Hey Rog,
You wrote:
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for the dialogue.
P: mutual. but my last reply to you (and Platt) was more of a monologue
inspired purely by my disliking of the word 'emergent'. I was writing
and deleting in the mail all of the time, as I said, it was a bit of
struggling with the matter, so I took some time to read your and my
posts again to re-evaluate it a day later. And "oops, I did it again.":
Misquoting your given definition of 'emergence', and making out of
'self-consistent' 'selfcontainedness' and thereby come to the wrong
conclusion that our visions on ... the origin of purpose (and not, sigh,
as I read: experience/quality) are the same. Not very attentive of me.
But, I don't think my argument on form as a kind of Platonic,
mathematical world ('ultimate static quality without it's complement
DQ'), applied to the concept 'emergent', is therefor flawed: I think
that our scientific models of life are in essence just this: form,
abstractions, static, platonic. A word like 'emergent' is aptly applied
to capture some insight of the 'form' of ant-populations, tornado's,
societies and cities (ah! Finally: Hello Pirsig!), but to explain our
feelings of purpose and meaning with it... no.
Okay, here then:
> 3) Finally, one key complex experience or adaptation is that of
> establishing
> goals and purposes. Complex animals have developed this quality.
> Purpose is
> therefore not the cause of evolution, it is an emergent complex
> quality
> arising out of evolution.
A different reply now: If I stick with my 'form'-argument, I think
purpose doesn't exist in the theory of evolution as such. You can
program computers as neural nets or automata that adapt to some
'environment', like in the game Life, or by using principles of game
theory or something like that, but ... it remains form. And who! the
automata can get quite 'complex' after some runs... but complexity as
such doesn't matter for the computer, what's really there are 1's and
0's, ore more precisely collections of some abstract two ingredients
'this state' or 'that state'. I believe that mathematically speaking,
you can even do away with the concept of linear time: like a static
block-universe (hope that term is familiar with you) composed with a
collection of these two states. Yes, also traffic jams, composed out of
molecules in some very 'complex' dynamics, can be viewed as such by a
strict interpretation of what science's models are in it's essence.
Hey Platt, can you help me out here, you've read Penrose: Nearly all of
science's models are 'computable', thus can be simulated or implemented
in Turing Machines...
Ah... Penrose has written three 'popular' (I think they are fairly
academic!) science books on this subject, and STILL is highly
controversial; who am I to try to argue in favor of this vision in a
few alineas! Just maybe you'll see an essay with my name in the
undetermined future on this website on matters such as these.
Anyhow, to cut things short; the concept of 'purpose' is per definition
non-scientific. Yes?
In another mail, you wrote:
> A classic example of emergence is in the ant colony example that I
> gave above
> (though traffic patterns and your example of flock behavior are also
> commonly
> used). In studying ants, they find that the critters follow very
> simple
> patterns of behavior based upon their immediate environment and odors.
>
> However, when you aggregate the net effects of thousands of simple
> ants
> acting in simple ways, you get much more complex colony behavior in
> terms of
> scouting, food gathering and storage, defense, waste removal and even
> formation of ant graveyards. To say that such examples "explain
> nothing"
> doesn't make any sense to me.
'Explanation' could be interpeted as illuminating the simple and complex
CAUSES of phenomena. In this sense I agree with you -of course!- that
you can have valueable insights in the dynamics of ant populations and
what kind of phenomena (ant-graveyards?!) they exhibit. But these
phenomena take a subjective (by lack of a better word) perspective, that
is: OUR perspective.
Do ants have purpose?: Do they plan things, do they strive for an
orderly ant-society? Well, I do believe they have an experience of value
that is necessary for the type of behaviors they exhibit, and I also
believe that science has no place for these experiences of value, but I
don't think they plan to do the things they do. Maybe it's fair to say
that there is a strong mechanistic (evolutionary) component that indeed
explains their behavior. Okay, aha-erlebnis: Whitehead's 'occasions of
experience', that what the world is made of. Ants are tiny bits of
agents having these occasions of experience, and they are made of other
occasions of experience, (Pirsig's 'patterns of value'?) but it takes
our capacity to be able to have the occasions of experience to view that
so-called purpose-full behavior. It happens to resemble purposeful
behavior as it seems to be well planned and performed, in the way that
we humans truly plan and perform certain 'projects'. But we are
conscious of it. Ants are not.
Okay, that's it for now. Hope I now dit a better job in reading your
writings.
P.
Ps. I am aware of my use of 'us' 'having' 'occasions of experience';
that is, that we have a 'self' that has experience. Ah, plain old
'common sense' maybe right after all. No need to dig on a metaphysics,
philosophy or science that sees all kinds of problems with this. You
only become unhappy.
Pss. I do believe life is 'good', and better than death as meaning
'Nothing whatsoever'. But it's a one-sided view. I'll never know how to
appreciate life and death from the perspective of death!
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