And I will respectfully inform you that these claims are irrelevant. “Organic compounds” are not necessarily living, because “live” implies possessing the active agent which animates the compound from within, to act purposefully, in relation to the whole. Organic compounds, such as the ones synthesized in labs, are dead, and do not possess that intrinsic purposeful activity.
“Purpose” refers to the direction of the activity. So synthesizing organic compounds is an activity which has a completely different purpose from the purpose of the active agent which creates and animates those compounds naturally. The distinct purposes of these two very different activities are not even comparable. Therefore your statements are irrelevant. Please refer to the difference between extrinsic and immanent purposiveness, mentioned below.
Would you argue that an organism that we have inserted a gene encoding a protein that glows green in the presence of ATP into so that the organism glows green is less ‘alive’ or less ‘purposive’, assuming your premise that life has a special ‘purpose’ to it, than the same organism without the gene inserted just because it was done artificially?
Remember that I am not a physicalist in the sense that I am not strictly a monist, because I believe that abstractions upon the physical realm can have their own rules and identity. I just believe that all things ultimately exist on a physical substrate, that these abstractions in the end need the physical to be.
Take, for example, a simulation of genetically-programmed fighting robots — the concept first existed in my mind, then I wrote, compiled, and executed code for it on my computer. This is a mathematical system, both in my mind and on my computer.
But at the same time it was invented, unless you argue that it always existed and I only discovered it (just like Michelangelo’s statue having already existed in the block of marble and Michelangelo having only acted to set it free).
By this count, countless possible undiscovered mathematical systems exist for eternity, to only be potentially discovered by people at one point or another.
About physicalism, my argument is that the ideal world is a set of abstractions that are embedded in the physical world yet have their own identity, their own behavior independent of it.
The genetically-programmed fighting robots are an abstraction that did not exist until I thought of them (even though they were strongly inspired by others’ examples of genetic programming), at which point they came to be, embedded in the physical substrate of my brain. Then I programmed them as code, so they were transferred to an entirely different physical substrate, of electric charges and currents in my computer’s CPU and RAM and magnetic charges in my hard disk.
About intuitionism and constructivism, I personally reject them as concepts. And let’s not get into finitism…
I don’t understand what you are asking tabemann. First, I didn’t say that life has a special purpose. Maybe wayfarer implied that, in some sense, but that’s not me.
What I meant is that life in its activities is purposeful. And, we know from our understanding of human intention, that the purpose of an act is very particular and highly dependent on circumstances which the being finds itself in. Our intentions rapidly change according to the situation. Accordingly, we can assume that the purpose of any living being’s activities also changes according to the situation. Therefore inserting something into a being which alters its activities, most certainly would change the purpose of the being’s activities.
So here’s an analogy to the situation you described. Suppose we teach a human being that it’s good to brush one’s teeth before bedtime. Inserting that principle into the being is analogous with your example of inserting the gene. The human being’s intentions are altered to include that purposeful act, in a way similar to the way that the purposeful acts of the organism are atered in your example.
I think it’s worth pointing out that there many different forms of dualism. There’s substance dualism, property dualism, hylomorphic dualism, platonism, dual-aspect theory, predicate dualism. Each of these tries take “formal reality” seriously, but do so in very different ways. Personally, I find hylomorphism most compelling. William Jaworski gives a nice introduction to contemporary hylomorphism in his book Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction.
My point is that you stated that organic chemicals synthesized in a lab lack ‘purpose’, unlike the very same organic chemicals as generated by life.
Yet here, with this glowing-green genetically-engineered organism we have something that is both natural (we did not encode the vast majority of its genome from whole cloth) and artificial (we specifically used, say, CRISPR or a retrovirus to insert a gene encoding a glowing-green protein that we had previously discovered from another organism into its genome).
If natural things have ‘purpose’ and artificial things do not, what about things that are both natural and artificial simultaneously?
Correction: I asked you to distinguish between extrinsic and immanent purposefulness. By that distinction, artificial things have purpose, the purpose imposed by the artificer. An inanimate tool for example, has purpose put into it in its manufacture. That is the defining feature of “tool”, it serves a function, i.e. it has purpose.
Because you did not do this, the rest of your post is irrelevant as a reply to my last post, so I’ll wait for you to properly consider what I wrote, and provide me with an adequate reply.
That is what my analogy was meant to explain. Once you accept that artificial things have purpose (explained above), you’ll understand that a human being has naturally based (innate and immanent) purposes, and also artificially based (learned and provided from an external soure, the educator) purposes, all combined within itself.
Okay, from this perspective ‘purpose’ is distinctive from the old idea of ‘vital force’ which @Wayfarer seems to believe in. Then, if ‘purpose’ can arise from human action, isn’t in this case ‘purpose’ an emergent quality upon human existence? I do not disagree with this position at all (indeed I have stated on this forum that I specifically believe that ‘purpose’ arises from human existence).
My objection, though, is to the idea that the universe and through it life have any kind of underlying ‘purpose’. Indeed, to me ‘purpose’ only arises as an emergent quality, e.g. from human existence — the universe and thus life have no underlying ‘goals’ in the first place.
I would give that alien civilizations could exist somewhere, and these aliens could create their own ‘purpose’ and ‘goals’ just like humans do.
You could argue that one could deduce ‘purpose’ and ‘goals’ as emergent qualities upon life rather than just human existence, but this changes the meaning of these words, as much of this life lacks the consciousness to internalize ideas like ‘purpose’ and ‘goals’ (even if one argues that animals such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and corvids have consciousness).
It’s a bit more complicated than that. What happened was that Varela softened his original strongly anti-teleological stance over time. Thompson writes:
Varela and I discussed these issues in e-mail exchanges over a period of several months in 1999. Our discussion began because I pointed out to him that his commitment to the explanatory role that phenomenology could play in relation to biology seemed inconsistent with his older position on teleology with Maturana. We had both independently been reading Kant and Jonas, and I asked him whether he would still maintain his earlier antiteleological stance in light of Jonas’s argument (discussed below) that one cannot recognize something to be a living being unless one recognizes it as purposive and that one cannot recognize something as purposive unless one is an embodied agent who experiences purposiveness in one’s own case.
Varela replied that he was “still quite suspicious” about this appeal to teleology, and hence about this WAY of linking phenomenology and biology, and that he preferred to “shift the accent” from teleology to original intentionality, understood as the sense-making capacity proper to autopoietic units. He saw this shift as a refinement of the " ‘Santiago school’ move to introduce the equation life = cognition." It is clearly “silly,” he said, to make cellular cognition just like animal cognition, but their “common root” is this basic sense-making capacity proper to autopoietic life. Appealing to sense-making, he suggested, was more “constructive” than appealing to the “elusive principle of purpose.”
Sense-making provides a strong link to intentionality, but “whether this turns into teleology,” he said, “is another matter.” This line of thought struck me as unsatisfactory because “original intentionality” and “sense-making” are themselves teleological notions. The issue is precisely how to analyze this teleology. Although the proposition “living is sense-making” may be an important elaboration of the equation life = cognition, it is insufficient to establish any antiteleological stance with respect to Kant’s and Jonas\s notions of intrinsic purposiveness.
I pressed Varela on this issue, and he later indicated that as time had gone by he had come to have a “broader view.” He had begun to see that “in a funny way you do recover a full fledged teleology . . . but this teleology . . . is intrinsic to life in action,” and “does not require an extra transcendental source” in the Kantian sense. In other words, teleology, in the sense of self-organized, intrinsic purposiveness, can be seen as a constitutive feature of the organism, on the basis of its autonomy and sense-making, rather than only a form of our judgment, as Kant had held. It is precisely this conception that Weber and Varela advance and call immanent teleology.
Let’s take a closer look at how this immanent teleology functions for Thompson. Living systems are purposive because they produce a dynamically reproducing self or ‘inside’. This can be thought of as a normative patten of functioning which aims to preserve itself over time. And how exactly does the organism produce this normative activity? Thompson draws from Kant:
For Kant, as we have seen, self-organization implies intrinsic purpo-siveness. A natural purpose is both cause and effect of itself. Every part not only exists for the sake of the other parts, but also reciprocally pro-duces them. The parts produce the whole, but also have their exis-tence by means of the whole. Because of this self-organizing circularity, cause-and-effect relations are also means-end relations. A natural pur-pose is thus a totality of interrelated means and ends. Unlike an arti-fact, its purposiveness is not extrinsic (a use to which it can be put by something outside it), but intrinsic, being no other than to exist by or-ganizing itself, by self-organizing. In contrast, the theory of autopoiesis in its original formulation was explicitly mechanistic and antiteleological. Maturana and Varela identified living systems with autopoietic machines and denied that living systems are teleological: “Living systems, as physical autopoietic machines, are purposeless systems”.
The key feature of Kant’s model of self-organization is its reliance on circular causal loops, a reciprocal interaffecting in which each part contributes a tendency which is at the time the effect of a cause and the origin of a cause. It is the reciprocal casual system of these micro-tendencies which produces an overarching structure of normativity which tends to preserve itself. But what is key here is that “survival” is not an independently specified goal that the organism aims at.
It is a retrospective abstraction from the ongoing process of self-maintenance. The organism doesn’t first have the end “survive” and then act toward it; rather, what we call “survival” just is the continued success of its autopoietic organization. If you reify that into a goal, you subtly reintroduce a means–end structure that the theory is meant to dissolve.
Thus, Thompson’s “teleology” is strictly immanent, non-transcendent, and reducible to autonomous organization and sense-making. It is not teleology as a fundamental explanatory principle alongside efficient causation; it is a reinterpretation of certain organized causal processes ( circular or reciprocal causality) in teleological language. The normative whole, with its aims and purposes, is the constructed product of a system of reciprocal causal tendencies among the parts. But these parts cannot be said to ‘strive for’ the continued preservation of the normative whole.
They are their own strivings, their own tendencies, whose mutual shaping via the influence of their neighboring bits stabilizes the system as a whole into a consistent overarching pattern of activity to which a unitary ‘end’ can be attributed. Is this formulation of immanent teleology acceptable to you?
Extrinsic purpose would definitely be emergent, but immanet purpose is the cause of human action, therefore prior to it.
You seem to have a hard time understanding purpose as a cause of action. Imagine that you want some bread, so you walk to the store to get some. The purpose of you walking is to get bread. And, the purpose is the cause of that action. As the cause, it is necessarily prior to the action, in time. It is not emergent from the action because it is prior in time to it.
Can you conceive of purpose as the cause of action, rather than as the result of action? That would be more realistic.
So for example, a bird builds a nest. We can judge the purpose of that activity to be that it is providing itself a place to lay its eggs. The purpose is the cause of the activity, therefore it must exist prior in time to the activity itself. So before building the nest, the bird has the purpose, goal, or aim, to build a nest and this causes it to do that.
Or, imagine that some bees fill the hive with honey, The purpose is to have a supply of food. As the cause of that activity, the purpose precedes the activity, in time. So before collecting the nectar and producing the honey, the bees have that goal, aim, or purpose, and this causes those actions.
These are only ‘purpose’ in the sense of ‘purpose’ emergent from life. There is no force in the universe that provides ‘purpose’ for birds to build nests or bees to fill hives with honey. Rather, ‘purpose’ here is an abstraction upon the behavior of birds or bees. We can say that birds or bees have ‘purpose’ in the sense that we humans can deduce a cause of birds’ or bees’ behavior. What we deduce is ‘purpose’.
And hence this ‘purpose’ of birds or bees exists on a substrate of the human mind, or on a substrate of nature writings that encode discussion of birds and bees in human language, or on a substrate of nature videos narrated by David Attenborough, even if its subject exists in the natural world independent of humans or human-created media.
The key thing is that ‘purpose’ is the causes we, as conscious beings, ascribe to things. We can speak of our ‘purpose’ as humans in so far as we can ascribe causes to our own actions, past, present, and future.
We can speak of ‘purpose’ of things outside the human world by deducing causes to others’ actions, whether animate or inanimate.
E.g. some humans may say that the ‘purpose’ of a rock is to undergo the pull of gravity towards a state of least potential energy — but that does not mean that a rock itself has any special metaphysical quality of ‘purpose’.
If we can ascribe ‘purpose’ to an animate creature, we likewise can ascribe ‘purpose’ to that rock — there is no fundamental reason why the subject’s animacy should be relevant.
Yet at the same time the ‘purpose’ of the rock only exists in human minds and in human-created media like the text of this comment.
The assumption of de facto purposes involves the presupposition of retrocausation, by which the future is interpreted as “pulling” the past towards it.
Alternatively, the assumption of de facto purposes can be rejected in a way that avoids teleological nihilism, through the theory of synchronicity proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, according to which spatio-temporally separated events are interpreted as being non-locally correlated e.g via quantum entanglement, in a way that metaphysically defends our post-hoc attribution of future-directedness to our previous belief states, whilst at the same time rejecting the existence of a priori future directedness towards the unrealized future that is ontologically needed for the existence of prophecies.
De facto purposes can only be firmly established in hindsight, but can be hypothesized before the relevant event happens, particularly by someone who ascribes a purpose to themselves. E.g., as I type this, I believe that the purpose that I am writing this comment is that I will post it on TPF to respond to your comment, but I haven’t hit the Reply button yet, and something could happen between as I press these keystrokes and I click on Reply, such as the battery in the computer I am using starting on fire.
That said, de facto purposes in the future can only be formulated by imagining some future state of events (e.g. this comment being posted) and then thinking about how the past and present state of events (e.g. my thinking about writing this comment and my physically pressing keys on this computer) serve to lead to that future state of events. I.e. you cannot think of a de facto purpose for a future event you cannot imagine.
It’s deduction. We understand what purpose is, and we conclude that the birds must act with purpose when they build their nests. That purpose is immanent within the creature. You can deny it if you like, and insist that there is no such force in the universe, but why deny the obvious? What is the purpose in your denial of the truth?
Obviously, the purpose inheres within the creature which acts with purpose, as the cause of it acting in that way, just like when a human being acts with purpose. Human beings act with purpose, and we understand the purpose to inhere within the being as a cause of its actions. When you see that other animals act with purpose, how can you not conclude that this is the same principle, that the purpose inheres within, just like in the case of human beings? Instead, you claim that it is a “substrate of the human mind”, that the purpose is imaginary, a fiction created by the observer.
You need to explain logically, justify, how you support this separation between human beings and other animals. You know that other human beings act with purpose which inheres within them, just like the way you act with purpose. So why would you concoct a division between human beings and other creatures, such that when they display purposeful acts you claim that this supposed “purpose” is just a fantasy created by your own mind?
I take this to be your argument then. So, we need to extend the principle you argue, to include human beings then. There is no fundamental reason why a being’s species should be relevant because we see no physical features to account for this difference. Therefore by your principle, there is no reason to believe that human beings act with purpose, and no reason to believe that “purpose” is a real cause of anything.
However, if you reflect on your own experience, and if conclude that you act with purpose, and that purpose inheres within you as a cause of your actions, then you need to reconsider what you are saying. And if by observing other human beings, you might conclude that they also act with purpose, why stop there? We know other living beings are very similar and they display purpose, as in the examples I gave you. However, we see no such indication of purpose in the activities of a rock. Rocks do not act to create complex structures like living things do. Therefore it is very reasonable to draw the line there.
Actually, when people argue this, that is exactly what they mean, that there is a special metaphysical quality of purpose which inheres within the rock. It’s a form of panpsychism, they say that the rock is inclined by purpose to move in the way which is commonly described by us as gravity.
The accepted wisdom is that mind is the product of the brain, which is the product of evolution, which is the product of undirected physical causation. Hence mathematics, scientific laws, and so on, while they have their own rules and identity, are ultimately dependent on the physical brain, which can be understood as the consequence of physical causation.
Originally, the physical was understood as that which resists the will:
what we regard as the physical world is “physical” to us precisely in the sense that it acts in opposition to our will and constrains our actions. The aspect of the universe that resists our push and demands muscular effort on our part is what we consider to be “physical”. On the other hand, since sensation and thought don’t require overcoming any physical resistance, we consider them to be outside of material reality.
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics (p. 6). Kindle Edition.
The deep issue with the physicalist account, however, is that it is itself based on abstraction . Modern mathematical physics is grounded in Galileo’s abstraction of the ideal qualities of mass, velocity, momentum, and so on, formalised in Newton’s laws. As I say in the original post, ’ The rise of early modern physics was built on a profound methodological simplification: the exclusion of context. Galileo and Newton inaugurated a new style of reasoning by isolating variables — mass, motion, force — and expressing their relations mathematically. The result was a set of laws remarkable for their precision and generality. What made them so effective was precisely their invariance: they were true in all places and times, for all observers, regardless of the specificities of any actual situation.’
It is in that context, or rather, lack of context, that you will see the physical as being somehow self-existent or real independently of the mind that experiences it. However, at back of this, is layer upon layer of abstraction and construction, all of which takes place in the observing mind. You very idea of the physical depends on it. So temporal priority doesn’t equate to ontological priority.
We, and presumably some other animals, who can imagine some goal or other can be said to demonstrate cases of "the future pulling the past (or present depending on perspective) towards it.
I think the burning question for those wishing to draw analogically driven overarching metaphysical conclusions from this fact is whether this human (and animal) purposiveness can be “writ large” in some cosmic sense. Such an analogy would presumably require the hypothesis of a “cosmic mind”.
The truth status of such a speculation certainly seems to be indeterminable, and so we are each left with our intuitions to settle on an answer (hopefully not influenced by wishful thinking) if we feel compelled to get off the fence in the matter.
Perish the thought of the suggestion of a higher intelligence! I’ve yet to read Maturana and Varela’s original paper on autopoiesis (although I’ve read about it) but I strongly suspect that it was necessary for them to banish any idea of teleology at the outset if they were to find any audience for this idea of autopoiesis. It had to presented as strictly mechanical and non-purposive, otherwise it would be read as Bergson all over again (you see that happening in this thread!)
But this is sophistry. Watching a monkey clinging precariously but determinedlly to a raft of vegetation swept out to sea by a mighty Amazon flood, it is, as the saying goes, ‘clinging on for dear life’. The ‘survival instinct’. You can describe it in terms of ‘autopoiesis’, but the entire elaborate apparatus — retrospective abstraction, circular causality, sense-making carefully distinguished from “elusive purpose” — is doing the work of acknowledging what looks undeniably like purposefulness while ensuring it never opens a door that might admit anything transcendent. It’s a kind of philosophical gerrymandering, drawing the boundaries of acceptable discourse very precisely around the immanent.
From the original post:
So, as the philosopher David Hull once noted, "calling something ‘teleonomic’ doesn’t explain teleology away — it just gives it a different name." The explanatory work is still being done by the as if. But when the entire vocabulary of biology — function, adaptation, selection, error-correction, information — is suffused with purpose-shaped terms, one has to wonder whether we’ve really done away with telos, or simply smuggled it back in through the servants’ entrance, it having been displaced by a form of science which had no direct relevance to the subject of biology in the first place.
I can see the sense of it in biology, but philosophy is a different matter. Humans have a larger ‘salience landscape’ than do other organisms, as we’re obliged to consider such questions as purpose in the abstract, not just in terms of why I’m driving a nail into that board at this particular time. I think the mistake is that the idea of ‘higher purpose’ became so enmeshed in formulaic dogma that it indeed lost its meaning. But that is a sociological or historical observation. Whether it really does mean something is another matter.
The OP doesn’t pose the issue in terms of an overarching purpose.
The question of purpose, or its lack, doesn’t always require invoking some grandiose ‘cosmic meaning.’ Meaning and purpose are discovered first in the intelligibility of ordinary life — in the way we write, behave, build, and think. The moment we ask whether something is meaningful, we’re already inhabiting a world structured by purposes. And the belief that the Universe is purposeless is itself a judgement about meaning. Asking what this purpose might be, in the abstract, is almost a red herring — it doesn’t really exist in the abstract, but it is inherent in the purposeful activities of beings of all kinds, humans and other, which are driven by the imperative of survival. It is, as it were, woven into the fabric of existence.
And let’s not forget that the final cause of a match is fire.
Perhaps not, but the question of the overarching seems to be the only permutation of the question which is not uncontroversial.
Not sure what your point is here, but in any case that’s just one possible answer―why not “cooking” or “the desire for warmth”? Also fire was around long before matches, so perhaps convenience would be a better candidate for the final cause of matches than fire.