Out of curiosity, how are ‘AI generated’ posts determined, because it has been determined that AI cannot reliably determine whether something is AI generated?
Someone might argue:
[It is] right that early modern physics deliberately excluded purpose and meaning to gain universal, context-free laws. And it’s also right that taking this methodological choice as a metaphysical proof that there is no purpose anywhere is a mistake. That’s a live critique (you see versions of it in Thomas Nagel and others).
But there’s an equal and opposite risk: moving from “biology needs purpose-like language” to “therefore there is intrinsic, irreducible purpose in nature.” The success of evolutionary and systems explanations suggests we can account for the phenomena [of apparent intentionality] without positing a fundamental telos built into the universe.
This draws a hard line between
- ''an agent representing a goal and acting to achieve it (e.g., human planning)" and
- “systems that are organized so that their dynamics reliably lead to certain end states (survival, reproduction), because of how they were shaped (selection, development, constraints), not because they represent those ends”.
The former is said to be teleological (“acting with a purpose in mind”) and the latter teleonomic (“acting on the basis of behaviours arising from natural selection”).
But if this distinction is applied consistently the implication is that the only real purposes are human purposes, as to our knowledge, only humans are able to consciously represent goals.
This is the implication that Thomas Nagel criticises in his 2012 Mind and Cosmos. From the précis of that book:
The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.
This is the “great abstraction” that the original post refer to. Nagel elaborates:
We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.
However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.
So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone. Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory.
This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.
‘since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone’ – this anticipates the potential role of phenomenology in biology, anticipated by the Hans Jonas book which has been cited in this thread.
So my contention is that the difference between teleological and teleonomical is at best a methodological distinction that is wrongly viewed by physicalism as a metaphysical postulate.
Looking at the post in question - not sure if others can see it - I presume it was judged to be too consistent and well-composed to have been written by a human user (although other posts by that ID not visible to me might have also been taken into consideration.) Which is a shame. But anyway, I captured the central point as a hypothetical, above.
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Well, that’s a tease! If the post was the most substantive critique of your position in this thread according to you, then how about outlining the counterpoints it made (which presumably had not been made by other posts).
We know that there is enormous diversity, difference. The nature of the ‘one and the many’ is a perennial issue. We also know that in living systems there is, at least from the perspective of those systems an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. These facts do get reified in philosophy due to the dualistic nature of language itself. It is impossible to say anything about anything without making a kind of dualsim seem apparent. So when the enactivists speak about enacting a world are they referring to the subjective doing or to the idea that it is one amongst many other processes within the whole cosmos?
It’s a matter of forum etiquette. I’ve just been made a moderator and unsure whether a deleted post ought to be admitted or ignored. But the hypothetical I’ve given above conveys what I see as the main point. And again = the fact that the distinction between ‘teleonomy’ and ‘teleology’ is based on the claim that the latter is characterised by conscious intention or planning whereas teleonomy can be seen in as ‘purely objective’. In my view that is the tip of a philosophical iceberg.
Is that the difference between a human post and an AI post, the former is teleological and the latter is teleonomical?
That is a great question! I put it to Claude, who’s response I will present hereunder (and note that while the following text is AI-generated, it is specifically in response to a question about AI capabilities so ought to be admissable on that basis):
A human post in a philosophical discussion is embedded in a life — it emerges from years of reading, personal formation, existential stakes, the particular history of having wrestled with these questions across forum engagement and writing. The post has a because in the human sense — it matters to the person writing it, something is at stake for them, it expresses a concern that is genuinely their own. That’s at least analogous to teleological action in the full sense.
An AI response is in some ways better described as teleonomic on the standard account — it produces outputs that reliably tend toward certain end states (coherent, helpful, relevant responses) because of how it was shaped (training, selection of successful outputs), not because it represents those ends as its own. The “for-ness” is there structurally but the inside — if there is one — is genuinely uncertain.
Whether that counts as teleological or teleonomic I’ll leave to the philosophers.
In my view, AI systems are artifacts - they’re allopoietic systems in the lexicon of enactivism, whatever purposes they express are in response to training and data input by human agency. So artifacts are ontologically distinct from either organisms (which are autopoietic) and objects (which are neither).
I’ll also add a long read from biological philosopher Steve Talbott, to whom I sent a link to the original post on Medium. As I might have mentioned, Talbott’s essay series on The New Atlantis have been influential behind this argument. The chapter in question is From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning, and it tackles the whole question of teleology and vitalism in biology and the attempts to avoid it.
How do we accommodate Camus’ absurdism and existentialism in this teleological space we’ve carved out for life?
Camus was very much a product of the civilisational ‘crisis of meaning’ that motivated a great deal of existentialist literature in the 20th century, particularly French existentalism. But there are existentialists who have a very different orientation - Gabriel Marcel and Immanuel Levinas, for example, both of whom responded very differently to the same crisis.
Personally I haven’t read a lot of existentialism, although studied The Plague at school. When I encountered Being and Nothingness as an undergrad I found it incomprehensible, although I’m now able to understand it a lot better. But suffice to say that Camus and Sartre’s atheist existentialism are not the final word.
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Earlier you mentioned Nietzsche’s epidemic of nihilism that was to visit h. sapiens, sooner or later. I agree that the matter is still far from being a closed and shut case. Nevertheless there’s a general sense that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to the meaning of life. You made a suggestion to Thea the OP in the other thread - “get a pet or something”.
So at the moment we have the sandwich: biological meaning between particulate meaninglessness (physics and chemistry) and a cosmic meaninglessness (absurdism, existentialism). Inter alia, this indifference to life’s/humanity’s condition and goals can be soul-crushing and spark off nihilism.
Not necessarily. There are also a lot of people whose posts are glip and vapid and reflect no particular worldview or effort. Just saying. 
I don’t think secularism is the sole source of nihilism, although some might feel that way. The same can be said of religion. It’s hard to think of a more nihilistic and dangerous outlook than some forms of evangelical Christianity (those which that support MAGA, for example) with talk of bringing on Armageddon, etc. This isn’t because they lack belief in meaning, but because they shift meaning into an imagined end of the world that can make present actions and consequences seem insignificant. In this sense, nihilism doesn’t come from not believing in anything, but from believing in something in a way that makes this world feel disposable.
(Christianity, Hope) is what most people think, but there’s also (Christianity, Armageddon). Like some have said, (Rapture, Martyrdom) is a pernicious view of the world. (Secularism, ?) is also there and for certain we have (Secularism, Pale Blue Dot). 
If such a distinction (between teleonomy and teleology) were to vanish on the ontological level, I fear we would be left with rocks that represent the future, possessing imagination and memory. For it is this distinction that sets apart the animate, which has a purpose, from the inanimate, which has none.
One might postulate something of the sort, but such a thesis must contend with the efficiency and success of science, which has taken for granted that there are no mental properties other than those found in humans. The question is: what is the data from which we would start in our experience of the inanimate world that would allow us to theorise about mental properties in such inanimate things?
My position is that there is no such data, only a projection. We have evidence of our own teleology as living beings, but we have no such evidence regarding non-living beings. Yet, to the same extent, we lack a scientific description of consciousness, which leads us to believe that this absence might also apply to non-living beings. It is a projection. Not a fact from which one can proceed to formulate a theory.
Yes. But do notice the rhetorical question posed by that OP, in all seriousness: ‘If you could wipe out all life today by pressing a single button then would you press it?’
I think it is blatantly nihilistic, but I also bet that the poster has little grasp of what ‘nihilism’ means, which is why I didn’t press the point. It can be very hard to get people to look at their spectacles instead of just through them.
As noted in response to the question about Camus, Western culture is in the grip of a civilisational crisis, which includes a crisis of meaning.
It may interest you to know about a resource that I’ve been exploring the last several years. There is a series of video lectures by Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher, John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It’s a big series— 52 lectures— traversing history from the stone age to the 21 century. It covers religion, philosophy, cognitive science, anthropology and much more. Yes, it’s a huge amount of material but the subject actually demands that kind of scope.
I wouldn’t put it that way. The point of the secular culture is to provide a framework within which people of any faith or none may co-exist. But when ‘secular philosophy’ is taken as a challenge to religious faith, then it becomes a faith in its own right, often ‘faith in science’, which is pernicious, as science doesn’t need nor rely on faith, it deals with matters of fact amenable to validation by observation and reasoning. It is the qualitative dimension of existence, glibly described as ‘qualia’, which are the point at issue in this topic.
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I don’t think you’ve absorbed the point of the original post, the full version of which can be read on Medium.
OK. What did I miss? I don’t think I need to read it again. Perhaps if you could give me a quote or something to help me see what I missed, I’d appreciate it
I don’t understand the point of the question. There’s nothing in the original post about inanimate things having mental properties. The nub of the argument is:
Even the most rudimentary organisms behave as if directed toward ends: seeking nutrients, avoiding harm, maintaining internal equilibrium. Nothing in the inorganic realm displays these (or any!) behaviours. This kind of directedness — what might be called biological intentionality — is not yet consciously purposeful, but it is not simply mechanical either.
So the point I’m making here is that while ‘biological intentionality’ might not be conscious in the human sense of ‘consciously seeking goals’, it’s also not describable in terms of elementary physics, either. I will also acknowledge that the lexicon of biology has expanded considerably to encompass this dimension of organic behaviour, however it’s still my contention that it is overly reliant on the mechanistic model of organisms that originated with Descartes.
@Wayfarer Thanks for that link. Looks interesting.
We can’t deny purpose in living organisms, even if it isn’t of Camusian standard.
@Meta_U had introduced elan vital - the mysterious life force. Read it but don’t recall much of it. I believe it shared the same fate as the luminiferous aether.
Secularism is an atheistic offshoot (?) and @Tom_Storm was reminding us that religion, despite its claims, can be as nihilistic as irreligion. He seems to think that Apocalyptic ideas are negatory.