For purposes of this discussion.
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Chance = non-teleological causes that happen to result in particular effects via regularities referred to as “lawful” and stochastic in nature.
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Purpose = teleological causes that are intended to result in particular effects; the organization of causes towards a pre-defined future goal.
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My question is: can chance causes generate all of the effects normally associated with purpose,but without purpose? IOW, is purpose necessary to produce all, most, or some apparently purposeful effects, or is purpose, in effect, only an associated sensation by-product or side-effect that isn’t necessary to the generation of any particular effect normally associated with it?
Given that just about any purpose we’re capable of imagining is easily projected onto just about any phenomenon we observe, the connection between the two is entirely arbitrary.
Let’s say the wind knocks a rock loose on a hillside, and it rolls down to the bottom and stops. Did the rock have purpose? Well, for us watching, no, it didn’t have any purpose we would share. But to the ant the rock lands on and crushes, it sure SEEMS like that rock had the purpose of crushing that ant. Or let’s say the rock just happens to hit and damage your car. You might look to see if some vandal pushed it – you’d look for purpose because the results just happened to be meaningful to you. If it missed your car by a mile, you’d suspect no purpose. The ant, who doesn’t know from cars, would suspect no purpose in either case.
So what you’re doing is an exercise in seeing what you CHOOSE to see, and projecting your own motivations onto phenomena inappropriately.
Flint,
I’m not really sure how that answers my question, but thanks for the participation.
EDIT: After rereading several times, it seems to me you are saying that purpose is not ever a necessary causative quality of what appears to be purposeful effects; it’s just a chance (as defined) sensation or interpretation of certain sequences of cause and effect. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Who decides what is “apparently” purposeful, and how?
A better question might be “Can chance effects result in anything useful?” – although the answer is obvious.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. No, I’m not saying purposer is NOT EVER a causitive quality, I’m saying that one cannot reliably derive purpose post facto. Some phenomenon MIGHT be the result of someone’s purpose, and it might not – and the Law of Unintended Consequences tells us that, all too often, our purposes and our results are very different. No way could we look at the results and derive the purposes.
In any case, to put it in other words, in order to conclude purpose you need additional background information. Let’s say two cars collide. Was this done on purpose? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. How can we distinguish? We need more information.
Generally when people are involved, so is purpose. People do everything for a purpose. Some collisions, though, are NOT done for a purpose even though people are involved. But if no people are involved, no such rule of thumb is available. A bird builds a nest. Was this intentional? Well, is instinct intentional? Depends on how you want to look at it.
So I’m definitely not saying there’s no such thing as purpose, I’m saying that whether purpose is involved cannot always be determined from examining a phenomenon without background knowledge.
So, what is purpose? Where does it come from? What, if anything, causes it?
What are “chance causes?”
Do you have any examples?
My question is: can chance causes generate all of the effects normally associated with purpose,but without purpose? IOW, is purpose necessary to produce all, most, or some apparently purposeful effects, or is purpose, in effect, only an associated sensation by-product or side-effect that isn’t necessary to the generation of any particular effect normally associated with it?
People often confuse function for purpose (as defined in the O.P.). In fact, it seems to be a chronic human tendency to do so. Perhaps this is what you mean by “apparently purposeful effects” and “any particular effect normally associated with it”.
The sun, from our perspective, functions as an essential source of light and power, so in some cultures it is perceived as a god who acts with intent. In others, it has been made by the gods to serve its purpose. The moon functions as a useful night light for us, and can become a goddess, or, as the Koran tells us, something put there by god for our convenience, on purpose.
We can see function in many things, but intentful purpose is something we only know from ourselves and other animals. It’s difficult to answer your question without knowing what, to you, are “apparently purposeful effects”. All I can say is that “function” certainly doesn’t require “purpose”, using your definition of purpose.
You have now changed the subject. So I will presume that we have answered the original question in the negative – that apparently purposeful effects do not necessarily imply purpose.
Now, what is purpose? It’s a goal or an intention. Where does it come from? I suppose you formulate it with a somewhat different future in mind than would come to pass otherwise. What causes it? I’m not sure what you’re asking here. The way I see it, I have a mental model of how the world works, and I have a fairly complex set of self-interests at many levels. My self-interests lead me to wish to use my mental model as a guide to making changes I believe I would find congenial and desirable. Sometimes I’m successful – often enough, anyway, to keep doing it.
But once again, the result fails to match the purpose often enough so that you can’t reliably look at my results and infer my purposes. At best you could say “If I had engineered those results, why would I have done it?” And many of these speculations would fail to match whatever I had had in mind.
That might be a good question for this blog’s owner, as it’s right in her field!
Oh. Dear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
The kind of purpose that concerns ID proponents is that of divine providence – God’s plan. As such, every single thing that occurs must do so because of God’s sustaining will and his preordained vision for Creation. In other words, even chance has a teleological cause: directly through God, the first cause, and indirectly by God through relevant secondary causes. Thus the premise that WJM presents can not generate a truthful answer.
A better way to frame this question is to turn it back on the ID proponents and ask how is it possible that anything in the universe to occur outside of God’s purpose IF God is indeed omniscient and omnipotent?
I would want to ask how it is possible for existence not to be static if God is omniscient.
I suspect that if we substitute “design” for “purpose” the question will mean the same. After all, life and everything must have been intelligently designed for some reason, so if we think there IS a reason, we’ve supported “design”.
So I interpret all such questions as “I know goddidit, now how can I trick everyone else into admitting this. They MUST believe it, because I can’t conceive of anyone NOT believing it, so if I use just the right words…”
Very fast and lose with language. Purpose could simply be “what something does”. Clouds make rain, which is necessary for some life, but yet they predate that life (clouds in general, not specific ones). It would be easy for the unsophisticated or those without sufficient knowledge to claim they are God’s watering can – but they came before life: Life exploits them, but that’s because evolution is so very clever 😉
I suspect that the main reason these pseudo-philosophical threads are so long compared to the threads that discuss real science is that the pseudo-philosophers can burn up all available time playing word games while avoiding learning any science. That way they don’t have to weigh any of the findings of science into their preconception.
We see the same process going on over at UD.
petrushka,
I partially answered this in another thread with quotations from Aquinas. If you are truly interested in understanding Catholic theology as it relates to God’s abilities and freedom granted to aspects of Creation, then a good place to start is with the Summa Theologica. Also worth reading is the Summa Contra Gentiles
I don’t find apologetics to be worth the time.
Erosion- wind, rain, rivers, waves
Glacial deposits, weather, genetic accidents, accidents in general
That doesn’t really answer my question, so let me try this: If humans had no self-awareness and no teleological sense of goals or purpose, could they still build computers and airplanes?
Can dead people tell tales?
How far are you willing to take that question?
Bird’s nests? Beaver dams? Termite mounds? Beehives? Ant agriculture? Spider webs?
It strikes me that there are many things built by creatures with very small brains.
My own suspicion is that ‘chance’ (for whatever value of ‘chance’) is, at least potentially, capable of producing pretty much any effect that ‘purpose’ can produce, just not as quickly or efficiently.
I wouldn’t rule on efficiency. The objects I cited are better for their “purpose” than anything humans can construct. Their invention took a while in human terms. It brings to mind the mill of god, which grinds slowly but exceedingly fine.
Yes it does. What you’re trying to say is, it’s not the answer you wanted.
That question fails to illuminate your original question, which I take it is already answered by now. NO, the appearance of purpose (to you, of course) doesn’t necessarily imply something else has a purpose.
Questions of the form “what would things be like if things were different” are a bit too open-ended. So the answer to this new question is, without those characteristics humans would not be human. Whether (unspecified, undescribed) non-humans in some alternate reality could build computers isn’t a meaningful question.
An Interstellar gas cloud that forms into a solar system is an example of building by unaware things without a teleological sense, is it not? (And if not, why not?)
No, you’re just either not understanding the question as I intend it, or you’re not wanting to address the question as intended.
Note that Cubist has (at least partially) answered the question as intended:
Petrushka agrees with Cubist, apparently:
rhampton seems to share this sentiment via this illustration:
… apparently making the point that the building of a solar system is categorically equitable to the building of a computer or an airplane. IOW, it might seem teleological, or it might seem even to the person designing the computer that a teleological, purposeful process is what is ultimately creating the thing in question, but ultimately (distal cause), it is really chance (as defined in the O.P.
So, apparently (correct me if I’m wrong), we have three on-point answers that purpose in and of itself (as in, an “I” with a sense of teleological purpose) is not necessary to generate any effect we normally consider the product of purposeful causation, like airplanes and computers.
That would make it only a proximal cause, not an ultimate (distal) cause, and not even a necessary cause. IOW, computers can be made without any sentient being purposefully manipulating causative factors towards that end. This is actually a trivial point, since brains (as computers) and birds (as airplanes) are (I would assume) considered by those responding here to be the product of chance (as defined in the OP) causes.
Which makes purpose, as I offered in the OP:
“..only an associated sensation by-product or side-effect that isn’t necessary to the generation of any particular effect normally associated with it”
Correct? Purpose may be “felt” in the process, or interpreted from the process, but it is not necessary to the generation of any particular order, structure, mechanism, etc.
My question for cubist, who said:
Why “suspicion”? Is there some other agency that is not ultimately chance (as described in the O.P.) that can produce effects that chance might only be potentially able of “pretty much” mimicking?
Is there something else other than “non-teleological causes that happen to result in particular effects via regularities referred to as “lawful” and stochastic in nature” going on in the universe? Do computers and battleships require anything other than chance to come into being?
Yes, there’s another agency. It’s called evolution.
WJM,
Essentially your question is about First Cause. Can we agree that Science is agnostic on this? If so, then all we have left is opinion. You know that I see things from a TE perspective, others hold a strictly materialist view, and you represent the ID side. What else needs to be said?
WJM, you seem to be trying heroically to get people to tell you what you wish to hear. YOU believe goddidit, and that without Divine Purpose and Intent, life cannot form or evolve. But you need to ask directly, and not try to get people to guess what you mean, and then interpret their guesses by force-fitting them into your preconceptions.
So let’s try to be straightforward. As far as current knowledge goes, there is no reason why life could NOT get started according to the normal principles of chemistry and physics, and no reason why the most primitive possible proto-life could not gradually evolve into sometimes more complex and sophisticated forms through normal interactive feedback processes. Life has NO “apparent purpose or design” except as you choose to project onto it.
You were asked whether spider webs would meet your notion of “purposeful”, and I notice you evaded this question. These are not the product of “chance” (Dembski’s definition of drawn from a uniform probability distribution), nor of “regularity” (Dembski’s definition where variation is disallowed), but how can you judge whether a spider has “intent”?
Mike Elzinga has been trying to tell you for months that not all chemical reactions are equally likely, that Dembski’s flat distribution is unrealistic (and chosen BECAUSE it’s unrealistic), that natural adaptive feedback systems follow the rules of chemistry and physics, and that those rules are not random. You ignore every bit of this, every time.
You will have to seek your god elsewhere.
Consider a spring of pure water flowing out of a sandstone ledge. The reason the water is pure is because it has been filtered by the fine sand it flowed through on its path through the ground from some muddy river, removing silt, clay particles, and bacteria.
The effect of this process, pure drinkable water from a muddy, polluted starting point, can easily be seen as purposeful.
But, was this sandstone spring formed for a purpose?
I have been straightforward. The problem is that you assume I’m driving towards something I am not. . I’ve presented a question about what, ultimately, you and others here believe “purpose” to be, because I think that it is one of the fundamental disconnects between Darwinists and IDists and why communication reaches an impasse in certain situations.
It was my opinion that many who support Darwinism believe that not only are brains and birds constructed ultimately by chance (as defined in the O.P.) causes and processes, but that even computers and airplanes are ultimately constructed via chance; that the purpose humans feel as they design and construct such machines is as unnecessary to their construction as you hold it to be unnecessary to the construction of biological equivalents.
Since it was just an opinion, I decided to ask to see if it would be corroborated. Just as “artificial selection” is subsumed in such a Darwinist perspective under “natural selection”, so too is purpose subsumed by chance. IOW, “artificial” is just a subset of “natural”, and “purpose” is a subset of “chance”.
I suspected it, but just wanted to confirm it by asking the question.
So, you can see how the disconnect occurs; on a fundamental level, IDists assume “purpose” and “artifice” to be causative commodities fundamentally distinct from “chance” and “natural”. When an IDist argues or interprets an argument, their terminology (and understanding thereof) refers to distal and proximate cause concepts that are entirely different from the Darwinists in question.
When either side says “you don’t understand what I’m saying”, what is really going on is that neither side understands what the other side means, because they are interpreting it via a fundamentally different conceptual root.
llanitedave apparently add his agreement that “purpose” is ultimately equitable to chance with this:
I can see better now why many of you consider ID a nonsensical, religious claim; that’s all it really can be, given these fundamental metaphysical assumptions about what purpose and artifice ultimately are.
Purpose ” I’m doing this because I want to or need to” – as distinct from instinct, is the product of a mind.
How that mind came to be is irrelevant.
I, for one, do not accept your subsumings and subsettings, William. Purpose s not a subset of chance, although the ability to form and execute purpose may be the result of a long series of chance events.
I believe that IDists and “Darwinists” understand each other pretty well, on the whole. Regrettably, in my experience those IDists who argue against evolution do not understand the subject very well at all – and when called on their misconceptions, sometimes resort to idiotic arguments about the meanings of words, usually because they can never countenance admitting they were wrong.
If I may be blunt, you have been perpetrating balderdash
I asked a question, and I got answers. If I am misrepresenting those answers in my summary, those who answered are free to correct me here.
Perhaps, but “what that mind is”, is the difference between a proximate cause that is ultimately a chance cause,thus subsuming purpose, and an ultimate cause in and of itself as an agency not reducible to chance.
You can’t have it both ways; what purpose apparently produces is either ultimately extractable from chance (as defined by the OP), or it is not. Is the existence of a battleship ultimately extractable from chance? I only ask if it is, or is not. You can answer either way – I’m just looking for everyone’s view.
WJM, I don’t think anybody here is dissing the general concept of “purpose”. I’d certainly concede that I have a purpose in posting this reply. The problem you have seems to be trying to generalize it into an all or nothing state: Either everything has purpose, or nothing does.
Is that your stance?
damitall2,
You haven’t been blunt enough! 🙂
My stance is irrelevant. This thread is me asking you for yours, and others for theirs. I’m not quibbling that you experience what you felt or interpret as “purpose” in writing the text; I’m asking what the ultimate and/or necessary categorical causes are for the existence of that text. Is purpose itself an ultimate, necessary cause for the existence of the text? Or is purpose just a proximate cause, or even just a side-effect, an illusion if you will, of what are ultimately chance causes?
WJM,
While we have answered some of your metaphysical questions, I think it’s only fair that you answer mine, since it’s entirely relevant:
An Interstellar gas cloud that forms into a solar system is an example of building by unaware things without a teleological sense, is it not? (And if not, why not?)
Yes. That’s why Monod used the word “teleonomy”, to denote something that serves the function of causing something to persist. From an anthropomorphic PoV we can say that the pillars of a natural arch function to hold up the arch. We can also say that the wings of a bird serve to help the bird survive and breed. We can even say that’s what they are “for”. In other words, we can use the language of purpose.
However, that is different from what happens when an intelligent animal imagines some future goal, and selects her actions so as to bring it about.
The effects may be the same, but the difference lies in the foresight. Animal brains, especially human brains, have the capacity to simulate the effects of possible actions before executing those actions, thus allowing us to save energy by only executing those actions likely to bring about our goals, rather than trying anything at random and repeating what works.
We do that too, when we must, but we also have a quicker way.
Interesting question. What are *effects normally associated with purpose*?
My thought, exactly.
Virtual selection.
That’s a little far outside of my area of experience and/or expertise for me to commit to. I’ll agree to it for the sake of pursuing whatever point you wish to make, if you wish, or you can perhaps propose an example I’m more likely to be familiar with.
The design and building of things like planes, computers, software programs, etic.
“My question is: can chance causes generate all of the effects normally associated with purpose,but without purpose?”
Elizabeth wins the “direct answer of the month” award. Thank you!
Now perhaps you’ll provide a direct answer to my question regarding things made by animals other than humans. Is a spider purposeful in the same way a human engineer is purposeful? How about a human fisherman who builds nets?
Thanks – I’ll take you up on that offer, because I believe it provides a partial answer your initial question. For the creation of solar systems, (demonstrable) purpose is not necessary to acquire any apparently purposeful effect.
Now that you have provisionally agreed to such a heretical statement, has that made you a materialist by default? I would answer no, unless you also deny God as the First Cause. And has your answer disavowed the intelligent design of, and an ultimate teleological purpose in, the formation of solar systems? Again no, and for the same reasons.
That’s way too vague. Likewise, your definition of “chance” is way too vague.
Given your definitions, how can we even tell whether there is a purpose in operation?
As it happens, I actually have a series of posts on purpose on my blog. I give what I think is a reasonably clear characterization of purpose that is potentially available for empirical testing. It does not depend on consciousness and is entirely natural. With my characterization, probably all biological organisms have some ability to act purposely. And I strongly suspect that it is entirely sufficient to explain the things in biology that ID proponents take to require purpose.
If people would like to discuss my characterization of purpose, then I’ll be happy to start a new thread on that.