Teleodynamics

Explaining and explaining away

Historically, we can discern four main categories of attempts to explain or explain away telos:

Preformationist answers posit that these special phenomena are already present fully formed in the very fabric of the universe. For example, some argue that the mental realm with its implicit meaning and value is pre-formed in the mind of God; or that information is a basic component of all patterned physical phenomena so that it is implicit in quantum events and intrinsic to DNA molecules.

Eliminativist answers posit that these special phenomena not only aren’t as special as they appear, but in fact are conceptual mirages, the residue of pre-scientific thinking. For example, some argue that consciousness is nothing more than chemical processes in brains, that mental representation and the experience of agency are illusory and do not reflect the real underlying clockwork determinism of neurochemical mechanisms.

Mysterian answers posit that it is beyond the human intellect to understand the nature of teleological phenomena because their relationship to physical processes is in some way unknowable in principle. For example, some argue that, in the same way that a dog’s cognitive limitations render it incapable of ever conceiving of how an internal combustion engine works, we may be limited by our evolutionary endowment to never being able to conceive of how consciousness works. A slightly more mysterian version of this is eloquently stated by Douglas Hofstadter, who argues that “Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature” (2007, p. 363). These express the mystery in terms of human, or mental incapacity in general, but do not go so far as to suggest some deeper ultimate mystery, But what if there is something about teleological explanations that makes them fundamentally incompatible with physical explanations? Or what if they actually are incompatible modes of causality? Could they actually arise from independent realms — e.g. the material versus spiritual — that operate according to incompatible principles?

By an interesting convergence, preformationism and mysterianism often join forces. This is because if telos is ultimately mysterious and yet is a real influence in the world, then it must be part of the very fabric of the world, unanalyzably necessary as a basic axiom, underived from any more fundamental principles or properties. After all, if it must be preformed that means that it can’t be derived. It is a black box that can’t be opened. So we might describe this common synthesis the mysterious preformation view.

Notice that none of the above alternatives are attempts to explain the nature of telos. They are rather efforts to explain it away or to at least explain away the problem. They are “halting moves” that in one way or another keep their adherents from having to deal with the dilemmas telos presents. What, then, of serious attempts to explain how telos actually works in the world?

Emergentist: Proposals that have attempted to offer scientific explanations of the nature and origins of these phenomena can be found clustered under the heading of “emergence.” They are efforts to have it both ways: i.e. they consider telos as fully compatible with physical causality and yet attempt to show how such phenomena can exhibit causal properties that are unprecedented in the physical and chemical sciences. In these theories, teleology is presumed to “emerge” spontaneously under certain conditions from physical antecedents lacking these properties. We believe that some version of an emergence explanation must be correct, and are convinced that only a scientific effort to take teleological phenomena seriously, and understand it as emergent, rather than illusory or unexplainably fundamental, can do justice to both scientific rigor and to its indubitable specialness.

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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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Here’s a 3 minute film introducing Deacon’s model for a transitional form between chemistry and life, a spontaneous molecular system that would have the necessary and sufficient features for initiating the emergence of evolvability, function, responsiveness, representation, information, end-directedness, for-ness, about-ness, selfhood and purpose.

{vidavee id=”3410″ w=”320″ }

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From early Roman times, it was thought that some, if not all, life arose from inanimate matter by way of spontaneous generation. Evidence to support the theory of spontaneous generation was seen in the way maggots would emerge spontaneously from rotting beef. In 1668, in one of the world’s first controlled biological experiments, Francisco Redi challenged the theory by demonstrating that maggots did not emerge from meat when put under glass. Belief that life emerged spontaneously from non-life, nevertheless, died hard. Support for spontaneous generation persisted for more than 200 years, until 1889, when Louis Pasteur, using sterilized rotting meat in a flask with an s-shaped neck, demonstrated that maggots do not grow spontaneously, so long as outside contamination is prevented.

Analogous to Pasteur, the constructivist approach puts the test under glass in order to avoid contamination. We must imagine how, within a universe completely devoid of any contamination by life or telos, life’s telos could emerge. Ironically, we are not trying to disprove spontaneous generation, we are trying to demonstrate it rigorously, in a very restricted sense. Evolution ultimately demands that, at least in a minimal sense, spontaneous generation is possible. Initially, life was generated spontaneously. The first life form was not reproduced, it had no parent, it did not evolve; it emerged. Evolution itself must have emerged since it makes no sense to argue that evolution evolved by evolution.

Surrounded by teeming life so imperceptibly minuscule as to require extreme care to avoid contamination, spontaneous generation theorists were fooled again and again. Trying to explain how telos emerges from within our current teleologically rich environment risks analogous contamination. Setting our experiments in a teleologically barren context is thus the equivalent of testing spontaneous generation in a sterile environment.

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Scientific inquiry into the origins of life typically employs a reverse engineering approach. In other words, researchers examine current life forms and extrapolate backwards asking how the whole and its parts got put together. This often leads to a focus on one or another critical attribute of life as a plausible starting place: typically either its information molecules that makes reproduction possible, its metabolic machinery that maintains an organism in a non-equilibrium state, or its lipid membrane container which selectively keeps critical components inside, troublesome molecules outside, and selectively influences which can pass in or out.

For example, biologists recognize that reproduction, supported by the replication of informational molecules (i.e. DNA) is a fundamental feature of all life forms. Many origins of life researchers have therefore postulated that life began with something like a proto-replicator, a first self-copier (e.g. see Dawkins, 1976; Maynard-Smith and Szathmáry, 1999; Woese, 1967, 1998). So what about the accidental synthesis of a first “naked replicator” molecule (Dawkins, 1976)? Given the truly cosmic improbability of such a complex accident, such an explanation is no more scientific than invoking divine miracle or intelligent design. Besides, it is not merely the replication of a molecule that matters, but a complex chemical relationship that both defends against degradation and reproduces this capacity.

Likewise, since all life depends on mechanisms that operate to resist degradation and dissolution under the influence of the second law of thermodynamics, something like a metabolism is nearly ubiquitous (except for viruses which are parasitic on organisms with metabolisms). Many other origins of life researchers argue that life began with something like a proto–work cycle: a first, simple cyclic chemical process that makes more identical parts (molecules) faster than they break down (e.g. e.g. Kauffman, 1986; Eigen and Oswatitsch, 1992; Shapiro, 2007). And since all life is contained in cell membranes that define inside and outside, self and other, still other origins of life researchers have focused on the spontaneous appearance of the first lipid enclosures as the critical first step in the genesis of life (e.g. Deamer and Barchfeld, 1982; Hanczyc et al., 2003). Some laboratories are attempting to combine all three features into structures called protocells (e.g. Szostak et al., 2001; Rasmussen et al., 2004;).

If the goal of origins of life research were simply to engineer life, then building a successful protocell would be success in itself. But engineered life is not tantamount to the spontaneous emergence of life because engineering is precisely what a pre-life universe lacks. Does the simplified combining of components found in living cells provide an adequate picture of an un-engineered missing link between physics and biology, or is it more like a sort of Frankencell, reconstructed from components extracted from once-living cells?

In three respects, the emergence of life from non-life is more challenging than the reverse engineering approach would suggest. First, we cannot invoke prior teleological processes to explain either component fit or the means of their combination. Second, the molecular components cannot be the products of a prior evolutionary process, only spontaneous geochemistry. Third, components cannot merely be brought into proximity with each other, they must reciprocally produce one another and maintain these proximity conditions (e.g. by generating containment). Merely collecting the critical molecular components of cells into a cell-like container it is not enough, even if each performs chemical functions characteristic of those produced in life. This even goes for the self-replication of nucleic acids. In the absence of this synergistic co-production and maintenance of reaction proximity there is nothing more than organic chemistry in a lipid reaction vessel.

The true proof of concept must demonstrate how life could emerge in a universe that completely lacks anything like an engineer’s intervention, and in which astronomically unlikely good luck is neither the only nor the most important explanatory principle. To meet the emergentist challenge therefore requires vigilance to avoid what could be called the Amnesic Watchmaker Syndrome. Imagine a watchmaker, with a serious case of Alzheimer’s disease, absent-mindedly fitting together parts from a previously disassembled watch. Forgetting where these parts came from and finding that they only fit together in certain ways, he combines them in many alternative configurations until he eventually fits them together so that collectively they function to tell time. Astounded by this, he muses that the ingredients for watches may be strewn about the world naturally, and that time-telling machines might just fall together spontaneously by accident.

This is not to imply that protocell researchers and other origins of life theorists are unaware that they are often working with already evolved components. Nor does it suggest that nothing can be learned about the basic principles of time-telling mechanisms or living mechanisms by exploring the way the parts interact. Indeed, this is the probably the best way to understand first-hand how the basic processes work, when the function is already presumed. However, it may not be the best approach toward understanding how this functional logic itself came to exist in the first place, either for life or for watches. Exploring the interactive relationships among components that are already evolved for their functional contributions to a living cell can provide important insights about some of the basic processes of life, but it would be unwise to mistake these as modeling life’s origin. But most important for investigating the origins of life’s telos, this amounts to a spontaneous generation experiment that is contaminated from the start, by the telos of prior life.

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General behavioral science

The life and social sciences are converging with a realization that parallels that which followed Newton’s insights into the movements of heavenly bodies. The physical dynamics that best explain planetary motion also explain terrestrial motion—there is one explanatory regime. So too the behavioral dynamics that apply in one arena of life apply in another.

Expectations as central

Economists study supply and demand. Biologists study selective regimes. Political scientists study power structures. Management scientists study incentive structures. Psychologists study motivations and aspirations. In all of these arenas behavior is driven by exposure to expectations.

Demand and supply; ends and means

Expectations and the behaviors that meet them are like demand and supply, means and ends. Not all of these research fields address both sides. Evolutionary biology most notably has attempted to understand behavior exclusively as a passive response to selective demand. Only recently with evo-devo are evolutionary biologists beginning to detail biology’s supply processes.

Selecti-on and Selecti-off

Exposure’s opposite is non-exposure. In complex systems exposure and non-exposure form a continuum. Organisms are under selective pressure to varying degrees anywhere from negligible to severe. One parameter common to all behavioral sciences is the degree of exposure to a particular pressure.

Clearing normativity from analysis of normativity

When considered positive, a selective force is called a goal, ideal, or standard. When considered negative a pressure is called a constraint, demand, straightjacket. When considered positive, the relaxation of pressure is called liberation, freedom, tolerance. When considered negative the relaxation of pressure is called a lowered standard, degadation, or lassitude. Our tendencies to read positive or negative connotation into the imposing and relaxing of incentives has gotten in the way of a thorough analysis of the dynamics of incentive and disincentive. High and low pressure are neutral means to a variety of possible ends, rather than ends themselves.

Performance standards

Selective pressures are implicit requirements. These requirements are the equivalent to what in public policy are called performance standards. Performance standards specify a performance threshold but not the particulars for how that performance threshold is achieved. Emission standards for example don’t specify how polluters reduce emission but simply the level of acceptable emissions. Micro-management is the opposite of a performance standard. A micro-manager specifies details to achieve certain performance standards. Micro-managers impose selective pressure on means rather than ends.

Means as ends

Means and ends are in hierarchical relationship to each other. Tactical and strategic goals are obviously similar. Tactical goals are still goals—they are ends at a lower or more fine-grained level of analysis. Tactical and Strategic form another continuum, from selective pressure for a very specific necessary condition to selective pressure for a broad overall objective.

Clearing normativity from analysis of normativity

As with the continuum from high to low tolerance, there are positive and negative valences associated with the continuum from narrow to broad selective pressure. Micro-management has pejorative connotations but also simply denotes focusing selective pressure at a relatively fine grain level of analysis. Obviously not all selective pressure at a fine grain level is negative.

Selective matrix

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