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Article 4491 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zeleny@widder.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Causes and Goals
Message-ID: <1992Mar16.200503.9918@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 17 Mar 92 01:04:57 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Mar16.200503.9918
References: <1992Mar14.010014.552@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu> 
 <1992Mar15.170938.9882@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Mar16.031843.14299@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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In article <1992Mar16.031843.14299@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu> 
bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs) writes:

>In article <1992Mar15.170938.9882@husc3.harvard.edu> 
>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

Bill Skaggs:
>>>  What, then, is a "goal", and how does something come to have
>>>one?
>>>
>>>  Answer:  Any system (such as the human genome) that has evolved
>>>by natural selection can be assigned the primitive goal of 
>>>surviving.  Other goals and functions are inherited from this
>>>primitive goal.  Machines inherit goals from the fact that they
>>>are designed for specific purposes by beings that have evolved
>>>by natural selection, and the components of machines perform
>>>functions in helping them achieve their goals.  

MZ:
>>Now you have a problem.  

BS:
>I have a lot of problems, but let's not dwell on it, please.

Meant metonymically, the above is to be interpreted as: "your explanation
has a problem".  Is this any better?

MZ:
>>Setting aside the commonly acknowledged problems
>>inherent in the sort of vitalism you seem to be assuming (most evolutionary
>>biologists these days disclaim the theoretical indispensability of any
>>notion of final cause), . . . 

BS:
>Virtually all evolutionary biologists recognize the necessity of
>functional (and thus teleological) explanations.  Some, for example
>Gould, feel it is important to stress that not *all* features of
>organisms need have functional explanations.  Even Gould, though,
>agrees that many aspects of phenotype can be explained by the fact
>that they increase the fitness of organisms.

That's not quite the story I get from the Harvard Biology Department, but
don't let that stop you.  Incidentally, I don't see why a functional
explanation cannot be conducted in terms of the efficient, material, and
formal causation only.

MZ:
>> . . . what you have is yet another quasi-materialist
>>vulgarization of the Hegelian view of universal history, the main
>>difference being that the primitive goal you postulate is outward-, rather
>>than inward-directed.  

BS:
>No!  Please!  Not Hegel!  Anything but Hegel!

So sorry, but you must respect your philosophical ancestry.  I recommend
Walter Kaufmann's edition of "Reason in History" for your chapbook; unless,
that is, you prefer dialectical materialism...

MZ:
>>Now, the goal-inheritance scheme you are advocating
>>must be either wholly transitive, . . .

BS:
>It is.

MZ:
>> . . . i.e. reducing the teleology of every
>>natural system to the one primitive goal of survival, . . .

BS:
>I prefer to say "deriving the teleogy of everything that
>has teleology from the one primitive goal of survival".
>There is a trap here that needs to be avoided.  It is
>easiest to explain with an analogy from the game of chess.
>The goal in a game of chess is to win, but that goal is usually
>not directly useful for selecting moves, because it is
>usually impossible to calculate directly whether a given
>move will lead to victory.  Moves tend to be made on the basis
>of secondary goals, such as, for example, maximizing the
>value of one's pieces, or maintaining a good pawn structure,
>or getting a rook on an open file.  These secondary goals
>are derived from the observation that they are correlated
>with winning, but the correlation need not be perfect.  On
>some occasions moving a rook to an open file gets one
>quickly checkmated; nevertheless, it is still true that
>the secondary goal of having a rook on an open file is
>derived from the primary goal of winning.

So sorry, but this is just so much handwaving.  In the language of your
teleological explanation, *every* action must be explicable in terms of the
single primitive goal; "secondary goals" just don't make the grade.  This
can be readily seen by comparing the latter to the ultimately causally
insignificant individual goals in the Hegelian philosophy of history.

BS:
>But actually, the goal of winning is not "primary".  It is
>derived from some kind of social goal.  There may be several
>more levels of derivation, but at the end of the chain is 
>the goal of survival of the genome.

And so every attribution of final cause, and ipso facto, every semantical
explanation, will have to be made in terms of the genome.  It only appears
that we are having a meaningful conversation; deep down, it's but one
single vital force blindly struggling for self-perpetuation.  How deep...

BS:
>Because secondary goals are only indirectly related to the
>primary goals they are derived from, the actions they lead
>to may sometimes be irrelevant or even counterproductive
>with respect to the primary goals.  Thus the human value
>system, derived from the primary goal of survival of the
>human genome, could conceivably lead to the destruction of
>the human genome in a nuclear holocaust.

Conceivably, but never purposefully.  You might consider the implications
of your philosophy, as exemplified in a certain proposition of Spinoza's
"Ethics", which claims that every thing is naturally concerned with its own
perpetuation, and hence may never wilfully self-destruct.  Then consider
any case of deliberate suicide (Spinoza, who attributes conative force to
all material beings, would be stymied even by the example of a candle
burning out of existence...).

MZ:
>> . . . or compositional,
>>i.e. capable of combining this goal with other primitive (irreducible)
>>goals . . .

BS:
>But how would such goals come into being?

Through human autonomy.

MZ:
>> . . . on any level of organizational structure; in other words, either all
>>of your goals are wholly reducible to the single primitive goal of survival
>>of the species, in which case you don't have any personal goals that would
>>enable *you* to mean *anything* by your own words, . . .

BS:
>As I have explained above, personal goals can be derived from
>the primitive goal of survival without being identical to it.

Sorry, but I remain unconvinced by your explanation.  Allow me to offer a
thought experiment, which has been developed on an erarlier occasion.  I
have before me a SIG AMT rifle in 7.62 NATO caliber, equipped with a bipod
and a 20-round magazine.  My window affords me a good view of the
Massachusetts Avenue.  Suppose Jesus came to me in my dream and told me to
punish all those godless pinko liberal Cantabrigians with my mighty weapon.
Would you blame Jesus, the rifle, or me?

Suppose now that, upon hearing the Good News, I were to call my friend
Lenny Rudin at Cognitech in Santa Monica, CA, and ask him for some custom
image recognition software, constructing a sophisticated infrared tracking
system for the rifle.  Suppose also that, just to make things more
interesting, I would proceed to rig up a linkage between the tracking
control and a device monitoring some random process, e.g. radioactive
decay.  Given that I am no longer pulling the trigger, would you blame the
device or me?  In other words, given that we are dealing with a single
determinate final cause, to which entity do we attribute the agency in
question?

MZ:
>> . . . or you have some private
>>goals, in which case your evolutionary story is bereft of any explanatory
>>force in determining the private semantics of your utterances.  Either way,
>>you lose.

BS:
>I think I have blunted one of the horns of this dilemma.

I think not.

>	-- Bill


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: Mikhail Zeleny                                                     :
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