causing trouble

[John Kineman <***>]

Just to cause trouble, I'll throw out the not-so-facetious suggestion
that the mechanistic concept of "energy" is vitalistic and animistic,
and the concept of entropy is teleological. Furthermore, there is no
tangibility to energy - it is a mysterious potential that drives
"things" distributed in space to move. For example, a gravitational
"force" causes things to move toward each other, unless opposed by
another force. Movement against a force is work. Energy is the ability
to do work, or to move objects against forces. Measures of energy are in
terms of  motion or force required to resist it. So, what's up?

The charges of vitalism, animism, and teleology are dismissed for the
following reasons:
1. the vital energy, which produces forces, and its drive toward maximum
entropy, can be described generically for all systems explained by this
theory and the quantities can be formulated in ways that allow
predictions to be tested. Any universal property can be disproven by a
counter-demonstration, whereas a system-dependent property cannot be.
2. the animistic behavior of objects is fully explainable in terms of
such energy, and how it is expressed locally (modified by system
organization).
3. the inevitable drive toward high entropy (unusable energy, or heat
death) is not used in the formulation of how the process works, so it is
not a "causally effective" end result, just a predictable end result.
4. all of these assumptions work for a closed logical system, for which
the assumptions apply and which is defined by them.
5. exceptions are handled as unknowable causes, or fundamental
uncertainties.

In precisely the same way, a universal property of functional
complementarity (the modeling relationship taken ontologically) will
meet precisely the same criteria as above. It is no more or less
tangible, it is formalizable and if applied universally it is testible.
The end result that I, for example, claim in evolution - that
evolutionary pathways will be modified for functional purposes - is also
not teleology for the same reason that entropy is not; the process as
formalized does not involve this end result as a cause, it produces it.

Just thought I'd point out the analogy to show how the pejorative terms
are dismissed in physical science, and hence why an ontological
interpretation is essential to escape them. It is a bit of a con job
that physical science disallows system-dependent functions (including
human purposes) on the guise that they introduce teleological causes.
They introduce teleos in real time, with modification as the system
progresses, not as a crystal ball or Divine end. There may indeed be an
inevitability to their result, as there is with entropy, but that is not
a causal end, it is a produced one. The fact that it can become
indistinguishable from beliefs that possible inevitable results then
seem "pre-destined" is not a weakness, but a strength. Both views may be
true. But only one of them allows us to produce scientific knowledge
about the process. One can see the exact same discussion regarding the
inevitability of universal heat death in the physical theory. It is not
at all uncommon for physicists to associate this with cosmic or Divine
purpose, or for theologins to draw analogies with cycles of death and
rebirth. Regardless of the validity of those associations, the fact they
can be made does not weaken the science (or the theology, for that matter).

JJK