The methods of modern research involves dissecting and focusing in on finer and finer details. We would be forever blind to these finer details if it weren’t for instruments such as the microscope and the telescope. These tools allow specialists to focus in on the parts and gain a tremendous amount of knowledge in narrow fields.
But if researchers don’t look beyond these isolated islands of existence they will settle for a fragmented view of reality. And this causes problems for building theories about development and evolution of life. Researchers begin by looking at the parts to try to understand how they “build” bodies. Viewing things from this perspective it was expected that humans would have many more genes than turned out to be the case.. This is the type of error produced by this way of thinking Initially they did not understand the way in which the organism used its genes because they approached it from the wrong direction. Genes are in reality never isolated from the context of networks, cells and organisms.
Jaap van der Wal argues that we have become accustomed to thinking the human organism is made by a process of cells multiplication. But there is another more realistic way of thinking about it. From conception to adulthood a human being has always been a complete organism with a form and function suited to its environment. A machine is assembled from parts and it can only function as intended when all the parts are in place. Organisms are not like this. Where the organism is concerned the cell or cells of which it is composed serve the whole organism throughout its existence. It is not gradually built from parts. Machines are always built from the parts to the whole but organisms are never anything but complete wholes.
It is time to start paying more attention to how the whole determines the parts within it and luckily this view is becoming more prevalent.
Bruce,
If fitness didn’t have a real effect on individual animals’ biographies, how could it alter their relative success in the aggregate?
Recognized by us? Probably not, but that’s a separate question from whether relative fitness would operate within the low-level simulation. I think the answer to the latter is yes, and that relative fitness is therefore a weakly emergent phenomenon.
I think so. A sufficiently intelligent entity would notice the phenotypic changes over time and would be able to infer their causes.
Again, I think so. The key is to remember that when we shift from “in practice” to “in principle”, any presumed limitations on intelligence go out the window. A Laplacean superintelligence would be able to voluntarily coarse-grain a system and examine it at any desired resolution.
Have I missed something? I understand that there can be objective measures of things like enzyme activity, and such, but fitness seems to be a reification of relative reproductive success. And it seems to me to require multiple generations.
I think this is one of those insurmountable design problems.
Every once in a while I read about some engineered gene that makes photosynthesis more efficient. If you could call this fitness, you could simply plug this modification into crops and be done. But perhaps there are side effects.
petrushka,
I would say that fitness is an abstraction, not a reification. No one is claiming that you can point to some concrete object and say “there’s the fitness, right there.” But it is something you can detect by observing the behavior of a system (or simulation).
A Laplacean demon (or super-simulator) would be looking at behavior over time.
This comment is wrong in many ways.
First, fitness isn’t a system component, it is an individual component. Secondly, it may be the case that you can claim to “see” fitness in some cases (which of course would be a completely subjective observation), but since you could never “see” all cases of fitness, that means you can’t see fitness. For instance, your wife chose you presumably, and if you have offspring, then we would need to be able to see the reason she chose you. Do the same thing with ducks. Or pythons. You can’t.
That’s why I have been saying all along that fitness is a meaningless concept. Unless luck is fitness.
I’m not sure I follow your reasoning. Of course fitness is a system component, in the sense that an organism can’t be “fit” in isolation, it is only fit in terms of how well it can survive within some environment. Both organisms and environments are complex things, so organisms will be composed of some potentially large number of features, so will environments, and so fitness is a matter of degree — how well all features of both work together.
I would therefore regard fitness as a statistical abstraction, measured in relative survival rates over time. The importance of statistical fitness must be emphasized – for many species, only a very tiny fraction of offspring survive to breed, and sheer luck plays a key role. The “fitter” seed isn’t necessarily the one that falls on fertile ground. Resistance to fire doesn’t help trees living where there don’t happen to be any fires for extended periods. But luck is not the only factor involved; if luck is factored out (statistically, luck is evenly distributed across all organisms), there is a fitness factor left.
Where people have been selectively breeding lineages, whether it be with dogs or corn or goldfish, changes in the desired direction are rapid and striking. Clearly, this isn’t all luck. And from the perspective of the dog or corn plant or goldfish, human selection IS the environment. If selection didn’t work, and fitness were pure luck, we would not HAVE dogs or corn or goldfish at all.
I’m having trouble articulating my point. I think we tend to reify the abstraction.
We tend to say a gene has fitness, or an individual that has a particular gene is fit.
I think of fit as a verb. A gene fits, as in propagates more frequently than its variants.
This avoids the rabbit hole of reduction. We don’t have to qualify the attribute of fitness.
petrushka,
We’ve had a similar conversation before. I commented at the time:
Or when evolutionary biologists talk about the relative fitness of an allele.
petrushka,
I don’t see how that helps. “Allele A fits better” is synonymous with “allele A has higher relative fitness”. Only the phrasing has changed; the meaning hasn’t.
The problem is the implication that fitness is a property of a sequence, like length or mass. Fitness is a relationship.
Some years back, one of the technically competent wizards of the ID movement did some actual lab work on evolving proteins. He argued that evolution could increase the fitness of a molecule, but would be stymied at some point by the need to produce multiple simultaneous mutations.
Behe formalized this argument in The Edge.
One problem with this is that fitness is not an inherent property of a molecule. Fitness is a statement about the behavior of the molecule in a multidimensional context.
Actually, following the argument from Arrival of the Fittest, fitness is not just multidimensional. It is hyperdimensional.
A change can affect the viability of a phenotype in many ways simultaneously.
And successful, non fatal, changes open doors to new dimensions of fitness.
Thinking is my starting point – everybody thinks and comes up with loads of stuff, some of it real, some of it fantasy. The challenge is to distinguish the one from the other.
I am an empiricist and in addition to reason I use the tools of empiricism to help me do this. What are your tools?
Perhaps it could, if it were prompted somehow to look for a specified pattern. But why would it do so on its own? Coarse graining is a tool for limited intellects like ours. It would have no need to coarse grain.
Assuming all it sensed was the universal quantum wave equation, how would it even recognize entities like living beings? Patterns are defined and analysed from the top down as much as from the bottom up, and I am assuming it only senses the bottom.
That’s enough meandering on that for me. Over to you for last word on this one.
In the preface, the author says the book is pitched to general audience, but with lots of notes for his technical readers.
FWIW, so far he seems to be a someone who respects the role of philosophy in the cognitive sciences.
petrushka,
Then the object of your complaint is a misattribution, not a reification. (Though I don’t think it’s a misattribution that evolutionary biologists commonly make.)
Other similar misattributions:
1) Attributing CSI to a particular feature, when in fact it’s a function both of that feature and of the chosen specification; and
2) Attributing a given quantity of entropy to a thermodynamic system, when in fact it’s a function of the system and of the observer’s state of knowledge regarding the system.
keiths:
Bruce:
If coarse-graining were the only way to see certain patterns, as you seem to be suggesting, then the demon would need to coarse-grain, and would proceed to do so. This is one smart demon, after all.
By coarse-graining.
Then you’re suggesting that it’s actually incapable of coarse-graining, or incapable of choosing to coarse-grain. That seems like a pretty serious limitation for a Laplacean demon.
Well, this is the first problem. When you say over time, you are suggesting over several generations right, not over one individuals lifetime? Is so, then what are we measuring exactly, other than a new organism and thus new parameters. So the fitness of the previous organism becomes irrelevant.
There is no way to know this. Its like saying, well, speed is factored out statistically over time, so its other reasons besides speed.
Happenstance will always be a part of reproductive success. You can never know what percent it plays. It could be 100%.
The book in question (thanks to BruceS for the link looks to be worth a read). I’ll have to make do with the sections that are available on line for the moment.
From the book:
I could change your paragraph to the following:
The book “integrates a personal dynamic account (we have endogenous dynamics that allow us to respond selectively to perturbing information) with a predictive processing approach (we don’t passively take in what’s there anyway but actively generate top-down models of the world and only correct those models when they conflict with information that matters for accomplishing specific goals).”
You have transferred our activity as conscious beings to brain activity. But brain activity cannot be isolated from the perceiving subject in this way.
Your first response to my post was to read the words and then think about what I said. Hold on you say, “I must read it before I think about it”. But you can only understand what have read if in the past you have gained a knowledge of the words through thinking.
In order to cognize we need both observation and thinking. You can only arrive at at theory of knowledge by thinking about what you have observed.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that to engage in epistemology we must proceed by thinking. I have made no assertion or comment here about which is the more fundamental in the world order.
No.
No incapable, but unmotivated, since it knows everything that will happen.
Anyway, I broke my promise.
This is a tricky one, I agree.
I think it comes down to how you see counterfactuals playing into the role of fitness and whether or not counterfactuals have any relevance for a single life as lived.
But maybe you might disagree. Maybe not? Nah….
Bruce,
Only in one sense. By your stipulation, it knows everything that will happen but only at the bottom level. It would need to coarse-grain in order to see the patterns at higher levels, so there would be a motivation for coarse-graining.
Charlie,
Here’s one:
Right, so now we are getting into Laplacean demon psychology. Which sounds pointless and speculative; that is, ideal for TSZ.
If you do an OP on that topic, I will definitely take a look at it.
Perhaps you will find there is a difference between our mellow Canadian demons who share in our 4 week yearly vacations and our universal health care versus your go-getter US entrepreneurial demons, driven into a coarsened viewpoint of the world by fear of not getting the latest 4K TV?
I recognize that a coarsened viewpoint conflicts with ultra HD TV envy.
Changes are indeed rapid and striking but the specimens obtained by breeders never fall outside the boundary of what Goethe referred to as the “typus” the “ur-phenomena”. Dogs will always be recognisable dogs. For instance no matter how much change artificial selection produces dogs will never grow horns.
The specific is an expression of the general and once a particular line reaches a certain stage of specialisation it remains within the bounds of that stage. IMO dogs will always remain within canidae and will always be recognisable as such.
See here for
From Wikipedia
The Goethean method comes at the process of gaining knowledge from the opposite direction to that taken by the modern scientific method.
I too would call myself an empiricist. I experience the outer world through my senses and I also have inner experiences where I come to know certain concepts through thinking. That’s why I constantly go on about the ideal triangle. This is a concept with an objectivity to it. Its properties are independent of my thoughts about it.
Would you call the concept of the ideal triangle real or fantasy?
Sorry, I did not make myself clear. By “here” I meant in my reply to faded_glory which I assumed you were basing your assumption on.
Generally I have not hidden my belief that mind is primal to matter. What I am getting at is that before we can even make a decision as to whether mind or matter are more primal we must begin by thinking.
Charlie,
True, but irrelevant to the question. Yet you seem to be offering it as evidence for your belief.
Bruce,
I’ll note that it was you who brought up the demon’s motivations (or lack thereof):
And of course, a Laplacean demon that refuses to use its powers is pretty pointless as a thought experiment.
It has the power to coarse-grain. It could learn something by doing so. Why assume that it would refuse?
Yes, it was a setup for the C-humor, of course.
OK, now I am done.
Bruce,
It was an attempt to explain why humans might know things that a Laplacean demon would be unmotivated to learn.
But remember, the Laplacean demon is a stand-in for knowability in principle, so placing limits on its motivations defeats the purpose of its introduction.
The concept is real all right, what I am disputing is that this concept has an in dependent existence outside and apart from the people who think about it. The ideal triangle is a thought, and as such, yes, it really exists as a process in the brains of people thinking about it. That is all it is, in my view. No people => no thoughts => no concepts = no ideal triangle.
If anyone wants to study how it is that we gain knowledge then they must begin from a position that makes as little presuppositions as possible. All I am saying is that thinking is the point where anyone should start no matter what their beliefs. Notice I’m not saying to start from “I think” or “my thinking”, because to do so would assume that there is such a thing as an “I” which thinks. Thinking is a direct experience, but “I” is a concept that can only be arrived at once thinking has taken place.
Whether we believe that matter is primal or mind is primal thinking must precede either of these conclusions. I am looking for a neutral position that both sides can agree upon. A bit of common ground.
The concept triangle is the laws of the triangle which is independent of human thinking. The quantity three is a property that needs no human observer to be real and this property is contained in the ideal triangle. Any physical triangle only appears to be a triangle because of the perspective of the observer. It is subjective to the point of view of this observer. If any human observer was to shrink down to a small fraction of the size of the triangle being observed its triangular properties would vanish completely. There would be no straight lines to observe. It does not have a fractal quality because its properties change depending on the point of view of the observer. So long as we both have the correct concept of a triangle then it will not be any different for either of us. It will be the same concept.
The perception of a triangle is subjective. The concept triangle is objective.
Earlier on you were insisting that “thinking must be your starting point” and that “everything subsequent to this you will have arrived at through thinking.” Abstract mathematical concepts are exempt from this rule, I understand?
CharlieM,
We clearly have a different view on this.
You said you are an empiricist – what empirical method can you propose to settle the matter one way or another?
But thinking must be about something. So we begin by thinking about what is given through our senses, the observed world. It is by means of thinking that I distinguish myself as subject from the world around me as object. Observation alone does not tell us that a dog is an animal and it is also a mammal. We need to make the connections through thinking before we can make such a determination. Observation gives us the separate sensations and thinking unifies them and allows us to recognise the concepts.
I would say it is a mistake to consider abstract mathematical concepts as unreal just because they cannot be perceived with the outer senses. We can “see” them with our inner senses. Concepts can be grasped with inner perception. By thinking I add nothing to the concept triangle that did not already belong to it in the first place.
Well let’s see if we can agree on anything.
No two people can have the same perception of a physical triangle. Do you agree with that? If we were playing against each other at snooker or pool, hopefully we would both recognise the devise for setting up the balls as a triangle. What is it that allows us to agree on this?
Human social convention.
So is it human convention that three non-collinear points make up the vertices of a triangle?. Or that quadrupeds have four legs?
What is “the observed world” made of? Is it made of “concepts” or something more tangible, like billiard racks?
How about the concept of “matter”? Does it have an existence independent of thinking? Are you adding something to the concept of matter by thinking about it?
I am asking this because you like to argue that “thinking must be your starting point”, and that statement strikes me as quite irrelevant if it turns out that you can only be thinking with a physical brain about stuff perceived in a physical world.
No. But it is human convention that tells us to pick out and name these things. And that we share these conventions is a large part of what makes agreement possible. Your original question was about how we can come to agree.
This is all powerful stuff. The kind of discussion that used to make our heads expand in dorm sessions. At least I think it was the discussion that did that.
Why do you think many mathematicians are platonists about math objects?
I understand this is a different issue than the one you are replying to CharlieM about, at least prima facie.
.
I try to avoid getting into arguments about mathematical platonism.
My main reason for preferring fictionalism, is I see that as a better fit with the use of mathematics in science. If I adopt platonism, then I have to assume that measurements are platonic objects. And that seems a bit far fetched. So fictionalism is a better fit, in that it sees mathematical objects (such as numbers) as fictional standins for things like counts and measurements.
OK, that makes sense. Thanks.
The relations are what they are, distributions of forms in physical space. That we single out some of them, give them names and deduce properties, is indeed human convention. We don’t discover such things all by ourselves, we are taught them (sometimes some bright people do a bit of extra thinking and come up with ways to formally describe these relations and their properties).
I have to ask you again – if these things exist separate from and independent of human thinking, where exactly do they exist? And, as an empiricist, how can you demonstrate this?
Would that you took that tack on every matter!!
[Just kidding. 😉 ]