Re: Teleology and vitalism

[Ayten Aydin <***>]

Judith,
Perhaps superfluous, but I would like to emphasise the reference you make in
your following paragraph:

"One of my father's main secondary goals in everything he did and wrote was
to prove that biology WAS accessible through science; that the reasons for
life in organisms is knowable and explainable in scientific parlance, it
just wasn't quite the way we had expected. In the course of working through
this whole process, he discovered that the impediments in science were
almost always caused by attitudes in science itself-- attitudes that were
based on all sorts of things but, without exception, they were not based on
logic or truth."

I agree that biology and fields beyond (within human sciences) should be
explainable in scientific parlance, that is by applying to them scientific
method provided that this method has freedom (not operating within "Closure"
as meant by Lawson) to apply different criteria for each level of enquiry
representing different categories, for verification; not limited to the
criteria rigidly applied to Physics. Even the chemistry goes beyond physics
and gets closer to biology.
Somehow human being finds it easy to operate within simple systems without
realizing or not wanting to realize that the life and living are complex
matters and need a complexity minded approach in dealing with everything
concerning the life.

Once we agree on this among ourselves we should start thinking how we can
break our boundaries and go outside with more practical applications to
diffuse the related openness.

In this context your idea of selecting a relatively simple and all
embracing, that is directly involving all human body/mind and soul triplex,
area (such as health maintenance) is picked up and pursued within the RR's
framework to start with and see where it takes us whether we make the RR
theory evolve further or consider it already an open theory applicable to
all with necessary wings to be added as needed to fly higher. A
united/concerted and for that matter teleological action appears needed.

A.A

----- Original Message -----
From: "Judith Rosen" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2004 7:44 AM
Subject: Re: Teleology and vitalism


> Some context on this subject, and then I have some comments on John's
> comments.
>
> One of my father's main secondary goals in everything he did and wrote was
> to prove that biology WAS accessible through science; that the reasons for
> life in organisms is knowable and explainable in scientific parlance, it
> just wasn't quite the way we had expected. In the course of working
through
> this whole process, he discovered that the impediments in science were
> almost always caused by attitudes in science itself-- attitudes that were
> based on all sorts of things but, without exception, they were not based
on
> logic or truth.
>
> In trying to understand why this should be so, he scrutinized the history
of
> scientific thought as well as the human societal contexts of the times
each
> development took place within. One of the contextual realities he
> discovered, all through the history of science, was that "the truth" was
> dangerous. There were forces in the Catholic Church, for example, that
> literally tried to kill you if you reported anything that was in
> contradiction to the current papal dictums. The antagonism of religious
> dogma to scientific "truth" was a centuries-old tradition that held back
the
> pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge in Western Europe and elsewhere for
> millennia. This led to a philosophical backlash, once science managed to
get
> out from under the threat of execution and could proceed unimpeded. The
> result was that science became virulently intolerant of any hint of
> religiosity in scientific explanations.
>
> So, to John K.'s comments:
>
> John K. wrote:
> > Thus vitalism is not necessarily about God -- that's a weapon, not a
> > legitimate characterization. It is about a vital force in nature, a life
> > force.
>
> "A vital force", "a life force"... The problem is that those sound like
> something that transcends the natural world. It talks about life as a
> "free-standing thing" in itself, not the effect of some causal process.
This
> is why my father chose to not use that terminology. He believed that the
> explanations for life in organisms was inherent in the natural world, not
> transcendent or supernatural. He said the same about consciousness and
wrote
> several of the papers in "Essays on Life, Itself" about the "mind/brain
> problem".
>
> > John K. Wrote:  from Balckburn:
> > Teleology:  The study of the ends or purpose of things. The idea that
> > there is such a thing as the end or purpose of life is prominent in the
> > Aristotelian view of nature (and ethics), and then in the Christian
> > tradition.
>
> In the mid-1200's, Thomas Aquinas sought to reconcile Aristotelian
> philosophies with Christianity in a series of written discourses on the
> subject. On the one hand, this removed the stigma of "blasphemy" from the
> pursuit of science which was important in human history, but
unfortunately,
> it also ended up kind of "discrediting" Aristotle for a long time within
> science-- the two (Aristotle and Religion) had become equated with each
> other, so during the post-Renaissance backlash against religion that
> scientists indulged in to an extreme, Aristotle was a casualty
>
> > John K. wrote:The theory of evolution through natural selection allows
> > speculation about the function for which particular things are adapted,
> > and so permits assertions about the purpose an adaptation serves,
> > without any commitment to the idea of a designer who put it there for a
> > purpose, and without the unscientific belief that the future utility of
> > a feature somehow brings about its existence by a kind of backwards
> > causation.
>
> This was not true when my father was writing his books-- natural selection
> was considered to be a mechanical, reactive process whereby the "purpose"
or
> "function" that adaptations served was entirely a happy accident of random
> mutation. In the traditional scientific view, my father said, the aspect
of
> evolution that he viewed as "the cart" was always put in front of "the
> horse". The whole process was entirely looked upon as a "feed-forward
only"
> process: the past acting on the present creates the future. My father's
work
> on developing the concepts of Complexity Theory and the connected ideas
> about Anticipation argued that function was a perfectly scientific concept
> which emerged along with life at a certain level of complex organization
in
> a system.  (Anticipatory Systems, remember, deals with Biology and
> biological systems- a fact which easily gets lost when people start
> engineering this kind of system control into technologies and disconnect
the
> human role in the whole process from the machines that have these
mechanisms
> built in.) "Anticipatory Systems" (the book) argued that Life is able to
> exploit opportunities precisely because of the edge that functional
> entailments create within these systems. Complex systems at this
> "dimension/level" of complexity exhibit a host of new properties and/or
> behaviors that are not seen in less complex systems (like the atom)-- LIFE
> being a rather prominent one.
>
> The scientific stamp of approval on the concept of function is not logical
> unless it is kept within the framework of Anticipation. In other words, if
> science is really trying to say that function is a scientific concept but
> reject the notion that time is quite a bit more fluid than the linear
> version put forward in explanations of evolutionary processes prior to my
> father's work, they are indulging in a kind of ideological inconsistency.
It
> doesn't hold up and my father argued that it never DID hold up. He drew
the
> lines of logic together and what they illuminated was what he named
> "Anticipation" in the systemic sense. But there's a whole lot more to it
> than just what functional entailment means.Anticipation reveals that time
is
> something which can allow functional entailments to use the past to
predict
> the future, in the present. In a sense, all three concepts are present, in
a
> causal way, at once.
>
> John K. wrote:
> > Continuing, the definition in this version of Webster is slightly
> > different than the one Judith quoted:
> > 1 a: the study of evidences of design in nature b: a doctrine (as in
> > vitalism) that ends are immanent in nature c: a doctrine explaining
> > phenomena by final causes 2. : the fact or character attributed to
> > nature or natural processes of being directed toward an end or shaped >
> bya purpose 3: use of design or purpose as an explanation of natural
> > phenomena.
> > My comments in reference: 1 a: Is an internal model not "evidence of
> > design" in nature? b: What are causal loops if not ends immanently
> > affecting causes? 2: Are organisms not to be discussed as being "shaped
> > by a purpose?" The only version of teleology that needs to be excluded
> > is the third one, using the purpose as an explanation. We are instead
> > explaining the origin and operation of purpose in terms of internal
> models.
>
> You're looking at this differently than my father did. There's a religious
> connotation in some of those definitions (1 and 3). Evidence of design in
> nature is seen as being akin to identifying a newly discovered painting as
> being by one of the masters ("Ah, see that design element there, that's
> proof this is a VanGogh-- I recognize his stylistic elements, which are
> consistent all through his work!") The taint of creationism is all over
it.
> I've heard people point to the fact that water rivulet patterns and blood
> vessel patterns and tree root branching patterns are all alike because the
> same "artist" created them all. My father said that those patterns are
> generated by a material "path of least resistance" effect.Similarly, atoms
> resemble solar systems and galaxies spiral just like hurricanes. Lots of
> people see "the mind of God" in these things and the definitions of
> teleology that we see in dictionaries today are directly influenced by
> Thomas Aquinas and his Scholastic movement in Christianity. The purpose
> referred to in most definitions of the word Teleology is an overarching
one
> (the grand plan of divine origin). The concept of function is beginning to
> creep in, apparently, through the side door of science, because it makes
so
> much sense. But it is not consistent with a mechanistic view to say that
it
> plays any role in driving evolution. Do you see what I'm trying to
> articulate here?
>
> I'll respond to the second half of John K's post tomorrow.
>
> Judith
>
>