“Teleology” is a naughty word in certain circles — largely the circles that I often move in myself, namely physicists or other scientists who know what the word “teleology” means. To wit, it’s the concept of “being directed toward a goal.” In the good old days of Aristotle, our best understanding of the world was teleological from start to finish: acorns existed in order to grow into mighty oak trees; heavy objects wanted to fall and light objects to rise; human beings strove to fulfill their capacity as rational beings. Not everyone agreed, including my buddy Lucretius, but at the time it was a perfectly sensible view of the world.
These days we know better, though the knowledge has been hard-won. The early glimmerings of the notion of conservation of momentum supported the idea that things just kept happening, rather than being directed toward a cause, and this view seemed to find its ultimate embodiment in the clockwork universe of Newtonian mechanics. (In technical terms, time evolution is described by differential equations fixed by initial data, not by future goals.) Darwin showed how the splendid variety of biological life could arise without being in any sense goal-directed or guided — although this obviously remains a bone of contention among religious people, even respectable philosophers. But the dominant paradigm among scientists and philosophers is dysteleological physicalism.
However. Aristotle was a smart cookie, and dismissing him as an outdated relic is always a bad idea. Sure, maybe the underlying laws of nature are dysteleological, but surely there’s some useful sense in which macroscopic real-world systems can be usefully described using teleological language, even if it’s only approximate or limited in scope. (Here’s where I like to paraphrase Scott Derrickson: The universe has purposes. I know this because I am part of the universe, and I have purposes.) It’s okay, I think, to say things like “predators tend to have sharp teeth because it helps them kill and eat prey,” even if we understand that those causes are merely local and contingent, not transcendent. Stephen Asma defends this kind of view in an interesting recent article, although I would like to see more acknowledgement made of the effort required to connect the purposeless, mechanical underpinnings of the world to the purposeful, macroscopic biosphere. Such a connection can be made, but it requires some effort.
Of course loyal readers all know where such a connection comes from: it’s the arrow of time. The underlying laws of physics don’t work in terms of any particular “pull” toward future goals, but the specific trajectory of our actual universe looks very different in the past than in the future. In particular, the past had a low entropy: we can reconcile the directedness of macroscopic time evolution with the indifference of microscopic dynamics by positing some sort of Past Hypothesis (see also). All of the ways in which physical objects behave differently toward the future than toward the past can ultimately be traced to the thermodynamic arrow of time.
Which raises an interesting point that I don’t think is sufficiently appreciated: we now know enough about the real behavior of the physical world to understand that what looks to us like teleological behavior is actually, deep down, not determined by any goals in the future, but fixed by a boundary condition in the past. So while “teleological” might be acceptable as a rough macroscopic descriptor, a more precise characterization would say that we are being pushed from behind, not pulled from ahead.
The question is, what do we call such a way of thinking? Apparently “teleology” is a word never actually used by Aristotle, but invented in the eighteenth century based on the Greek télos, meaning “end.” So perhaps what we want is an equivalent term, with “end” replaced by “beginning.” I know exactly zero ancient Greek, but from what I can glean from the internet there is an obvious choice: arche is the Greek word for beginning or origin. Sadly, “archeology” is already taken to mean something completely different, so we can’t use it.
I therefore tentatively propose the word aphormeology to mean “originating from a condition in the past,” in contrast with teleology, “driven toward a goal in the future.” (Amazingly, a Google search for this word on 3 February 2014 returns precisely zero hits.) Remember — no knowledge of ancient Greek, but apparently aphorme means “a base of operations, a place from which a campaign is launched.” Which is not a terribly bad way of describing the cosmological Past Hypothesis when you think about it. (Better suggestions would be welcome, especially from anyone who actually knows Greek.)
We live in a world where the dynamical laws are fundamentally dysteleological, but our cosmic history is aphormeological, which through the magic of statistical mechanics gives rise to the appearance of teleology in our macroscopic environment. A shame Aristotle and Lucretius aren’t around to appreciate the progress we’ve made.
Teleology is a big problem in computer science. People are always saying things like “the computer added two numbers” or “the computer rendered the web page”. In practice, computers don’t add numbers or render web pages, they manipulate voltages, currents and charge states in a manner which their programmers and users can interpret as having performed an addition or rendered a web page. This usually gets driven home hard and strong when one is debugging.
P.S. Aristotle probably thought that women had fewer teeth than men, because back then and for the next couple of thousand years, the rule of thumb was that a woman lost one tooth for each child born.
Kaleberg: computers are afforded teleology because they arise by design, at the hands of human engineers who intended them to operate in a particular way. Nature, on the other hand, in the nauralistic world view, is the product of aimless physical laws, sheer chance and, at most, natural selection. It is in this context that teleology is a “naughty word.”
Hi Kaleberg and Del, I would say quite the contrary to Del, from the analysis I set out clearly above in various places, that the laws are not “aimless”. They “aim” at a periodic table of elements naturally by aggregation of neurons in decay after a Big Bang. They evolve quite well “aimed” at a periodic table in a mantle on a planetary surface – a mantle has heavier elements in the approximate proportions they are created in supernova. Whether you call it an “aim” or an inevitability of the mindless laws (laws cannot have aims but they can have inevitabilities) driving neutrons in decay to aggregate, its exists as an aim to a mantle to enable life to evolve using chemical elements (whether life will in fact evolve of not, they are enabled by that undoubtedly mindless but clearly directed course of particle evolution).
Well done Marcus in saying “laws cannot have aims but they can have inevitabilities”. It is inevitable that in right conditions, trees get sucked up from gravity by photons, and it is inevitable that in right conditions, gravity pulls rainforests into cold dark photons (which I call deepons). My own opinion is that the arrows of time radiate out into photonic “aphormeological” entropy and clump into deeponic “teleological” syntropy. For more on dark photons see https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/10/29/dark-photons/
Allen: Until we define measures for those (continuum-sized) sets of Turing machines, questions 1 and 2 (of your second set of questions) cannot be answered. And there are arbitrarily many ways to define those measures, so the answer can be anything you like. Without answering (1) and (2) in a manner we can all agree on, we cannot answer (3), which makes (4) irrelevant.
Although archaeologists, like folks from other areas of science such as particle or astrophysics like to think of themselves as “discoverers”, they are almost never the first (nor even among the first) observers of the artifacts they uncover or otherwise liberate from layers of rock, sediment or other more subtle effects of the passage of time.
About 13 billion years have transpired since the Higgs field settled to its current state. Just because it took our race this long to reach the point of noticing the Higgs boson (which is a part of the Higgs mechanism) was there, should we feel better about ourselves because we have finally done it? Or should it instead make our manifestly finite intellects simply feel that much more dull and massive? ‘Foggy’, to use Sean’s own analogy, utterly fails to capture it.
This is progress? Forget Aristotle (and even Lucretius, also one of my favorites). It takes us on average about 1500 years for us to produce only one Newton or Einstein. I suppose, on a cosmological scale, that isn’t really so long. I’m feeling better already.
The Higgs Field is an interesting topic. What have we discovered? A particle that provides no less than all mass with “weight”. Then it simply relies on curved spacetime to compress it into various objects with weight. It looks like a whitewash of a difficult issue. Momentum is mass, and everything has it, so now we have a massive particle giving photons their weight by momentum, and ignoring whether there are gravitons rather than curved spacetime drawing their “weights” together along with particles.
I would really like to read a paragraph or two from a physicist explaining these phenomena in plain language rather than abstract math or jargon, so I can understand it better. As I see it, Higgs may be a specific momentary creation of mass in an accelerator by continual bombarding of stable and unstable particle and fields to find a specific product and inevitably they created it momentarily.
What it is, in intelligible terms of all particles and fields having weight (momentum) is unintelligible in the explanations I have read. A moment created to order in an accelerator to the old idea of an “ether” as a “Higgs Field” giving weight to mass, and quite possibly the wrong approach entirely. I like scepticism until intelligibility presents itself.
Marcus: “inertia”, NOT “weight”. Particle physics folks are actually very touchy and guarded about the issue of gravity and Higgs, and with good reason. A scalar field such as Higgs cannot account for planetary orbits, which requires an inverse square law force. See “Bertrand’s theorem” on Wikipedia for a complete mathematical proof.
This is not to say that other ideas to explain gravity and its relation (or unrelatedness) to the Higgs field are not in the works. There are many, and some of them are very fresh and interesting.
Maybe you misunderstand my reference. Momentum is inertial weight. A mass has its state of rest and energy combined in momentum, and that is its (relative) inertia, as measured. (inertia by moving or resisting being moved) All mass has inertia and it is measured in weight. Higgs provides weight to particles and fields to have their own inertia (relative momentum) with that weight.
I don’t think inertia and weight are unrelated. Weight is the basis for inertia, and gravity is the property of mass that gives it weight (in my view). Even photons rely on gravitational mass to be sent with momentum between particles with gravitational mass. It is a fundamental property that Higgs purports to provide.
I suspect gravity is itself weight, and that there is no need for a Higgs. A gravitational field may provide relative weight (being universally consistent for all mass for their relative weights ). Weight is omnipresent from an omnipresent gravitational field that provides it to both particles and fields equivalently (equivalence of gravitation and inertia). You need to find a “graviton” that can draw mass to increase weight while also providing mass to the particles that are drawn – a dual purpose field. Higgs “tries” to provide the weight and appears to leave the compression to gravity, but that can be obviated by the correct field, which is a possible mechanism and likely quite simple (I have a view of it in my book above).
I will read more, but these fundamentals need to be laid out as above, otherwise we will slip into jargon and misunderstand. The inverse square law is fundamental, and like many universals it is set aside conveniently at times. I would retain it absolutely as a field property shared by gravitons with photons (in fact, their material substance might be matched for shearing), with gravitons providing weight, and photons providing quantities using weight to be sent with fixed momentum. They work mutually, and the inverse square law enables their shearing for photons to redshift in a graviton field and so on. It needs to be laid out in plain language and mechanisms as here and in my book.
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, is inertia in each measured momentus.
“Weight” = Force due to gravity = ma = inertial mass * acceleration due to gravity (9.8 m/sec^2, at the surface of the Earth).
Although F = ma also works just as well for inertial mass, Newton and our physics teachers presented them as equivalent when I went to high school; not any more. Of course, you wouldn’t know this unless you had spent the last several years observing the same subject matter taught in a 21st century high school physics classroom. I have.
They also emphasize the third law as dealing with forces that come in pairs, but they still botch the explanation of why some such force diagrams don’t work, such as for uniform circular motion (why “centrifugal” is “fictitious).
Where the Higgs mechanism is concerned, you are better off forgetting about any relationship to gravity, for now at least. It’s well beyond the scope of what the Standard Model of particle physics was designed to do. Look closely at the math — it’s just not in there!
I see how Sean presents the modern view in part in his most recent blog. I realize that there are interpretations at work, and I see how far apart I am from current theory (and maybe Newton is far from it too) but I suspect it comes down to interpretation in tying any “Higgs attempt” to gravity.
My overview above tries to say that “weight” (or the relative force we feel in gravitational interactions) is likely an omnipresent field in the “void” that we only measure relatively (6 kg on earth, 1 kg on the moon) but which gives everything something to bargain with in relative exchanges to build weight because it directly proportional to its “mass” (a quantity of mass-energy). It is like a fluid we move through but are unaware of except as changing weights, and it affects photons directly by interfering in redshift paths all the way to earth from galaxies, and in labs with stationary slit apparatus. “Gravitons” would make waves at light speed based on motion and position of objects and set a path for photons to follow when passing through a slit.
It’s not 21st century high school, juts a series of mechanisms, also without math. These are shearing mechanisms between gravitons and photons, and we know how sensitive photons are to gravitons if they redshift all the way here to sprinkle on our telescopes. Higgs sounds nice, but if you repeatedly collide stable and unstable particles to get a supposed specific product you will probably create it given the splitting possible in colliders. They got “something” for sure by brute repeated effort, but I would wait for the intelligible explanation. I tend to ignore Higgs.
While my view seems speculative, it is hopefully understandable in my comments about the two mysteries of redshifts and interferences. The materials involved, as shearing mechanisms, I write about in my free book – which is like an ongoing project of mine to present mechanisms clearly without math. It more or less reconciles Newton and QM by preserving Newton but allowing mass to have more properties than he imagined or currently imagined by QM. I would keep his formalisms and work around them using properties rather than changing the formalisms. This applies also to introducing unnecessary formalisms like “uncertainty”, which is a product of limitation to measurement and not a property of masses, and which has led to strange interpretations of properties of masses.
It’s all rather informal and abstract, which is a good combination. To wit:
‘..what looks to us like teleological behavior is actually, deep down, not determined by any goals in the future, but fixed by a boundary condition in the past.’
Remind me, what is it that looks to us like teleological behavior? Like, a person who buys an airplane ticket? A knife is made for cutting? A bird’s wings are for flying? But this simply *is* teleological.
‘actually, deep down’ = pseudo-depth.
I’m trying to read something coherent into ‘fixed by a boundary condition’..sounds to me like for example saying there was something in the constitution of the remote ancestors of birds that would necessitate the appearance of wings in their descendants. This is not true.
Driven from, or drawn to, is the same thing. It’s two ways of looking at the same arrow from past to future IF laws are consistent and inevitably interact consistently to some product or other – Laplace. Just track them. If they are consistent, as laws, you can track them backwards and predict them forwards. Science is supposed to predict and yet it hasn’t come to grips with inevitable products of fixed laws?
It’s a furphy. Just track. See the consistencies backwards and forwards and conclude for yourself what products are inevitable on that arrow. Philosophically and scientifically, being drawn to ends or driven by original conditions is the same thing, but this has not been grasped. Draw your own conclusion about different inevitable (stars) and potential (life) ends. No need to invent a new term or even use “teleology”, which falls into the same by saying things are drawn. They are both at once as “statistical predetermination from initial conditions”. Pretty obvious when you lay it out like that.
Sequential exogeneity implies contemporaneous exogeneity. Say you want to quantify the (causal) effect of education on income. You take education years and income data and regress one against the other. Did you recover what you wanted?
DanLanglois’s 1st:
“a person who buys an airplane ticket? A knife is made for cutting?”
Here there have existed intentions of an autonomous agent, at least at the human-social reduction level.
“A bird’s wings are for flying?””
A contemporary evolutionary biologist, and any secular, science-versed, contemporary undividual for that matter, would say that wings “are” due to having been inherited from a long line of ancestors that survived to reproduce owing to having wings.
The whole point of dismissing teleology is to exorcise from nature, at the proper level of reduction, any intentional autonomous agent. And if one sees no further than the human arena level, its for stooping under the burden of Giants.