Teleodynamics

Abstract: Bateson left an unresolved ambiguity in his explanation of the relationship of the mind to the world, the map to the territory. This ambiguity is related to his failure to develop a theory of intentionality, reference, “aboutness.” However, he left us all the tools necessary to resolve this ambiguity and to lay the groundwork for a theory of intentionality. In using these tools, a different emphasis is placed on the relationship between change and difference. A proposal is made for an understanding of the rudiments of abstraction. Finally, the ambiguity is addressed and the groundwork of a theory of intentionality proposed, through an understanding of the distinction between (a) the indirect access of creatural mental process to the pleromic world and (b) the direct access of our pleromic hands to the pleromic world. It is through the interplay and alternation of indirect perception/cognition of the world and direct action on the world in manually-operated experiments that Bateson’s problem of “maps, of maps, of maps, ad infinitum” is solved and a theory of mediate realism can be derived from his work, linking to an understanding of the roots of intentionality.

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Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science Winter 2007

By Jeremy Sherman
Expression College for Digital Arts
and Terrence Deacon

University of California, Berkeley

Introduction

Among the issues of greatest and most pressing interest at the interface between scientific and spiritual understandings of reality are questions regarding the nature and origins of teleological phenomena; i.e. end-directed processes and properties, like functions, representations, intentions, purposes, meanings, values, and of course subjective consciousness. We refer to this diverse array of phenomena as all exhibiting a general property we will call telos, (from the Greek: end, aim, goal, purpose, completion, fulfillment), referring to their common feature of being organized with respect to some end or intended content, and closely related to Aristotle’s notion of a final cause: that for the sake of which something exists or is done.

Unfortunately, an immense logical chasm appears to exist between explanations of things given in the terms of telos and explanations given in terms of the familiar pushes and pulls of physics and chemistry. For the most part, the history of the natural sciences during the past two centuries has been characterized by a systematic effort to eliminate teleological explanations. This is because they are essentially truncated explanations; accounts of phenomena that point to black boxes and then stop. To say that an intention, belief, or desire is the cause of something does no more than point to some location, typically in a human agent, without saying anything about the specific details of the mechanism involved. There is very little doubt that physical-chemical processes taking place in a body are critical to the physical consequence that ensue, but such an account says nothing about the relationships that link these processes to the mental representations that human experience tells us were the origins of this process. So everyday human experience appears to result from an intractably contradictory combination of clockwork and purpose.

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