On the left is a photograph of a real snowflake. Most people would agree that it was not created intentionally, except possibly in the rather esoteric sense of being the foreseen result of the properties of water atoms in an intentionally designed universe in which water atoms were designed to have those properties. But I think most people here, ID proponents and ID critics alike, would consider that the “design” (in the sense of “pattern”) of this snowflake is neither random nor teleological. Nor, however, is it predictable in detail. Famously “no two snowflakes are alike”, yet all snowflakes have six-fold rotational symmetry. They are, to put it another way, the products of both “law” (the natural law that governs the crystalisation of water molecules) and “chance” (stochastic variation in humidity and temperature that affect the rate of growth of each arm of the crystal as it grows). We need not, to continue in Dembski’s “Explanatory Filter” framework, infer “Design”.
The patterns below, also have six-fold rotational symmetry, and the process that created them is also one in which no two are alike. However, despite this, they were, in fact, designed. By me. I wrote the program that generated them, and I can generate as many as I like. The chances that two will be identical is pretty low (though possibly not as low as that of two snowflakes). I did this by first of all “designing” a law (one that ensures six-fold rotational symmetry), and then by “designing” a stochastic algorithm that randomly generates “ice” by drawing from a built-in probability distribution.
Clearly, applying the Explanatory Filter does not easily allow us to infer design in the second case, but that is not a problem – Dembski does not claim that the ID detecting methods he proposes will not produce false negatives, he only claims a good record for true positives. And in any case, that isn’t what I want to discuss in this post. I’m not asking people to infer which were designed and which were not. I know that the second set were designed and the first was not.
What I’d like to discuss is how the processes differ. Both involve a law (natural in the first, designed by me in the second), and both involve stochastic processes (natural in the first, designed by me in the second). But we would probably agree that the first was the result of a non-teleological process, regardless of the fact that when the conditions are right for snow, snowflakes of a reliable general pattern form, while the second are the result of a teleological process, namely my intention to make snowflake-like patterns for Christmas cards (yes, I know I’m late) and for this post.
(Have a merry Christmas all, by the way!)
At the moment, I’m reading Dembski’s book, Being As Communion. I was interested to see that he uses “teleology” more or less interchangeably with “intelligence”, which is a change from the definition he used to use (“by intelligence I mean the power and facility to choose between options”), and which unambiguously entails the concept of “intention”, something he back then explicitly claimed was outwith the domain of science (I profoundly disagree), only coming “back on the table” after “intelligence” (old definition) has been established. He also, in Being As Communion, uses “design” in the sense of “pattern” rather than as in “by accident or design”. So under his current usage, “Intelligent Design” means “Patterns produced by teleological processes”, which I think is actually clearer.
So I am curious now about his view of the difference between what he characterises as “materialism” and his own view (and interestingly, he places Nagel on the same side of this perceived divide).
I think that Dembski would say that, as a materialist, I could avoid the conclusion that my ersatz snowflakes are the result of a teleological process by claiming that they are, nonetheless, the outcome of interactions between matter in my body and brain, and that thus they are not essentially different from the non-teleological snowflake because I am not really an intentional being – my sense of intention is illusory.
Whereas a non-materialist, or at least someone not a priori committed to materialism would say (as I understand Dembski’s thinking here), would regard the second as a special case of a process (teleology) operating within the world in a way that may also be apparent in such phenomena as the Origin of Life, possibly the evolution of the bacterial flagellum, and possibly in the “fine-tuning” of our universe to be life-friendly.
There are a number of things that could be said about this, but the point I want to make in this post, is that I do NOT think that the intentional processes by which I generated the second lot of snowflakes are illusory. I think there is a real and major distinction between the processes that created the real snowflake and the processes that created the artificial ones (although I will note in passing that often the way we infer artifice, i.e. intelligent design, is that the results are not as complex as the real thing!)
So what is that distinction? What is the property of teleological processes that makes them different from non-teleological ones?
I suggest that the answer is fairly straightforward: a teleological process, whether stochastic or under strict control), entails some kind of prior representation (of something to something, possibly itself) of what the end result of the process will be like. The only advance “representation” of a snowflake is that inherent in the laws and probability distributions that govern its emergence from non-snowflakeness. Whereas had you stopped me before I’d finished writing my MatLab code and asked me what I was doing (in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep) I’d have told you quite clearly: “I’m trying to write some code that will generate snowflake patterns, and I’m fiddling about with possible distributions my code will randomly draw from trying to find one that tends to the most snowflake like patterns”.
I am, in other words, selecting my actions so as to execute those with the greatest probability of producing an outcome that matches some prior template.
In yet other words, I start by imagining a snowflake, then I set about experimenting, trying things out, rejecting those that don’t work very well, dreaming up different way sof doing it, until I end up with a reliable series of snowflakes.
And even as a so-called “materialist”, that process is very different from the one that produces a real snowflake. The “intentional” component is not illusory – it can be objectively detected as being present in my actions, and not present in the processes that I hope will give us a White Christmas this year.
Intention, in other word, is perfectly real, and “real teleology”, as Dembski calls it, is perfectly compatible with the view he likes to call “materialism”.
[edited to fix grammar!]
Alan Fox said:
We’re not “doing science” here, Alan. We’re debating, which is a philosophical exercise. At the core of this debate is what “materialism” and “intention” mean, which is certainly not a scientific enterprise. Also, you are making an unsupported assumption here – that if science cannot quantify or model a thing, then that necessarily means something supernatural or non-material is in play. You are also assuming that science cannot quantify anything that doesn’t behave according to law-like or random patterns; that depends on the definition of science one is using, and defining what “science” means is a matter of philosophy, not science.
So, in your responses to me, you are not actually responding to me? I have no idea what you – or anyone – means by the term “supernatural”. Seems like you’re making a lot of unwarranted assumptions and errors here.
Well, how does the “explanation” that gravity is a fundamental force of nature add anything to how we understand the external world? That’s not really an “explanation”, but a designation. What does the designation “fundamental force” signify? IMO, even if it (and the other fundamental forces) is ultimately reducible to some “single law”, gravity represents a pattern that forms part of the bedrock of our being able to predict, describe and characterize how things in the universe occur. The “fundamental” aspect of it represents, IMO, that it is fundamental to many explanations. IOW, when we say that gravity is the cause of something, we don’t require that we explain what causes gravity, but rather that we just have a useful model of gravitational effects/behavior.
Similarly. once we find a thing to be intentionally designed, we don’t ask “what caused the intention” in any sense that methodological naturalism can solve. A finding of intentional agency is enough by itself to add other layers to, or redirect, the ensuing investigation towards purpose, motivation, identity, etc.
So yes, IMO, treating intention as a fundamental force – a fundamental designation – that redirects ensuing investigation – is something we already do. That ensuing investigation uses models of instantiated intentional designs – such as purpose, efficiency, aesthetics, capacity, etc. – to organize our understanding of the nature of the design, it’s implementation, and some things about the designer.
All of which is knowledge about the outside world gained from the premise that “intention” is in itself a fundamental causal category.
Dembski defined it fairly clearly as I said in the OP as “the power and facility to choose between options”, which is fine, but specifically excludes intention, and thus beautifully includes Darwinian processes, which aren’t called “selection” for nothing. The environment beautifully “chooses” between the optional phenotypes presented to it, by “selecting” those phenotypes that can exploit its resources and avoid its hazards in favour of those less appropriately equipped to do either.
And I think he’s realised his error, which is a variant on the same mistake he made with the No Free Lunch theorems, and why he is no using “intelligence” almost interchangebly with teleology, and why he now talks about “the search for a search”.
What he seems to be reaching for is some way of reconciling his (perfectly sound) intuition that information has got something to do with actualising one option out of many, and thus with probability, with his intuition that intelligence, as in “teleology”, somehow has to be the generator, at some remove, of that information.
With respect, William, I don’t think you are making anything like the argument that Dembski is making, and so my argument as presented in the OP is not with you.
I disagree that intention can be coherently thought of as a “force”, but I don’t think that Dembski is arguing that it can. He might be, but I’m pretty sure he isn’t.
Agreed.
One of the definitions of design is the pattern of elements of an object. ID contends certain patterns can only occur with intentionality,
Depending on who “ID” is in that sentence. There’s a tendency I regret, in these discussions, for anthropomorphising movements that don’t really have the internal structure to carry that burden. ID isn’t just one thing; inasmuch as it is defined on the UD website, it doesn’t invoke intentionality.
Although I’ve always thought that the I in ID would make more sense if it stood for “intentional”. And the D would be less ambiguous, and the whole thing less tautological, if it stood for Pattern. As I think I mentioned 🙂
fifthmonarchyman,
Nor can there be such things as intent, mind, will, responsiveness, tuning, learning, progress, and so on – all the things we associate with ‘being’ are temporal, including the very essence of ‘existent’. The entire conception of an ‘atemporal being’ is incoherent. Nor is it a majority position among theist philosophers, possibly for that reason.
Science cannot proceed effectively without first defining terms. Operational definitions are key to producing testable hypotheses.
EL said:
Well, I can certainly see the tactical value of arguing against those who are not here to correct your personal interpretations and characterizations of their argument/positions.
It’s certainly true that explanations couched in terms of intentional systems are governed by different basic concepts than explanations couched in terms of mechanistic systems. But lots of different metaphysics can be squeezed from that conceptual distinction, and one can grant that conceptual distinction within metaphysical naturalism. It gives theism (or any non-naturalism) no aid and comfort to acknowledge that we describe and explain some phenomena with terms like agency, purpose, intent, belief, desire, understanding, inference, and goal.
I’m puzzled by how Dembski has enlisted Nagel as an ally here. I didn’t see anything in Mind and Cosmos that couldn’t be accommodated within some version of complexity theory. I know that Dembski has had some lively (though polite) interactions with Stuart Kaufman. But both of them understood that complexity theory and intelligent design were very different hypotheses. Now I’m wondering if Dembski has watered-down his claims to the point where the differences between ID and complexity theory vanish.
And I can also see the value in discussing a book by a prominent ID writer and thinker. If you think I have misreprsented Dembski’s argument or position, it would be useful if you’d point out how, and where.
Can someone offer an example of a general methodology or tool to detect intention, valid even in cases where the ‘designer’ is not human?
Note: being able to detect that something was intended by a human is not the same as a general methodology.
Spiderwebs, anyone?
fG
I would also think that having an intent implies having a choice. Having a choice implies having responsibility. Having responsibility implies being subject to justice.
This would lead to some interesting issues, if we found intent outwith humans.
fG
I don’t think all these implications are necessary. I think my cat can fully intend to catch a mouse without having any responsibility for it. And I’m sure it never crosses her mind that she is subject to justice.
I think the alternative would have been to admit that he had been completely wrong all along.
That’s clearly right.
The tricky part is how exactly to describe this sort of ‘primitive’, animal intentionality, how to explain (in neurodynamical/neurocomputational terms) the causal processes that instantiate animal intentionality, and how to describe the differences between animal intentionality and human intentionality.
Ahhh! Ok. I understand. Ok…that distinction works for me.
Carry on…
I agree that it comes easy to read intent in certain animal behaviours. But then, do you think she chooses to catch a mouse, or not? Does it make sense to say she does something intentionally if she has no choice in the matter? Do cats have free will, lol?
Can one make a choice without being responsible for the outcome? Maybe park this one to avoid another morality fest!
I wonder how much of the concept of ‘intent’ is simply our understanding of how we ourselves, and presumably other people, decide and act, rather than something universally present in the world.
Do we anthropomorphise our cats?
fG
From UD
“The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ”
“In a broader sense, Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. ”
Seems like intent to me.
That would depend on the purpose of ID.Intentional would create more questions about how, what and why. Intelligent is abstract and since no one believes humans designed life ,we are left with the Designer.
I think the ambiguity is intentional to conflate this meaning of design ” purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.” with design as a “pattern of elements” .That sleight of hand eliminates the need to demonstrate any of those qualities. They are front loading the argument
I wrote a response and lost it. I’ll try again.
The word “search” easily becomes an overextended metaphor.
I misplace my glasses all the time and search for them. there’s no question that they exist and are contained within a well defined area of space. If I search for Atlantis or El Dorado, there’s some question as to whether they exist, and assuming they exist, whether they ever had the characteristics attributed to them.
If I search for a material suitable for lamp filaments, or a cure for cancer, there’s some question as to whether the ideal solution exists.
But searching for an object that exists or doesn’t exist in a finite space is different than searching for an improvement, and it’s different than generating variations and differentially keeping some.
I think blueprints lead to a false notion of how inventions and novel designs arise. I don’t think inventors start with a blueprint in their head. I think by the time an inventor sits down to sketch a product, an enormous amount of evolution has taken place, driven by an imagined outcome rather than an imagined product.
Example: I invented something this morning. a compact travel Water Pic.
I have a bunch of crowns and simply can’t clean them with floss and a toothbrush. At least I’m not happy with the results. So I have a travel Water Pic.
But it is big and clumsy and absolutely not pocketable. So this morning, while packing, I envisioned something built around the components of a battery toothbrush, with a cylindrical carrying case that doubles as a water reservoir. the whole thing would be about the size of a battery toothbrush handle.
Unlike Behe’s mousetrap, every functional part already exists for some other purpose. The invention is just a bit of topological morphing, like converting a doughnut into a coffee cup. The design process is not particularly different from my childhood play with Plasticine.
Behe’s Designer would like Plasticine.
I guess that is risk of writing a book about what you think, people discuss what you wrote.
EL said:
As I said, I also can see the tactical and rhetorical value of arguments made in the absence of those who can properly correct and inform.
Is this an accusation of bad faith, William? If not, what are you implying? That we should not discuss published works unless the author is a participating member of this site?
I find it interesting that none of Meyer’s admeyerers seem able to defend him.
Why is that?
Yes indeed. But it isn’t what it says, and at one point (see the link in my OP), Dembski explicitly excluded “intention” from his definition of intelligence. He said it was something that was “not a question of science” and should be discussed AFTER intelligence was on the table.
My point is that his definition of intelligence seems to have changed, on the basis of his book Being As Communion.
Which is interesting, and changes the arguments somewhat. It shifts the burden from showing that a pattern simply shows evidence of being produced by a process “with the power and capacity to choose between options” (which would include Darwinian evolution) to one that was intentionally produced i.e. produce with some prior goal “in mind” or otherwise represented in some prior state.
Aren’t we talking about Dembski here? Meyer has slightly more defenders, I think, though I find him less defensible.
Yes, but not as much as I do. By which I mean she has fewer options available.
I agree that free will is lurking at the bottom of this discussion 🙂 I wondered when we’d get to it. Can we put it off for a bit longer?
I find “intention” a more tractable concept – much easier to agree on a reasonable definition, I think!
Oops. wrong thread. But the question remains.
It does 🙂
William J. Murray,
One would certainly expect a regular pro-UD commenter to see the merit of such an approach.
The folks at UD and ENV are tactical geniuses. They not only make arguments in the absence of correction, they actively block opposing commenters.
I guess that is where I was going with my questions. Without having thought through the whole concept of ‘intention’, I intuit that it won’t be much more tractable than Free Will. I could be wrong. This is interesting.
I would be interested to hear one. I think we can probably come up with something that fits humans (assuming all other humans are very similar to me lol). After all, the judicial system has had a go at this for a very long time.
Not sure at all when it comes to non-human agents. Do you have something in mind? (he said ‘mind’, heheh)
Are people here so scared of spiders that nobody wants to discuss if they weave their webs with intent? Malicious or otherwise?
fG
I think there are two approaches to intention.
1. Operational definitions.
2. Bullshit.
Same with free will.
It’s more a matter of spiders and insects being so different from us, that it is hard to judge intent, or even what “intent” should mean for spiders.
I’ll go out on a limb, and say that there is more intent in the actions of a spider than in the actions of a digital computer (not counting the intent of the programmer).
I would be inclined to label evolved behavior as intentional, whether human, insect, or computer.
Neither can rational debate. 🙂
Everyone seems to know this and to expect others to not equivocate [take a word like “choose,” for example], but is it a self-evidence truth, or law of logic, or not really necessary at all?
I take it that you are referencing my reading of Dembski’s definition of intelligence.
“Choose” and “select” are synonyms. The key issue is whether Dembski meant “choose” (and he could have easily used “select”) in the sense of an intentional choice/selection, or not. And, in fact, in that article, he makes it clear that he did not mean “intention” to form part of his definition of “intelligence”.
Therefore it is not “equivocation” on my part to read Dembski’s definition and to consider that it also covers “natural selection”. I ‘am using it in just the same sense as Dembski was using it. Used thus, the definition covers Darwinian evolution.
It WOULD have been equivocation, if Dembski had said: “by intelligence I mean the power and capacity to intentionally select between options” and I had said “oh, that means natural selection comes under Dembski’s definition of ‘intelligence.” But he did not say that, and he specifically excluded “intention” from his definition.
And the interesting thing (to me) is that I think Dembski’s definition works quite well – I think there really is a detectable difference between patterns that arise from something process that involves “the power and capacity to choose/select between options”. That’s why, in my view, living things do NOT look like inorganic things. They look as though they have been filtered through a complex “design” process, in which the design has been optimised through many iterations, at each of which, the best has been “selected” and the worst “rejected”.
It’s just that such processes are not the sole prerogative of intentional agents.
Perhaps you were not referencing me, but in case you were, that is my response.
Maximally, an intentional agent is one that can have thoughts and can take those thoughts as reasons for acting one way rather than another. When you ask me why I closed the door, you are soliciting from me a reason as to why I did it — I’m not just closing the door because I was programmed to or was coerced. When I say, “because I was cold”, I’m offering a reason as to why I acted as I did. You implicitly understand that I had a feeling of being cold, a desire to not be cold, and a belief that closing the door would lead to my not being cold.
Now, beliefs can be true or false, and desires can be fulfilled or unfulfilled. Whether a belief is true, or a desire fulfilled, depends on whether the mental act matches up with the intended object. (The direction of fit is different, but both beliefs and desires aim at a satisfactory fit between ‘mind’ and ‘world’.) In short, both beliefs and desires are intentional by virtue of being normative, or accountable to some criterion (truth, fulfillment).
In the case of us rational beings, it is we who hold each other accountable. The norms and criteria for what makes an inference a good inference, a reason a good reason, a desire one worth having — all of that comes from the linguistic community. (The “we” constrains the “I”.)
And since there is nothing like that for non-linguistic animals, it would seem that they lack intentionality. But I think that they do have intentionality, albeit of a less sophisticated sort, just in case there are specifiable conditions under which their behavior can successfully latch onto the world or fall short of it. In many cases the animal in question might lack a distinction between directive and descriptive representations. (Millikan calls these “pushmi-pullyu” representations; one representation plays both roles.) I’m no expert on animal behavior, but I’d bet that most animals have pushmi-pullyu representations, and the split between descriptives and directives is pretty rare — probably restricted to some birds and some mammals.
Even so, animals can get things wrong — they can miss a branch they’re leaping onto, misjudge how fast a predator is approaching, fail to notice that an egg in a nest is not one of theirs, and so on. This seems sufficient to say that at least some animals have a distinct kind of non-linguistic intentionality.
The formation of a snowflake is the result of a teleological process. That doesn’t entail that the process had snowflakes in mind. If teleology did not exist science would not be possible.
I may be the only one here who will say that. We’ll see.
OK, so can you explain what you mean exactly by “teleological” then? In such a way that a snowflake is covered?
I’m more than happy with saying that organisms display real teleology, but I’m going to draw the line at snowflakes. Snowflakes are formed through crystallization, and expanding the scope of “teleology” to include crystallization, dissolving, melting, burning, and other physical reactions seems to blur the concept beyond usefulness.
There’s an aspect here I’m interested in which is the evolutionary development of sociality and the source of ethical behaviour. Solitary animals, including individual humans abandoned on desert islands, don’t need ethics. Ethics are a requirement if social living is to work. The roots of social ethics in mammals can be traced back at least 25 million years.
Clearly something like that has got to be right!
I’m very much interested in the evolution of cooperation. Several new books have come out recently (see here) that stress the importance of cooperation in the evolution of uniquely human forms of cognition. I haven’t read those books but I have read Sterelny’s The Evolved Apprentice, which has a really sophisticated take on similar ideas, as does Tomasello’s stuff. (Tomasello has a new book coming out on the evolution of morality; it should be published in early January.)
For me, the hard and interesting question is to understand how the need to cooperate in new ways transformed primate prosociality into human morality. There’s already a huge literature on this, including this forthcoming book: The Origins of Fairness: How Evolution Explains Our Moral Nature.
A “force” is just a description of behavior, EL. Do you get that? It seems to me that Dembski, in the article you linked to, is making pretty much exactly the points I’ve made above – that intelligence (intentionality) is a fundamental aspect of reality that is not reducible to physical causes.
From the article EL linked to:
It looks to me that Dembski is using intelligence, design and intention as essentially interchangeable terms, which would contradict your claim that he would consider “natural selection” a form of intelligent choice at all. You’ve referred to what he now writes in Communion, but you simply characterize what you think he means, without providing any properly contextualized quotes that would support your characterization.
Him using different words like “teleology” and “pattern” doesn’t indicate that he means what you are claiming; it just means that is how you are interpreting him.
Also, it seems to me you’ve contradicted yourself. First, you say:
Then you say:
Unless you can provide extensive quotes that indicate the contrary, I’d have to assume that Dembski still considers intention an essential aspect of ID, I assume that like any good writer, he tries to use different terms for the same essential thing in order to break up the monotony, into which you are imputing false meanings as if every time he uses a term or leaves a term out it has some important significance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument
By “natural bodies” he’s not limiting his argument to living organisms. This end-directedness [final causes] is what I call teleology, wherever it exists.
[E]verything that Nature makes is means to an end —Aristotle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes#Final_cause
Don’t want to derail the thread. Just saying I believe in a teleology beyond that of living organisms, which would include [eta: what we would call] unintelligent processes. I think this is what Dembski is leaning towards if not outright adopting.
Well, I chose snowflakes for a reason. I’d really like to hear the definition of teleology that Mung is using that includes snowflakes.
I’m wondering what it excludes – possibly nothing. In which case, is Mung simply saying that the entire universe is intended? Which would be fine as a statement of faith, but pretty much empties the word of any utility.
Mung?
No, I don’t.
Well, in Being as Communion, as I understand him, he argues that information is not a, but the, fundamental aspect of reality, and that information can only come from intelligence. Not quite the same thing, but close.
It doesn’t look that way to me.
That’s true. I will try to provide some quotes.
Yes, I think so.
Have you read it, William? I think you’d enjoy it. I think it’s very good, but also very frustrating to read.
I’m not terribly happy with the implicit suggestion here that a comprehensive metaphysics lacks “utility” or must be accepted entirely on “faith.” The distinction between science and metaphysics, whatever that distinction turns out to be, is not the distinction between science and religion.