One definition I found for teleology:
the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise.
An example of a mindless machine that can be described in terms of teleology is an autopilot or missile guidance system. “The purpose of an autopilot or guidance system is to drive the vehicle to its destination.” One does not immediately have to invoke non-material minds for this proximal description of the system. In fact, no one would say there is a non-material spirit inside a missile guidance system. For that reason, any system exhibiting purposeful behavior (or dare we say moral-like behavior) cannot by default be assumed to have non-material soul.
Conflating core ID and Creation Science with issues of materialism just adds confusion factors. IDists and Creationists can talk about notions of a non-material soul, even some quantum physicists have hinted at it, but such discussions should be compartmentalized outside of core ID and creation science arguments that are built on analysis of probability. Perhaps questions of soul should be compartmentalized to the realm of unprovable faith statements.
The problem of “mindless” teleology might be traced to mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener. Wiener is credited with pioneering the field of cybernetics. From wiki:
Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems—their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” In other words, it is the scientific study of how humans, animals and machines control and communicate with each other.
I presume the word “cyberspace” comes from cybernetics. Additionally, from wiki:
Computational cybernetics is the integration of cybernetics and computational intelligence techniques. Though the term Cybernetics entered the technical lexicon in the 1940s and 1950s, it was first used informally as a popular noun in the 1960s, when it became associated with computers, robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Science fiction.
[I actually didn’t know until recently that people fancied Wiener as a philosopher. I actually encountered his work in a Digital Signal Processing class when I studied the Wiener Filter.]
But, back to mindless machines and systems that exhibit teleology…
Consider the case of ball released randomly into a bowl. By “randomly” I mean arbitrarily. In a sense, whatever random position the ball is placed in a bowl, it will eventually “navigate” to the same location. So this “navigation” can happen provided the initial position and velocity are within certain bounds, i.e. the ball doesn’t have so much potential energy and intitial velocity that it goes out of the bowl.
Electrical Engineers metaphorically relate many of their feedback control systems to this illustration of a ball in a bowl, and try to make their systems converge on a target in a manner comparable to the ball “navigating” to a place on the bottom. For a variety of reasons, they call such systems BIBO stable systems, where BIBO stands for Bounded Input, Bounded Output. The reason the term BIBO is used is to emphasize there easily could be a circumstance where the feed back control system could not adequately overcome an obstacle. For example, a storm could destroy a auto-piloted drone where the BIBO limits of the autopilot are simply over powered by an unexpected obstacle or disaster.
Many Electrical Engineering textbooks use the ball in the bowl diagram to illustrate BIBO stable systems and a ball on an upside down bowl to describe an BIBO unstable system.
One could start with the illustration of a simple ball in a bowl and use teleological descriptions such as “whatever random positions the ball is placed at in the bowl, the ball will propel itself to the same end” even though the description is not accurate since the ball is not making conscious choices. Principles of physics lead to an inevitable outcome without the ball making any sort of choices. The point is, we can inappropriately project our notions of purpose to something that is mindless and purposeless.
Likewise a thermostat system where random variations of outside temperature can be compensated by “guiding” a heat pump to manage the indoor temperature. The thermostat system illustrates where a goal is achieved despite unexpected obstacles. The obstacles, however, have to be within BIBO limits lest the system fails to achieve its goal.
One then could extend the idea to more complex systems that have built-in strategies to compensate for unexpected random events within BIBO limits — robots, autopilots, missiles, or any number of machines whose OPERATION (not initial manufacture) can be framed in terms of “purposeful” navigation to a certain outcome despite unexpected obstacles within BIBO limits of the system.
TLDR. My point is that purposeful-looking behavior does not immediately imply a non-material soul. Even if one concludes reality looks purposeful, it is hard deduce from that premise alone that there is some sort of non-Material Conscious God. Perhaps arguments such as those put forward by Barrow and Tipler from Quantum Mechanics are more appropriate for the claim of a non-material Conscious Intelligent God or Ultimate Designing Intelligence.
PS
Barrow and Tipler argue that quantum mechanics and some formulations of classical mechanics (such as the Principle of Least Action) can be framed in final rather than first causes, and thus frames physics in teleological language and retro-causality. To resolve the regress issues of how quantum systems can experience wave-function collapse, Tipler postulated some Ultimate non-material cause. But strictly speaking, the claim of teleology is separate from questions of non-material causes in Barrow and Tipler’s formulation in their books.
Tipler especially, identifies this non-Material Intelligent Cause with the God of the Bible. Tipler also argues for the resurrection of the dead! Before Tipler, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner also tied consciousness as some essential non-material substance that makes reality possible. Even in 2005, a professor at my school, Richard Conn Henry, published an opinion essay in the prestigious scientific journal Nature where he argued from quantum mechanics alone that MIND is the ultimate reality, that material objects don’t have a reality of their own.
However, the above considerations of a non-material realm, are not core ID and creation arguments as they are hard to rigorously demonstrate to the exclusion of other descriptions. Not to mention they are very esoteric. And even if there is a non-Material God, and if men have non-material souls, it is hard to formally prove it. They might only be accepted ultimately on the basis of faith. Hence I suggest compartmentalizing out these ideas form the core ID/Creation Science arguments that are based on probability. Stephen Meyer and other argue for a “conscious intelligence,” but I think that is really a separate issue than basic probability arguments from natural expectation.
PPS
Some at UD took serious umbridge to me saying a mindless intelligence can make CSI or exhibit purposeful behavior. Now that I see gene regulatory networks that are nicely modeled by the language of mindless control systems in electrical engineering, I’m relatively certain, my detractors at UD were wrong. See this paper for example:
Linear Control Theory Gene Network Modelling
CSI can be made by mindless machines with AI at least for the simple reason that Dembski himself said there could be proxies (presumably mindless machines) that express the intentions of conscious intelligent agents. At the very least, an AI system could do such a good job that it would be hard to distinguish SOME of the products of an AI system from a human mind. The AI systems could at the very least be programmed to make the evaluation of CSI in a system so hard to determine as to make useless any CSI claims.
For example, to my knowledge, BIll Dembski didn’t calculate how much CSI was in the repetitive elements of DNA. There is a subtle dilemma in the calculation because repetitive elements don’t have high Kolmogorov coplexity. To say a repetitive elements don’t have much CSI would be to suggest that indeed the human genome is mostly junk, and therefore not designed. On the other hand, to claim repetitive elements have CSI, one would need some actual evidence which is not contained in the math of CSI! They’d have to go down to places like the NIH like I did, and interview researchers and read their papers on repetitive elements. Personally, in the process of me doing so, I found out the importance of CTCF zinc finger proteins and the exquisitely laid-out repetitive elements (like CTCF binding sites in Transposable Elements) used for creating the 4D Nucleome architecture of the human genome. The Design of such “junkDNA” was evident without any appeal to CSI, because without it, we’d be dead.
So that’s one of the many reasons I abandoned CSI altogether. I found the arguments of Tour, Sanford, Don Johnson and Behe (and some names not mentioned) much more accessible and defensible than those coming from the pro-CSI faction, and certainly from the 2nd Law faction.
I also pointed out at UD, that no one views the sperm and ovum egg as conscious mental agents. At what point do the sperm/egg/zygote/embryo/fetus/baby etc. possess a non-material mind? The causal history, as far as we can tell from the outside, is purely mechanistic! We can only accept by faith there is a non-material realm perhaps for the simple reason that no matter how complex a machine we can make, it can never truly experience pain and suffering the way a human soul can. I can’t imagine that even if I built a machine to mimic behaviors of anguish and suffering, that it really FEELS pain the way a conscious human soul can. For that simple child-like reason, I believe in non-material souls.
Eric,
You, and Dr. Watson, are speculating here and an experiment would have to show the evidence for retrocausality. This would open the door to some really puzzling paradoxes…such as seeing the effects of your choice before you make it…
However, it seems that retrocausality can occur only in very isolated instances, i.e. when not ALL information is available to contradict the results of the experiment, such as the the which path in the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment…
Sal and those that have some imagination,
Do you think there are some similarities between my illustration/ thought experiment with a flex stick with two photons at each end of it, separated by time, and this picture?
Anybody???
The picture above illustrates how Einstein imagined a wormhole…
https://www.space.com/20881-wormholes.html
No, like I said in another comment, in the same way that Newton did not invent gravity Dembski did not invent CSI. He is one of the first to formalize the idea.
People were not floating around in mid air before Newton discovered the law of gravitation, but we also were not putting objects into orbit. Formalizing something allows us to better understand and use the thing, but does not bring it into being, nor invalidate those using the thing less formally before the fact.
Great, I look forward to seeing if anyone wrote anything substantive there.
At any rate, the mere fact a 108 comment thread exists discussing the technical merits or lack thereof does demonstrate the concept of ASC has been used to some extent that it can either be discounted or accepted. It is no longer “not even wrong” but can now either be right or wrong, which puts it in the category of “scientific hypothesis.”
This is where the retrocausality pops into your timeline. Once a free choice is made there is no antecedent that can force it into being. Additionally, it is oriented towards a future purpose, which is what makes it retrocausal.
EricMH,
Sure, Winston used the concept in his paper (poorly, as you’ll see when you read the thread), and he made some falsifiable claims, many of which were falsified. 20+ substantive errors is not something to brag about.
EricMH:
Again, there’s nothing retrocausal about it. The attempt to drink is not transcendentally caused by its future fulfillment (or the lack thereof). It’s caused by thirst and prior experience, and the causality is in the forward direction.
When a self-driving car navigates to its destination, do you think its action is transcendentally retrocaused by its future arrival (or lack thereof)? If a car can perform a goal-oriented action without depending on retrocausality, why not humans and other animals?
That’s not retrocausality. That’s called planning.
You may find this discussion useful:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2HxAkCG7NWTrrn5R3/three-fallacies-of-teleology
You seem to have a very low standard for what counts as a scientific hypothesis
Imagine the point in time when I wrote the post was at one end of a stick …
https://www.britannica.com/science/scientific-hypothesis
Have you scientifically evaluated this “ID” hypothesis? If not, has anybody? If not, is anybody planning to?
What, specifically is the “ID” hypothesis if not at some point, at some time something did something?
Newton, accidentally, with his deep motives to try to contradict everything I write, without any true motives to learn anything, has actually brought up a very good point that has puzzled many about QM and the nature of reality…
Can his writing the post in the past be altered?
Can the end of the stick with his writing the post in the past be bent, as it were, and be brought to the present time, so that the end of the stick with the past event meets the present time, and possibly be altered?
P.S. please note that I’m not referring to Einstein’s theory of special relativity…This is quantum mechanics only…for now…
Absolutely! on June 12, you wrote to newton:
So the above post will be written 5 days into the future!
You don’t really say anything. Everything is couched in “if” and “maybe” , you are “just asking questions or “vague quantum guff”. Stuff like that can’t be contradicted. There’s nothing to contradict!
Just asking?
Just asking?
P.S. guff.
Thanks, as usual Eliezer is much better than most at understanding the opposition’s argument, but then, disappointingly, just begs the question by assuming materialism is true and asserting retrocausality is impossible.
He’s obviously an incredibly brilliant researcher and talented writer, but most of his writing evidences a lack of basic knowledge about what constitutes a valid argument.
Well, it’s at least a standard that evolutionary theory hasn’t met yet, so ID is ahead of the game in that regard 😀
Plus, it has only taken about ten years for ID to get to that point, whereas evolution is at over a century and a half and still hasn’t reached this level.
From a purely time based perspective ID is already the more fruitful research paradigm.
That’s called speculation.
To disprove retrocausality you need to show the brain state is sufficient to determine Keith’s choice.
Or, you can just beg the question like Eliezer and assume materialism must be true, therefore the brain state must be sufficient.
Here is a hint before “Einsteins” here further confuse everyone by pretending that quantum mechanics has been unified with special relativity…
Relativity versus quantum mechanics: the battle for the universe
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/04/relativity-quantum-mechanics-universe-physicists
“… It begins to look as if we ourselves, by a last-minute decision, have an influence on what a photon will do when it has accomplished most of its doing… we have to say that we ourselves an undeniable part in shaping what we have always called the past. The past is not really the past until it has been registered. Or put it in another way, the past has no meaning or existence unless it exists as a record in the present.” – John Wheeler
BTW: is it 5 o’clock were most of retirees from TSZ are?
Or, are most retirees so bored that they will write anything that come to their mind just to kill the boredom?
I’m afraid that these posts at TSZ don’t count as records in the present.
Is that the “pretending to be a child” J-Mac who J-Mac “pretends” to let use his account or the real J-Mac?
Said the guy who writes OP after OP that don’t generate any conversation about their OP itself, just about how imbecilic the OPs are.
Wonder what predictions this fruitful paradigm can make? Perhaps retrocausality is the thing now as it’s how ID science progresses?
Actual scientists make a discovery, turns out that ID predicted it all along!
Eric,
You, and DI for that matter, have dug a hole for yourselves by the commitment to the immaterial soul in order to contradict and defeat materialism…
There are many experiments that seem to imply retrocausality but they don’t necessarily prove the existence of an immaterial soul… Quite to the contrary…
Dr. Egnor, whom I respect, has provided me with insights into the human consciousness and mind that don’t depend on an immaterial soul…Other neurosurgeons too, as well as many experiments in that field…
The perfect examples is when Dr. Egnor (or others) surgically remove the majority of patient’s brain. In most cases the brain is able to compensate and the patients can more of less function, but not always.
Why?
If the human consciousness and mind are based on the existence of an immaterial soul, why the exceptions?
The general anestheasia is another example.
The human brain under general anesthesia has normal brain activity with the exception of one: Consciousness.
That’s how the surgeon and the anesthesiologist know the patient is not feeling any pain. You can ask Dr. Egnor. If the brain activity is showing the activity related to the patient being conscious, that means the patient is waking up and can feel pain. The anesthesiologist has to give the patient more medications to keep him unconscious…
PS. Some brain surgeries are performed with local anesthetics, because the brain itself doesn’t feel any pain…
Quantum consciousness can explain most of the issues I have mentioned…
Does quantum consciousness equal the quantum soul? It seems possible that “quantum soul” exists even after death as quantum information. However, it seems it still needs a material, quantum processor, such a functional human brain for the conscious experience of now…
Fair Witness:
EricMH:
Oh, the irony. The guy invoking retrocausality is just stating the obvious, while the guy invoking routine planning? Well, he’s “speculating”.
My argument doesn’t depend on physicalism or determinism. I can easily modify it so that it will work assuming libertarian free will and an immaterial soul.
1. I’ve had previous experience being thirsty, and previous experience slaking my thirst by drinking something.
2. I know, again from experience, that the fridge typically contains things to drink.
3. I begin to feel thirst and desire to slake it.
4. I put #1 and #2 together and deduce that if I walk to the fridge, I might find something inside that I can drink.
5. I freely and indeterministically form the intent to walk to the fridge.
6. I walk to the fridge and get a drink.
All in order. No retrocausality needed.
Another irony is that Eric is invoking a kind of “retrodeterminism” without realizing it.
By his reasoning, my decision to walk to the fridge is determined by a future event, which means it isn’t free at all.
I’m fairly familiar with the literature here, for various reasons. Would you care to name a specific case where the majority of a patient’s brain has been removed and they have retained normal function?
After all, if you know about these cases then they must be public knowledge so it should be trivial for you to name names. Link links.
And then in place you merely ask a series of questions, as if you don’t really have any explanation at all.
I thought that was what you were explaining?
Sure, it “seems” possible. Do you have any, say, mathematics backing that up at all?
Sure, it does “seem” that way.
Again, you proffer explanations that merey dissipate like candy in the water to a disappointed racoon on any inspection at all really.
Do you really somehow knit these questions and “could be’s” and general handwaving into a coherent worldview? How?
OMagain:
Here’s what he’s talking about:
It’s marvellous ;P
Automated driving isn’t really goal oriented, because everything the car does is dictated by its past. We just anthropomorphize its behavior.
Hmm.
EricMH isn’t really goal oriented, because everything EricMH does is dictated by his past. We just anthropomorphize his behavior.
?
EricMH,
How is it not goal-oriented? The car doesn’t start driving to Modoc unless its goal is to get there.
Also, do you see why my argument doesn’t depend on physicalism or determinism, and why yours depends on a kind of “retrodeterminism”?
keiths:
EricMH:
This is too bizarre not to comment on again. There are countless counterfactuals,such as
1) there is a cold Sprite between the sofa cushions,
2) in the microwave,
3) in the toilet tank,
4) in the mailbox,
…etc.
Why do I go to the fridge when all of these counterfactuals want to retrocause different motions? Why doesn’t one of the other counterfactuals “win”?
Better still, why doesn’t my drinking of Sprite at the 7-11 retrocause me to drive there instead of going to the fridge?
It’s ridiculous to invoke retrocausality when there’s an obvious and simple causal explanation — one that doesn’t even depend on physicalism and/or determinism.
My motive is I am lazy, it would be harder to agree with you. But you are a good sport , so there is one thing I’ve learned. And you love the little stuff.
ETA
I missed the “ accidentally” , better to be lucky than smart even better to be both.
Even if it were, what difference would it make/ Sal’s entire premise is severely flawed. If things are automated, who automated them, they didn’t automate themselves? They didn’t become automated by accident. They were designed that way-by an intelligent being!
So how could the existence of any teleological computers be a contradiction to ID theory, when it is quite clearly the opposite?
Everything that we know that is teleological is designed that way-so how that doesn’t bolster ID theory in Sal’s mind is beyond me.
phoodoo,
You’re missing the point. Eric and I are talking about whether teleology requires retrocausality, not whether computers require designers.
Is your purported designer teleological?
Why would I make inferences about a designer I know nothing about. I am simply remarking on what we DO know. All teleology that we see around us comes by through design.
Can’t you understand the difference?
You seem to know plenty.
Don’t include me in that “we”. I doubt many other people would want to be included in that group.
After all, according to you we can actually know nothing. No experement or conclusion can be trusted because some experiments are done badly. Remember, you said that a couple of days ago? You asked for the source of a conclusion, experimental evidence was provided and you waved it away with a study that shows some statistics are done badly.
So you’ve got zero right to talk about what we DO know as what we know we know only when it suits YOU. Everything else can be waved away by you as probably wrong if it suits. Building a world view one cherry-pick at a time.
And are the entities that implemented those designs themselves teleological? How do you know?
I can understand why you are trying so hard to avoid talking about the properties of the designer you pretend to know nothing about, yes.
What did you learn?
He doesn’t want to…
Me too that’s why I can’t hold a grudge…😉
This love got me to where I’m today…
Just like Sal said it, the universe and life were designed for the discovery… all we need is time and motivation.. the right motives…
The universe where almost all of it is locked away from us by relativity? The universe where in not too long all that will be left is this galaxy, apparently, and then not too long after that nothing at all except heat, forever cooling? That universe?
And if life was designed for discovery, why is it so very very unnecessarily complex? And why does it seem like it evolved rather then being designed? You’ve obviously never created anything complex or a computer program, but take it from those that have, biology is not how you’d design biology if you were doing it from scratch from our perspective.
And if biology was designed for the discovery, what have we discovered so far? That knees and backs are badly designed? That water can trigger wars? Do tell!