Can we clarify the use of “purpose” here? As my Roomba vacuums, does it have an “apparent purpose” or a “real purpose”?
The Roomba is deliberately designed and created by humans with vacuuming rooms in mind, so in this specific case the designers of the Roomba assigned a “real purpose” to the Roomba.
However, unless one believes in intelligent design (and hence believes in a greater cosmic will, which the original poster denies), there is no designer of life, so hence there is no “real purpose” to it.
I should note that evolution can have “real purpose” in the case of genetic algorithms and genetic programming designed by humans with the specific intention of evolution occurring within a simulated world.
But the matter is that “real purpose” inevitably requires a designer, a creator, and is distinct from “apparent purpose” that humans arrive at retrospectively from their observation of the world.
OK. So “purpose” need not refer to something that an entity professes or even experiences. The Roomba experiences nothing; its purpose is not apparent to itself. This is a different sense of “purpose” than used for humans, generally; we say “My purpose in doing X was such and such . . .” and go on to give an account of what we were thinking or intending before the action took place.
So, would Roomba’s actions be teleonomy or teleology, as you understand it? I think you would have to say, “Teleology,” since the goal-directedness of Roomba is real, not apparent. Is that right?
Yes, the Roomba’s purpose is teleology, as the Roomba was assigned a ‘goal’ when humans designed and created it; as you say, this is irrelevant to the fact that the Roomba itself experiences no concept of a ‘goal’ itself.
The problem with the original poster’s line of reasoning is that it indicates the existence of ‘real purpose’ in the natural world without a designer, a creator, and denies that the ‘purpose’ that one observes in things ranging from life to rocks to humans themselves is really ‘apparent purpose’ that exists solely in human minds and the human-created world that we humans derive from our observations of life, rocks, and even our own thought processes.
Let’s slow down a little. You’re saying that in order to have “real purpose,” one of two conditions must be met: either 1) the entity is of a sort that can give itself a purpose, or 2) the entity must be given its purpose by a designer or creator. So Roomba qualifies because its inventor gave it a purpose, and you and I qualify because we can declare, and act on, our own goals, at least in some limited way.
Have I got this right so far?
Condition 2) definitely applies, but 1) can be argued about because one could argue that one’s own ‘purpose’ is a retroactive conclusion one has arrived on by observing one’s own thought processes.
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Huh, that’s interesting. What does your use of scare-quotes around “purpose”, in the retroactive-conclusion case, indicate?
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Where I’m going with these questions is to point out the rather significant difference between the two kinds of purpose. One appears to depend on something being done to something else (either an act of creation or an act of design), while the other depends on . . . well, what, exactly? A mental state? A thought process or intention? Something only a conscious being could have? To tip my hand: I think you’re going to have trouble showing that only creation/invention can endow an entity with purpose. We already know that humans are an exception – we produce our own purposes without creating anything at all – and I’d argue that there other problems with this concept too. But I’ll save that for later.
My scare-quotes just mean that I am referring to the word ‘purpose’ as such without meaning to imply that I am referring to what we have been referring to as ‘real purpose’.
Yes, these two kinds of purpose do have a significant difference, precisely because one is something done to something else (through creation or design) while another is a mental state resulting from observations (when considered directly) or that mental state encoded in something in the physical world (e.g. when we discuss the topic of ‘purpose’ on this forum, it is encoded in electronic form).
What unifies these, though, is that even the ‘real purpose’ of the Roomba is ultimately a mental state, because the Roomba itself has no concept of its ‘real purpose’; rather, the ‘real purpose’ of the Roomba exists in the minds of the designers, creators, buyers, and users of the Roomba.
The difference between the ‘apparent purpose’ that humans observe in life in the natural world, is that ‘apparent purpose’ is retrospective — we humans, genetic engineering aside, arrive at it by our interpretation of our observations — while ‘real purpose’ is prospective — ‘real purpose’ was assigned to the Roomba before the first Roomba was manufactured.
I see what you’re getting at, but consider this: “Real purpose” doesn’t necessarily have to be prospective, does it? Or at least, not prospective to the physical existence of the purposeful entity.
The Roomba example misleads us here, because it’s wildly unlikely that Roomba could come into being without someone’s intending it to vacuum floors. How about a piece of rubber being used as a pencil eraser? I can imagine an early scientist messing around with rubber and discovering its erasing abilities. So they use it for that purpose. What should we say? Have they “invented” an eraser? Sort of, if we allow that invention, like purpose, can be a mental state, and that this state can arise after the purposive entity itself has entered the picture. No physical creation or invention is required, it would seem. You just have to notice that Item X can be used for something.
This may seem trivial, but the question of how such a thing as “real purpose” can arise in the larger world depends on these fine-tuned considerations, I think. Another example that raises similar questions: I point out my window and declare that the oak tree outside has the purpose of shading me from the sun. True or false? Our first reaction is to say, “No, that isn’t a ‘real purpose’.” But why not? How is it different from the eraser? Why is it silly to claim a personal purpose for the oak tree, but reasonable to demonstrate a collective purpose for rubber? Or should we limit the demonstration to saying that some instances of rubber now have a real purpose?
What understandings about “purpose” are being invoked here? We want to say that we “give things purpose” and I think that’s right, but the process of doing so can’t be as simple as the Roomba model of invention.
The first eraser, if one discovered that one could erase pencil-marks with a lump of rubber, has retrospective ‘apparent purpose’ because one discovered after the fact that the lump of rubber could erase pencil-marks. It did not basically have this ‘purpose’ until one discovered it from one’s observations.
This is also prospective ‘real purpose’ because one can then use it to deliberately erase pencil-marks in the future and one can then manufacture other similar lumps of rubber with the ‘real purpose’ of erasing pencil-marks.
First, I think that it is a mistake to equate the purpose in what we observe in human to the one of simple organisms. Accepting this distinction, simple organisms either respond to different stimuli differently or have the ability to do simple computation. Saying that they can compute requires that they can compare at least two situations, and for that, they need memory of situations, and they should have the capacity to recognise which situation is better than another, read which situation is beneficial for survival. I am not saying that they are simple to understand, but I don’t think if can come to an agreement that they can compute given the reductionist point of view. Given the fact that everything in nature is made of elementary particles, and the assumption that these particles do not have computing power but only a simple set of properties, we then face the hard problem of computation in such organisms that lack any structure for computation. Accepting that simple organisms can compute requires that we change our main assumption: Elementary particles have computational power! This is, at best, absurd, or if it is true, we have to accept that we cannot do science afterward at all, an old Persian saying: A stone does not lie on another stone!
If you review the original essay, you will see an account is given of how ‘teleology’ fell out of favour with Galileo’s rejection of Aristotelian physics, and that ‘teleonomy’ was eventually introduced in its place. My argument is that teleology ought never to have been banished from biology in the first place, as organisms plainly do act for purposes, and that the re-introduction of telos in the form of teleonomy amounts to belated recognition of this fact.
But the larger issue is that because physicalism takes physics as paradigmatic, then it calls into question the whole idea of purpose or intentionality, as these were excluded from the Galilean model at the outset. Hence another passage in the original post, a quote from philosopher Thomas Nagel on the significance of this for the ‘mind-body problem’:
“The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand — how this physical world appears to human perception — were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind — as well as human intentions and purposes — from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop” ~ Mind and Cosmos
That is the context in which we see consciousness, purpose, and intentionality, and so on, as ‘epiphenomenal’.
The alternative idea of the ubiquitous nature of goal-directed activity comes from phenomenology, specifically, a 1966 book called The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophy of Biology, by Hans Jonas. He contends that according to physicalism, non-living matter (or more bluntly ‘death’) is the norm, and life an anomaly which has to be explained away or assimilated. In his alternative philosophy of biology, organisms are recognizably different to inorganic matter from their very inception, as from the outset they must maintain themselves in distinction from their environment. His is not a creationist or theistic account, but naturalistic, albeit with a different paradigm of naturalism to the physicalist.
Roombas are artifacts. Machines and artifacts are in enactivist jargon ‘allopoietic’ as distinct from’ autopietic’ . ‘Autopoietic systems (self-producing) are living, organizationally closed systems that generate their own components and maintain their structure (e.g., cells, organisms). Allopoietic systems (other-producing) are non-living, open systems that produce something other than themselves, usually operated by external forces (e.g., cars, factories).’ This distinction also has precedents in Aristotle, who distinguished artifacts from organisms on this same basis. Natural things have an internal organising principle; artifacts have it imposed on them by design. And the history of mechanism has been, in effect, the progressive assimilation of natural things to the artifact model. The autopoiesis/allopoiesis distinction, whatever Maturana and Varela intended, is a biological rediscovery of those Aristotelian ideas.
But from my perspective, that is still reductionist. It is putting humans on a continuum with other species. But humanity has an existential plight, which animals do not. As humans are fully self-aware, they are individuals, with past and future, they are aware of loss and death in a way that animals cannot be. I’ll refer here to an essay by Zen teacher and poet, Norman Fischer, written in response to the 9/11 atrocities, in an essay called The Violence of Oneness:
In his book The Theory of Religion, translated by Robert Hurley (Zone Books, 1992), Georges Bataille analyzes the arising of human consciousness as it emerges out of animal consciousness and shows how religious sensibility necessarily develops from this. His argument goes like this:
The animal world is a world of pure being, a world of immediacy and immanence. The animal soul is like “water in water,” seamlessly connected to all that surrounds it, so that there is no sense of self or other, of time, of space, of being or not being. This utopian (to human sensibility, which has such alienating notions) Shangri-La or Eden actually isn’t that because it is characterized at all points by what we’d call violence. Animals, that is, eat and are eaten. For them killing and being killed is the norm; and there isn’t any meaning to such a thing, or anything that we would call fear; there’s no concept of killing or being killed. There’s only being, immediacy, “is-ness.” Animals don’t have any need for religion; they already are that, already transcend life and death, being and nonbeing, self and other, in their very living, which is utterly pure.
Bataille sees human consciousness beginning with the making of the first tool, the first “thing” that isn’t a pure being, intrinsic in its value and inseparable from all of being. A tool is a separable, useful, intentionally made thing; it can be possessed, and it serves a purpose. It can be altered to suit that purpose. It is instrumental, defined by its use. The tool is the first instance of the “not-I,” and with its advent there is now the beginning of a world of objects, a “thing” world. Little by little out of this comes a way of thinking and acting within thingness (language), and then once this plane of thingness is established, more and more gets placed upon it—other objects, plants, animals, other people, one’s self, a world. Now there is self and other—and then, paradoxically, self becomes other to itself, alienated not only from the rest of the projected world of things, but from itself, which it must perceive as a thing, a possession. This constellation of an alienated self is a double-edged sword: seeing the self as a thing, the self can for the first time know itself and so find a closeness to itself; prior to this, there isn’t any self so there is nothing to be known or not known. But the creation of my me, though it gives me for the first time myself as a friend, also rips me out of the world and puts me out on a limb on my own. Interestingly, and quite logically, this development of human consciousness coincides with a deepening of the human relationship to the animal world, which opens up to the human mind now as a depth, a mystery. Humans are that depth, because humans are animals, know this and feel it to be so, and yet also not so; humans long for union with the animal world of immediacy, yet know they are separate from it. Also they are terrified of it, for to reenter that world would be a loss of the self; it would literally be the end of me as I know me.
In the midst of this essential human loneliness and perplexity, which is almost unbearable, religion appears.
There is a lot more to be said (and if interested I have the full essay in .pdf) but this is the essential point for where I see religion fitting into the overall situation. And for me that’s an indispensable aspect, although I acknowledge that it won’t be for others.
Yes, I agree that the purposes which serve to guide individuals are constantly changing, according to the particulars of the situation. But I think we also need to accept that “purpose in general” is a very real condition of living beings. This is a general condition in which the being is in some way aware of the future, and from this general purpose, specific goals are derived. So @Wayfarer described a general attitude toward personal survival, and this would be a basic manifestation of purpose in general. Purpose in general serves as the basic foundation for specific purposes which emerge and evolve according to the particular situation one individual finds oneself to be in.
To help understand the relation between purpose in general, and specific purposes, we can look at a simple desire, like hunger, as an example. In it’s basic level hunger is a manifestation of the general purposeful attitude toward personal survival. Hunger, the feeling itself, is a basic uncomfortableness which produces the general goal, or purpose, to eat. So the most general intention, survival, gives rise to a slightly more specific intention, to eat. Then, according to the circumstances the person will sometimes decide on the type of food, and finally the particular items which will be eaten. So intention refines itself through a process whereby the particular goal emerges from the general.
We can say that about the specific purposes which emerge from the general purpose, but we cannot say that about the general purpose which is prior to the existence of the individual being, in the way I explained in the last post.
What you say here has an implicit conflation of teleonomy and teleology like that made by the OP.
To use your example, hunger, including that experienced by humans, is a case of teleonomy. All animals that failed to feel hunger failed to eat and hence starved to death, failing to pass on their genes; consequently, we have inherited genes from ancestors that did feel hunger and thus the expression of these genes makes us feel hunger. No designer or creator made us feel hunger.
Of course one can say that one is hungry for pizza, and surely our ancestors beyond a limited number of generations back did not eat pizza. However, we have evolved taste buds which do enable us to be attracted to certain kinds of food that themselves were not part of our evolutionary environment. Furthermore, we have evolved the ability to learn from experience, and that includes the ability to learn that pizza is tasty.
As for our ‘purpose’ in wanting to eat pizza beyond mere teleonomy, that is a matter of us observing our hunger and our consequent desire to eat pizza and hence retrospectively formulating in our minds an ‘apparent purpose’ of seeking pizza that we project on our thoughts of how we fulfill that desire.
I think the problem is that, for you, intention and purpose must be the acts of a conscious agent like yourself. You imagine that God is such an agent (leaving aside whether you believe in God or not), and humans are other agents. Agents are able to entertain the idea of purpose whereas organisms can only ‘enact genetic programs’. Teleology implies conscious purpose, teleonomy is a ‘genetic mechanism’
Whereas I’m attributing agency to organisms. Would that be about right?
I love Bataille, but I’m guessing you’ve never read him. Did you know that Nietzsche was a major influence on his ‘religion’? Brook Ziporyn’s book Mystical Atheism is a relentless attack on the notion of purpose, and his central philosophical allies, other than certain strands of Buddhism, are Bataille, Nietzsche and Deleuze.
It is not merely agency per se, because one could argue that (especially higher) non-human animals have ‘agency’ in a sense, but rather the ability to consciously entertain ideas like ‘purpose’, which goes a step beyond mere agency.
There’s a big problem with this explanation. By your description, feeling hungry occurred prior to those animals starving to death who did not feel hunger. So feeling hunger now, as an “expression of these genes”, is an extension of feeling hunger back then. So these genes now, are posterior to feeling hunger, back then, therefore not the cause of “feeling hunger” in general, which by that description was happening long before we got these genes. And so you have no explanation for where feeling hunger came from in the first place, since it was prior to these genes.
Yes I explained this, how the more specific intention emerges from the more general intention. However, the issue is where the general intention came from in the first place. The specific is just a refined form of intention, shaped to the particularities of the circumstances. Because the specific intention is conformed to meet the circumstances, it appears like the intention is caused by the circumstances, and emerges accordingly. However, like I explained, the general form of intention is prior to those circumstances, as that which is shaped by the circumstances.
So to go back to the example of feeling hunger. Prior to evolving these taste buds, and developing these particular genes, there was “feeling hunger” in a more general sense. Those who did not recognize that general feeling as a requirement, starved, by your example. Those who recognized it fed, and developed the more specific feelings of hunger which the various species alive today feel. Pay attention though, to the fact that the more general was prior to the more specific, which developed through evolution.