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!]
newton,
Right, the definition of who is taller is the one that is taller. Apparently the definition of bias, is the one that is biased.
So Lizzie explanation is that its random except if its biased. How do you know if its biased? Well, if its biased of course.
And how do we know if its biased? Its hard. But if someone expects it to be, that is an indication it could be.
And in the first case, adaptive evolution occurs.
To think your way into Aristotle’s metaphysics, imagine the following:
Suppose you’re a brilliant and patient describer of almost every thing that are able to observe with unaided senses, but you’re only two generations removed from myth, you’ve got the technology of an Iron Age civilization, there’s no mathematics beyond geometry and arithmetic and you can’t use either of them, and you can’t do experiments because no one’s invented them yet.
What kinds of comprehensive systematic explanations might make the most sense of you under those conditions?
(I also think that situating Aristotle in this context helps me understand better why his ethics is still today one of the best philosophical reflections on morality to come out of the Western tradition, whereas his physics and metaphysics have been superseded.)
phoodoo,
You can make a childish summary of pretty much any position and make it sound like you’ve refuted it.
Elizabeth, do you grasp the connection between final causes and teleology?
As you can see, it’s not uncommon to say teleology when what is meant is final causes. The basic term here is telos.
Again quoting Aquinas:
“We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end [telos]”
So I am taking about the existence of ends or end-directedness. Teleology or final causes. KN accepts teleology in the living world, I accept it in inanimate objects. Contra Allan Miller, I am not introducing anything new into science or philosophy.
phoodoo,
Actually no, you don’t get one biased and one not. The differential is the bias. Two individuals are either the same height or they differ. If the latter, one is necessarily taller, by the definition of that relative term. Likewise with competing types. They are either the same or they are different, vis a vis their mean offspring numbers. Do you disagree?
That’s exactly how I feel! I bet two generations from now people will still feel that way.
Mung,
What’s the purpose, end, aim, or goal of a snowflake?
Says Allan Miller, doing his best Barry Arrington impression.
Good for you Allan, you pass logic 101. A=A. You should start a thread.
You see phoodoo, when it really matters, they are not so illogical after all. When they are the ones making the argument, then they expect everyone else to be logical.
Allan Miller,
You just used another way to state the same point Allan. Whichever one is the resultantly favored one, must be the favored one.
Again, its a random process, that is biased in favor of whatever one it is more biased towards.
Did I claim somewhere that snowflakes have a purpose, end, aim, or goal?
Here’s what I wrote:
The formation of a snowflake is the result of a teleological process. That doesn’t entail that the process had snowflakes in mind.
It’s what is normally called a stochastic process. “Random” can mean too many things to be a terribly informative descriptor.
An Aristotelian definition of teleology would be (something like — this is not quite right) — the temporal sequence in which the structure of a thing is more fully exemplified in the stuff (out of which it is made) at later stages than in earlier stages.
For Aristotle, all contingent and perceptible things must be understood in terms of structure and stuff: what something is made out of, and how that stuff is arranged. All change consists of a ‘movement’ from stages where the structure is less evident to stages where the structure is more evident. The structure is at work in this process; the structure is not neither the finished product nor imposed on material stuff from outside of it. Rather, the structure is actively constantly structuring stuff so that stuff is constantly becoming more structured.
All structuring is intrinsically teleological because it is striving towards more evident, more explicit structure. Organisms have a special kind of structuring that Aristotle calls psyche. This is normally translated as “soul” but I believe a closer study of Aristotle’s biology suggests that he uses this word to mean (somehow, at once) “metabolism,” “life-cycle”, and “cognition”.
Is there some reason this same statement cannot be applied to atoms [replace organisms with atoms]?
If atoms did not maintain some structural invariance over time, would organisms even be possible?
I was just asking for a definition of “teleological” in the context of your post:
Did you mean that snowflakes are formed by a process that is “guided not only by mechanical forces but that they also move toward certain goals of self-realization”?
If not, in what sense did you mean that the process that produces them is “teleological”?
No. Existence itself would be impossible! I’d argue that to say that something “exists” as opposed to saying that something “happens” is to say that the thing maintains some kind of structural invariance over some minimal period of time.
Do you agree?
EL said:
How can we accept your characterization of his “definition of materialism” as a “straw man” when (1) you yourself say it is a poorly-defined concept in general and (2) you have provided us with absolutely no quotes from Dembski explicitly defining materialism, either from the book or quoted from elsewhere?
It seems to me that Dembski makes a claim that “intention is incompatible with materialism” and you, for whatever reason, react automatically to protect “materialism” and simply assume he is utilizing a straw man. How can it be otherwise, given that you have offered us no definition of materialism, either from some source which should be taken as an authority, or from Dembski himself? What straw man definition or characterization is Dembski using, precisely?
Patrick said:
They only “meet his definition” if they meet what Dembski means by his definition.
But that is exactly what he has written.
BeheDembski said in his article:EL herself said about his article:
Unless EL provides us quotes from his new book that explicitly say otherwise, Dembski has explicitly defined intelligence in a manner that excludes any ultimately unintentional processes, and EL has agreed that “intention” is an unambiguous entailment in that explanation.
To then claim that “Dembski’s definition of intelligence” could include “natural selection” without any intention is simply wrong.
Yes, I agree.
This might help: we in the West, ever since the 17th century, have thought about causation as a kind of pushing. A cause ‘pushes’ on an effect (think of the falling dominoes!). Aristotle thinks of causation as a kind of pulling: the structuring structure pulls on the structured stuff.
Another point: Aristotle doesn’t actually talk about four kinds of causes, and he doesn’t actually distinguish between causation and explanation. He says that causation/explanation can be understood in four different ways: as formal (the structure), as material (the stuff), as efficient (the bringing-together of structure and stuff), and as final (the fully explicit, evident structure). A few commenters have observed that the formal, efficient, and final causes are different ways of talking about the structuring structure, and the material cause is about the structured stuff.
I am using my own terms to translate Aristotle’s Greek, not because I know Greek (I don’t) or because I’m an Aristotle scholar (I’m not) but because I find it more helpful to use terms that already have a use in the language (structure, stuff, thing). I want to get away from the Latin encrustations around Aristotle’s Greek, so I’m not going to use Latinate words like “potential,” “actual”, “formal”, and “material” in order to translate dunamis, energeia, morphe, and hule.
William J. Murray,
You’re conflating Behe and Dembski. Elizabeth is correct when she states that evolutionary processes meet Dembski’s definition of “intelligence”.
geez, William, did you even read my OP? My point was that in THIS book, Dembski DOES seem to have equated intelligence with teleology, whereas in the old article I cited, he specifically excluded the intentional dimension.
I simply noted that he had changed his definition. Under the old definition, evolution was covered, and interestingly so, in my view.
Under the new one, it isn’t. Which is also interesting, but in a different way.
In my view there are processes that non-purposefully “select between options” including Darwinian evolution, and the result is “information” as defined by Dembski. So in my view, using his old definition he was right that only “intelligence” (old definition) could produce “information” but that left room for evolution to do so, which, in my view, it does.
Now, he is still saying that only intelligence can produce information, but he has revised his definition of intelligence. Which means he’s also had to change his argument, just as he had to change his No Free Lunch argument in response to valid critiques of it.
And his new argument is interesting. I haven’t got to the end of the book, but I’m interested to see where he’s going.
It would help, William, if you didn’t start from the assumption (which is against the rules, in fact, but no matter) that my “main purpose” is “finding fault” with Dembski. It simply isn’t. I’m interested in what he is trying to say. I’m also interested in the math, because he’s good at math, but he does make some errors. I suppose you could say I’m “looking for errors” in his math, but that doesn’t mean they are what I want to find.
If you could make the leap of faith of assuming that I am not trying to find fault with Dembski (I bothered to buy his book, because I wanted to know what his “last word” on ID would be – the evolution of his thought has been interesting) then we might communicate better.
Patrick,
No, I just wrote “Behe” when I meant “Dembski”. Corrected.
EL said:
Yes, I read it. Your point has no merit until you provide the quotes and context that support your view. Without those quotes, what we have is Dembski’s prior statements that directly and explicitly contradict the characterization you are presenting.
Again, how is it that Dembski is attacking a “straw man” version of materialism when you yourself agree it is poorly defined and offer us no quotes from Dembski as to how he defines it? A straw man only exists in relation to some actual or authorized version, EL. What is your actual or authorized definition of materialism?
Or will you retract your claim that Dembski is employing a straw man? Also, without that definition, your closing statement:
… is utterly groundless.
EL said:
This is an assertion without any support whatsoever. Because you interpret what he writes as “a change in his definition” does not mean Dembski has, in fact, changed his definition.
Does Dembski say anywhere explicitly that he has changed is definition?
Elizabeth,
As you understand it, would be the following be a fair characterization: formerly, Dembski associated intelligence with intention, whereas now he associates intelligence with information?
Sorry, I don’t know of any mechanical forces. 🙂
No, I am not advocating vitalist philosophy.
Is this another new rule or a bizarre interpretation of an old rule? We have to assume that posters here aren’t trying to find fault with ID? And you have to assume we aren’t trying to find fault with evolution?
Wait, let me add that I think Dembski is pretty smart, so I don’t get accused of posting in the wrong place, and the entire question becomes lost in space.
And my position is that it is not only organisms that are structured or in the process of becoming structured. The movement from potential to actual is present throughout nature, animate and inanimate alike, else there would be no change, and in fact there would be no organisms in the first place. But what make one outcome actualized as opposed to any other outcome. This is the essence i think of final causes and teleology.
Elizabeth,
Called by whom? You are the one with definitions problems, not me, so why must I use your phrasing?
Its a random (that’s what stochastic means) process, that has a bias, and the bias doesn’t affect the results, the results are the bias. How do we know there is a bias? Because the definition for bias that is being used is the variation in results.
So if someone wants to know if the results of differentials in offspring success are due to randomness or a bias, the answer can only be a bias, because the definition of bias means differentials in offspring success.
Hohoho…what a fun use of words.
No, it’s just the old rule – assume that posters are posting in good faith, in other words that their “main purpose” is not “finding fault”.
No.
I explained what I meant. I can do no more.
Elizabeth,
So Patrick broke the rules by calling me a troll, yes?
And you have great faith in your mods, right? The mods who according to your definition, just broke the rules.
I think I understand well-enough that that’s your view. I understand abiotic physico-chemical changes in non-Arisotelian terms.
Yes, accusing someone of being a troll is against the rules. It carries a clear implication of “bad faith”.
Elizabeth,
You explained what bias means. I then showed how that is such a useless definition of bias, because according to that definition, the only answer to the question of whether differentials are the result of randomness or bias, is that it has to be bias, because the definition is the answer.
I am allowed to show why your logic makes no sense, right?
Elizabeth,
Then why do you trust your mods, who don’t even follow the rules themselves?
Take it to Moderation Issues, please, phoodoo.
phoodoo,
That’s right. That’s me putting some effort into my explanation, that is, or trying to see why or if you have a genuine difficulty with it.
I wouldn’t say ‘favoured’, but if there is a differential, one must necessarily produce more than the other. Just as, if there is a slope, one end is necessarily higher than the other. Is that a problem?
Sigh. You pretty much have it correct. So why is this a problem, for you or anyone else? Bias, in any stochastic sampling process, causes a distortion away from a neutral expectation. This is true with differential reproduction, with choccies in a box, with polling voter intentions, with clinical trials …
What’s the problem?
Sure. And I am allowed to think that you have done no such thing.
Mung,
I don’t think Barry Arrington has dibs on covering all the logical possibilities. You seem to be insinuating that I had a part in the ‘LNC Wars’. You’d be wrong. There is not just one atheist viewpoint, I’m sure you know.
phoodoo seems to be having some trouble with a very basic concept. Perhaps you could assist?
Allan Miller,
Why is it a problem, to use the definition of bias as the answer as to whether bias plays a role in differential reproduction rates?
Like Lizzie just said, you have the right to not understand when you have just been shown the error in your thinking.
Mung,
What did it have in mind? Where does mind come in at all?
phoodoo,
No, because the result (fixation) can occur whether there is bias or not. One does not define bias by the result. After all, any biased process can give an apparently unbiased result, purely by chance. Comes with the probabilistic territory.
Nor does evolution depend on whether ‘someone’ can determine the degree of historic bias there was in any given case. Evolution occurs irrespective of the degree of bias.
phoodoo,
That is not what is done. The differential in reproduction rates is there before anything reproduces, just as the bias in a roulette wheel is there before it is spun even once. The ‘problem’ you assert is a measurement problem.
Do you deny that, given a differential in mean reproductive rate, one type will replace the other due to this differential? Do you insist that there is NEVER a differential in reproductive rate?
Allan Miller,
No, I think you misundertand — Mung’s point was that, on Aristotelian grounds, teleological processes can be non-intentional. The exercise of a causal power — the structuring of stuff, as I’ve called it here — doesn’t require (according to Aristotle) any mental representation, imagination, or choice.
Aristotle would say that burning is a teleological process, because the fire is pulled upwards to where it naturally belongs (just as rocks are pulled downwards belong they naturally belong where the Earth is). But just because falling and burning are teleological processes, according to Aristotle, doesn’t mean that any choice or intellect is involved. Aristotle doesn’t think that fire chooses to go upwards or that rocks choose to go downwards.
Now, if Dembski thinks that teleology and intentionality cannot be decoupled, and Aristotle does think so, then I’m on Aristotle’s side.
Elizabeth,
Lizzie, please help me with this one, Patrick says this posting is on topic, because it is furthering the discussion about Intelligence and teleology. I on the other hand think it is furthering the discussion about you telling Willam how he should further the discussion.
I can’t really find ANYTHING in this post about the topic in fact. I guess Patrick perhaps has keener insight to see through your words and definitions?
BTW Parenthetically I would like to add ( You would think if the owner says please ask a question about something in moderation and not here, said owner would then actually go to that thread and answer the question that you would told to ask elsewhere. You would think…)
Anyway, here is the post. Can you or Patrick show me the relevance to the topic?
Allan Miller,
You have already explained what the definition of bias is Allan. In doing so, the question and the answer are the same Allan.
You don’t get to claim, well the bias was already there, when the definition you give for bias is the differential in reproduction rates.
As Lizzie showed, I can show you why you are wrong, but I can’t force you to understand. I guess others will have to explain it to you.
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t see what applying the term ‘teleology’ so broadly gives – Aristotle didn’t, AFAIK, use it. As I said, it seems to reduce to a statement that a system in state A will, at a later time, achieve another state B, and that B can be declared the ‘end’ of the causal processes that took A there.
Are you not a believer in Intelligent Falling?