On Purpose (Reprise)

Philosophy of Science
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41

I’m saying that my action was caused by what the abstraction generalizes over, yet, at the same time, I am perfectly capable of making meta-thoughts involving neural processes encoding such abstractions upon other neural processes, and I cannot rule out such meta-thoughts being involved, just like this discussion we are having involves meta-thoughts and meta-thoughts upon meta-thoughts and so on.

The key thing that may be making this conversation confusing is that the human brain very readily abstracts and thinks about abstractions, including abstractions on its own processes, and even abstractions on those abstractions, with no real apparent limit beyond the physical limitations of the human brain itself (and the number of memories that a single human brain can store from all appearances is gargantuan).

Consequently, while we can reason about the physical substrate of the brain as a physical object, composed of neurons, neural connections, action potentials, and so on, we cannot really separate thoughts into different levels of abstraction as the abstract concept of ‘thoughts’ inevitably involves massive amounts of self-reference in any mature human brain.

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In your view, are abstractions real in their own right? Can they cause or be caused by other things?

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The reason why I would consider the abstract contents of thoughts to be epiphenomena is that we cannot simply will things into being or non-being with the power of our thoughts. The abstract contents of thoughts are a layer above physical reality; protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons do not know about any concept of a ‘thought’. The abstract idea of thoughts can refer to the abstract idea of thoughts almost ad infinitum but physical reality only knows about things such as matter, energy, and charge.

However, the main argument you can make against the idea of thoughts-as-epiphenomena is things such as assistive devices for the disabled that have been developed that enable severely disabled people to control things in the physical world (e.g. a computer) purely with the power of their thoughts, and these thoughts can involve self-reference such that the abstract ideas of their thoughts can leak back into the physical world through these devices. For all you know, I could be in a ‘locked-in’ state writing these posts entirely through a neural interface. In this hypothetical case, my abstract thoughts about these ideas we have been discussing and their self-referential aspects would be directly impacting physical reality.

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The key question here is really whether one can consider such a dualism of a physical neural substrate and epiphenomenal abstract idea to be true, or whether one considers abstract ideas to be directly encoded upon the neural substrate. Of course, if we reject such dualism we have to entirely reject the idea that abstractions at any level exist independent of the physical substrate.

Consequently, to use an example of money from another thread, money would have to be treated not as an abstract quantity arising from human societies and economies but rather purely as something encoded and only encoded upon the physical substrate.

This results in a problem, though — money exists independent of any one person and arguably can exist independent of people altogether, in that one could construct economic mechanisms involving money that do not involve the money actually existing in anyone’s hands. Yet is that money any less ‘real’ as an abstraction upon reality (as opposed to real as an element of physical reality itself, which it certainly is not, as nothing in reality physically involves money — we don’t have money particles or money waves in the universe)?

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I think not!

In Mind in Life, chapter on Autopoiesis and Teleology, Evan Thompson distinguishes between extrinsic and immanent purposiveness. He writes that Maturana and Varela’s original antiteleological stance was directed against the former — the functionalist idea that purpose is attributed by an observer situating a system in some larger context. But this leaves immanent purposiveness entirely untouched. In an autopoietic system, every part produces and is produced by the whole, meaning causal relations are simultaneously means-end relations. Purposiveness here is neither imposed from outside nor a mysterious internal essence — it’s a constitutive property of the system’s organisation as a whole. It is intrincially purposive in pursuit of survival.

Thompson also shows that Varela himself eventually abandoned the anti-teleological position. In a late essay with Andreas Weber, he argued that autopoiesis entails immanent purposiveness in two complementary modes: identity, the maintenance of a dynamic self through material change, and sense-making, the organism’s active orientation toward its environment. And sense-making, Varela explicitly argues, is intentionality in its minimal and original biological form. So the claim that phenomenology and enactivism support a merely “apparent” reading of purpose is not just contestable — it runs directly counter to where Varela himself ended up.

From Mind in Life: Biology, Consciousness, and the Phenomenology of Life, Evan Thompson

In Phenomenology of Biology, Appendix 1 to the First Essay, Hans Jonas argues as follows. Hume showed that causation isn’t found among percepts — ‘This is incontrovertible so long as “perception” is understood, with Hume, as mere receptivity that registers the incoming data of sensation’ . But, he says, the “decausalized” world of observation isn’t really givn; it’s an abstraction . The apparent priority of stable, enduring entities over dynamic activity underwrites the mechanistic worldview.

(The) result: the apparent priority of enduring entity over occasional activity— the cognitive child of perception — is an inversion of the originative ontological order, and the root of a theoretical problem of causality later on.

The positive source of causal knowledge, which both Hume and Kant neglect, is bodily action — what Jonas calls “animal nisus,” the direct experience of force exerted and resisted. And this is one of the original statements of ‘enactivism’! Bodily action is not inferred or constructed; it is originally experienced from within. The body, not perception, is where we actually encounter causality as such (reminiscent of Schopenhauer).

The connection to the OP is that the “meaningless universe” isn’t discovered by science, it’s produced by the objectifying stance that perception and then theory impose on experience. Jonas gives the genetic account of how that abstraction arises and what it costs. And crucially, the suppression of force, agency, and purpose from the theoretical picture doesn’t mean they aren’t real — it means the theoretical picture has systematically excluded them as the condition of its own possibility - just as the OP says.

On page 80, Jonas provides a luminous interpretation of hylomorphism:

Let us consider further this new element of freedom that appears in organism , with special reference to form. Form, we h ave seen, is an essential and a real, that is, efficacious, characteristic of life. It is only with life that the difference of matter and fo rm , in respect to lifeless things an abstract distinction, emerges as a concrete reality. And the ontological relationship is reversed: form becomes the essence, matter the accident. In the realm of the lifeless, form is no more than a changing composite state, an accident, of enduring matter. And viewed from the fixed identities of the changing material contents, as the inventory of each moment would record them, the living form too is only a region of local and temporal transit in their own movements, its apparent unity passing, configurative state of their multiplicity. But viewed from the dynamic identity of the living form, the reverse holds : the changing material contents are states of its enduring identity, their multiplicity marking the range of its effective unity. In fact, instead of saying that the living form is a region of transit for matter, it would be truer to say that the material contents in their succession are phases of transit for the self continution of the form.

Throughout Jonas, he stresses the ‘needful freedom’ of the organism. For Jonas, the organism is paradoxically both free and needful — and the two are inseparable. It’s free in the sense that it has achieved a kind of independence from any particular parcel of matter; it maintains its identity through continuous material exchange, which no mere physical thing does. But that very freedom is purchased at a cost: precisely because the organism is not identical with its material contents, it depends on a constant supply of new matter and energy to sustain itself. It must keep going, or cease to be. It has, in Jonas’s phrase, a need to be.

This is what separates even the simplest organism from a stone. The stone is indifferent to its own continuation — nothing is at stake in its persistence or dissolution. The organism, by contrast, is always teetering between being and non-being, and its entire activity is oriented toward maintaining itself on the right side of that threshold. That orientation — however unconscious, however minimal — is what Jonas means by concern, and it’s what makes the organism a subject of a kind, however rudimentary, rather than merely an object.

The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Hans Jonas

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The device you wrote that on has precisely been ‘thought into being’. It’s a digital computer. Not long ago, in historical terms, such devices did not exist. They have been invented by reason of the human ability to peer into the realm of the possible and retreive things from it.

But that is actually a seperate topic to this thread. This thread is about the idea of purpose and the neglected fact that purpose pervades existence.

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An argument one can make for a dualism between physical substrate and abstract idea is that some kind of abstract essence of something persists even as an abstraction persists across different media.

Take for example an old-timey telegram. I first think of what I want to write (as English words), write them down with a pen on a piece of paper, take that piece of paper down to Western Union (back from the days that they actually sent telegrams), the WU person keys the telegram into a teletypewriter which sends the message, in English, as Baudot code encoded as electrical pulses to another TTY at another WU office, which prints the message on another piece of paper, which someone then removes from the TTY and then sends a courier to deliver to the destination person, who reads it.

In this scheme, the words in English traverse a number of different media, going from thoughts in my head, to ink on a piece of paper, to thoughts in the head of the person at the WU office, to keystrokes into the TTY machine, to electronic pulses themselves encoding Baudot code to the other TTY machine, to ink on another piece of paper, to thoughts in the head of the destination person reading the piece of paper, with momentary stages in between where the message is communicated by light bouncing off words printed on paper. Yet the words, the abstraction, remain constant despite all these changes in media. This is despite that this abstraction is not real in the physical substrate — English words simply do not exist at the level of particles and waves.

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Good point about these posts written on this computer being ‘thought into being’.

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@tabemann

I think your insights regarding the nature of money and the telegraph are good ones, and potentially point us in the right direction with regard to purpose too. As you say, money is an abstraction that can’t be reduced to any particular concrete instance, yet it’s real and clearly has causal efficacy in the world. Is it possible that purpose could be something similar?

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Very interesting OP. I would call this problem the hard problem of intentionality. How could there be a purpose in a world where there is no purpose in its ingredients? I think this problem is more difficult than the hard problem of consciousness, since one can resolve the hard problem of consciousness by introducing another substance, so-called the mind. I also think we are dealing with the same problems when we are talking about all the different forms of subjective experiences, such as love, beauty, justice, etc. Although substance dualism can resolve the problem of experience answering how we could have a single experience, it cannot answer why our experience has different qualities, so-called Qualia.

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This is what I have meant by effectively real in my comments on here — an abstraction can not exist in the physical substrate, yet its practical impacts are very much real despite the unreality of the abstraction with reference to the physical substrate.

(And many, many things in human society and human-created existence fall in this category of effectively real, ranging from our aforementioned examples of purpose, abstract thoughts, money, and human language to morals, to values, to meaning, to data, to code, to social/political/economic power, to race, to ethnicity, to social class, to gender, and so on.)

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“Effectively real” is an interesting way to put it. Abstractions are clearly real enough that they have an impact on the way things happen in the world, but they aren’t identical to the physical substrates in which they are realized. Historically, philosophers would have said that abstractions are formally real, which I think is probably just another way of saying the same thing, although they would have pushed back on the notion that abstractions are “unreal” with reference to the physical substrate. They would have said that abstractions are real in a different, but no less efficacious, way than the physical substrates that they are instantiated in.

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Ultimately, I would have to say that one has to accept a sort of dualism where abstract ideas exist independent of the physical substrate yet may be simultaneously intimately tied to the physical substrate in an inescapable fashion.

Take numbers for instance. They can be encoded in the physical substate in many different ways, whether as ink on a check (encoding numbers both as Arabic numerals and as English-language text), positions of beads on an abacus, or as electric charges and currents in a computer. Yet regardless of their myriad encodings their identity within the realm of math is independent of the physical substate. It is very easy to construct and operate on a number that cannot refer to a cardinal number of anything in the physical substate, e.g. a number countless orders of magnitude greater than the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons in the observable universe. Yet numbers and math are not arbitrary — they operate by clear rules that even they, as ineffable as they are, cannot escape.

Yet, at the same time, math has a suspiciously strong predictive power with regard to the physical substate. The laws of physics that we have deduced are fundamentally grounded in numbers and math. In many cases, the math has come first and only later has the observations confirmed it. If math did not have such a strong tie to physical reality this would not be true.

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Now you’re getting there! :+1:

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An understanding of the evolution of the word “physics” may be be useful here. From the Greek “physis” it originally meant nature. The early physicists, Galileo, Newton, established “physics” as the study of the behaviour of bodies. In their work, objects are referred to as bodies, and from this the derivatives “physical”, meaning “of the body”, and “physician” who treats illness of the body.

Now the point is that the early physicists completely respected the body/soul duality derived from religion, so physics was never meant to infringe upon matters of the soul, nor was it meant to describe the purposeful activities of the soul. Purposeful activities of the immaterial soul were kept to completely different categories, different disciplines of study. The closest we get to a crossing of the boundary in the early stages of physics is Leibniz’s concept “vis viva” (living force) which was the foundation for the concept of energy. As “the capacity to do work”, this concept provides a sort of link between the physical body and the intention of the immaterial soul, allowing “potential energy” to become a very important concept.

I agree that teleology was excluded from physics, but that was intentional. Once the idea of divinity was driven out of the conception of the solar system, and the earth, sun, moon, and planets, were firmly recognized as inanimate bodies, rather than divinities, then a study of the motions of inanimate bodies was developed as “physics”.

This was not, in itself, a rejection of telos. It was an act of classification, based on the observational conclusions that inanimate bodies could be understood separately from animated ones. This was actually a very useful distinction, because the movements of inanimate bodies are very simple and straight forward to understand, in comparison to the movements of living things which act with purpose. So these very simple physical principles of motion were well suited for a developing human mind to focus on

The problem is the misunderstanding of the laity. Since understanding the activities of the inanimate is so simple in comparison to understanding living activities, knowledge has extended in that field, far and rapidly. This explosion of physical knowledge has the effect of making lay people believe that the discipline of physics can explain everything. So they turn a blind eye to the complexities of the animated world which physics is in no way designed to explain, things like free will, intention, mind and the soul, and they naively assert that physics will explain it all.

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I must respectfully disagree. We have fundamentally no reason to believe today that life is inherently ‘special’ in the universe ─ yes, we may have once believed that, but that was before we realized that the same methodologies we use to analyze the inorganic realm can also be used to analyze the organic realm, before we discovered that organic compounds that make up life really just are compounds like any other (and can be synthesized in the lab like any other compounds), before we discovered the structure and function of genetic material and enzymes, before we discovered that the brain is really made up of physical neurons that interact with charge potentials and neurotransmitters (and whose behavior we can artificially modify with drugs and sticking electrodes in the brain), before we learned how to modify life itself through genetic engineering.

Believing that life has ‘special’ metaphysical properties is to hearken back to a time before science had really turned its attention to life, when we assumed for lack of better knowledge that life must somehow have some special ‘vital force’, that organic compounds could not be synthesized artificially and could only be generated by life.

Fundamentally, the only really ‘special’ thing about life is it is centered around the close interaction of compounds composed primarily of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in the liquid state in such a fashion that it is potentially limited to a small portion of the universe ─ but even then, astronomers have discovered other Earth-like planets in other solar systems that could just potentially harbor life.

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I should note that when I spoke of dualism earlier in the thread I did not mean mind-body dualism — I believe that the mind ultimately is part of the physical world, as you can probably tell from my comments.

Rather, the sort of dualism I speak of is that the world can be divided into both physical and ideal spheres, the former of which is inherently ‘real’ and the latter of which requires some sort of encoding in the physical sphere to exist (as it has no inherent ‘reality’ in and of itself) yet follows its own logic independent of the physical sphere. However, this encoding need not have any one particular character; as mentioned, the same ideal abstraction can have countless seemingly unrelated encodings yet still be one. At the same time, the ideal sphere can directly impact the physical sphere in a way that makes it effectively real, as I mentioned.

The closest philosophical position to this that I have seen written down is actually interactionism, except interactionism applies dualism to mind versus body whereas I apply dualism to ideal versus physical.

Unlike interactionism, I still see things such as pain in response to, say, touching a hot object to be part of the physical sphere, as it involves pain and heat receptor neurons sending neural impulses to the brain, which activates neural circuits in portions of the brain that govern the sensation of pain and heat rather than some metaphysical process.

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Intresting that billions of dollars have been spent on SETI - search for extraterrestrial intelligence - yet to no avail! Even more so, considering that a new telescope has compiled a directory of 47 million galaxies.

You must have pretty high requirements for what you consider ‘special’.

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You don’t see this as a challenge for physicalism? I am persuaded by mathematical Platonism, which is the understanding that number is real independently of any mind – that maths is ‘discovered not invented’ in slogan form. (That said, having discovered the integers, then all manner of imaginary systems can be invented, but the point remains.)

If you look into philosophy of mathematics (in which I’m no expert as I’m not a mathematician) you will discover that mathematical Platonism was probably the dominant outlook until quite recently, and that it has been challenged by other schools (intuitionism, constructivism, factionalism) all of which deprecate the idea of the independent reality of numbers. And why? Because if number is real but not material, then this obviously poses a challenge to physicalism. But then, the fact that mathematics is so intimately intertwined with physics becomes something of an inconvenient truth for physicalism.

Indeed in the SEP article Platonism in Philosophy of Mathematics, we read:

Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.[1] Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate.

What say you?

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You’re not wrong in seeing the connection between ‘the hard problem’ and the issue of intentionality. But pay close attention to the fact that this particular argument is grounded in the activities of organic life. It is arguing that organisms act intentionally, if not consciously, from the moment of their inception. So the organic domain, of which we are inextricably a part, is undeniably intentional in that sense. All the tremendously intricate activities of cells and organs is characterised by purposiveness - again, not conscious intentionality in the human sense.

If you have time, review this interesting video presentation, ‘how the universe thinks without a brain’.

However, I would caution against the idea of ‘mind as substance’. This is a different topic to that of ‘organic intentionality’. But it’s important to understand that the word ‘substance’ in philosophy is different to ‘substance’ in day-to-day use. Calling mind ‘substance’ conveys the idea of ‘immaterial stuff’ which is surely a misconception. Mind as ‘res cogitans’, ‘thinking thing’, is one of the unfortunate consequences of René Descartes’ dualism, which has left a deep imprint on modern culture.