution. Chance is noise and the degree of noise is something the biology gets to define for itself. It wants a useful level. And what counts as a useful level can depend on things that biology learns over time.
Pure chance for biology would be noise or fluctuations so extreme that biology could not survive. On the whole, biology knows that every next generation is going to need eyes, legs, guts - a standard complement of organs. So mutation is restricted accordingly. It is scaled so that height, weight - developmental trajectories in general - shoot for an average and thus result in tightly limited Gaussian bell-curve variety. A purer (less constrained) form of chance would be log/log or powerlaw, not normal/normal or bell curve.
So chance in nature is in fact a really complex subject. But the use of theory of truth concepts - contingent vs necessary truths - does fit with this contrast between free noise as a cause of events, and constrained action as a cause of events. Things can happen either because of probabilistic inevitability, or because of orderly direction.
But biology is then deeply teleological in attempting to suppress noise - as much as necessary to ensure the regularity of development - and equally, to harness noise, as much as necessary to ensure the production of evolution's requisite variety.
Most natural processes, like soil erosion or weather patterns, don't have this kind of choice - to either suppress or harness noisy chance. But biology is all about about this duality of desires - the duality of metabolism and replication, or developmental regularity vs evolutionary variety.
Classical Darwinism focuses on the one at the expense of the other. Blind contingency is said to explain biological complexity because the harnessing of genomic noise is what evolvability is about. However the importance of developmental regularity is now much better understood, no longer taken for granted. And so the suppression of noise is likewise seen to be at the root of biological complexity.
And the ability to arbitrate between plasticity and stability in this fashion is then the further thing that makes for a real model of biological complexity. It shows that chance or noise isn't just shit that happens for life. As much as it can afford to, life is about setting the levels of chance that can be either welcomed or tolerated. Chance for life is framed by its own historically-emergent purpose. And to point out that the future is always still irreducibly chancy does not mean that a considerable measure of finality is not in play.
To say that genetic mutations are random could mean:
Next there is the related question of whether there is any determining relation from natural selection to genetic mutation. It would seem there must be a determining relation in the other direction or else the notion of natural selection becomes unintelligible. So according to Darwinian theory certain mutations must bring about an enhanced ability in the organisms in which they occur (compared to those organisms in which they do not) to reproduce. But it would seem to be impossible to make sense of even this posit, if our ideas are limited to efficient causation. Telos may not so easily be escaped, except illegitimately in the confused minds of the reductionists.
We can dispense with ill defined notions such as "chance" or "randomness" and can even admit processes that may indeed turn out not to be "random" so long as we do not allow the environment to systematically affect the genome.
The confusion arises when we create systems that model the theory. Typically "randomness" is employed to ensure the absence of systematic feedback, but in doing so, we use a sledgehammer to crack a nt.
These are metaphors of agency. Parallels from the Origin of Species:
1876 edition, 68-69
Are you saying that "chance" in the sense of an occurrence which has neither a design nor a determinable cause is an incoherent notion? I tend to agree, because as I argued earlier, random occurrences must be designed to be that way. The toss of the coin, or dice, the lottery, the random number generator, they're all designed.
My contention is that the scientific community propagates a myth of "chance" in this incoherent sense of "chance", insinuating that there are random occurrences which are "chance" events.
Quoting tomWhat would you mean by "systematically affected"? Doesn't consistency in the world fulfill the conditions of "systematic"? So if the world behaves in a consistent way, as it appears to according to the laws of physics, and the way that the world behaves affects the evolutionary process, wouldn't this constitute "systematically affected"?
One way to think about this is to make the distinction between teleology and teleonomy. The difference is between a telos which is in some way 'pre-existant' and 'external' to the system, and a telos which is generated internally by the system itself. A difference between transcendent and immanent telos. Evolutionary processes, to the degree that there is 'directedness' involved, involves teleonomy, and not teleology. Thus Apo is perfectly right to note that the necessity of survival itself 'makes' the contingencies involved 'matter', and that it is the interplay of necessity and chance that drives the evolutionary process as a whole (Why he thinks I somehow deny this is beyond me, then then again, confrontation and disagreement is simply his modus operandi).
In any case, the question is about the modality of these necessities themselves. Are they themselves necessary ('pre-programmed' and thus teleological) or contingent (a result of process and thus teleonomic)? This is complicated territory because it involves modality to the second degree, but it is here that the question over telos is settled. And the answer, as far as we can tell, is that we can account for the generation of necessity without any appeal to any transcendant teleology. Teleonomy is engendered within the process of evolution's unfolding without it having been 'put there at the beginning'. To the degree that evolution entails necessity - and it does - it does so without design.
There exists no mechanism by which the environment can program the genome. Neither the organism that the genome encodes, nor the wider environment, contains the knowledge or capacity to alter the genetic encoding in any systematic way.
It looks like you're carving a system out of the sexual and asexual reproduction of plants and animals. That's a little bit of a startling proposition. We could think of a single organism as a system.
Which evolutionary biologist talks about "directedness" in evolution? I think the prevailing assumption is that random (or to avoid a philosophical quagmire, what appears to be random) changes are involved. The principle is exactly the same as the foundational statement of statistics: "Things vary."
"Contrary to current dogma, the variation on which natural selection acts is not always random in origin or blind to function: new heritable variation can arise in response to the conditions of life. Variation is often targeted, in the sense that it preferentially affects functions or activities that can make organisms better adapted to the environment in which they live. Variation is also constructed, in the sense that, whatever their origin, which variants are inherited and what final form they assume depend on various “filtering” and “editing” processes that occur before and during transmission.
Some biologists have great difficulty in accepting this “Lamarckian” aspect of evolution. To them it smacks of teleology, seeming to suggest that variations arise for a purpose. It appears as if the hand of God is being introduced into evolution by the backdoor. But of course there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about what happens—it is simply a consequence of the properties of the various inheritance systems and the way they respond to internal and external influences."
Elsewhere you can check out the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard on developmental plasticity, or Wanger's Arrival of the Fittest, or Scott Turner's The Tinkerer's Accomplice.
If a window breaks, the question isn't "is the breaking of the window an inexplicable event?" but "did someone intend to break the window?" It's quite ordinary to say that if nobody intended to break the window – if it was just a very windy day and something heavy was blown into it – that the window broke by chance. Such a claim doesn't reject the notion of causation (whether predictable or probabilisitic). All it does is say that the window wasn't broken on purpose.
And that's what is meant when it is claimed that genetic mutations are chance occurrences; that the mutations weren't made to happen intentionally.
There's no intelligent designer or genetic gremlin that realises that a certain mutation needs to happen for the organism to survive and so works to make this necessary change.
Interesting stuff. It's also controversial (the quote you provided is, anyway.) It's speculative. And that's great. .
At this point, the prevailing view in biology (essentially a branch of physics), is that "Shit Happens" is a fair description of the driving principle in nature.
I think an alteration in that situation would require a more profound cultural alteration in perspective (something Kantian, perhaps.) I say it's a mistake to sniff at the magnitude of such a shift by imagining that a few imaginative scientists could dictate it. Yea... no.
--
Even Dawkins, that doyen of evolutionary ‘reductionism’ is all too happy to admit that natural selection does and can in fact favour certain ‘directions’ of evolution: “A title like ’The Evolution of Evolvability’ ought to be anathema to a dyed-in-the-wool, radical neb-darwinian like me! [Yet ]…there is a sense in which a form of natural selection favours, not just adaptively successful phenotypes, but a tendency to evolve in certain directions." (Dawkins, "The Evolution of Evolvability").
I appreciate your mentioning those various authors. This is one I actually did read, though. A lot of this book is borderline filler. His point is summed up in the last chapter. It's Kantian. Obviously. If that's the view you're advocating, that's fine. But it doesn't make sense to do that and then claim that "the facts of nature don't care" for prevailing views. Rosen's point is that our definition of life contains apriori forms such as final cause.
Quoting StreetlightX
Dawkins is an adaptationist, which means his views are out of date. It's true there's some telos to his outlook. That's due to his project of using adaptation to understand everything everywhere. He hasn't been a practicing scientist for several decades.
I'm sympathetic to the attitude that we need to slip from the grip of a strict naturalist outlook. And maybe you're right... that we'll do it a little at a time without anybody making a big deal out of it.
Emergent purpose... that would be a big deal. Future historians of science would want to pinpoint exactly how and when scientists started thinking in those terms.
Quoting StreetlightX
It occurred to me after I read it that the last chapter could have been presented as a stand-alone essay. I don't know if anybody would have read it, though.
The traits already have been selected for (or are apparent) in a breeding pair of animals and are a part of the genetic diversity of the species. A very well practiced horse or dog breeder might have an idea what traits are possible or likely given pedigrees over a few generations.
The variation made possible from genetic diversity of a species (shuffling the gene pool by a lottery of chances) is vastly different from the variation made possible by random mutation. Maybe this highlights a problem with the given example of animal husbandry.
For a refutation of Jablonka et. al. see http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-006-9033-y
I challenge you to find a single case in which an adaptive change in an organism—or any change that has been fixed in a species—rests on inheritance that is not based on changes in the DNA.
This is a useful distinction, between teleology and teleonomy, between the transcendent, logos and the imminent, nomos. But, a third possibility, I think, is that of a telos that is "pre-existent" and yet not "external to the system", not transcendent but nonetheless infinite and eternal, and yet a fully immanent telos.
This conception could be somewhat along the lines, for example, of Whitehead's process philosophy, where the "direction" is seen not as "generated from within the system", an idea which suggests that it is generated from scratch from the brute, so to speak, but is understood to be immanent from the beginning and evolving right along with the system. It would be a kind of heart, mind and soul, as well as spirit, of the system.
So, the "necessity of survival" would be the most basic kind of 'inner directive'. You ask the question in your second paragraph as to whether they would be "pre-programmed". I think this question reflects our anthropomorphic understanding that there must be an 'external' programmer, analogous to the way we understand ourselves to be external to our own programs. So, the two possibilities seem to be confined to something external to the system, that is something necessary, or something internal to the system, or something mechanically contingent, something causally determined by the system itself.
I'm not convinced that we really can "account for the generation of necessity" at all, or even,more modestly, account for necessity. Necessity is always presupposed in all our thinking and we are hobbled by the inevitably mechanical, that is deterministic, nature of our models, which is really to say the same thing.
Now that is a confronting way to put it perhaps. But consider the parallel with a tossed coin or rolled die.
As humans, we can imagine this Platonic thing of pure or crisp chance. Following the laws of thought, we can imagine reality being divided in a digital or binary fashion into a definite set of possibilities that then either definitely happen or definitely don't happen.
And then we can produce physical models of such absolute chance. We can really go to town to machine a flat disk so that it has an insignificant degree of asymmetry to bias any fair toss. We can really go to town to produce a perfect cube, with rounded corners, so that it to will have only inconsequential levels of bias when rolled on a flat surface.
So the physical world is analog. But we can make digital devices. Or at least we can approach our Platonic notion of absolute chance so closely as not to make any practical difference, given our purposes - which can be using chance to gamble, or chance to decide who serves first, or whatever.
So the point is that a world with digital perfection of this kind - a perfect symmetry of an outcome-generating process that removes any predictability from some assignable cause - does not exist normally in the world. It has to be made. And to get made implies someone with an interest in that happening. It is already a purposeful act to arrange reality so as to produce chancy outcomes.
We think of natural systems being intrinsically chancy. So a tornado could take any path, a thunderstorm could pop up anywhere. But this is vague chance, or analog chance. Yes, there is unpredictability, But it is just as mixed with inevitability. In hindsight, the thunderstorm had to happen the way it did because so many confluent events panned out that way. However there is not the sharp binary consequence that is taking one path and not another. Instead there was an infinity of trajectories - and most of them were bunched together in the way described by a chaotic attractor. So you have this muddy form of chance, this analog chance, where generally things pan out in a certain direction, and the finer detail of what happens doesn't make much difference.
With life however, it was all about sharpening up muddy chance into sharp chance. The genetic mechanism separated aspects of structure so they became discrete traits. You could take bits of the whole and ask whether going in direction A or B was the better binary choice.
So life always was about the evolution of evolvability. Life arose out of the analog organic soup by being able to pose digitally crisp questions. Intelligibility in a logical sense was the big move.
And its more than just about DNA. Bacteria have unfocused sexual lives. They can share genes at any time across different species. But multicellular life developed a more binary approach to sex. You eventually get individual acts of breeding where sharp mating choices are being made. It now becomes an either/or fact of history whether A mated with B, rather than C, D or E.
So a simplistic ontology of life does stress that what is different is that evolution is ruled by chance. It is a story of the blind watchmaker and cosmic contingency. But this is a view of chance that already presumes a digital physics - a world where absolute determinism rules, and so chance is defined in terms of there naturally always being absolute crispness about what did happen vs what didn't happen in a material sense.
But a more organic conception of reality sees it as analog or muddy when it comes to its variety. Nothing actually starts in sharp distinction. Distinctions or individuations are things that have to be developed. And to varying degrees, material individuation can arise of its own accord due to contextual factors. Yet it all remains entangled or unseparated in some degree too. A bit soupy.
Life then came along and imposed a Platonic digital rigour on this soupy organic possibilty. It framed the chemistry with cell walls, enzyme rate knobs, molecular motors, receptor pores and all other kinds of digital devices. The chemistry was organised by a tight set of yes/no paths and switches.
So developmentally, chemistry became informationally regulated. And as the flip side of this coin, the regulating information was made exposed to blind evolutionary selection. Ways were found to put as much of this digital machinery on show, out in the world for natural selection to play its part, as made sense, given the purpose of wanting adaptive plasticity to go along with the adaptive stability.
So chance - as we digitally conceive of it in its Platonically-ideal splendour - is something that life has become good at manufacturing as it is so useful. Just as life has become good at manufacturing its opposite - a regulated, homeostatic, stability. The kind of purposeful state in which strong determinism appears to rule rather than strong chance.
This is a view of the Universe that can't be seen from a classical Newtonian perspective. But it is the thermodynamic view of a Universe that is mostly a vague entropic mess spreading and cooling its way downhill to a heat death. And out of this sludge, life arises by a negentropic dichotomy. It divides the sludge into a more regulated aspect, and a more chancy aspect. It creates a new, more mechanical, level of self-interaction that makes the sludge both more self-organised, and less self-directed, than was the case.
So the "paradox" is that life seems both more purposeful and more chancy than the world it arises in. For monistic thinkers, this creates a deep problem. Life as a phenomenon ought to be reduced to one of these two ontic categories - necessary or contingent, determined or random, cosmically inevitable or cosmically accidental.
But a systems approach to existence says instead that reality is triadic. It always has this extra dimension which is the developmental one of the vague~crisp. The laws of thought, with their insistence on classical binary possibilities, is just one end of this spectrum - the crisply developed limit. And so our logic has to be larger. It must include the more radical kind of ground that is the muddy analog swamp out of which crisp counter-factually has to emerge.
And it is this triadicy which explains why there are always the dichotomies. For life to be more self-determining, it had to also be more deliberately chancy. It had to go in opposite directions within itself as a material phenomenon to break away from the entropic muddiness that was its initial conditions.
That is why theoretical biologists like Rosen break life down into the dichotomy of metabolism and replication, why they talk about the centrality of the epistemic cut. It is not about which came first - the development or the evolution, the metabolic processes or the genetic regulation. The first thing to happen is the division itself - the division that sets deterministic development and chancy evolution apart.
Most accounts - 'the future' is already here: they've already been written! People just need to read them! - begin with Kant's third critique, where he recognizes the inability of mechanism to account for organization in nature, but ended up domesticating his own insight by putting it down to a matter of (human) judgement rather than nature itself. For Kant, the experience of the sublime was nothing but the experience of purpose in what ought to be 'purposeless things' in nature. Here is Alicia Juarrero, who has written plenty about this too:
"Although organisms cannot be explained mechanistically because of this strange kind of recursive causality unknown to us, Kant concluded that the impasse is due to a limitation of reason. His solution: relegate teleology and purposiveness to the "regulative judgment" by virtue of the self-organization that is their hallmark. By appealing to the critical turn, Kant thereby avoided an antinomy between mechanism and finality while allowing that mechanism and finality can perhaps be reconciled in the supersensible, a reconciliation, unfortunately, that we will never know. The assumption that only external forces can bring about change thus continued to deny causal efficacy to nonlinear feedback loops, and there- fore to self-organizing processes, which were accordingly dismissed as a form of causality unknown to us.
Even though Aristotle's Posterior Analytics was the first systematic attempt to examine the concept of cause, modern science summarily dismantled his system of four causes, and it is since mentioned for the most part only with a certain embarrassment. Despite opting in the end for a mechanistic understanding of causal relations, at least Kant recognized and addressed the problem of self-cause. Philosophers since, however, have for the most part ignored Kant's third Critique, the Critique of Judgment. By discarding Aristotelian appeals to formal or final cause while at the same time retain- ing his prohibition against that unknown form of causality, self-cause, modern philosophy of action effectively boxed itself into a corner". (Dynamics in Action).
Evan Thompson's Life in Mind - again about the same ideas - similarly begins it's history with Kant: "My starting point is to examine the theory of autopoiesis in relation to Kant's classic treatment of organic nature in his Critique of Judgment, first published in 1790 (Kant 1987). Kant gave an original and visionary account of the organism as a self-organizing being, an account close in many ways to the theory of autopoiesis."
So again, all the resources are there! We know all about this stuff, in detail, with plenty of scientific backing. People just need to read them, take them up, and digest them.
Yep. But I would add two things stand in the way of a widespread understanding of four causes holism.
First, classical reductionism sells itself not just because it is simple, but because it has good immediate pay-back. If you imagine all reality to be a machine, then that is how you get good at building machines and imposing machinery in ways that control existence. There's a lot of dollars in that.
Then related to that, no-one has produced a proper mathematics of holism. There is a ton of mathematical bits and pieces, like chaos theory, tensegrity, or whatever. But no-one has boiled it all down in the way Newton boiled down the mechanics of dynamics. So building holism in the world is hard due to a lack of first principle mathematical models.
I think immanent telos is a good idea. But immanent implies inherent within, so to think that it is generated, or emergent from the system is somewhat contradictory, it must be inherent within the system. Besides, we know that the existence of the intention (telos) is always prior to the existence of the thing created (in this case, the system itself). So I prefer something more in line with John's description.
Quoting John
Quoting StreetlightX
I think that you, as well as apokrisis, are too quick to jump to this conclusion (premise) of necessity. Where do you draw this "necessity" from? As extinction demonstrates, existence is just as much a contingency as anything else.
Quoting apokrisis
The whole point of teleology is that there is no necessity, that is what gives us free will. We are free to choose our ends, and the means. Necessity is artificial, created, it is not natural. We, as individuals, historically have created a sense of what's needed, food, shelter, etc. From this we develop a communal necessity, morality, laws, and eventually a logical necessity. Logical necessity is derived from this need, what is desired for a purpose, and this need is chosen.
We cannot confuse the two basic senses of "necessity", logical necessity, and that which is designated as necessary for a particular end, needed. The latter, is actually a contingency, and open to choice. The former being artificial and therefore unnatural, is a refined form of the latter.
Quoting John
This is not logical necessity referred to here, above, it is necessity in the sense of needed for an end.
Quoting Michael
When you consider the immanent nature of intentionality, purposefulness, and observe that it is inherent within all living beings, it is hard to deny that it is prior to living bodies, and realize that mutations were intentionally made to happen.
Quoting Michael
It is not that "a certain mutation needs to happen". It is the case that the living being does not know what mutation needs to happen, because the organism emerges in an environment of unknowns. Therefore, seemingly random mutations need to happen, in order that they can be judged in a process of trial and error, as the organisms become accustomed to the environment.
I meant to add that there is also Stan Salthe's hierarchical approach to a definition here that recognises various grades of telos, ranging from the brutely physical to the complexly mindful.
Salthe offers the stepping stones of {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}. Or in more regular language,
{propensity {function {purpose}}}.
See for instance: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284
So rather than getting stuck in an either/or argument, a hierarchical definition says that the whole of existence is teleological in a generic (and quite dilute) sense. And then a strong version of teleology is what arises intensionally - immanently within the generic condition - via semiosis, or the growth of reasonableness in complex systems.
Again, this seems right to you because of your ontological commitments. You are thinking in terms of directed outcomes - action that is the result of a big psychic hand reaching down to control material events.
But I am talking about an ontology based on constraints. So telos is about the evolution of such constraints. It is finality that is emergent and only "pre-exists" in the sense that even a chaos of possibility has only one generic way it will wind up organised. In hindsight, nothing else could have been possible as the way to average over all the tensions to result in an action that is the most efficient path connecting a start and its end.
So yes, humans are individuated within a historically-evolved social context. We are the product of a system of constraints. We are shaped by the culture within which we have no choice about growing up.
And yet that very culture - which has historically become pretty sophisticated - encourages this new thing of "freewill". We are encouraged to believe we all start off equal, the blank pages of an unwritten novel, and our job is to ink in that exciting life story. We are invited to demonstrate our individuation by kicking against the very thing of cultural constraints.
But as you say, this carte blanche is rather misguided. We actually still do depend on a social organisation to give us a place where we can actually live and flourish. So - if you go down the rabbit-hole of romanticism/existentialism - you wind up calling inauthentic the thing you most need to exist.
So one view is based on the notion that a positive form of freedom is what results from breaking free of all social and material constraints.
The other view says that is simply a recipe for chaos or vagueness. It is the evolution of constraints that are responsible for powerfully shaped degrees of freedom. To remove those constraints results in psychic collapse. You can't make definite choices unless you exist within a sharply definite reference frame - one that includes purposeful directions that you can either then go with, or act against, as a further locally individuated fact.
This is a point well taken, and I appreciate you pointing it out. That said, the only way I know how to make sense of a telos in this 'third' sense you mention here is through the notion of entropy, where the (necessary) cosmic dissipation of energy prompts the formation of local (contingent) negentropic eddies - one of which is life with it's concomitant processes of evolution. The article by Salthe that Apo cites introduces a third term, teleomaty, which he correlates to 'propensity', which more or less characterizes the entropic drive of the universe - the full hierarchy, which Apo also quoted, is:
{teleomaty (propensity) {teleonomy (function) {teleology} (purpose)}}.
Perhaps another way to put this is that entropy is a necessary question to which local (self-)organization are the (contingent) answer(s).
Quoting apokrisis
Mm, I have Salthe's Evolving Hierarchical Systems sitting on my shelf where it's been for about a year now, but it hasn't yet found it's way into my reading schedule. Hopefully I'll get to it by the end of the year, but so much else on the priority list right now.
Living things have intentions (assuming some level of consciousness), but they don't have the power to intentionally alter their genetic code (the emerging field of genetic engineering not withstanding).
Mutations don't happen because the organism wills it. They happen because a mistake is made as DNA copies itself or when ultraviolet radiation damages said DNA.
It's absurd to suggest that this radiation-induced damage or copy-failure occurs intentionally, as if DNA and electromagnetism have a will and want this to happen. Mystical nonsense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't understand what you're trying to say here, but it seems inconsistent with the above.
Try as I might I cannot begin to grasp how it could be that entropy "prompts" the formation of local negentropy. This may well be due to my lack of proper education in these matters, and I would certainly appreciate any help in understanding this that anyone might be able to offer.
Intuitively it has always seemed to me that any departure from absolute homogeneity and equilibrium represents a kind of disorder, so I cannot get my head around what local negentropy (order) could actually consist in, or how self-organization (is it really a kind of order or a kind of disorder?) could come about. If it is a kind of order, then is it a 'reconcentration' of some vestiges of order left over from the posited almost perfect original homogeneity? What about the large scale homogeneity and equilibrium of a 'heat death'? Is that maximal disorder or a magnified return and perfection of the absolute stasis almost achieved in the original moment? Is entropy anything more than the arbitrary brute behavior of matter/energy, entirely encapsualted in the efficient realm? How could we justify a belief that it must be a formal principle or a necessary telos?
Quite! The fact that information from the environment (which for the genome includes the organism) cannot be transferred to the genome is so important that it has it's own name:
THE CENTRAL DOGMA OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
Now watch, someone is going to complain that it is a "dogma". Sure, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics is only a "model". Sorry, but in reality, information flows in one direction only:
DNA -> RNA -> Proteins. And there is no mechanism for the reverse.
But actually the truth is even more fundamental. Von Neumann showed that an accurate self-reproducer must consist of a replicator and a vehicle.
Quoting StreetlightX
Now you have both turned to an external telos. But there is no reason to drop the notion of immanent telos, which is prior to, and acts as the cause of living organisms. Just because the science isn't there, to understand this immanent telos, doesn't mean that to speculate in this direction is a lost cause. Nor does it mean that we cannot produce a coherent understanding in this direction. What is needed is a proper understanding of existence in relation to the passing of time.
Quoting Michael
I do not conceive of intention requiring consciousness, I understand consciousness as requiring intention. This positions intention as prior to consciousness. This is consistent with observations that plants and animals which do not appear to have developed consciousness, still act purposefully. Therefore intention (purposefulness) appears to inhere within all living things. It appears to exist primarily as an instinctual directing of the activities of living things. This goes right to the molecular level, and the activities of DNA, such as mitosis, whatever it is which "acts" at this level. I don't think biological science has properly identified what it is which is acting, because it must be acting at a sub-atomic level to produce such molecular changes. But this thing which is acting, is clearly acting purposefully, or intentionally. And it is also responsible for genetic changes.
The key to this conceptual scheme is to understand all living activities as caused from within. The external shapes and affects the internal activities, but does not cause them. This means that we distance ourselves from Newton's first law, which implies that a thing will persist unchanged until acted upon by an external force. We must dismiss this law to account for living activities which have an internal source of movement. Now the determinist, physicalist, models, which represent the living organism as being caused to do this or that, by external causes, are rejected, in favour of a model which represents the cause of living activity as emanating from within, and being affected by external obstacles.
Plants don't act purposefully, they act reactively. Animals act purposefully to the extent that they have consciousness (although a determinist or compatibilist would argue that even the intentionality in consciousness is itself a reactive phenomenon).
Either you're misusing the words "purpose" and "intention" or you're arguing for some sort of mysticism with no scientific support.
The only "telos" in genetic mutation and evolution is one that is the necessary or probabilistic consequence of physical causation. But it's important not to conflate this sense of telos with that of intention (which is a feature of consciousness).
And what do you mean by "internal source of movement"? Do you just mean movement caused by things behind a body's surface, e.g. inner organs and whatnot?
This is the misunderstanding that we must reject in order to properly understand the existence of life. Do you think that photosynthesis is not a purposeful act?
Quoting Michael
Reread my post, I think there is a preliminary answer to this question there. If you have a specific problem, please address it to me. But don't ask me to rewrite what I just wrote, if you skipped over the passage, not taking the time to understand the words.
Yes, I think that photosynthesis is not a purposeful act. A purposeful act is an act done by conscious determination.
I read your post, and nowhere do you explain it. You simply say that "all living activities as caused from within", that we must reject the claim that "a thing will persist unchanged until acted upon by an external force", and that "living activities ... have an internal source of movement".
What is the distinction between an "internal" and an "external" cause? I understand these terms as referring to the spatial location of an object, such that a thing located on one side of a wall, under a roof, is inside the house and a thing located on the other side of the wall, under the open sky, is outside the house, and that a thing located between my chest and my back is inside me and a thing located between my chest and your chest – whilst facing each other – is outside me.
You seem to be using the terms in a very different way, so I'd like it explained.
It's one of the more counterintuitive facts when it comes to entropy, but the idea is actually quite simple: local negentropy accelerates - and thus increases - global entropy. Think about it: any sort of organisation (your bedroom, a city, an ecosystem) requires that work be constantly put into sustaining that organization; without work, organization dissipates (thanks to the second law: the total entropy of an isolated system always increase over time). Thus, there is a price to pay for any local organization. The interesting point however, is that any work put in to sustain local organization generally ends up producing more entropy at a global scale - think waste products, waste processing, energy expenditure, etc. This is especially evident when it comes to living systems, which sustain their local organization at the price of dissipating the energy gradients available in the immediate environment. Hence: local negentropy accelerates global entropy in a way that doesn't violate the second law.
In truth however, this is only half the story. While the above explains how it is possible for organizing systems to arise in the first place, the question remains how such self-organizing systems actually arose. Why did the energy gradient that existed at the beginning of the universe not simply 'wind down' without creating all the 'intermediary' self-organizing structures that accelerated it? The answer has to do with the lack of symmetry in the universe - the universe - and life especially - is full of asymmetries. From the abundance of matter over anti-matter, to the curious exclusivity of 'left-handed' neutrinos in nature, to the 'right-handedness' of the DNA helix and the asymmetries of animo acids, these asymmetries basically 'force' organization to happen. An entirely symmetrical universe would dissipate symmetrically, foreclosing any sort of self-organizing capacities. The exact source(s) of cosmic asymmetry are hotly debated, but it's these asymmetries which account for self-organizing tendencies which do not violate the second law.
Taking it back to evolution, the point is that entropy, together with cosmic asymmetry - provides the base of 'propensity' that drives organization in the universe. The argument is that together with the right conditions - one of the leading being the environment created by hydrothemral vents at the bottom of the ocean - life - and with it evolution - becomes a quite likely outcome of these initial conditions. Anyway, I'm trying to pack alot of info - the beginnings of life and the cosmic development of the universe! - into a few paragraphs, but I hope it provides an understandable, if very basic picture, of how a telos might arise naturally based off of entropic principles.
This is true, but it paints a misleading picture of the complexity of gene expression. First of all, the process of gene expression is multi-final. That is, the same DNA codon can produce different proteins, depending of the state of the cell at any one time. Moreover, proteins themselves also function differently depending on the environment in which they are themselves found in. John Protevi puts it as follows: "So we've gone from "one string of DNA = one gene = one protein = one function" to "one string of DNA (structural / hereditary gene) = many (functional) genes (many mature mRNA transcripts) = many proteins = many functions. ... gene formation and expression depends on cell dynamics which are part of larger networks."
So while the central dogma remains inviolable - in ontogenesis, neither environment nor phenotype can alter genotype - the idea that DNA simply codes for a protein in a simple, unambiguous manner is incredibly misleading. This is why Jablonka and Lamb, and West-Eberhard are not Lamarckians. It's not that the environment acts directly upon genotype, but rather, to quote Eberhard: "a new phenotype develops (developmental plasticity) by being induced via a genetic mutation or an environmental difference. What has happened here in the latter case is that the new environment has brought forth an untapped potential of the pre-existing genetic variation." - the 'potential' here being the differential manner in which genertype can code for different proteins which in turn can function in different manners. the simple picture of DNA -> RNA -> Proteins paints a picture of equifinality (same starting point = same results) whereas the actual process of gene expression is multi-final.
Genes can be turned on and off. I think the question on the table was whether epigenetics is an evolutionary factor... so for instance: what did the unprecedented scale of violence in the 20th Century do to us (in terms of our hardware)? It's unknown.
"The prominence of genes in both the general media and the scientific press suggests that in this new science of genomics, twentieth-century genetics has achieved its apotheosis. Yet, the very successes that have so stirred our imagination have also radically undermined their core driving concept, the concept of the gene. … Now that the genomes of several lower organisms have been fully sequenced, the call for a new phase of genome analysis—functional genomics rather than structural genomics—is heard with growing frequency … For almost fifty years, we lulled ourselves into believing that, in discovering the molecular basis of genetic information, we had found the “secret of life”; we were confident that if we could only decode the message in DNA’s sequence of nucleotides, we would understand the “program” that makes an organism what it is. And we marveled at how simple the answer seemed to be. But now, in the call for a functional genomics, we can read at least a tacit acknowledgment of how large the gap between genetic “information” and biological meaning really is".
Quoting MichaelYes, this is a good description, so I am not using terms in a very different way. You distinguish between the internal and external of an object. Now consider an object, a body, in relation to Newton's first law. That body will continue in the state that it is, unless acted upon by a force. Let's say that the force is the cause of change, or motion. The force could have a source outside that body, or it could have a source from within that body. This is the difference between internal and external cause.
So, in my post, I questioned:
"the activities of DNA, such as mitosis, whatever it is which "acts" at this level. I don't think biological science has properly identified what it is which is acting, because it must be acting at a sub-atomic level to produce such molecular changes".
Consider activities such as mitosis and meiosis. What do you think is the active agent in such activities, what is acting? We could say that the cell is acting, then we assume an internal cause. What is this internal cause, or force?
Yeah, which is a very unconventional, and so confusing, use of the word "intention" (or "purpose").
I don't see how you get from "X successfully achieves Y" to "A intentionally uses X to achieve Y".
I use the word in this restricted sense because that's what the word means. If I intend to do something then I have made the conscious decision to do that thing.
To say that I intend to do something but that I haven't consciously decided to do that thing strikes me as a very obvious contradiction
What, exactly, do you mean by the word "intend"? What does it mean for an habitual act to be carried out intentionally?
Mitosis and meiosis are reactive events that occur in response to physical changes in their environment. It's not much different to a computer turning on in response to a button being pressed. What, exactly, are you suggesting? You haven't been very clear. Are you arguing against the notion of physical causation and in favour of a supernatural explanation? If so then what's the evidence, and if not then what view are you attacking?
Thanks SX; I was familiar with most of what you wrote, except the "left-handedness of neutrinos and the right-handedness of the DNA helix. I suppose the (I guess we must think universal?) operation of entropy is itself the most basic asymmetry, since it would seem to produce temporal directionality. You say that a symmetrical universe would dissipate symmetrically.Thinking about this the question that comes to mind is whether in an absolutely homogeneous, that is absolutely symmetrical, universe any dissipation of energy would occur at all.
The origin of asymmetry may be "hotly contested" but does it seem plausible there could be any hope of answering this question by either empirical observation or mathematical modeling?
Also, I still don't see why an asymmetrical universe might not simply dissipate chaotically without producing any order. It still seems to be the case that order, in terms of the invariant behavior of matter/energy in its various forms must be inherent, for entropic dissipation in the form of ordered complexification to occur. So, I still don't have a handle on howQuoting StreetlightX. I can see, that is how it makes sense that the asymmetries allow for self-organization but not howQuoting StreetlightX
Surely you don't deny that we might have unconscious intentions?
One could surely only be aware of thinking of having unconscious intentions if one were conscious?
I think the Neo-Darwinian idea is that general, statistically predictable variability within a gene pool just is the expression of novel mutations. For this to follow it would seem that the sheer novelty of the mutations would have to be suitably restricted; and of course it is suitably restricted by the generally lawlike invariant behavior of matter/energy.
Quoting John
SX makes the critical points very nicely. I will add a few thoughts.
The baseline state of the Universe was set up by the symmetry breaking that was the hot Big Bang. The Universe started out as a simple spreading/cooling bath of radiation. So from one perspective, it was an entropic gradient - the Universe was running down the hill from the Planck temperature towards absolute zero. But then because the Universe was effectively its own heat sink - it cooled by metric expansion - you could say that this creation of "new space" was a matching negentropic order.
So from a global perspective - one that counts degrees of freedom or microstates - it is difficult to say the entropy count actually changes. The essential change - the symmetry breaking represented by the Big Bang - already created a maximum entropy state. The radiative contents were already as messy as they could be. The now locked in story of a constant c rate radiative expansion and cooling had been "paid for" in terms of the phase transition that resulted in such a world with its orderly Planck scale structure and three dimensional, radiation dissipating, geometry.
So if we ask the usual question of how the Universe started in a state of high negentropy - an initial orderliness which could then be the fuel for a second law trajectory towards messiness - one answer is that the Big Bang was itself a mathematical-strength structural asymmetry just waiting to happen.
Before the Big Bang was a vagueness or quantum roil - a state of unbounded fluctuation or infinite dimensionality. There was action happening in any direction and so no actual global geometry or real dissipation. For structural reasons, limiting this wild chaos by constraining the action to a 3D heat sink - grabbing a chunk of this primal energy and spinning it into a cool/expanding fabric of radiative events - was a way to make a world. It created a realm of distinct pathways - the three dimensions that allowed powerlaw dilution of thermal action - that could then roll downhill towards a maximum separation between the complementary things of position and momentum, the container that is spacetime and the contents of this expanding box which was its gas of particles or thermalising events.
So before the Big Bang, things would (logically) have been so symmetrical as to be vague. Action was unbounded and so nothing existed to say that anything was happening in some direction. The Big Bang was then the dualised creation of the very split by which negentropy and entropy could even be distinguished. The emergence of an expanding spacetime dimensionality as the organised container was what made possible a matching story of spreading and so cooling particles or thermalising events. Structurally, it locked in a trajectory in which particles could make symmetric exchanges of energy among themselves - there was no trajectory of change at the individual level. But then emergently, statistically, the particles would find themselves behaving asymmetrically, the hotter particles always on the whole yielding to the probability they would make radiative exchanges with cooler particles.
This very simple initial universe - a spreading/cooling gas - then hit further symmetry breakings as its temperature dropped. Like a tide going out, suddenly a rocky deeper structure was exposed and rock pools of trapped negentropy formed.
The critical one was the electroweak symmetry breaking that saw the Higgs mechanism switched on and particles becoming gravitationally massive. This happened all at once at a critical temperature and so represented a sudden entropic deceleration everywhere in the Universe. There was a shift from the steady entropification rate where radiation was spreading as fast as it could - the speed of light - to a Universe where a good chunk of its hot contents was now dragging along at sub-light speed. The balance of the Universe was suddenly out of equilibrium, setting up the need (the telos) for a new level of dissipative mechanism. The Universe was spreading/cooling at a sub-optimal rate now. And so that paid for any further negentropic structure that would help it catch up, re-accelerate the entropification.
Hence stars. Mass clumped gravitationally. But then as a further twist of fate, it caught fire and started turning mass into radiation.
That then left its own negentropic residue in the form of heavy elements and rocky planets. And so afresh, you have the negentropic platform for life to emerge and add its (fantastically tiny) contribution to the universal cause.
So my point is that second law entropy thinking explains a heck of a lot. But metaphysically, we then have to recognise how entropy and negentropy are two faces of the same coin in some deep way. And rather than chasing some chicken and egg question of which comes first - the symmetry or its breaking - we need to have a story where they both co-arise in synergistic fashion from an even more primal state - the state that can be dubbed a chaos, an apeiron, a roil, a vagueness, an unbounded dimensionality of fluctuation.
But it is still the case that the Big Bang looks to represent a properly crisp symmetry breaking. That was the instant when a strictly limited dimensionality clicked into place. And from there, with spreading/cooling as a locked in story, further mathematical outcomes become a historical inevitability. Once action was confined to the point where it had highly constrained properties - once it was playing out in a world in which crisp dimensionality underwrote definite symmetries like those of translation and rotation - then the structural mathematics of those definite symmetries became an inevitable emergent fact. As the Universe cooled enough, it would have to go through the symmetry breakings that are represented by gauge symmetries or lie groups in particular, and so result in the Standard Model family of fundamental particles.
Long-term of course, all matter should be returned to pure radiation even if it has to be swept up into black holes first. At the Heat Death, following a history of sudden global decelerations and subsequent slowly catching up local re-accelerations, the Universe will get back to being a homogenous entropic equilibrium. It will become just the lingering black body fizzle of cosmic event horizon radiation.
But that of course is a steady-state fate that is itself underwritten by the new thing of dark energy or the cosmological constant. Everywhere the spatial fabric of the Universe is undergoing a further faint acceleration for some reason.
This is the reason we can now say the Universe will coast to a halt in terms of cosmic event horizons and so - in third law of thermodynamic fashion - actually arrive at a minimum entropy condition (rather than cooling endlessly). In Red Queen style, the Universe will still be expanding/cooling at c. But that will become running on the spot for event horizons as the underlying spacetime will be continuing to accelerate away at superluminal speed.
Yet while this negentropic dark energy acceleration is a further energy that makes certain the general entropic tale of the Universe is drawn to a close, it is of course now a new source of mystery. The hope is that a better understanding of the symmetry breaking that was the Big Bang will reveal how dark energy is again the negentropic flip-side of some larger entropic symmetry breaking. It must be another tiny source of order that paid for a lot of extra mess in some fashion.
So our explanatory instinct is always to try to arrange existence into a temporal order of causes and effects. If we are talking about entropy and negentropy, mess and order, spacetime and material contents, symmetries and symmetry-breakings, we want to decide which is chicken, which is egg. We want to impose a temporal linearity that conforms with our metaphysical prejudices.
But while that is indeed a useful way of looking at things, and even a true way of looking at things once a state of crisp organisation has developed, there is then a deeper way of looking at things which is dependent on seeing symmetry and symmetry-breaking as itself the two sides of one coin. As each other's dichotomous "other", each has to arise in the presence of its opposite even to be crisply actual.
Four causes thinking can get at this by treating finality as "lurking structure awaiting its inevitable expression".
Who knew that the entropic cooling/spreading of a 3D bath of radiation would have to get interrupted by a cascade of further negentropic symmetry-breakings as it passed critical temperatures? Well those breakings already lurked in the future due to the necessity of structural mathematics. The path to ultimate simplicity was always going to be a bumpy ride as it jolted over these hidden symmetry features that define the Standard Model family of particle species - all the ways that spin in particular can have a complexity, an intrinsic asymmetry, in its directions.
The most basic answer is that asymmetry means that things will clump together in ways that will accelerate more clumping - hence the formation of local negentropic eddies. It's a matter of feedback: tiny asymmetries in the otherwise homogeneous energy soup of the universe tend to feedback upon themselves to create larger (local) asymmetries. Apo's account is a far better one than I can give - biology is more my shtick, rather than cosmology - but the same principles are operative all throughout nature.
So rather than speak about the sub-atomic realm, which I'm not as familiar with, one can think about the analogous situation at the level of planet formation: planets begin their life as nebulous clouds which, thanks to gravity, begin to clump together at the centre. Because the gravitational forces are generally not uniformally spread - they are asymmetrical! - some parts of the cloud become more dense than others, eventually causing a 'tipping' effect which means that the cloud begins to spin along one axis of rotation rather than another. The angular momentum then engenders a centripetal effect, where matter is drawn into the center of the spinning disk. The end result of this process is a planet.
The point is that while the mechanisms are different at the subatomic level (the Higgs, etc), the actual principles of formation are the same; asymmetrical differences driven by entropic necessity begin to feedback upon themselves after having (contingently) 'tipped over' certain thresholds. So the short answer to your question is this: if you couple feedback with asymmetry in a closed system subject to entropy, you get negentropic eddies of organization. The exact details of the system under consideration will depend on the qualities of the matter in question (i.e. whether you're dealing with dust nebulae, subatomic particles, living populations, etc), but whatever scale of the universe you pick out, the same morphogenetic principles (principles which preside over the generation of 'form' (morphe)) tend to be at play.
What's key however, is that the above is an immanent account of morphogenesis. Planents don't form they way they do because of any 'external' Idea of Planethood; rather, planets are the way they are because of the processes which engender them, processes which abide by the play of necessity and chance at work in all morphogenetic processes. The trick is in extending these naturalist principles down to the level of ontogeny (development of the individual organism) and phylogeny (evolution of the species) as well.
OK, thanks apokrisis and StreetlightX, your replies have given me plenty to think about.
X is an attribute, a property which is necessarily attributed to something, and this implies the existence of A, which X is the property of. You say "photosynthesis produces sugar" (X achieves Y). So where's the intention?" I say the intention is in the plant, A. You remove the plant, and you remove the intention.
When you remove the part from the whole, and analyze the function of the part, there is no intention to be found here. Intention is found in the relationship of the part to the whole, the purpose that the part has with respect to the whole. Your computer, for example, has many components, each of which, on its own, has a function. Put together, they make a computer, and each part's function has a purpose in relation to the existence of the computer as a whole. Since each part has a purpose in relation to the whole, we can conclude that it was put together with intention. If someone analyzes the computer itself, the fact that the parts have a purpose with respect to the whole, implies design, intention.
You want to deny the validity of this inductive conclusion, that when the parts of a thing have a purpose in relation to the whole thing, the thing was created with intention. You do this by denying that there is intention involved, in places where there really is. That is simple denial of reality. How can you deny that photosynthesis is useful to the plant? And if it is useful, how can you deny that it is purposeful? And if it is purposeful, how can you deny that it is intentional?
Quoting Michael
To say that an act has purpose in relation to a larger whole, is to say that it is intentional, it is carried out intentionally. There is no need to assume that the thing which carries out an intentional act, does so consciously. In the example of your computer, each part plays a role with respect to the whole. This makes "the role" an intentional act. What the part does, in relation to the whole, is an intentional act, it was produce with intent, but the part is not conscious. Intention is not acting within the computer, as it does in living things, it is imposed from an external source, and this is called design.
Earlier in the thread, I stressed that we should separate intention as imposed from an external source, design, from intention which inheres within. The former we infer by analyzing artificial things, the latter we infer by analyzing natural things.
Quoting Michael
Intention is implied within each of these acts. That the computer turns on when you hit the button implies that the computer was created with intention, designed. That the living cell divides when the time is right, implies that it was created with design. So, we look for the designer. The computer has an external designer. The living cell appears to have an internal designer.
Quoting Michael
What I am attacking is the false representation of intentional acts, commonly referred to as "chance". What I believe is that intention is not evident in observations of physical causation, it must be inferred. It is inferred in a method similar to what I described above. When a part plays a role in a larger whole, then intention is implied. We have much evidence where intention is involved in human artifacts. Artificial things are often separated from natural things. Rather than argue that artificial things are supernatural, I would argue that the exclusion of intention from natural things, is a mistake.
The modern perspective sees intention as something imposed externally. This implies an external designer of the intentional thing, such as the computer. Some may proceed to assume an external, transcendental Designer, of the entire natural world. But this neglects the natural, real existence of intention, as something within. So when we consider intention as it really is, in its natural state, we find it as something inherent within nature, immanent. This is where we find intention, through introspection, inhering within us, each, individually. And this intention is natural.
So to exclude intention from nature, as you want to do, and to say that those who apprehend purpose, or intention, within the natural acts of plants and animals, are invoking the supernatural, is a mistake. We simply see "nature" in a different way, a more comprehensive way, one which allows intention to be a natural thing.
A designer is someone who makes conscious decisions to achieve some desired end. So, again, you're misusing words (or arguing for some sort of intelligence that makes genetic mutations occur).
What's the difference between X being the result of a natural, non-conscious intention and X being the causal consequence of prior physical phenomena?
None the less the concept of acquired characteristics is included in both the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, and taken as read.
His 'empirical' evidence of evolution via natural selection is never established except by inference with domestic selection. And ever Karl Popper had to give him a free pass when it came to falsification.
Quoting unenlightened
Now, consider what StreetlightX says:
Quoting StreetlightX
So here's an analogy. Consider that genes are like words, which, together in combination, produce something. You might think that if you select the proper words, you will create a sentence with one fixed meaning. But this is not the case, due to variance in the meaning of individual words, the meaning of the sentence might be different depending on the individual who interprets the sentence. Likewise, the same genes might have a different effect on the phenotype, depending on the individual. This means that there is something deeper which acts to determines the phenotype, rather than just the genes. That is, something deeper than the genes, which actually interprets the genes, like a mind is necessary to interpret words. And it is due to this factor, the necessity of something which "interprets", that words, nor genes, have a fixed meaning.
Quoting MichaelIntention is understood to be non-physical. We understand the intentional agent, a human being for example, to choose the appropriate efficient causes (physical causes), required to bring about the desired end. This is a free will action. Thus intention is understood as a cause which creates a physical activity (efficient cause), without itself being such a thing. What is not understood is how the intentional agent starts a chain of efficient causes. A determinist doesn't allow such a chain of efficient cause to start in this way. That is the difference.
Or it might be something shallower. My story is that there are a number of genes that 'mean' amongst other things 'more pepper'. And also possibly some that 'mean' 'less pepper'. So as the industrial revolution changes the environment first one way and then the other, the population, i.e. the gene pool, quickly adjusts the average amount of pepper in the peppered moth, by preferentially eliminating first those with not enough pepper, and then later reverses to eliminate those with too much pepper.
Such changes in distribution of genes in a population cannot conceivably be the result of intention at the cellular, or phenotypical level. I fail to see how one can intend without foresight which is based on memory and projection to a future. I see no reason to impute such things without evidence at the intra-cellular level at which genetic interpretation occurs.
I'm not assuming this. It simply follows from the common definition of "intention"/"purpose"/"design". You're misusing these words.
Again you're offering an example of consciousness to make sense of intention. I'm asking you to make sense of non-conscious intention. What is an intentional agent if not a conscious thing with, as @unenlightened explains, (motivating) foresight?
It seems to me that this non-conscious intention/purpose/design is a contradictory concept.
A determinist does allow for such a chain. They just reject the claim that intention is non-physical. A non-determinist, on the other hand, accepts that intention is non-physical but is an element of consciousness.
Intention is based in desire, want, and this is based in a deficiency, or deprivation of existence. So for instance, because of a deficiency, I am hungry. So I have a desire, or want to eat. Thus I intend to eat. This is all derived from my instinctual projection into the future, my inherent will to subsist.
From this perspective, the subsistence of a living thing, which requires nourishment, depends on this projection into the future. This projection into the future is a fundamental feature of, and therefore an indication of, or evidence of, intention. Quoting unenlightenedSo there you have your evidence, survival is itself a projection into the future. With respect to "genetic interpretation", we still need to assume something which does the interpreting. This "something" is the thing which acts with intention. What do you think performs genetic interpretations? I think it's the soul.
I am not misusing these words. You are attempting to impose unjustified restriction on my use of words. Look, "Intend" means to have as one's purpose. Purpose is defined as an object to be obtained. There is no reason to assume, that necessarily, what is referred to by "one", is a human being. Therefore a beaver may intend to build a dam. A bird may intend to build a nest. .
Quoting MichaelI already answered this. Plants are clearly not conscious, yet they carry out intentional acts such as photosynthesis. The plant produces sugar, with the "foresight" that it needs sugar within the flower to attract bees for reproduction. The plant produces seeds with the "foresight" of future generations. Foresight is defined as regard or provision for the future.
Though you may be a competent scientist, I don't know, you are simply uneducated, and in complete denial with respect to the facts of life. You attempt to justify your denial by claiming that I am misusing words. But no manner of restricting the use of words can change the reality of living beings.
"Purpose" is defined as "the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists". The reason in this context is to be understood as foresight. Only conscious things have foresight.
I'm not saying that the intentional agent must be human. I'm saying that the intentional agent must be conscious. A non-conscious thing having intentions is nonsensical. Plants don't intend to do anything. They just react to environmental stimulation.
It's not an intentional act. It's a reaction. Using the term "intention" here is quite simply a misuse of the term.
Why are you quoting the term "foresight"? Is it because you recognise that foresight is something that only conscious things have, and as such doesn't apply to plants? Plants have no regard for the future. You're just talking nonsense.
If anyone is in denial here, it isn't me.
And I am saying that it is quite clear that this is a mistaken assumption. It doesn't matter how many people agree with you, a mistaken assumption is still mistaken. And to change the definitions of common words, to support your mistaken assumption does not make the mistake go away either.
Direct from OED:
purpose: "an object to be attained; a thing intended"
foresight: "regard or provision for the future"
Accordingly, any act of self-nourishment, which is carried out for the purpose of subsistence, is done so according to foresight. Therefore I maintain my charge that your attempt to restrict my use of words, in the way that you are, is unjustified.
Quoting Michael
I'm sorry to have to shatter your illusions, but you're just plain wrong. And the fact that you will go to the extent of redefining words, to support your incorrect premise, indicates that you are steadfast in your refusal to recognize how wrong you are.
Quoting MichaelYou can deny that self-nourishment and photosynthesis are acts of providing for the future, and that producing seed is an act of providing for the future, all that you want, but you're only fooling yourself.
I'm not saying that they don't provide for the future. I'm saying that they have no regard for the future. To have regard for something is to think of or consider it.
Raining provides water for people to drink, but it doesn't then follow that the clouds have a regard for the well-being of living things. It doesn't then follow that the clouds intend for plants and animals to drink and survive.
Nope. You're the one in the wrong here. Something done on purpose is to be contrasted with something done by accident. If I make the conscious decision to break the vase then I broke it on purpose. If I broke the vase because I tripped over the cat then I broke the vase by accident. The series of events that lead to photosynthesis and genetic mutation are akin to the latter – a simple consequence of (non-conscious) physical causes. There's no conscious decision, and so no purpose, no intention, and no design.
My laptop has foresight. It tells me it will shut down unless I plug in the charger, and then if I don't, it shuts down.
But I suspect the intention lies with the programmer.
After further reflection on what you have written, I can't see how it could be that claiming that everything that appears to us as order is really down to entropy, is significantly different than saying that formal cause is really nothing but efficient cause.
It seems to me that entropy just is symmetry-breaking, which just is energy flow, which just is efficient causation.
Another question that comes up for me is the question of necessity in relation to entropy. Would you want to say that all possible worlds are entropic? If that were so, then entropy itself must be thought to stand as a 'platonic-like' principle above all possible worlds
Energy flow is efficient causation? Apples and oranges?
Questions about causation are usually why? questions. When asking why?, we're looking for how two things relate (or how a car relates to the whole train). For instance:
Why does my heartbeat speed up when I run?
Efficient cause: sympathetic nerve
Final cause: to speed up CO2 removal and glucose distribution
All the parties involved are following the path of least resistance. I'm not sure what entropy has to do with it (or if entropy is just a feature of the way we experience events.)
Quoting Mongrel
I'm not wanting to valorize reductive thinking. I'm trying to look at the issue from the POV of the thinker who says (as apo and SX apparently do) that all apparent order is really the result of entropy. So, what is entropy? It is, basically, directional flow of energy, no? What is efficient causation? It is the directional (cause to effect) application of force (energy), isn't it?
So the efficient cause of your elevated heart-rate, that is the most proximal cause, might be, for example, an electro-chemical signal from your sinus node to the muscle tissues that constitute your heart. That is more 'proximal' than the antecedent fact you are running, or the nerve signals from your muscles to your sinus node. We might be able to analyze it to an even more local efficient cause or set of efficient causes, but they all, in any case, involve energy exchange ( flow) and it is always directional. Thus we have temporality.
The final cause you example is itself understood to be a a set of outcomes which result from other chains of efficient causation. But again it is all a matter of the forced redistribution of matter/ energy. If this directional flowing of energy, with all its local accumulations, eddies, torrents and trickles, is really all there is to reality; then formal and final cause are reducible, in the final analysis, to efficient causation.
This would be to say that reality is 'all external' there is no genuine 'inner prompting' but just the appearance of it in complex systems (including ourselves); an illusory appearance simply due to our inability to grasp the totality of the determining efficient causes or energy flows.
Now, I don't believe it is the case that all there is is energy and its accumulations and flows, but I acknowledge that my belief is based pretty much solely on the fact that I trust my intuitions. I don't believe anyone can go anywhere near grasping the purported totality of efficient cause, and even if they could they could still never demonstrate that efficient cause is the whole story. The question of whether entropy and efficient cause is all can never be definitively answered empirically, due to our obvious and ineliminable epistemic limitations in that sphere. I think those who champion the idea that all can be explained by symmetry breaking are simply putting their faith in science instead of putting it in their own intuitions (or perhaps they simply don't have the 'temptations' due to any such spiritual intuitions?) In any case, for me, it seems to be inevitable that it comes down to faith.
By trying to look at the situation from the reductionist POV, I am really just trying to clarify to myself exactly what it is they are logically committed to in virtue of their claims.
Quoting Mongrel
See, I would say that entropy is precisely "the line of least resistance".
And that just tapped out my physics knowledge. :)
As I said.. efficient and final causes are the answers to two different kinds of question. If you know what a sinus node is, you must have studied enough A&P to be impressed by exactly how dense the lines of final causation are with even relatively simple organisms. It's all about the questions we're asking.
There is no definition of "regard" in my dictionary, which mentions "to think", or "consider" as you claim regard means. There are definitions which refer to "see", "give heed to", "look upon", "have relation to", etc., but why do you insist on "think"?
Quoting Michael
Quoting unenlightenedI never claimed that intention is essential to foresight, so I do not pretend that anything with foresight necessarily has intention. Unenlightened brought up foresight, and I agree that foresight may be an indication of intention, in the sense that foresight might be an essential aspect of intention, as unenlightened implied. But all this means is that anything with intention, also has foresight. It does not mean that everything with foresight has intention. So if you want to argue that rain, and laptops, provide for the future, and therefore have foresight, this does not necessitate that they have intention.
Quoting unenlightened That's right, I totally agree, and we went though this already, the difference between intention imposed from an external designer, and intention of an internal source. This is when Michael asked if I was making an appeal to the supernatural. So long as we maintain strict principles which define intention as inherent, immanent, intention remains as a natural thing, inhering within living beings, and not the property of an external, transcendent, designer of living things.
The intention externally imposed upon the components of the computer by the designer, and artificer, allows us to say that the parts exist in a specific relationship to each other, due to intention. That the computer exists in this designed way, is evidence that the relations of the parts is intentional. But intention itself, in its natural form, is within the designer. So despite the fact that the thing exists in a designed form, intention itself is separable from the designed form, and is attributable to the designer, as inherent within the designer, not within the designed form itself.
Due to the relationships between parts, we can conclude that DNA is a designed form, the parts exist in purposeful relations, so as to indicate that it is intentional. But intention is not necessarily within that deigned form, nor is it necessarily imposed from an external designer. It may inhere deeper, within a subatomic, immaterial agent, which creates that physical form.
From here:
1. Consider or think of in a specified way
So you're saying that plants see, give heed to, or look upon the future?
Yes, and consciousness is an essential aspect of foresight (foresight being "the ability to predict what will happen or be needed in the future"). Therefore consciousness is an essential aspect of intention.
They definitely have a relation to the future, but my favourite would be "let one's course be affected by" the future. That's exactly what I've been describing. From the day it starts growing, the plant intends to produce seed. It has as a purpose for growing, and that is to produce seed.
We disagree, so what? We each understand "intend" in a different way. I think you're wrong, and you misunderstand intention. You seem to think the same way about me. Now we can each go home and realize that someone else understands "intend" in a different way. I already know this though, because I've already been exposed to this type of narrow-minded thinking.
Yeah, I'm not real big on physics either; but taking a stab, I would say that the global tendency to go from higher to lower energy states, although apparently contravened by local self-organization (which is seems on the face of it to consist in accumulation, rather than dissipation, of energy) would be considered by thinkers of entropy to be the ultimate driver of efficient causation, despite any appearances to the contrary. So local accumulations or slowings of energy dissipation would inevitably cause faster dissipations of energy elsewhere, and this whole process could be modeled in terms of efficient causation if only we had all the facts. I think the problem for final or formal cause is that they cannot be modeled in terms of the physical, without resorting to mechanism; and mechanistic thinking is inescapably reductive.
Yes, I certainly agree with you that the ideas of efficient, formal and final causation represent different ways of looking at things and asking questions about them.
I haven't studied that much A&P, I know about the sinus node because I have a condition called 'Inappropriate Sinus Tachycardia'. Luckily it is mild, these days virtually nonexistent, if I don't overindulge in stimulants such as THC, LSD, alcohol, nicotine and caffeine and my heart is very fit according to all the tests, and I get plenty of exercise, eat very well, and so on. Apparently it is a condition most commonly found in adolescent females :-}, and it was much more extreme in my own adolescence (which made the racing heart that occurred during my copious psychotropic experiences pretty alarming and even terrifying, at times).
I agree with you that we elaborate "dense lines of final causation", but I don't think they can be effectively modeled in truly physicalist terms; and that is precisely the nub of the issue, as I see it.
Also if one wanted to posit the fundamental nature of semiosis, as apo does, then the fundamental relationship between semiosis and physical stuff seems to remains inevitably forever elusive, just as dualism's posited relation between mind and matter does. We model things in terms of the physical, but the modeling itself is semantic or semiotic. How can it be reduced to 'common terms'? I don't think we have a shadow of a clue, discursively speaking at least, as to what such 'common terms' might be. I have no doubt that, despite this apparently insurmountable difficulty for empirically based reason, we will continue to be issued with promissory notes by those of a scientistic bent, though.
How can the future effect a plant's present course (or anything, for that matter)? You're arguing for retrocausality (not that I know how such a thing would be relevant)?
What's the difference between saying that the plant intends to produce seed and saying that the plant will produce seed?
Perhaps MU is using 'intend' to mean something like 'inward tendency'. The inward tendency of plants to produce seed could be said to be a function of the earlier instantiations of plants' relationships (in terms of viability) to the later instantiations of those plants, as it affected past (to us) but future (to the earlier plants) instantiations of those plants.
This is not quite it. Think of entropy as a very general - perhaps the most general - imperative: "things need to get from here (inhomogeneous distribution of energy) to there (homogenous distribution of energy)". I refer to it as 'general' however, but 'it' is indifferent to the question of how things get from 'here' to 'there'. This is why Salthe refers to it simply as 'propensity'. So order is not, strictly speaking, the 'result' of entropy. If you take two boxes, fill one with gas, then connect them up, the gas will simply redistribute equally between the two boxes without any kind of 'ordering' happening. So there's no sense in which entropy can be called the 'efficient cause' of organization.
As I said, what you need, in addition to an entropic drive, are material asymmetries, chiral structures, which allow for the general entropic process to get 'stuck', so as to need to organize in order to disperse more easily. Again, my favorite example are Benard cells in boiling water - 'upward' rolling hexagonal structures - which form once the energy in a heated beaker passes a certain threshold; the cells form as a means to more efficiently dissipate the energy through the boiling water, and they do so spontaneously (they self-organize) thanks to a) the bonding qualities of water (it's specific material qualities) and b) the asymmetry of heat and weight distribution in the water (the heated water rises, which makes the top of the beaker more dense, which shifts the centre of gravity, which in turn causes the water to 'fall' again). Entropy alone doesn't drive this process: the specific material asymmetries of the beaker/heat/gravity set-up themselves 'force' entropy to expend itself in the particular self-organizing manner that it does.
Recall that this whole discussion began in order to make sense of what we were calling a 'third type' of telos: one neither purely immanent nor purely transcendent, but one embodying qualities of both. The point was to put forth entropy as naturalist candidate to satisfy this condition: It's clear that entropy isn't 'external' to the system (whatever that would even mean), nor does it necessarily 'arise'; entropy exists as soon as there are energetic inhomogeneities.
But isn't it the case that the material asymmetries of the set up, like all asymmetries, are the result of entropy, or even better, isn't it the case that they just are entropy? The more I think about it, it seems to me that asymmetry and entropy are the same. Also, as I said, if entropy is asymmetrical (and hence directional and temporal) energy flow, then all efficient causation (being directional energy flow) would seem to be simply entropy at work.
And in fact this last, that the regularities due to efficient causation we witness everywhere and interpret as 'order', is really just entropy at work is just what I had thought you and apo have been arguing.
If you are talking about a "state of maximum entropy", then you are talking about a state of final equilibrium symmetry - where things can't get messier even as things continue to freely mess around.
So "entropy" is a macroscopic quality - a formal description of final goal - in this sense. And then an entropy gradient is what you have when some system starts with the kind of asymmetry which represents some more ordered state - a state that could be far more messed up if allowed to evolve in time.
But entropy becomes a confusing word because we have got so use to counting systems in terms of information - local degrees of freedom or microstates. So it can also come to sound like we are talking about the constitutional events - the material and efficient causes - rather that the qualitative macrostate which is a state of global symmetry.
Also consider a model of an entropic potential - a ball resting on top of a dome. Under classical mechanics, the puzzle is the ball is at rest and so should never have reason to roll off the dome. So there is an entropic gradient - a different position for the ball that would lower its potential energy (and release waste heat and noise in the process). But the ball seems stuck forever.
Models of spontaneous symmetry breaking have to introduce a material efficient cause to break the symmetry. There must be "a fluctuation" that disturbs the ball enough that slope and gravity take over.
Then the ball rolls until it falls off the dome and reestablishes a state of symmetry - sitting still with all forces in equilibrium.
So the formal and final causes of the ball and dome describe the shape of the situation which creates a potential asymmetry, and then the desire for the second law to be fulfilled in a way that a more stable state of symmetry is achieved. And to get the ball rolling takes this rather ill-defined idea of "the inevitability of some tiny triggering push".
Of course quantum mechanics now says noisy fluctuations are an irreducible aspect of reality, so this is not such a metaphysical problem. But it does also say that material/efficient cause - the initiating event - is the least remarkable aspect of a story of symmetry-breaking processes. The fluctuation that seems to determine everything, is really just noise that can't in the end be completely suppressed.
No. In thermodynamics, work is work, not entropy. It is that part of an energy flow which does get used in materially efficient causal fashion. Then the part that gets lost as heat and waste is lost potential - the entropy. It is the part of the flow that doesn't do work towards whatever purpose you had in mind.
You seem to be talking about entropy as a formal principle here. The question this raises for me is whether you think of formal principles as being anything more than human formulations or judgements. If you say they are more then it would seem you are suggesting some kind of platonism. If you say they are not anything more than human formulations; then entropy would have no ontological reality beyond the conceptual.
If entropy is a property of material process, then what it is, ontologically speaking, would seem to be just the actual asymmetries and energy flows. But again, I see no reason to see, from a purely material perspective, the asymmetries as anything other than the conditions for potential, and the energy flows as anything other than the actual, causally efficient processes.
But wouldn't the energy that gets wasted in any specific causally efficient process we might be focused on, always be the efficient cause of other processes?
So we are both dealing in theoretical constructs. You just don't seem to realise it.
Well given some other formal and final cause setting up a different design to achieve this other goal. The crumbs that fall off the table could feed the sparrows and ants.
But every such level of dissipative structure must be wasteful in its extraction of work. That is what the second law captures.
I don't for a moment believe that Newtonian atomism is the truth; but I do see an inherent problem with the inevitably mechanical nature of human modeling. So, I'm just taking the nature of the modeling for what it appears to me to be, and trying to work out what is logically entailed in terms of conceptual commitments, by this nature of our modeling. This, since our modeling of what we observe, at least discursively speaking in the empirical mode, is all we have to go on. I am very aware that we are both dealing in theoretical constructs, but what else could we be dealing in?
I agree, but it is only wasteful (or not) from some perspective, no?
I confess, I don't know what it would even mean to say that 'asymmerty and entropy are the same'. Asymmetry is a characteristic of material states (a DNA helix, a particle distribution) or a process (like entropy, or Bennard cell formation), but to say that 'asymmerty and entropy are the same' makes about as much sense as saying 'blue' and 'cow' are the same; blue may be a property of cows, but blue is not cow!
Great. You agree there is always the telos that is what makes for a point of view then. Observerless physics can make no sense.
What I am trying to get at is that it seems to me that without asymmetry there is no entropy and without entropy there is no asymmetry. Asymmetry seems to be the frozen image of entropy and entropy the moving image of asymmetry.
Now, there are no blue cows, and even if there were there seems to be no reason to suppose that they must all be blue, so I confess I fail to see the analogy.
Yep, I certainly agree with that! :)
Symmetry and symmetry breaking do have to be flip sides of the same coin. That is basic metaphysical logic. Each has to be each other's other. That is why we talk about entropy and negentropy, or constraints and degrees of freedom. You need two opposites to tango.
Again, SX and I aren't just talking about entropy but the larger thermodynamical story of dissipative structure. And this ties together the two aspects of being that result in a world of structured dynamics.
So the asymmetry here speaks to another fundamental physical principle - the least action principle. When anything energetic happens, it must take the most direct route possible. It must in fact employ the path that results in the least overall effort. And so - as in the convection currents that form in a heated fluid - you have the apparently paradoxical situation of order erupting to further the production of disorder.
But rather than being a contradiction, this simply reflects the fact that nature must first divide itself into two for there to be anything systematic about existence at all. You have to have the yin and yang of the order that maximised the disordering.
For there to be a state of higher entropy, this must be revealed by the matching fact of there being the asymmetry of the path to access that more wasted state of global symmetry. To arrive at the bottom of the hill, there had to be the slope which was the hillside that was the path of least action.
Yes, this is what we discussed, remember? Entropy plays necessity to the contingencies of asymmetries. You were asking after what could account for negentropic eddies, and I said it was precisely the play of necessity and chance, each given 'body' by entropy and material asymmetries, respectively.
Then why do the most symmetrical objects in the universe have the highest entropy i.e. black-holes?
But in reality when "things clump together" e.g. a gas cloud forms a star or planet due to mutual gravitation, the entropy goes up not down.
They are the exceptions that prove the rule?
:s
Yes, this makes sense to me. But now I want to make a distinction between asymmetry (necessity) and asymmetries (contingency) and between entropy (necessity) and efficient causation (contingency). Perhaps along the lines of Heidegger's 'ontological/ ontic' or 'being/ beings' distinction or Spinoza's natura naturans/ natural naturata.
No, black-holes are not an exception. Black-holes have vastly more entropy than the matter that created them, be that a perfectly spherically distributed ideal gas or a solar system. Every state on the way to creating a black hole has greater entropy than the previous state.
Quoting apokrisis
Would you say that dissipative structure is the actual playing out of entropy? I think of dissipative structure as dynamic process, as the temporal flow of energy or force, but my thinking is very much intuitive 'lay' thinking, not at all illuminated by mathematical or thermodynamic understanding. Also, must we think of efficient causation as being really mechanical just like our models are?
Quoting apokrisis
This seems intuitively right to me; earlier in a response to Mongrel I wrote this:
Quoting John
Although I really enjoy it, I do feel a bit out of my depth trying to discuss this stuff with you and SX, since you are both obviously much better read than I am in the field.
I don't know, you've stumped me there, I don't have the math or the physics background: I'm just kicking a few ideas around...
Edit: Maybe in the case of black holes the energy, instead of flowing from one region to another is being extracted out of the system altogether; being taken out of play, so to speak?
I suggest you are therefore sceptical of terms such as "negentropic eddies".
If you mean to say that I still don't really grasp how order necessarily evolves out of chaos, and am therefore somewhat skeptical of the idea, then yeah...
On the other hand I acknowledge that this skepticism may be due to lack of understanding.
Now we have a ontological gap to bridge. Theoretically, time is not a real, active thing within the physical world, it is not actively passing, and therefore could not be a causal agent. In practise, the affects of time passing must be accounted for. The gap manifests as the micro/macro division. This can be related to the internal/external division, because the micro necessarily requires the assumption of a boundary for its creation. The gap can then be modeled as the difference between the bounded and the unbounded. Entropy is proposed to account for the difference between the unbounded (real time), and the bounded (conceptual space-time).
Quoting apokrisisHere is a reductionist attempt to bridge that gap. The reductionist will not consider the possibility of a real, non-physical, (unbounded), immaterial cause, to assist in understanding the role of time in the universe. Hence an efficient cause is assumed to set the ball rolling. But this is so blatantly contradictory, because prior to symmetry breaking there could be no time passing, therefore no efficient causation.
That is why the discussion of entropy here is completely misdirected. It is simply a way of circling around the real issue, while still avoid a direct approach. However, the focus on entropy is somewhat useful for bringing the specifics of the problem into view. Modern science really has no understanding of time, and other non-physical, or immaterial things. Unbounded things fall out of the scope of the scientist's carefully controlled experimentation. Furthermore, it has no approach, or method, for gaining an understanding of these things.
The habits of thought, which would make someone posit something like a chance fluctuation, to facilitate one's metaphysical belief, have developed into a particular form of laziness which permeates the intellectual society.
Quoting MichaelThere is a chance (chance in the proper, primary sense, as possibility) that the plant will not produce seed. There is a big difference between things which have already occurred, in the past (they are necessary), and things which may occur in the future (they are possible). It seems like many choose to ignore this difference.
Quoting John
You could use the word tendency, and "tend" lends itself to care, attend, and intend. But tendency itself tends to imply a form of habituation. And if we keep looking for earlier instantiations, we must approach a first, because it is known that there was a time with no life on earth. So "tendency" does not approach the root of the issue, which is the cause of the tendency. "Intention" on the other hand is understood as a cause, final cause, and therefore gives us an approach to the issue, which is an issue of causation.
Entropy could be understood also as a tendency, with the same problem. it doesn't give us an approach to the cause. Instead, we are left to assume a chance fluctuation.
I don't see how this explains the difference between "the plant intends to produce seed" and "the plant will produce seed". Are you saying that the former means "the plant has a chance to produce seed"?
Any actual state is born of possibility rather than eliminating it.
As I said, planets and stars and other "gravitational clumping" in Reality have more entropy than an evenly distributed gas.
You could start with this book:
The Physical Basis of the Direction of Time
If you don't want to read the whole thing:
http://www.time-direction.de/
To say that the plant intends to produce seed implies that it is recognized by the speaker of the phrase, that it is possible that for one reason or another, the plant will not produce seed. To say that the plant will produce seed implies that the production of seed is a necessity. The former recognizes the act as a contingent act, while the latter implies that it is necessary.Quoting tom
Yes, the title of the book, betrays the problem I referred to, assuming that time has a physical basis. Here's a quote from what little I have access to, without paying, through your links:
"More recent conceptions of time in physics may instead be understood as a complete elimination of absolute time, and hence of absolute motion. This approach is equivalent to the construction of 'timeless orbits', ...".
I suggest you read something like theoretical physicist Lee Smolin's "Time Reborn", for an outline of the problems faced by physicists with respect to the ontology of time, and an explanation of the inadequacies of "entropy".
"Intention" and "will" are identical. "The plant shall produce seed", or "the plant is going to produce seed" would be preferable, as "Will" implies intent, whereas "shall" is neutral.
Obviously will or intent and even "purpose" are bad language when it comes to evolution, as they hint at a teleology. But you do not have to go far even in the works of the greatest writers on evolution to see this mistake made again and again.
Sure, that's why experiments like this work
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/quantum-experiment-shows-how-time-emerges-from-entanglement-d5d3dc850933#.uty0d36wp
Then you are saying that "the plant intends to produce seed" just means that there is a chance that the plant will produce seed. So this use of the word "intention" is just a replacement for the word "chance". And given that you're arguing that there is an element of intention in genetic mutation and evolution you're just arguing that there is an element of chance in genetic mutation and evolution.
So, rather than arguing that "chance within evolutionary theory is simply a myth", as you say in the OP, you're actually arguing that it isn't a myth.
And yet black holes evaporate. So while clumping increases the entropy in terms of dissipating gravitational degrees of freedom, dark energy expansion is then a further complication that overwhelms that clumping given enough passing time. The highest entropy state becomes the blackbody radiation of minimal temperature cosmic event horizons on current physical understanding. It all ends with a fizzle of photons with a wavelength the span of the visible universe - the inverse of the Planck-scale state of things at the hot Big Bang.
Why should "planets and stars and other "gravitational clumping"" be thought to possess more symmetry than "an evenly distributed gas".
There is a useful distinction between tendencies which are inherent and those which are the result of "habituation". Whether all tendencies that are inherent today are exhaustively resultant from past habituations or not is not something which can be demonstrated logically or determined by empirical observation. There seems to be no doubt that present inherencies are influenced by past habituations. But 'influenced' is not coterminous with 'determined' or "exhaustively resultant". So, whether you believe one story or the other comes down to an exercise of intuition and faith. Do you trust your own intuitions or the intuitions of the majority of the materialistically minded intelligentsia? If you opt for the former then be prepared to endure some ridicule from the like-minded mob.
Not really. Instead, what it says is that if you try to strip reality back to some foundational material monism, what you arrive at is quite different from conventional linear notions of efficient cause. Instead of the particularity of some cause creating some effect, you instead have just thermal noise - pure fluctuation.
This is what the butterfly effect in deterministic chaos models was all about. The most innocuous fluctuation, like a beating wing, could retrospectively be blamed as the efficient cause of a big storm halfway around the world. But what that means is that in a non-linear world, trying to separate causal signal from causal noise in the usual way is futile. At the time, anything could have been the crucial trigger.
More important is the way events snowballed. And even more important is that there was some generic attractor - a global finality - towards which any such snowballing fluctuation was always going to tend. It really never mattered what might be said to break the initial symmetry as all paths were going to lead to much the same eventual outcome.
So this is the ontic message of dissipative structure theory. It doesn't really matter how things begin. Any old fluctuation will do as the fluctuations simply represent the infinity of particular ways to get rolling towards the one waiting generic global outcome. It is formal and final cause that tell the story.
And learning to tell such a different story of reality hardly seems intellectually lazy. The ball on the dome paradox is simply meant to illustrate what a basic problem the old Newtonian model of things in fact had.
According to Newtonian laws - which are all about crisp material/efficient causes - a ball sitting still would never have reason to move. But a view of reality founded on indeterminism says the opposite. Spacetime itself fluctuates on the smallest scale. It is noisy or grainy in a way that can't ultimately be suppressed.
And from there, the fact that fluctuations are largely suppressed - on our classical scale of observation - can be retrojected to the question of initial conditions. The beginning of everything must logically be a case of fluctuation unbounded - a roil or vagueness.
No, to say that the plant intends to produce seed, is to say that it has as a goal, purpose, or objective, to produce seed. We've been through this already. The fact that there is a chance that it will not is irrelevant to this point. I know that you don't agree with me, you don't believe that any non-conscious thing could intend anything, or have a goal, objective, or purpose. But I think it is obvious, and you are in denial of basic facts of life.
I think this is just a consequence of your habit of usage of the word. You are in the habit of using "intend" and "intention", only to refer to properties of conscious beings. Since your usage has been restricted by this particular habit, you have come to believe that this is the only way that the word ought to be used. Your habit is the habit which others ought to have. I, on the other hand have a different way to use the word. I've spent much time now, with dictionary definitions and examples, trying to explain why I think my way is better than yours. You have merely repeated your assertions, only conscious things intend. Why do you think that your habit of use is better than the way I've explained to you?
Quoting MichaelI already went through these two substantially different ways of using "chance". One, the one I just used, refers to a future possibility, as a chance that something may occur. The other, the one I object to, refers to a past event as a chance occurrence, or random event.
Quoting charletonNo, when Michael said "the plant will produce seed", "will" I believe, was used as a synonym for "shall". It is another sense of the word "will" which is associated with intention. We must be careful not to equivocate, but I think that it was clear from the context.
Why does this appear to be so opposed to you example? In the example, a small event such as the butterfly flapping its wings, could have a huge difference in the final effect, either nice weather, or a big storm. And proceeding from there, the difference would only get bigger and bigger, as the big storm would cause damage, etc.. Are you attempting to deny that a small event can make a huge difference over a long period of time?
This is exactly what we see as evidence in the evolution of life, a very small change occurs, then over a longer and longer period of time, this manifests into a bigger and bigger difference.
But then you make a conclusion completely opposed to these observations, all paths are going to lead to the same eventual outcome. Where is your evidence, or what kind of principles are you following?
Quoting apokrisisAgain, this principle is completely opposed to the evidence. Changes closest to the beginning of any event have the most potential to change that event. This is due to the reality of momentum. From any point in space, motion can begin in any direction. Since such a beginning is necessarily an acceleration, the difficulty in adopting a different direction is exponential with the passing of time. Therefore the act at the beginning, being furthest back in time has the greatest influence over the final outcome.
I'm making the point that material/efficient cause gets overplayed in regular metaphysics. The butterfly effect was understood by many in just the way you say - the smallest initiating event can have incredible consequences. Yet really, what it says is that the critical event was no better than random noise. There were any number of butterfly wings beating that same morning. To single out one as the prime mover is thus a retrospective fallacy. Especially if there was always a global attractor saying that every path was the first step to the same final destination.
So the beating of the butterfly wings is as contingent a material fact as you can get - just a fluctuation. And the weather that developed was the kind of weather that always develops - being ruled by formal/final cause.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, this was the important thing that chaos theory modeled - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This may seem true of linear Newtonian mechanics. But it is not true of non-linear worlds in which feedback both amplifies and damps action at a collective level of interaction.
In real world full of interactions - like a chaos of billiard balls rattling around a table - any new ball you fire into the mess is going to have a high chance of being redirected. Most of the collisions are going to decelerate your ball, although there is also the slim chance that some collisions send it going even faster in the direction you intended. But either way, your initial act of acceleration to the ball will have exponentially less to do with its actual continuing behaviour over time.
Quoting apokrisis
But you were clearly referring to how things "begin". So your analogy, that there are balls already rattling around, doesn't suffice. Introducing a new efficient cause into a sea of efficient causes does not describe a beginning. This is what you said:
Quoting apokrisis
So if we're not talking about the beginning now, we are talking about a universe with organised structures, not the random noise, of your chaos of billiard balls. With organized structures, a strategically placed, tiny efficient cause, can have a huge effect over an extended period of time, just like the butterfly effect.
Either way then, the direction of the tiny event may have great significance over the final outcome. At the beginning, there is no random noise, so the first event sets the direction for everything. In the middle, there may be what appears to be random noise, but all this apparent random noise is really part of the organized structures which we observe around us, the earth, solar system, galaxies, etc.. Here, an intentionally placed, minute efficient cause, could also significantly effect the final outcome.
So I maintain my accusation that this line of thinking amounts to an intellectual laziness. Instead of determining particular causes, this line of thinking lumps them altogether as some type of random soup, with no particular cause of existence of that soup, yet an assumed particular final outcome (effect). Doesn't this seem contradictory to you, a determined effect, from an indeterminate cause?
Well what makes a fluctuation intentional rather than just actually being random noise?
Local intentional acts are possible. We humans - as the most complex kinds of thing - produce them all the time. But here we are talking of physics - the metaphysics of simplicity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are just persistently grabbing the wrong end of the stick every time you face some fresh example. The point was that regardless of beginnings, context is what rapidly matters. A system - especially a Newtonian one with no foresight to avoid accidental collisions - is going to develop towards its equilibrium average behaviour pretty quickly.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
From what point of view exactly? Especially if the outcomes all look generically the same.
So sure, the tale feels significant if you have a metaphysics dependent on every big event having its tiny triggering cause. But instead this is about how regularity arises from randomness in a self-organising fashion.
In that light, efficient causes become a metaphysical red herring. Or at least, it only makes sense to talk about them in retrospective fashion from some perspective where a form or purpose is said to have been achieved.
They clearly don't. What's your point?
Quoting tom
Since you claimed that planets and stars "have more entropy than an evenly distributed gas", and that
" the most symmetrical objects have the highest entropy", it would seem that you would be committed to the claim that planets and stars possess more symmetry than " an evenly distributed gas".
So I asked: Quoting John
And you replied: Quoting tom
:s
An intentional act is one which is carried out for a purpose. That means that it is a part of a lager whole, the means toward an end. The whole, being something which will come to fruition in the future, is not immediately evident. Therefore it may appear as random noise, but this description would be a failing to recognize it as a part of a whole which has not yet come into existence.
Quoting apokrisisPhysics is not metaphysics. So if you are reducing your metaphysics, such that it becomes a form of theoretical physics, just so that you can exclude the relevance of local intentional acts, you are either not engaged in metaphysics, or a very sloppy, lazy form of metaphysics.
Quoting apokrisisEach end of the example you hand me has to make sense, or else what is the point of making the example? You could hand me a valid conclusion with false premises, or excellent premises with an invalid conclusion, each is equally pointless.
So when you say "regardless of beginnings, context is what rapidly matters", I receive this as a premise because you have not provide the logic to support it as a conclusion. But as a premise, it has complexities which are difficult to understand without contradiction. Within a context, an event cannot properly be called a beginning. "Context" implies that there is a presupposed extension surrounding that supposed beginning, contradicting the meaning of "beginning".
If by "beginning" you mean something which comes into existence that is not directly part of, or caused by, the context, then we have to look for a cause outside of the described context. This is when we look for intention as a cause. But when we look at intention as a cause, the context which is evident is not what really matters, because the cause is part of a bigger whole, which will only come into existence in the future.
Quoting apokrisisThe point is, that at every point in time of the "big event", every stage of proceedings, from the first triggering cause, to the finality, the event must be guided by intention. This means that at every moment of time, along this extended occurrence, there must be more and more tiny triggering causes, to keep the big event from going off track. The event can only be said to be "self-organizing" if each tiny triggering event emanates from within the context of the whole. That is, the cause of the organism must be truly immanent. Then each tiny efficient cause is of the utmost importance, in directing the "self-organizing", and clearly not a metaphysical red herring.
Clearly you are wrong about this as black-holes demonstrate. Also, @apokrisis pointed out, the final state of the universe may indeed be a perfectly symmetrical photon sea and the state of ultimate entropy.
Quoting John
It is a well known physical fact that gravitational clumping is associated with an increase in entropy, and a loss of symmetry. So, disorder must be increasing as stars and planets form. Ar this matter is accreted into a black hole, disorder again increases, but this time the symmetry increases.
Asymmetry and entropy don't appear to be the same.
Fractals have scale symmetry in that things look the same or self similar no matter what scale of observation is chosen. So a fractal is a maximum entropy condition.
When I spoke of asymmetry and entropy being the same I had in mind systemic asymmetry not the asymmetry of individual entities. From a systemic perspective, considered in terms of gravity or mass, the black hole would seem to be the supreme asymmetry.
But your point of view is the unrealistic one that is imagining a single black hole in an unbounded void. So it is asymmetric in the sense of being everything massive lumped in the one place.
Yet as said, a black hole - as an event horizon of some entropic size - is as simple and symmetric state as it gets. A smooth sphere. So it has a temperature and a size, and that's it.
It is an asymmetry from one point of view - being hyperspheric curvature in contrast to the flat spacetime around it. But from its own point of view, it is a state of high symmetry.
And then from the world's point of view, the black hole is never alone. At the very least - for there to be a world that is generally flat - it would have to exist as part of a fractal distribution of black holes, an entropic symmetry from that point of view.
If all the black holes started to collect, then the whole of the Universe would be gravitationally collapsing and becoming a single ball of hyperspheric curvature.
In fact, the cosmological problem of a few years back was that the Universe appeared under-dense in terms of gravitating mass and so should be expanding and diluting rather faster than it is. This is why the further ingredient of dark energy or the cosmological constant fixes things. It ensures the Universe expands with a slightly hyperbolic curvature and so - in Red Queen fashion - it will in fact bottom out eventually in the scale symmetry of a heat death.
We will be bounded by event horizons at a fixed distance just a little larger than our near heat death condition today. So in a way, it will be like being inside a black hole looking out. We will be closed off by a wall of maximum entropy that makes further change inside our region of spacetime meaningless. You will still have a quantum sizzle of thermal fluctuations - the black body photons emitted by the event horizon - but it will do no work and not change the entropy.
A symmetry is a difference that doesn't make a difference. An asymmetry is a difference that does.
So for us as human scale observers, a black hole in our vicinity makes a difference. But for a Universe, the black hole doesn't if it is part of an even fractal distribution of such clumping (the cosmological flat balance), or as now seems the case, it only has to be roughly fractal as any clumping tendency is already being overwhelmed by many orders of magnitude by a general dark energy acceleration of spacetime - an acceleration that will put us inside a fixed event horizon that puts an end to thermal events that make any difference to the state of what is left within.
What you say here seems to be in agreement with what I was saying, and yet you seem think you are disagreeing.
:s
You seem to be defending the notion that entropy = asymmetry.
I am saying that a state of entropy is a state of equilbrium - so a general symmetry in terms of its local fluctuations or differences.
But that then describes closed systems gone to equilibrium. And how this aspect of the thread got going was when far from equilbrium thermodynamics was introduced - or the still more generic thing of self-organising dissipative structure.
So the dissipative structure view talks about how symmetries can be broken by structural asymmetries - paths that point down a hill to (relatively) higher entropy states.
And then to talk about the Universe - which is a dissipative structure that is also its own heat sink - takes us up yet another level to where both symmetry and asymmetry, entropy and negentropy, have to be understood as two sides of the same coin that emerge synergistically out of a more foundational vagueness or quantum indeterminism.
So we start off with conventional closed system mechanical notions of entropy - the classical Boltzmann ideal gas type models - and move progressively through ever expanded notions of system thermodynamics to arrive at a self-organising cosmos that is dissipating vagueness in effect. Both order and disorder are being produced in equal measure by breaking the even more foundational state of "symmetry" which is the unbounded apeiron.
So rather than disagreeing with you, I have been trying to provide some sense of how the essential question - is entropy symmetry or asymmetry? - might be viewed across a spectrum of increasingly holistic or systematic thermodynamic models.
And on the whole, a state of high entropy is measured in terms of a state of high symmetry - a state in which there is plenty of particular difference, but it doesn't make a general difference. Change happens freely - in the same way as trapped gas particles rattle around inside a flask forever, or blackbody photons rattle around inside an event horizon. But the temperature and pressure of the system remains unchanged despite all this apparent difference, all this apparent busy action, just as a circle looks the same whether it is at rest or spinning at any speed.
Intention is directly related to purpose. Do you believe that purpose is necessarily conscious purpose? Let's assume that life evolved form consisting completely of non-conscious beings to having conscious beings as well, and that there is a vague boundary between the two, a grey area, such that it would be debatable whether certain creatures are conscious or not. How are we going to decide whether a being is conscious or not?
If we watch the creature's behaviour, and notice that it appears to act with purpose, we have reason to believe that it acts with intention. However, we see all kinds of creatures that we know are not conscious, which appear to act with purpose. Therefore, acting with purpose, or intention, is not a good indicator as to whether or not a thing is conscious. In this vague boundary, between conscious and non-conscious, all the creatures appear to act with purpose, or intention. Don't you think that we should dismiss this misleading idea that intention is necessarily conscious intention? All it does is create confusion when we attempt to distinguish conscious from non-conscious.
.
The essential difference here would seem to be that we call purpose conscious when it involves a conscious choice. That is, when the organism knows it is doing one thing and not another.
I could give money to a beggar because it will make him feel good. Or maybe the real purpose is that it just makes me feel good. So am I acting out of generosity or self-regard? To the extent that I can sort my intentions into polar alternatives, I am taking another step up in my consciousness.
So when we watch a creature act, we might be able to see it could have acted differently, but is that a choice it was aware of?
And so this is what justifies a graded spectrum of intentionality or telos in nature of tendency/function/purpose.
Telos in nature starts out as a propensity - the likelihood of something happen that has a vague family resemblance.
Then it can become crisply functional - a hardwired response to a learnt situation.
Then it can become crisply optional - it is a choice within a context. Action is justified in terms of it not being its binary other.
So telos is the universal growth of reasonableness. It starts out as the most generic kind of constraint on freedom - a tendency. And it achieves its most definite form when it is fully dichotomous - a crisp choice between two formally contradictory life paths.
I think I am defending the notion that entropy-in-action is asymmetry in action. Maybe the state of maximum entropy (heat death?) can be understood to be, in some sense, a maximally symmetrical state, but I have also heard it referred to as a state of maximum disorder, which suggests maximal asymmetry.
So, in view of that kind of ambiguity, I certainly resonate with the idea that symmetry/ asymmetry and order/ disorder are two sides of one coin, although I am not clear on what that coin emerges from (which I guess is reasonable since it is said to be indeterministic).
I enjoy your very eloquent explanations, but I confess that I think some of it seems somewhat beyond me (possibly because I don't have a math/ physics background at all?) and I can only 'get an intuitive feel' for what you are saying, not a definite clarity about it.
But this is more a description of being self-aware, and this is quite different from consciousness, which is simply being aware. Intention is proper to both of these, and, as I've argued, to some non-conscious beings as well.
Quoting apokrisis
Even in a conscious, intentional act, we do not need to be aware of the other possible choices, in order that the act is intentional. There are often vast numbers of other possible choices which we do not consider. Also, I don't think that a conscious decision requires being aware of any other possibilities, like when someone asks me something, and I reply immediately, without thinking about what to say. I don't consider other possibilities. So an individual can make a conscious decision without considering any other possibilities, even while having the capacity to consider other possibilities. Likewise, a being might make an intentional (purposeful) act without even being aware (conscious of the fact) that it is an intentional act.
Yep. The asymmetry refers to the path or negentropic structure that gets you there. And then the symmetry is where the journey starts and ends.
However that is the simple view. And as you get into the detail, it becomes more awkward to make such an absolute distinction stick. This is because symmetry and symmetry-breaking aren't two distinct things, just two contrasting aspects of a general developmental trajectory (in my book).
This is why thermodynamics has a bundle of laws including the third. If you imagine a simple system like an ideal gas - non-interacting particles rattling around inside a container - there are two opposing states of maximum order. You could start off with all the particles in the same corner. Or instead, you could start off with all the particles exactly evenly spaced on a lattice or grid.
So two states that maximise order. And so disordering becomes the state sandwiched inbetween this upper and lower bound. If you release a gas from either of these two states, it will scramble both of them to arrive at a Gaussian statistical mix of positions and momenta. The gas will average itself away from being either stuck in a corner, or spread out with the geometric perfection of a lattice.
It seems that being released from a grid leaves a shorter distance to arriving at pure disorder. But still, that lower bound on entropy is why a third law of thermodynamics was needed.
So in this way, if you keep scrambling things, you could wind up coming out the other side to start getting more ordered again. And this is what the second law forbids. The equilibrium state is when all sources of constraint and freedom are in thermal balance - local differences cease to make a global difference.
This is a good article on the subtleties still being discovered....
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160712-hyperuniformity-found-in-birds-math-and-physics/
So note how maximum achievable disorder is the fluid solution. Marbles can only compact so far down through random motion - motion that does not pick out marbles and arrange them individually, just relies on an average degree of common settlement. Every marble is free to reverse its path during the shaking - there is a classical time reversal physics symmetry describing its individual motion. But collectively there is an emergent asymmetry as the marbles do evolve towards a single global average that tightly constrains their disorder to a single packing number.
So again, what ties it together is the semiotic definition of symmetry-breaking or asymmetry as a difference that makes a difference. And symmetry as differences that don't make a difference.
For a thermalising system, it makes a difference globally that it has gone from an ordered state to a disordered one. But a system in thermal balance is one that changes constantly without the changes making a general difference.
Did you want to distinguish now between sentience (in jumping spiders), consciousness (in squid) and self-consciousness (in language-equipped humans) now?
No, but I definitely don't want to talk about random motions, that's just the type of talk I believe is nonsense. To believe in such a thing is to believe in a myth. And to talk about such a thing is to propagate that myth.
I was just emphasizing the point that it is not nonsense to talk about non-conscious things behaving purposefully, and therefore intentionally. So we have two opposing views here, mine being reasonable, but varying from common social habits of word use, yours employing a nonsense myth.
If non-conscious entities behave purposefully, then they must also possess the knowledge of how to achieve their purpose.
I think, that if you look closely at intention, through introspection, you'll find that intention, which gives you ambition, is a vey general sort of thing, lying below the level of consciousness. It manifests, through consciousness, as particular "intentions". The particular intentions, are toward the things we know through past experience, will bring us satisfaction. However, these particular intentions are things intended as the means toward further ends. So if A is intended for the sake of B, which is intended for the sake of C, an infinite regress would render intention unintelligible. But seeking an ultimate end looses one in generality, such that we don't really know why we do A, B, and C. We are faced with the question of why are we alive. You could posit something as the ultimate end, like Aristotle did with happiness, but such assumptions are so general that they don't have a lot of specific meaning, and no direct way of "knowing how to achieve the end".
Because of these difficulties, we tend to just assume that there is some sort of ultimate end which we strive for, such as happiness, but we assume it without knowing it. Failing to assume this ultimate end leaves our lives meaningless due to the infinite regress.
Sure, but if you are going to abuse the language in that way, you are compelled to admit that the non-conscious entity also possesses the means to achieve that purpose. Knowledge is central to those means.
You might claim that there is no purpose to a genome, or you might abuse the language and claim that the purpose of a genome is replication. I'm not sure which one of those statements is closer to the truth. The genome certainly possesses the attribute that, in the appropriate environment, it will cause itself to be copied. Furthermore, if the genome is better at copying itself in its niche than variants of it, it will cause itself to become dominant.
If you accept the Popperian conception of knowledge, that it is a type of information that, once instantiated on an appropriate environment, causes itself to remain so, then the genome certainly possesses knowledge if not purpose.
There is a comfortable majority in the scientific community that believe that the laws of the universe are deterministic. So your notion that the scientific community is "deceptive" about chance is...odd.
As to whether or not the universe is deterministic and chance simply amounts to nothing more than inaccessible information is a matter of opinion not fact. There is no conclusive proof that the universe, and evolution, is necessarily deterministic beyond all doubt.
Chance, in science, is not a "myth", it is a tool for making predictions about nature. A valuable tool that cannot be avoided at this point in scientific understanding.
What makes you think that this is an abuse of language. Do you not believe that plants produce seeds for a purpose, and, that plants are non-conscious objects?
As I explain to Michael already, the abuse of language here is being carried out by those who want to restrict "purpose" or "intention" to conscious choice. Clearly there is purpose in non-conscious activities, so to tell me that I am not correct in using the word this way is nothing more than a mistake on your part.
Quoting tom
Yes, knowledge is another word which is not well understood. Traditionally, "to know" would mean to be aware of, to be conscious of. Now, many epistemologists desire to give "knowledge" substantial existence, such that it is a thing independent of the conscious knower, who knows by being aware of something. We have to give knowledge a more substantial existence in order to account for things which we know, but are not presently aware of (principally things in the memory). Thus knowledge becomes understood as some type of information, which can be independent from consciousness, in the memory, and as some would argue, in the library, Under this definition, it would be difficult to argue that the genome does not contain knowledge. Where do you think it gets that knowledge from, experience?
Quoting m-theoryYes I agree, but we've been through the two distinct meanings of "chance" already. When referring to a possible future event, we refer to a chance that it might happen. This is the principal use of "chance", to refer to a future possibility, and this may be a useful tool in making predictions.
The other meaning, which I have a problem with, is when we refer to a past event, as a chance or random event. This would mean that the particular event is claimed to have no cause, neither efficient cause nor final cause. Unless it is known that the event had no cause, then why would anyone claim that the event was chance, or random? And why is it common to hear people talk about chance, or random genetic mutations?
The reason randomness is necessary is because many causes may have the same probability of occurrence such that any particular cause is therefor unknown.
I do not agree that the scientific community "deceives" about this information.
There is plenty of technical dissemination of information surrounding how randomness and chance play a role in causation within the context of evolution.
The reason it is so common in evolution is because randomness is how variation occurs.
Without a stochastic process life would not evolve at all, instead all it would do is replicate...if it could come into existence at all.
Fine, but consider this in relation to an event which has already occurred. You cannot say that this event has the same probability of occurrence as some other events which did not occur, because this one occurred, and the others did not. You cannot apply probabilities to past events in that way. Prior to the event, there was a chance that it may or may not happen, but afterwards, that knowledge is only useful in relating to other similar situations. To relate back to that particular occurrence, and say that it has a probability of occurrence, is nonsense, because it already occurred.
Quoting m-theoryBy saying that randomness and chance "play a role", you imply that these things are acting in a causal way. The only way that randomness and chance can play a role is through the mediation of intention. Heads I win, tails you win. But the intentional agent must set up the parameters of the chance event (choose, and flip the coin), and fix things such that one outcome will cause X (I win), and the other outcome will cause Y (you win). Otherwise, the coin is just lying on the table and it doesn't play a role in anything. And even if you assume that coins are just naturally flipping, it makes no difference whether they land heads or tails, unless the intentional agent sets something up, such that heads will be interpreted as I win, and tails as you win. Without intention, randomness and chance, if they could exist without being designed, couldn't play a role in anything, they would be just continuous, ongoing, randomness and chance.
Perhaps I did not make this clear...the particular causal chain may be unknown.
Therefor we must us probability models to make predictions.
When we say an event occurred in the past and we are dealing with probability we are saying the outcome could have been any number of things all with equal chance to occur just because only one of these occurrences happens does not mean it is not random it only means that any given occurrence is mutually exclusive of the other occurrences.
It also does not mean that we can know why (other than probability) that one occurrence happened rather than another occurrence.
So yes...probability has a causal effect...and just because some events are mutually exclusive of each other does not mean that those events cannot occur...sometimes you get a heads sometimes you get a tails.
These options are mutually exclusive...but if they are the only two possibilities we must make a model that allows for the occurrence for both.
So if happen upon a coin in the street that is facing heads up...it does not change the fact that it was equally possible in reality that it could have settled face down.
That is to say no laws of nature would have been broken if the coin you found was face down instead.
It is not clear within science as to whether or not the universe is determined and so we must use probability as a tool to model reality and account for all the outcomes that are possible.
Let me get this straight. By "outcome", I infer effect, rather than cause. So are you saying that when a particular event occurred, in the past, the outcome (effect) of that event could have been other than it was? How could the outcome of an event be different than it was, without actually changing the event? In which case, it would not be the same event. So it would not be the case that the said event had a different outcome, it would have been a different event altogether. Therefore it appears to me, that to say that the outcome of a past event could have been different is incoherent. To have a different outcome would require a different event, such that there could not have been a different outcome from the same event. A different outcome would require a different event.
I am saying...like in the coin example.
That no laws of physics are violated and both outcomes are possible but only one outcome at a time can occur because the effect (head or tails) are mutually exclusive of each other.
You can't get heads and tails.
When more than one outcome is possible we have to use probability, randomness, chance to model things.
So to your point and with my coin example again.
If you find a coin on the street facing heads down...that violates no laws of physics.
If it had been heads up instead...that too would violate no laws.
Both outcomes are physically possible...just not at the same time.
Our models have to account for that fact and so we use randomness, probability, and chance to describe that phenomena.
So concerning the past the probability that an event occurs does not have to be different it will remain the same.
The only thing that would have to be different in the past for a different outcome is the outcome itself not the probability.
What you seem to be thinking of is something akin to Laplace's demon
In the link it shows the various arguments used as evidence against this type of model that you describe.
OK, this explains the future event, there is a chance that the outcome of the coin toss could be heads, and there is a chance that it could be tails. I assume the probability is equal.
Quoting m-theory
You're still talking about a future event here, "if you find a coin on the street". In this event there are the same chances of heads or tails.
Now let's look at a past event. You have found a coin on the street, in the heads position. There is no chance that it could have been found at that time and place in the tails position, because it was in the heads position. The fact that it was in the heads position excludes the chance (possibility) that it was in the tails position.
Quoting m-theoryThis is incoherent to me. You cannot look at the past, and talk about the chance of an event occurring, because events don't occur in the past, they occur at the present. In the past, events have already occurred. I am not talking about Laplace's demon, I am simply making a proper distinction between future and past.
I don't know how to explain it it any better sorry.
You are saying that in order for something in the past to be different all of the past would have to be different.
That is not the modern view of physics because of probability.
The probability of something that occurred in the past does not change.
In the past you had a 50/50 shot of heads or tails and in the future this will also be true.
That does not change.
It seems to me you believe that probability only applies to some future event...that is not strictly true in modern physics.
You don't say that it was 100% tails or 100% heads in your model because both are physically possible outcomes even when we talk about the past, you still model the past event as a 50/50 chance for one or the other but not both.
The assumption in physics is that the laws of nature do not change over time so the same laws that apply now, applied in the past, and will apply in the future.
This is the modern principle of relativity.
Sorry but I cannot explain it any plainer than that.
There is plenty of source material you could review to get a better grasp of modern physics and the role probability plays.
From what I can tell by your posts you have a embraced a view of classical mechanics.
This is not how modern mechanics operates and one must contend with probability in the modern view of mechanics.
I don't see how I can further your understanding except to say that you are making classical arguments that do not lend themselves well to modern understanding of how physics work.
In particular stochasticity is the randomness at work in biology.
In evolution when the term random is used it is often in reference to some chemical stochastic process.
Another distinction to make is regarding the term non-deterministic.
This term is somewhat agnostic as it does not imply that the laws governing the system are strictly truly random.
It simply means that there is no way to access the information that does determine outcomes if that information is in fact there.
It may well be that the information does exist and the universe is determined...or it may be that the universe is truly random at a fundamental level.
Again that is an unresolved question in science.
You may well be right to argue your point...but what I was hoping to impress upon is that you are arguing an interpretation of current understanding and not indisputable facts of reality as we currently understand it.
If the universe ultimately is random or deterministic may well be an unanswerable question in science.
I happen to believe randomness is very real and is fundamental to our universe, that would mean that evolution would be truly random as well, however I do realize that this is interpretation and not fact.
I cannot prove beyond all reasonable doubt that it is true.
I was hoping you might admit the same about your beliefs.
That's not true. Possibility is not actuality. What happens is not a measure of possibility.
If that were so, possibility would be incoherent because only what happened could occur. Every event would be pre-determined and there would only be on possible outcome in the future. Possibility would be an illusion present by lack of knowledge about the future.
Instead, possibility is a logical truth, one that does not change or alter with respect to what happens in the world. Consider I six-sided die in a traditional example. It's always true there are six possible outcomes. No matter what I end rolling, it is true the other five number were possible-- that's why one of the many numbers I rolled was a possible outcome, rather than the necessary one. I had chance to roll other numbers, I just didn't.
Free will is actually one of the best examples to demonstrate this. If we were to believe your account of possibility, no-one could make a choice between two possible options. What they end up doing would be the only action the could have taken, as them acting in a different way, in that time and space, would exclude any possibility the might have acted otherwise.
For free will to function, possible options have to be available, no matter what someone ends up doing. That's how we can say the murder had a choice about whether to kill someone. Despite the fact they acted one way, it was possible they could have acted otherwise. Other outcomes at points in space and time have to be possible if free will is to be coherent.
We already know the answer to that in metaphysics. It's both.
Logically, causality involves states of the world bringing about other states of the world of states of the world-- when X causes Y, then Y necessarily results from X.
Yet, it is also true there is no reason for any causal relationship. Why is that X causes Y (as opposed to say Z or not even existing at all)? There's no answer. Any casual relation relies on itself for definition. Thus, any caused state is, by definition, a random event (this is partly alluded to in QM). For no reason at all, causality involves state X causing Y.
lol
Can't argue with that.
>:O
Quoting m-theory
I believe you are adequately demonstrating the myth of chance, which I am referring to. You believe, and you claim that modern physics supports your belief, that there is a possibility that a past event could be other than it actually was.
Quoting m-theory Why would I want to do that, and support such an incoherent myth? I already know the truth, that a past event is what it is, and that it is impossible to change it. Until someone demonstrates that a past event can be changed, I'll continue to believe the inductive logic which says that it cannot. Therefore, there is no possibility that a past event could be otherwise. Once the accident happens, or whatever happens in the world happens, there is no possibility of reversing this. There is of course the possibility that the event which occurred, could be other than the way I describe it, or remember it, But this is a different sort of possibility altogether.
Quoting m-theorySo the myth of chance permeates through physics as well as biology. There is a chance that past events could be changed?
Look, the passage here refers to a state, and a subsequent state which is predicted, determined probabilistically. It doesn't at all refer to a past state which is determined probabilistically. Why do you insist that physics treats past events, events which have already occurred, as probabilistic?
Quoting m-theory The reason why I haven't given consideration to the perspective you describe, is that I haven't found a way to make sense of it yet. And it's not that I'm not tying. What I want, is a way to understand what you mean when you say that you believe "randomness is very real". As I explained, I can see how the outcome of a future event, like tossing a coin, could be said to be random, or chance. Further, I can understand that if an event like this occurred in the past, at that time, prior to the event occurring, the outcome of such a proposed event could have been said to be random. But when we look back, now, at the past event, there is no randomness. The coin was tossed, and there was a particular outcome. The randomness, or chance element of the event has been removed by the passing of time. Therefore randomness, or chance, is only something which exists at the present. And, it exists only in relation to the future, not in relation to the past.
In any case, since you believe that randomness, and stochastic systems are real, and so do I, with the temporal qualifications described, here's the relevant question. Do you think that a random event, or stochastic system, could exist without being designed?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
You are not distinguishing between past and future, as I did. What I said is that what has already occurred in the past, cannot possible be different. We cannot change what has already occurred. Even if this is true, as I think it obviously is, it doesn't exclude possibility from the future. So with respect to the future, there are many things which could occur, are possible, may or may not occur, despite the fact that with respect to the past, things cannot possibly be different. The truth of this is supported by the empirical evidence that there is a substantial difference between past and future.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
It is true, that at that time, before rolling the die, there were six possible outcomes. But with the passing of time, you rolled the die, one outcome was confirmed, and therefore the other five possibilities wee excluded. So it is no longer correct to say that there are six possible outcomes from that roll of the die which already occurred, there already was one outcome, and the other five are impossible. The passage of time, has removed the element of chance, from that roll of the die. This is the difference between before and after
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yes, at the time, now, there are many options open to the organism with free will. But with the passing of time, many of these options disappear, The option to choose otherwise from what one did choose, is never available to the free will organism. When the choice is made, it is in the past, and cannot be changed to another choice. Therefore, all possibility that one might have acted otherwise, is in fact excluded by the passing of time. But this does not exclude free will. That is because free will allows us to act freely at the present, it does not allow us the possibility to change how we acted in the past. So as time passes, we can choose future acts, but we cannot choose past acts, they have already been chosen.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarknessThat the reason for something is unknown is distinctly different from there being no reason for that thing. When the reason for something is unknown, it is illogical to proceed to the conclusion that there is no reason for that thing, simply because the reason for that thing is unknown. When you consider the possibility of design, then you cannot logically proceed from "the reason for causal relationships is unknown", to "there is no reason for causal relationships".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The past has already changed to become the present???
Part of how that is possible is because of probability, chance, randomness.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because of the principle of relativity.
Why do you believe the laws of physics for the past are different from the laws of the present and/or future?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course not...humans designed these concepts in order to model reality.
It may be that the laws of nature are deterministic...it may be they are not...and it may be that we cannot know.
I am willing to admit that determinism is not possible to prove with our current state of scientific knowledge...if you are unwilling to accept that...that is your issue not mine...why should I be bothered to continue and point out all the reason why we cannot be sure of this?
It is not my problem if you can't be bothered to take probability, chance, and randomness seriously.
Science does take it seriously because it is necessary to do so in order to further our knowledge and understanding.
It's very obvious, events which have already occurred cannot be changed, events which have not yet occurred can be promoted or prevented. This is a fundamental empirical truth, supported by all the evidence that I know of. If the laws of physics contradict, or fail to respect, this fundamental truth, how can I believe in them?
Quoting m-theoryThat might be what you believe, what I believe is that humans designed stochastic systems, and from these they produced the concept that parts of reality consist of random occurrences. Yes, it's true that parts of reality consist of stochastic systems, the parts that humans have designed and produced.
Consider that all parts of reality exist within a larger context. Some put a limit to that larger context, to assume a whole, the universe. To create a stochastic system, the human being isolates a small part of reality from the larger context That boundary is artificial, yet necessary for the existence of the stochastic system.
Quoting m-theoryI take these things very seriously, as you can see, I am tying to understand them. But I think that those who take such things for granted, without properly understanding them, don't take them seriously. That's how myths are propagated, people take things for granted without properly understanding them.
Whatever it means by "the past cannot be changed" is unclear to me.
If you are suggesting that the past is strictly determined...again that is not clear and remains an open question in science.
I don't know if the past can change or what that means....somehow the past has become the present and I don't see how that is possible without change and I know you can't model it without using randomness.
Once it has become the past, all changes which will occur have already occurred, as they occur at the present, when the future becomes the past. Therefore it is impossible that the past can change.
As for your model, which employs randomness, I suggest that the randomness is simply a reflection of your inability to comprehend what it means for the future to become the past (for time to be passing).
Another unresolved question in physics eternalisim vs growing block universe theory.
You seem to be an eternalist.
Again I should make it the point that this is currently an unresolved issue.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Great...talk down to me...that is always a good way to get people to listen to your point of view.
:-}
No problem...I just would rather that you not assume I have some inability and explain how you can know eternalism is true and presentism is false?
As far as I am abreast of this subject it is still very much open for debate.
As I said, until it can be demonstrated that a past event can be prevented, or produced, like a future one can be, then the evidence, and consequent inductive principle is overwhelming. We have to start any logical proceeding from some fundamental assumptions. If we cannot assume something which all evidence indicates is the case, what can we assume?
Without any evidence that the past and future are not substantially different, as all the evidence indicates that they are, any such debate seems pointless. That the past and future "could be" essentially the same, is an unsupported myth.
I don't think presentism is a myth, I think it is a conjecture about the nature of time.
To me it the evidence does not seem to be conclusive one way or the other.
Sure it is possible that objects exist in the past, in the present, and in the future and all sates of nature are unchanging.
It is also possible that the only things that exist are present things that move through the dimension of time.and states of nature are changing.
Intuitively the evidence suggest that eternalism is wrong because humans experience change as something that is quite real.
But as we learn about the laws of nature it might be that this is just some trick of the mind and in reality all of time is extended.
It is not as cut and dry as you suggest I am afraid.
I am not suggesting that it's a cut and dry issue, actually I am suggesting something quite contrary, that things are more complex than you might think.
But I think, that in order to produce a clear understanding of temporal existence, we need to start from the most simple, and most evidently true premise that we can devise. This I believe, is the fact that there is a substantial difference between past and future. What has happened, in the past, we cannot alter, but with respect to the future, we can influence what will or will not happen. That is what is most evident to us about the nature of time.
So in defining "possibility", we have two distinct forms of that word. In relation to the past, we may not know exactly what happened, despite the fact that what has happened is fixed in time, and cannot be different than it is. This produces an epistemic possibility. With respect to the past, it is logically possible that X or Y may be the case, if we don't know which one is the case. If they exclude one another, then if X is the case then Y is not. In relation to the future, there is an ontological possibility, because neither A nor B is the case, if the time referred to has not yet arrived. The human agent may cause A to occur, or B to occur, and these may be equally possible, as with the flip of the coin.
The point though, is that each of these two types of "possibilities" only exist in relation to the intentional being. In relation to the past, there is possibility with respect to the intentional being's knowledge. In relation to the future, there is possibility with respect to what the intentional being can do. Remove the intentional being, and there is no such possibility of either type, though we could assume that the world would continue to exist
It may appear easier to understand the world by removing this fundamental principle, that there is a substantial difference between future and past, but such a move would be a mistake, since the principle is evidently true. If this means reassessing some of the principles of physics, then this is what we should do, in order to avoid misunderstanding.
Quoting m-theory
What I am suggesting is not presentism, because what is accepted as the real aspects of time, are the past and future. However, since we must recognize that there is a real difference between past and future, this necessitates that there is a boundary between these two, and the boundary is what is called the present. Since it is evident that change and motion occur at the present, it is impossible that this boundary is a sharp, crisp boundary. If the boundary was sharp, then at one moment things would be as they are in the future, then at the next, as they are in the past, without any motion at the present. But this is not the case, as we obseve. Therefore we need to assume two dimensions of time, the traditional one which marks the relationship between future and past, and another dimension to allow for the activity which occurs at the present.
Or, we can think that the present moment contains, or better, encompasses, both past and future; that it is 'stretched' so to speak and not a dimensionless point instant. The question is, though; is there any present moment, or any moment at all for that matter, other than the phenomenological?
Sorry but this was just inserted with no justification.
There is no reason to create an intentional being to understand nature when probability does a fine job of describing nature without the existence of an intentional being.
Then you don't understand the point. Probability, possibility, and chance, only exist in relation to an intentional being. That is why it is necessary to bring in the intentional being.
Epistemic possibility, logical possibility, exists only as a property of the intentional being's knowledge. Ontological possibility exists only in relation to what the intentional being can and cannot do. That the intentional being can flip a coin to produce a 50/50 probability, roll a die, create a lottery, or create a stochastic system, all of these being artificial creations of randomness, provides no evidence that such a thing as randomness could exist naturally. Therefore any claim that probability is something natural is what is unjustified.
Quoting JohnYou could think that way, but it distracts from the principal point, that the future is substantially different from the past. Then you have to attempt to unite these two incompatible things, future and past. I think it is more productive to think of the present as a sort of division between future and past.
But the present does contain elements of both the already-established (past) and the to-be-established (future). By thinking of the present as a "division" you are artificially cutting into the flow of time or events; and also trying to think the present as 'pure' which can only suggest a kind of infinitesimal point instant. I don't think that way of thinking about it is either comprehensive enough to capture the quality of the living present or even really intelligible at all, other than in the most abstract 'mathematical' kind of way.
No this is simply wrong...unless you mean to suggest that sub atomic particles are intentional beings.
If so I can't make sense of that view.
Sorry.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again sub atomic particles don't have knowledge.
I can't make sense of the notion that they do.
Ontological possibility simply means that the same laws of physics can have different outcomes.
Sometimes you can get heads and sometimes you can get tails.
The laws of physics are not violated because both outcomes are ontologically possible...just not at the same time.
This type of ontological possibility is fundamental at the quantum scale.
Quantum mechanics is probabilistic by definition not interpretation.
That is to say the best model of nature we have so far was designed under the assumption that ontological possibility is real regardless if an observer has some intention or not.
That this model works so well is justification enough that the assumption is valid.
They 'know' how to behave apparently, but it is implausible that they could know that they know. But, this is also true, it is commonly thought, of most or even all animals.
Perhaps to know that you know, or at least think that you know, requires symbolic language; the kind of self-reflection that it provides. The same could be said, I think, about knowing facts, in the discursive sense at least, and also being able to conceive of ostensive facts, and the idea that things may not be as they seem.
I mean to say that I cannot make sense of the notion that nature is an intentional being.
What does it mean to say reality or nature is intentional?
Saying this certainly does not improve our understanding of nature or reality.
That is to say we cannot make better models of reality and nature under that assumption.
If intensional is thought of as intending; would intending then be thought of as knowing you are intending?
I think intention is knowing that there are different outcomes and having a preference among those outcomes.
So if nature was intentional it would have a preferred outcome for things like sub atomic behavior and coin tosses.
If we say that nature does have intention this does not help our models because there is no indication why one outcome is preferred oppose to another.
If we say that nature has intentions then we are forced to admit we cannot fathom from the evidence what those intentions may be.
Any given speculation as to what those intentions were would be equally as valid as the next unless you were able to predict outcomes more accurately than current models.
Only then would you be able to claim that your assumption that nature has intentions is validated.
Yes, I agree, I don't think nature is intentional in the sense that it plans particular outcomes, but perhaps it can be thought to be intentional in that it might 'favour' certain tendencies, like, for example the arising of complexity and consciousness, and self-consciousness, and maybe later something else beyond consciousness in any way we can conceive it. I think it's just a conjecture though, and not something that could ever be conclusively decided to be so, or not be so, on the basis of empirical observations. The only 'guide' we have (however trustworthy we might think it is), in regard to this kind of question is our own self-experience and intuitions.
It may be that nature does favor certain tendencies.
But until we can use this assumption to make better models it is not a necessary assumption.
If we could predict nature on the assumption that it has favored tendencies that evidence would make it unreasonable to deny the assumption.
As far as I am abreast there is no model that makes better predictions using that assumption so I am not compelled by that assumption.
Case closed.
>:)
I would say that tendencies are unquestionably observed; I don't really see how the question of whether they are intended or not could have any bearing on the predictive efficacy of our modeling of those observed tendencies.
lol
If this were true consciousness would not have evolved.
There is no survival advantage in believing in different outcomes that don't exist.
However if possibility is real there is a tremendous survival advantage in being able to understand that possibilities exist.
Case not closed even if you are right.
If the universe was determined consciousness would be unnecessary and in fact should not have come to exist.
The very interesting question of why it does would leave the case open for discussion.
For you it apparently is...
;)
Tenancies are observed as compared to non-tendencies.
Intention would mean there is a reason why somethings are tendencies while others are not.
We still have admit we don't know why some things tend to happen while others do not.
I don't either to be honest.
I think he may mean something like was mentioned in this thread.
If so then I cannot comment on it because I have not researched it at all.
True, but we cannot make predictions on lack of tendency. All I was saying was that it is the tendencies themselves that are used to create predictive models; and that I can't see how whether the tendencies are intentional or not (in some way, whether involved something like the will of God or something like instinct) would affect their predictive power, per se.
I don't think I entirely get MU's arguments most of the time either.
:-}
True. We do have to face the fact that in reality some things are more likely to happen than other things. And it may be that is by design but knowing why that is the design is no simple matter to prove if that is what you believe.
You can't derive an ought from an is. You can't derive a "tends-to" from a "does".
I was thinking something more like "tends to" as in "does more so than does not."
All you need to do is derive a "tends-to" from a "does". Go ahead!
It does seem like I would tend to do that in this example..
.
Why not do it then. Derive a "tends-to" from a "does". You will be famous!
Why would you say that thinking of the present as a division between future and past involves "cutting into the flow of time"? It is not even established that there is such a thing as a "flow" of time. I suggested the division between past and future, as a fundamental principle, because it is what we can conclude as true, from empirical evidence. Notice that "flow" is not supported by empirical evidence, it is derived from deductive logic. It is not the same time now, as it was a while ago, such a change requires flow, therefore time must be flowing. What I think is that if you want to introduce a "flow" to account for this change, we must do so in a way which remains consistent with the first principle, that the past is distinct from the future.
We do not need to conceive of the present as a pure point of division, such as a non-dimensional separation. Modern science has given us many different perspectives, from huge galaxies, to sub-atomic particles. The division between past and future need not be the same from each of these perspectives, just like if we're talking in centuries, years, or in nanoseconds, we have a different perspective of that division. Still, I think it is more useful to devise a clear division from each of the different spatial perspectives, rather than to say that there is one extremely vague division, allowing that future and past overlap each other within this vague "present". Future and past being properly opposed, it would defeat logic to allow them to coexist at the present. So we need to do something such as allow that the division is different depending on the perspective, to account for the apparent vagueness of the division. The human being for instance uses five senses, and the division between past and future may be slightly different from each of these different perspectives. From the human being's perspective then, as a whole, the division is vague.
Quoting m-theoryDo you believe that a sub-atomic particle, in its natural state of existence, without human interference, would be behaving in a random way? If you do believe this, how would you proceed to demonstrate that it is true?
Quoting m-theory
That there are possibilities does not necessarily entail that there is randomness. Randomness must be created, and this requires intention. That is my argument, not that nature is intentional, but that nature does not consist of randomness. Randomness though is intentional. I believe there are ontological possibilities within nature, but the fact that possibilities can be understood through probability demonstrates that possibility does not logically imply randomness. If natural possibilities were random, they could not be understood through probability, they'd be random. Randomness does exist naturally though, it is created intentionally, through the human being's understanding of probability. Human beings create circumstances with equal probabilities, and this produces a random outcome.
We can prove that no particular observer is necessary for the laws of physics.
That is to say different observers measure the same outcomes which proves that those measurements are not dependent upon any given one.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Having possibilities entails that we must model them with randomness as the current state of knowledge stands now.
What you have is an interpretation that you strongly believe, which is fine.
What would be an error is to believe that your interpretation alone resolves the issue conclusively.
It does not.
Your talking about "laws" now, here, and we were talking about randomness. Randomness is a failure to follow any laws. So you appear to be trying to conflate two distinct, and even contradictory things, activity which follows laws, and random outcomes which do not. The coin flip, toss of the dice, lottery, etc., each possible outcome has an equal probability, so there is no law to determine outcomes.
Quoting m-theory
Having possibility does not necessitate randomness. That's where the mistake is. Randomness can be produced from possibility, like we do with the coin toss, and the lottery, but these are artificial, intentional products. Possibility in its natural state is understood by means of probabilities. The fact that possibilities can be understood through probabilities indicates that there are underlying laws, and therefore random outcomes are not a natural process.
Nature doesn't do things randomly or by chance. There is always a reason why something happens. There is always a cause and when we are able to determine the cause we go from defining the process as "random" to "predictable".
I've pointed out on more than one occasion that Neo-Darwinism does not require ill-defined or imaginary processes to support its thesis. It requires neither chance nor randomness, whatever you might think you mean by those concepts.
What is required is this: The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology
The mechanism of variation is irrelevant, so long as the DOGMA is respected.
No, he won't be famous, because everyone does it, cannot escape doing it, every day, including you.
The fact that a "tends to" cannot be deductively derived from a "does" is irrelevant. We do inductively derive the notion that certain things tend to behave in invariant or regular ways, from the fact that they have been invariably observed to do so. Of course this is no guarantee that things could not begin to behave differently at any time; there is no logical entailment that things must continue to behave as we think they have always been observed to, But because things (other than animals and humans) have never, so far as we know, been observed to suddenly begin behaving radically differently, then we do abductively derive the idea that the behavior of things may be invariant across time and space; and this hypothesis; which is incidentally necessary for the coherent practice of science, is rationally warranted insofar as all we have to go on is what has been observed and recorded thus far.
From Wiki:
In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, Crick wrote about his choice of the word dogma and some of the problems it caused him:
"I called this idea the central dogma, for two reasons, I suspect. I had already used the obvious word hypothesis in the sequence hypothesis, and in addition I wanted to suggest that this new assumption was more central and more powerful. ... As it turned out, the use of the word dogma caused almost more trouble than it was worth. Many years later Jacques Monod pointed out to me that I did not appear to understand the correct use of the word dogma, which is a belief that cannot be doubted. I did apprehend this in a vague sort of way but since I thought that all religious beliefs were without foundation, I used the word the way I myself thought about it, not as most of the world does, and simply applied it to a grand hypothesis that, however plausible, had little direct experimental support."
Similarly, Horace Freeland Judson records in The Eighth Day of Creation:
"My mind was, that a dogma was an idea for which there was no reasonable evidence. You see?!" And Crick gave a roar of delight. "I just didn't know what dogma meant. And I could just as well have called it the 'Central Hypothesis,' or — you know. Which is what I meant to say. Dogma was just a catch phrase."
You seem to be missing the point.
Arguing that probability is just a misunderstanding about physics is an interpretation.
There is no proof that the universe is deterministic.
Probability is necessary for creating the most accurate models in science.
Be it quantum mechanics or stochastic chemistry in evolution.
If there were better models that were strictly deterministic we would say that those models are necessary instead.
I have no problem with "probability", I believe it is very useful. What I have a problem with is "chance", or "randomness". Do you see the difference? Chance, or randomness, is when probability is inapplicable for the purpose of prediction. So chance and probability are inherently incompatible. Probability provides the basis for prediction, chance does not.
Quoting John
Well John, you give an exception to animals and humans, but these are exactly the kinds of things which we are talking about here. We are talking about this type of thing, a living thing, which can suddenly start behaving radically different. So when this occurs, do you think that this is just a random change in the plant or animal, or is there some reason for such a change?
I don't see a difference.
Probability is used because some things in nature are indeterminate.
The terms probability, randomness, and chance are all used to indicate that exact predictions cannot be made and instead only different possibilities can be described.
It could be either I guess. If I developed a brain tumour, or endocrinal imbalance or some LSD was slipped into my soup, my behavior could change more or less rapidly and radically, despite my own intentions; whether good or otherwise. Would you call that random?
Can plants or animals have intentions in the sense that humans do? Are you wanting to dissolve all and any distinction between 'intention' and 'tendency'?
Tendency and intention are two distinct things. Tendency is a leaning toward a particular action, it might be a habit or something like that. Intention is the purpose of the action. Two distinct things, we can identify a tendency, without knowing its purpose. And, knowing the purpose of a particular action will not necessitate that action, like a tendency will.
That's the ambiguity I referred to earlier. "Chance" when speaking about a future event, refers to a possibility. This could be interpreted as probability. "Chance", when speaking of a past event as a "chance event", implies equal possibility, like the flip of the coin. "Random" refers to equal chances in relation to both, past and future.
Since "random" refers to equal chances, it is useless for prediction. But any probability other than random is useful. So random is a particular type of probability which denies all possibility of prediction. That is the difference, probability is used in predictions when exactitude cannot be obtained, randomness does not allow for prediction at all.
Chance is just another way to quantify probability.
You have a 1 in 2 chance of getting heads in a coin toss for example.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is one interpretation.
That the laws of nature are not deterministic and exact predictions are never going to be possible.
But we can still get a general idea of what will happen based upon what has happened before.
Take the coin example.
We can guess that if we flip it enough times we will eventually get heads.
We can make exact predictions, they just won't always be right.
That is just going round in circles. You could just as easily have written:
"Probability is just another way to quantify chance. You have 0.5 probability of getting heads in a coin toss.."
But of course, probability and chance has nothing to do with physics of the coin toss - it is a fully deterministic process.
Quoting m-theory
Really? There has only ever been one stochastic physical theory - quantum mechanics in it's mid-20th century state-vector-collapse form.