Nope.

We can also devise languages (see Quine's predicate functor logic) which dispense entirely with individual variables or constants and thus have only predicates. Does that show that objects are dispensable and only properties have ontological standing? — Nagase

The argument is not that because we can dispense with predicates, they have no ontological standing. It's more along the lines of, given that we can dispense with predicates (as per demonstrated), what kind of ontology can we forge on this basis? The motivations for doing so are not internal to the argument; rather, the demonstration functions within a larger project in which the goal is to construct a naturalist ontology and with it, a naturalist theory of representation. One of the 'fallouts' of this desideratum is that such a theory must be a nominalist one, with respect to attributes like 'redness' or 'triangularity'.

Notice also that the translation goes both ways: we can "translate" 'X is larger than Y' with your spatial arrangement, but we can also "translate" your spatial arrangement by 'X is larger than Y'. So why is one translation preferable to the other? — Nagase

There's a particular asymmetry at work which I tried to detail here.

Is that fair? — csalisbury

I think it is. One interesting thing to note that is that Sellars refuses to give up the vocabulary of 'representation'. He continually calls for a more adequate theory of representation than those he argues against, and sees himself as providing such a theory. He even unabashedly uses terms like 'mapping' and 'picturing' even as he reconstrues them in ways that are almost barely recognisable. With respect to isomorphism, he even distinguishes between a 'first-order' isomorphism (where word mirrors thing) and a 'second-order' isomorphism in which what are correlated are patterns in the causal order, which language itself is part of. This is why he qualifies linguistic objects as natural-linguistic objects:

"The natural-linguistic objects which, by virtue of standing in certain matter-of-factual relationships to one another and to these non linguistic objects, constitute a picture of them in the desired sense, are the linguistic counterparts of nonlinguistic objects (not facts), and it is not too misleading to speak of them as 'names'. To add that it is a system of elementary statements (qua natural-linguistic objects) that is the picture is to draw upon Wittgenstein's insight that the occurrence of an elementary statement is to be construed as the occurrence in a certain manner of the names of the objects referred to." (Sellars, NAO)

It's this construal of language as belonging to the natural order that makes his 'theory of representation' a naturalist one. Brassier leans heavily on this strand of Sellars' thought: "He is a naturalist because he claims that linguistic practices, in which thinking is rooted, are varieties of natural processes... [even as] linguistic activity is a distinct and possibly even a unique variety of natural process". One further upshot of this naturalism is that it respects the 'autonomy of the real': the fact that nature, while not having propositional form, can nonetheless be 'tracked' by thought: "The challenge is to explain both how propositionally structured thought arises within nature and how it can be used to track natural processes despite the lack of congruence between propositional form and natural order."

Perhaps here is where you can see, dimly - as I still do - the connection between this and my interest in ecosystems and forces.

Just chiming in to say I think "commitment" is the magic word here. This is exactly the word I was about to reach for over in the "Belief" thread to explain my sense of beliefs as something like rules or norms you follow in thinking and acting.

And I think of commitment as placing your bet, or running your experiment. There's a strong current of pragmatism running beneath all this that I find increasingly appealing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, thinking of language in terms of what it commits one to really is the key here. That said, I borrowed the vocabulary of commitment not from Sellars (who prefers to talk of 'uniformity of behaviour' and 'patterns of inference') but from Robert Brandom, who more or less takes Sellars' 'inferentialist semantics' and develops it. Brandom actually says that there are two modes of inference at work when using language, one of which is commitment and the other is entitlement. Saying things commits you to inferring or being able to say/do other things; and commitment in turn entitles you to saying/doing other things (If I am entitled to 'it is raining' then I am entitled to 'the streets are wet'; also, if you commit to 'it is raining', I am entitled to asking for reasons why you think so). It's a way of seeing language as a kind of contract that comes with rights (entitlements) and responsibilities (commitments).

Again, this is something I'm only roughly familiar with, but I like it very much.

If I understand right, linguistic objects (either predicates or boldfaces) by themselves are not doing any kind of "meaning work", it's their formal use in relation to each other (and more generally in language as a self-contained system of differences?) that does this? — Πετροκότσυφας

I think this is right, although I'm more conceptually unsteady here than with respect to predicates. Basically, Sellars develops an account of meaning in which the meaning of anything is given by it's 'functional role' in (a) language. He has quite a complicated account which involves sortals and metalinguistic levels and other philosophical sprockets and gears, but the idea is broadly Wittgensteinian in that a word (or phrase, or whatever) is what one can do with it: to know (a) meaning is to have a certain 'know how' regarding how that word can function in a system of inferential patterns (saying certain things commits one to saying, or even doing, certain other things. This network of commitments is 'what language is', and meaning is making a commitment in that network, and understanding the ramifications of that commitment; to say 'here is an apple' while holding up an orange is to misunderstand what one is committed to by saying 'here is an apple').

To speak of commitments in this way provides, I hope, a clue as to why it's not the case that Sellars severs the tie between language and world. While it's true that on Sellars' account, predicates are intra-linguistic objects and not emblems of extra-linguistic facts, what matters is the larger network of commitments in which the mobilisation of those objects in relation to each other function in. Which is a very round-about way to say that all saying is a kind of doing. Brassier, again, puts it better than I can:

"Meaning is not a relation [between word and thing]: meaning statements establish metalinguistic correlations between words and other words rather than a metaphysical relation between words and things. ... Words do not depict reality because of what they mean but because of physical connections between the semantic regularities obeyed by speakers and the physical patterns in which these semantic regularities are embodied ... These uniformities are incarnated in phonetic, graphic, or haptic patterns, as well as behavioral ones. They are exhibited in the uniformities of performance that constitute pattern-governed linguistic behavior. But these patterns reflect espousals of principle that constitute linguistic competence".

In yet other words, the connection between language and world is in the performance of 'languaging' (which ties together words, behaviours, and patterns of commitment), and not in the fact that words stand for things in one-to-one relations. It is, to use an apt phrase, 'representation without mirrors'. Anyway, this is a bit far removed from the question of predicates, although it flows directly out of what it would mean to 'dispense' with them. But seriously good questions though, really helping me think some of this through.

But there is a way to disappear predicates. Treat them extensionally. The predicate ceases to have any meaning beyond the set of individuals it applies to. — Banno

Sellars speaks of this strategy in terms of 'unsaturated' propositions, but says that it doesn't do enough to diffuse the 'temptation' to treat particulars as universals:

"We must avoid that picture according to which the connection between 'a is red' and the non-linguistic domain is a composition function of a connection between 'a' and a and a connection of 'red' with red objects. For it is this picture which generates the perennial temptation to assimilate the semantical function of 'red' to that of 'a,' and hence to think of 'red' as referring either to an object (redness) or a non-object () is red The result in either case is a metaphysics which construes red things as particulars which, in the one case, are tied by 'exemplify' to the attribute redness and which, in the other, "saturate" the gappy (predicative) entity, () is red."

But, it's function isn't. By function I understand the work that the predicate does. We still use the de-linearised trick to accomplish what the predicate (in its original form) was doing. It functions as a predicate; it's just its form that has changed. — Πετροκότσυφας

This is the crux of the issue and it's important to clarify: what is the 'function' of the predicate? What work is it doing? This is the most delicate part of Sellars' argument: Sellars argues that it is not doing any work insofar as it is a predicate. Instead, it is only doing work insofar as it is a linguistic object (which just so happens to be, in this particular but entirely contingent case, a predicate). This is crucial to understand. The predicate qua predicate isn't doing any kind of job at all; in fact the only reason that it seems that it is doing any work is because it is a linguistic object. Putting it graphically might help, in terms of a hierarchy:

{Linguistic object(predicate)}

Where predicate is a 'species' of the genera 'lingustic object'. The work is being done by the fact of it's being a linguistic object, not by the fact of it being a predicate. The trick is to recognise that there are other linguistic objects than predicates, and that it is at this more general level where the work 'takes place'. Thus, boldface X, X is doing 'meaning work' by the fact of it's graphical difference, in it's capacity as a graphic object, and not because it does the work done by the predicate. This might seem a minor and even obscure difference, but the upshot is that it diffuses the tendency to abstract predicates as conceptual properties or metaphysical attributes. I quote Ray Brassier's gloss on this:

"The predicative role should not be reified and turned into an abstract entity called a “property” that exists independently of sentential contexts. Still less should the conceptual property supposedly expressed by the predicate be hypostatized and turned into an ontological attribute that exists not only independently of language — as conceptual properties are alleged to — but also independently of thought. As Sellars puts it, “The extralinguistic domain consists of objects, not facts. To put it bluntly, propositional form belongs only in the linguistic and conceptual orders” (Brassier, Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism).

@Banno I hope the above also clarifies why X being above Y does not indicate the predicate, but rather indicates the general function which the predicate contingently happens to fulfil.

Unless, of course, I read in this passage something that it does not actually say. — Πετροκότσυφας

I don't think the two claims are as incompatible as they look. As a practical matter, it's true that its simply impossible to drop predicates. But, to use Sellars' expression, it is 'philosophically perspicacious' to consider the fact they they are entirely dispensable, and see how this acknowledgement might change the way we think about ontology.

To expand a bit on why dropping predicates is so inconvenient - for my own sake as much as yours - think a little more about what Sellars proposes that they can be replaced with, with the language he calls jumblese. I'll focus on the bold-face example, because it's easier to deal with. Consider an object X. Now qualify this object as being red. Instead of saying 'X is red', we can say X, where boldface X expresses 'red X'. Now consider if the object is green. Perhaps in jumblese we say X (italics). And if blue, X.

What is happening here? Basically, language is being 'de-linearized'. We are considering not just the individual letter ('X'), but also the manner in which that letter is inscribed as carrying additional information. I say 'delinarized' because we are now looking at language in two dimensions: we are not just reading it from left to right, but also considering an extra (orthogonal?) dimension. While this is really cool, it is also incredibly inconvenient. It is much easier to memorise a series of base colour names ('red, green blue') and tack them on as qualifiers (predicates) to subjects (X, Red X) than it is to come up with multiple ways of writing 'X' (Apple, apple, apple). And liniearization also allows us to easily subject propositions to logical operators like negation, disjunction, conjunction, and quantification (although, as Apo's diagrams show, we can show such operations diagrammatically as well, even though they are more 'clunky' to work with).

So the inability to dispense with predicates is a matter of convenience: but Sellars' point is that we ought not to mistake convenience with ground for an ontology.

I wonder if Sellars would rather say that, by abandoning a Platonic interpretation of triangularity, we see triangularity for what it does. — andrewk

Hah, I think would be a particularly apt way to put it.

Is the "is" the essential element of predication? — Janus

I don't think so, at least not for Sellars. He often drops the copula entirely, preferring to use logical notation like 'Fa', or even alternative expressions like 'X stands for Y', 'X exemplifies Yness', or even 'X means Y'. He does note the specificities of each formulation (he leans on some but not others when trying to parse out both meaning and truth), but I don't think it's so relevant when talking about predicates as such. In fact I think the use of so many ways of expression is deliberately meant to show how widely applicable the strategy of 'dropping predicates' is meant to be.

If so, then are Sellar's examples 'bold X' and 'X above Y' really any different than if we drop the 'is' to express the same ideas, 'red apple' and 'X larger than Y' respectively? — Janus

Depends on what angle you want to look at it - for Sellars the answer is of course, no, they are not really any different at all, but you can only 'say' this if you recognize the essential continuity between bold X and red apple; and doing this in turn should lead one recognize the dispensibility of predicates. The key for Sellars is in understanding that subject-predicate couples do not stand for a relation between non-linguistic facts but between linguistic objects. 'X above Y' are two linguistic objects in a spatial relationship with each other, just and 'X larger than Y' contains three linguistic objects, 'X', 'larger than', and 'Y', in a triadic spatial relation to each other.

(Jumblese seems appropriate given that Sellars was, reportedly, drunk all the time :rofl: ). — Janus

Didn't know this, lol.

One thing that's important to Sellars is that he's not advocating that we give up using predicates (how could we?), or indeed, locutions like 'to be' either. All he wants to do is show the limits of thinking in those terms when constructing an ontology. As he puts it: "I have often been asked, what does one gain by abandoning such standard platonic entities as triangularity? .... The answer is, of course, that the above strategy abandons nothing but a picture. Triangularity is not abandoned; rather 'triangularity' is seen for what it is,"

Is this close to what the OP is saying? Except that it extends Ibn Sina's view to include ordinary properties, besides existence? — Πετροκότσυφας

Yeah, this would definitely be kind of close. That said, Sellars actually doesn't address existence as such insofar as he thinks doing so would open a can of worms he'd rather keep a lid on ("the verb 'to exist' is a slippery one and has uses which belong in quite different contexts and raise quite different problems [therefore,]... I shall not draw upon it"). So perhaps we might even go stronger and say that Sellars addresses and seeks to nominalize all predicates except for existence (which is not to say he doesn't want to, just that he keeps it aside for now). But yes, the basic idea is: don't translate grammatical categories into ontological ones - especially predicates.

What I tried to lay out in the OP - unsuccessfully, it seems! - are the reasons why Sellars thinks this: namely, that was can dispense with predicates altogether in our talk about the world without losing anything in particular. 'Jumblese', a language without predicates, is a way to do this. The OP is mostly a few examples of how Jumelese would work, and why it would be relevant with respect to thinking about predicates. Thanks for the Izutsu essay too, it seems very interesting.

--

Also, sorry for not getting back to you in the evolution thread, I was more or less away for three days and by the time I got back it was smashed with comments and I wasn't sure how to go about getting to them.

I don't think the substance/accident ontology is just some notion that we unthinkingly introject because we use words in a certain way, I think it's something that comes from observation of nature - which is the same whether you're American or Chinese. The classical ontology didn't just suddenly appear or mindlessly coalesce, it was built up over hundreds of years of dialogue and argument between notable philosophers right up until about the modern period. — gurugeorge

I'm not sure sure about this. It seems to me - but I won't press the point too much - that rational thought itself is categorical - i.e. we think in categories and classes, generalizations (genera) and species, on pain of being unable to rationalize at all. This is by no means a 'bad' thing - it's the virtue of reason itself, but the question - Sellars' question, if I understand him correctly - is whether the specificity of reason ought to be taken at face value when approaching questions of ontology.

Also, our understanding of those terms since modern philosophy is a feeble, truncated thing, relative to what the Aristotelians and Scholastics would have understood. (For example in the classical philosophy, substance and accident are tied up with concepts like actuality and potentiality - there's a whole bundle of closely-related topics in that area, that we don't really understand unless we make a study of the classical philosophy.) — gurugeorge

This I agree with entirely, and I follow Sellars - in this thread anyway - in using 'Platonism' as more of a catch-call for certain tendencies in thought rather than a clearly defined and crisply worked out position.

Does he talk about lambdas? Quine, another die-hard nominalist, at some point realized he could use lambdas to get around needing classes (and certainly attributes) as first-class objects for most purposes. — Srap Tasmaner

Not lambdas per se, but he does make use of Quine's virtual classes in order to try and conceive of Frege's 'concepts' in a nominalistic manner. That said, with respect to Quine, Sellars argues that he makes an advance over Quine insofar as Sellars manages to provide a theory of reference that was missing in Quine:

"We are also able to locate an insight of Quine's. He has argued, in "On What There Is" and other places, that predicates are syncategorematic expressions, contributing to the meaning of sentences without having reference. They present the ' ideology' of a language rather than its ontology. They are said to be ' true or objects. 'Red' is true of a just in case a is red. But Quine does not offer a theory of just what it is in which their syncategorematic character consists. He does relate it, however, to inaccessibility to quantification-indeed this seems to be almost its defining trait. My analysis, on the other hand, explains the syncategorematic character of predicates without any reference to quantification. This frees the concept of generalization from the close tie with objects and ontology which was built into classical quantification theory..."

I feel completely in over my head with that comment about the "linguistic and conceptual orders". You see this sort of Kantian view all over 20th century Anglo-American philosophy, even in Strawson's "descriptive metaphysics" (IIRC, they both wrote books about Kant) and I really have no idea what to make of it yet... — Srap Tasmaner

I have a rough understanding of it, but N&O doesn't address it too much. The basic distinction in which it is used is that between the order of causes and the order of reasons, where the latter is constituted by the normative demands of inference-making. I understand the relation between the two orders as one of asymmetry: while one can't 'read off' reasons from causes, one can read off causes from reasons. I say this only very schematically, as my understanding is mostly second-hand, but it's something I want to familiarize myself with more.

To be fair, it's a distinction that's positively medieval.

Interesting. I'm familiar with the distinction as employed by Kant - although he prefers to distinguish 'discursive' and 'intuitive' understanding - but I didn't realize it had such a rich history. It's a bit of a shame actually that it's not a very well known distinction anymore. It's actually pretty useful to have on hand when trying to wrangle with certain idealisms.

That's the difference between biological and non-biological evolution; there is no self-organization involved in the formation of hurricanes, rivers and sand dunes.

An individual hurricane, river or sand dune evolves over its life just as organisms do. The idea of evolution you seemingly want to address, though, is the idea of the evolution of successive forms in the history of a population and not the evolution of individuals.

It is possible that there could be an evolution of successive forms of hurricanes, rivers or sand dunes; but this would be entirely due to 'external' environmental and climatic changes, not to 'internal' heritable changes in their constitution.

The question then becomes whether in the example of say, AI, programming could become a heritable self-organizing substitute for DNA. — Janus

A quick response to this, as I'll be out all day: self-organization is most definitely a property of non-living things. Hurricanes are textbook examples of self-organising systems driven by entropic gradients. And as Srap rightly mentions, I'm concerned here with evolution in its strict sense - heritable variation in populations - rather than development over a lifetime. Finally, with respect to mechanisms of heritability, there is nothing about the principles of evolution that require those mechanisms to be 'internal' and not 'external', as it were. In fact, as I mentioned to Jarva, 'external' mechanisms are currently acknowledged to function in an evolutionary capacity independently of 'internal' mechnisms like DNA. That is, whether or not such a mechanism is 'internal' or 'external' to the subject population is a matter of indifference to the evolutionary process (cellphone blueprints and their factories are not contained in cellphones!).

My favourite reading of the lawgiver is Bonnie Honig's in Democracy and the Foreigner, the first chapter. Alternatively, check out William Connolly's reading in his The Ethos of Pluralization (chapter 5, "Democracy and Territoriality"). Serdar Tekin's Founding Acts also looks like it might be relevant, but I've not read it. Hopefully your library stocks these ones :)

With respect to the Jablonka and Lamb quote, it's made in the context of their book in which they try and show that (1) Genes are not the only mechanism of heritability (evolutionarily relevant traits can be passed down in ways other than DNA) and more importantly that, (2) those other mechanisms (which they call epigenetic, behavioural, and symbolic) can and do function/exert effects entirely independently of changes in the DNA code. That is, as a mechanism of heritability, DNA is, in principle dispensable. As it stands, all life on Earth has DNA as a replication mechanism, but there is no reason that it is necessarily so. Or at least that's the argument, which I find persuasive.

Notice though that this is different somewhat from the analogy with AI intelligence. The other heritability mechanisms that J+L speak of are real - they exist, here and now. The question is not - as with AI intelligence - whether new mechanisms will eventually emerge. There is no question of taking on faith or confidence that they will. It's already the case that they have. The question is rather whether or not their current existence may portend the dispensibility of DNA altogether as a mechanism of evolution, or at least whether or not that would be possible in principle. So I think this is definitely more than just a linguistic issue insofar as those other mechanisms - in living organisms all across the planet today - cause evolutionarily relevant effects independently of changes to the DNA code as it stands.

My hunch is that this is mostly because we're talking about simulation, if I'm not mistaken, which, in a way, gets rid of time and space, since they are simulated too. I mean, the architectural designs that got extinct by our algorithms, haven't existed the way extinct species existed in spacetime. It's a different milieu to use one of your expressions. So, I'm thinking that this evolutionary talk in design is mostly a metaphor for something that we were doing either way (selecting designs based on preferences), just not as efficiently or systematically as the new algorithms allow us to do? — Πετροκότσυφας

One other thing to note is that I am treating evolution here in entirely formal terms (in fdrake's terms, evolution is simply a 'generalized action of selection in a space of reproductive constraints'). Formal to the extent that it describes a certain process that may or may not be 'instantiated' by specific systems - be they living populations, a bunch of circuit-designs, or languages. It could be the case that all of these latter things cease to exist (if the Earth blew up tomorrow, say), and one could still speak of evolution as a formal process to which nothing, in fact, corresponds. One corollary of this is that the 'kind' of process(es) which may or may not correspond to it doesn't matter: it could be virtual, real, simulated - in fact, it doesn't even matter how we want to qualify these terms (as in, the question 'what is real?' or 'what is virtual?'), all we need to see is whether or not 'there is' evolution occurring.

Also, check out the article which I linked to in the OP regarding using genetic algorithms to come up with architecture. It describes how it's done in a way that I think is pretty helpful, and is a shortish read as well.

Can replication occur in the absence of agency? — javra

I guess at this point I remain somewhat agnostic on the issue, or at least open to convincing one way or another. As it stands though, I see no intrinsic or 'analytic' connection between replication and agency. To hone our concepts a bit though, it's important to specify - in a way I didn't do in the original 'list of ingredients' - that any evolutionary relevant replication needs to have a component of heritability. Hurricanes, sand dunes, and rivers, for example, are 'replicated' all the time given the right atmospheric/geological/hydrologic conditions but because they have no mechanism of heredity, strictly speaking, there can be no evolution of hurricanes/sand dunes etc. A hurricane is always created anew; it is not 'path dependant' on the phylogenesis of other, previous hurricanes. If we take these natural processes as our models of replication, then I see no necessary reason to think that agency plays any part in their replication.

On the other hand, the uniqueness of life lies in it's precisely having what is more or less a universal mechanism of heritability - DNA expression. Furthermore, DNA functions as a resource in the equally universal life process of self-maintainence (which is another thing not shared by other self-organizing systems like hurricanes). So at the very least what distinguishes life from other, natural, self-organizing systems is a mechanism of heritability and an ability to self-maintain - the two key components of autopoietic theory. Of these two components, I'm fairly convinced that the universality of DNA as a replication mechanism is, despite it's universality, a contingency due to shared ancestry, rather than an intrinsic component of life itself. As I quoted Jablonka and Lamb saying, one can imagine, in principle at a least, forms of life which might dispense with DNA altogether in favour of other kinds of mechanisms of heritability (other kinds which exist today - epigenetic, behavioural, and symbolic mechanics, to name the three they do).

So going back to the question of agency, the question is: where can we locate it? There are - on the outline above - three possible places (at minimum). (1) At the level of sheer reproduction (hurricanes, etc); (2) At the level of the mechanism of heritability (DNA expression, epigenetic processes of methylation, etc), and; (3) At the level of self-maintainence processes. I don't think any agency is required for either (1) or (2), but I do think one can begin to speak of agency operating at the level of (3). Complications arise when it becomes clear that one can't cleanly and analytically separate (2) and (3): in order to heal a cut, they body draws upon DNA in order to grow new skin to do so. So the question is: it is analytically necessary that processes of self-repair draw upon mechanisms of heritability? What is the modality of the connection between (2) and (3)?

If the connection is not a necessary one, then the answer to your question is yes: evolutionarily relevant replication can occur in the absence of agency. Repair can occur (in principle) without any need to draw on the resources of replication mechanisms. If the connection is a necessary, then agency cannot be separated from evolutionariliy relevant replication, and the answer to you question is no. So alot rides on the sense in which we understand replication, as well as where exactly it 'fits' in the conceptual and empirical constellation in which agency begins to matter. Anyway, I hope this also makes sense!

If evolution is claimed to be substrate independent, it needs a general description which can be applied to all types of objects, otherwise the notion is category error.

And if the terms used in such a description (notably "reproduction") can only be (or are usually) understood with reference to the life sciences, they require redefinition (which is equivocation). To avoid equivocation, they need to be replaced or supplemented with other terms/concepts. — Galuchat

I think the terms of evolution are robust enough to survive outside the incubator that was the biological sciences for them. In fact I don't just think this, I know this because those terms have been employed in non-biolgical ways as with the examples of circuit-design and architecture that I keep coming back to.

Evolution is an inorganic process insofar as it involves interactions between the organic and the inorganic. Nonetheless, arguably, the organic aspect is predominant.

Language, architecture and technology should be considered predominately organic, too, because they are activities associated only with organic beings. Of course they, just like organic beings and evolution itself, involve inorganic materials and aspects of the environment, but that does not mean that they are not predominately organic processes.

None of this is to say that there cannot be wholly inorganic evolution. The evolution of the pre-organic cosmos, for example. — Janus

I tried to address this in my reply to Wayfarer earlier, but yes, it's important to think in terms of principles rather than fact here.

Going by the orthodox qualifications of evolution which you’ve stipulated, evolution necessarily in part consist of self-replication. — javra

I'll stop you there! It doesn't have to be self-replication just replication (or reproduction). That's the thing with cellphones: they don't self-replicate, but they do replicate (with the help of a whole industry). To play with your own words a bit, evolution can work just as well with hetropoiesis as autopoiesis. To say that it is substrate independent is also to say that it is, er, poietically indifferent. It's also important to remember that autopoiesis includes self-maintainence as part of it's definition, which again, is not entailed by any of the necessary ingredients of evolution (cellphones don't self-maintain, yet they can still be subject to evolution). Again, the larger point is that evolution is indifferent to the exact mechanics of replication: it requires some mechanism of replication, but exactly what and how it works is something it is largely indifferent to at a formal level.

(I say 'at a formal level' because the specificities of replication mechanisms in practice have huge effects on how evolution itself 'plays out', and a shit-ton of evolutionary biology is given over to studying exactly those mechanisms and their evolutionary effects. I simply mean to say that the fact of evolution is indifferent to the mechanics - it only requires that there be some/one; but once there is one, it's specificities will have, at it were, retroactive effects upon the actual workings of evolution. I hope that's clear).

Why do we need to do that? What's at stake in thinking the nonliving in evolutionary terms? — Πετροκότσυφας

Keeping your elaboration of this question with fdrake in mind as well, evolutionary thinking can be useful in a few different ways: first, as fdrake says, its puts the living in continuity with the non-living (along a certain dimension anyway), and it's always useful and interesting to draw bridges across domains like that. As I mentioned in the OP, we now use evolutionary methods to design electronic circuits and other things, and it's more than likely the CPU which you're writing your posts with were designed, in part, by use of such methods. Without the import of evolutionary ideas from the biotic realm, you'd probably have a crappier processor. So were talking at the very least about a clear and practical reason to consider evolution in non-organic terms.

Another, more philosophically interesting reason (to me anyway) to think the abiotic in evolutionary terms is that evolutionary thinking implies thinking of things at the level of populations, rather than either individuals or types. There is, in other words, an (entirely positive, to my mind) anti-Platonic element to evolutionary thinking whose import is vital. Here's how Ernst Mayr, one of the grandddaddies of the modern synthesis, put it:

"For the typologist there] are a limited number of fixed, unchangeable ‘ideas’ underlying the observed variability [in nature], with the eidos (idea) being the only thing that is fixed and real, while the observed variability has no more reality than the shadows of an object on a cave wall... [In contrast], the populationist stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world... All organisms and organic phenomena are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind of organic entities, form populations of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions, only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist, the type (the average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different." (Mayr, quoted in Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy).

This the implications of this last sentence are worth stressing too: only variation is real. There is a realism here not of Form, but of difference. This is, to put it mildly, a major shift away from a great deal of Western philosophical thought, which has often begun from the premise of Form and identity rather than difference, and which has rather scant intellectual resources for thinking in terms of populations. Another intimately related element that follows from thinking in evolutionary terms is the irreducibility of time or temporality. One cannot think in evolutionary terms without thinking in temporal terms: to speak of variation is to speak not only of variation in traits (modification), but variation in time (descent). So there are at least two, co-related realisms that 'fall out' of thinking in evolutionary terms: a realism of difference and a realism of time. The same too needs to be said of space: evolution also cannot be thought of without reference to spatial distributions, interactions of populations across distances, with isolation producing speciaton.

Yet another import of evolutionary thinking is the impossibility of separating the individual from it's milieu, and from it's interactions with it's environment. Evolutionary thinking upends the simple distinction between 'inside' and 'outside' insofar as what is 'outside' - environment - can literally effect the very genotypes of a species: an individual's morphology is an expression of it's environment, an environmental invagination such that you can't neatly draw any border between where the individual begins and where the environment ends, and this on account, again, of the long-scale temporality that any approach to evolutionary thinking is obliged to have. The individual and the environment exist in a topological relation rather than geometric one (to be brief with an explanation, in topology, inside and outside are relative, not absolute). These are just some of the implications of thinking in evolutionary terms, and even then I've glossed over heaps and heaps of nuances. There are things to be said about refiguring the nature-culture distinction, about novelty, necessity and contingency, and more, but this will have to do for now.

I could go on about this for days. I don't think philosophers have paid nearly enough attention to exactly how much evolutionary thought can inform and enrich the discipline.

Hah, I'm glad you're so staunchly of the same mind - I think the idea that evolution is suprabiological is still not something that is part of the popular science education of most people, so it does jar a little to acknowledge evolution as substrate independant. I was trying for a gently-gently approach but that'll do too, lol.

Cool.

Evolution entails change. Better? — frank

As a necessary but not sufficient ingredient, yes.

So what non-living species evolves? — frank

Refer to the OP.

What's the difference between modification and change? — frank

I never said there was one. But I also never said that evolution is just 'modification' either. That too would be a mistake.

When woof woof fails, reptoid aliens are clearly the next step.

And they speak of rhetoric.

Then, how do rocks reproduce themselves? — Galuchat

They don't, clearly. There is no mechanism of heritability among populations of rocks. All I've argued is that evolution can be applicable to non-organic populations, not that all non-organic populations undergo evolution.

1) Does natural selection also happen to populations of natural inorganic objects? — Galuchat

If and only if there is heritable variation (changes in a developmental system [population + environment] that is passed down to another generation).

2) Is artificial selection something that happens to artificial populations (groups of individuals)?

I'm not sure what you mean by an 'artificial population'; 'artificial' and 'natural' qualify mechanisms of selection, but not populations.

In no scientific understanding of the term is evolution simply 'change'. Evolution is descent with modification among populations. That evolution is simply 'change' is misnomer and a mistake - although a common one. It's true that behavioural change can become evolutionarily relevant but such behavioural changes must affect differential survival and/or reproductive rates in populations in order for them to be so. That's the case with the Yellowstone wolves.

Don't organisms design themselves by engaging in natural selection? — Galuchat

No, or at least this kind of terminology is extremely awkward. First, natural selection happens to a population, and not single organisms: populations and their environment are what are subject to natural selection. Second, insofar as natural selection is something that happens to said population, it's not something that organisms 'engage in', as if it were some kind of optional past-time. Organisms can attempt, in minimal ways, to reduce (but never eliminate) selection pressure - by not parading in front or predators, say - but that selective pressure is there by virtue of any organism being alive at all. Lastly the very word 'design' is basically a minefield that any account of evolution ought to steer well clear of.

--

Also I realized that in my list of ingredients I left out the need for variation within populations, but that doesn't affect my overall point.

How do you define "language" and "technology"? — Galuchat

Heh, I threw that 'language as a technology' line in there as a provocation and wasn't sure if anyone would pick up on it, but the basic idea is that one of the functions of language (perhaps the most elementary, although not only one) is to enable us to communicate things which are not experienced. It can function as a tool - that is, a technology - that allows one to relate something you've never seen or touched, real or otherwise (one uses language to lie, to tell fantastic tales, etc). A precis of the idea can be found here [PDF, 3 pages], although I don't want to dwell on it too much as it is somewhat tangential to the thread. Perhaps I will start another on it down the track.

Human design (artifice) produces artificial inorganic objects (artefacta), but because human beings are organisms, the human design process is organic and evolves. Inorganic phenomena and artefacta do not design themselves or engage in selection (except in a metaphorical sense).

So, I wouldn't view evolution as substrate-independent. — Galuchat

'Design' is not really relevant though, insofar as all natural evolution takes place without any reference to design. So it cannot be the spindle upon which to adjudicate whether or not evolution is substrate independent or not. As I said to Warfarer, what is important are the minimal ingredients needed for any evolutionary process to take place (to restate: (1) a population, (2) an environment, (3) a reproductive mechanism), and none of those ingredients implicitly - that is, by necessity - entail life.

That’s a big assumption. — Wayfarer

It's not an assumption; it's entailed by the principles of evolution. I literally spelled them out for you - or rather numbered them out for you - to show you that there is no reference to life in any of them.

That nicely encapsulates what I think as the very worst of ‘evolutionism’ - the fact that it keeps the mechanistic paradigm which seems to ‘explain’ the processes of life, but omits the very principle which distinguishes living things from machines. It’s where Darwinism has become a metaphor that’s gone rogue. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure this really makes much sense: the theory of evolution explains the phenomenon of evolution, not 'the processes of life' (what processes?). It aims to explicate the mechanisms by which evolution (again: descent with modification) takes place (via natural selection, sexual selection, etc). It is right to say that those who look to evolution to explain 'life' are indeed barking up the wrong tree, but that's a problem with those people, not the theory of evolution itself. And in any case, I'm not trying to 'explain the processes of life' either, so I'm not sure where this is coming from.

But both language and architecture are junior to, or depend on, there being living species. — Wayfarer

True, but this is a matter of fact and not of principle. Were the robot revolution to occur and murder us all, the evolutionary principles would function all the same. Or, more technically, the only things that are needed for evolution to occur are (1) A target population (cellphone models, say), (2) an environment which places constraints on the growth of that population, and (3) a mechanism of reproduction (the cellphone industry). None of which entail any reference to living things. This is why I tried to emphasise that evolution, understood in it's broadest sense, is substrate independent, as a matter of principle. In fact, the generation of circuits and architectural designs using genetic algorithms is proof of exactly that.

To make it super clear, the role of life in biological evolution is to meet criteria (3) - a mechanism of reproduction. But that it is life and not something else is a matter of contingency, and not necessity, from the point of view of evolution. As Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb put it: "In existing organisms, which all have a nucleic acid–based inheritance system, it is inconceivable that the DNA inheritance system will be eliminated by another one that operates at a higher level. But theoretically it is possible that one heredity system can replace another. It may well have happened at an early stage in the evolution of life, during the murky period between chemical and biological evolution. Many theorists suggest that heredity during these early stages was not based on nucleic acids, and that the nucleic acid systems came later and replaced the primitive heredity systems. Maybe such a replacement will also occur in the distant future— if we create intelligent, reproducing, and evolving robots, they may eventually eliminate us. This would be equivalent to the elimination of one heredity system by another”. (Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions).

@Agustino brought to attention this line by David Hume, which I thought was really interesting:

"But though this topic be specious and sublime, it was soon found in practice weak and ineffectual".

The cool thing here is that Hume uses 'specious' in a positive way, and not a negative one, as is usually done today. In his day, to be specious meant to be beautiful, to have a good specular appearance. Today specious instead means something pejorative, like 'mere appearence' and lacking depth. But this merely scratches the surface of a really cool network of cognates: the Latin specere, means means 'to look' or 'to see', and is the root of species, which is of course today what we use to designate kinds of animals or organisms. The idea being that animals that look different are animals of different species. And this root ramifies through a whole series of other words too:

'Specular', already mentioned, 'spectral' (image or ghost), 'spectrum' (as in, the color spectrum) 'perspicuous' (transparent, easily understood), 'specimen' (example, sign), as well as 'spectacular' (awesome, overwhelming), 'specific' (particular), and 'spectacle' (display, performance) along with 'spectacles' (pair of glasses). Philosophically, the deepest connection is to the 'species', which has connotations of 'form', as in the Platonic eidos or Idea. In the Middle Ages, the species or species-being designated a very particular kind of being, one that was neither just 'in the mind', nor 'out there in the world' (neither ens reale, mind-independent, nor ens rationis, mind-dependant), but half-way between the two, the clearest instance of this being the image in the mirror, which is neither a 'substance' nor a 'thought', but, precisely, a special being. 'Species' also means 'aspect', which is why Spinoza will talk of looking at things sub specie aeternitatis - under the aspect of eternity.

Giorgio Agamben also draws attention to the theological, mythic, and even amorous dimensions of the word(s): "The being of the image is a continuous generation, a being (essere) of generation and not of substance. Each moment, it is created anew, like the angels who, according to the Talmud, sing the praises of God and immediately sink into nothingness"; and "Given the proximity between the image and the experience of love, it is not surprising that both Dante and Cavalcanti were led to define love in the same way: as an “accident without substance" ... "The mirror is the place where we discover that we have an image and, at the same time, that this image can be separate from us, that our species or imago does not belong to us. Between the perception of the image and the recognition of oneself in it, there is a gap, which the medieval poets called love. In this sense, Narcissus’s mirror is the source of love, the fierce and shocking realization that the image is and is not our image." (Agamben, Special Being).

So yeah. A series of really special words. And let's not even start to talk of the sublime...

You're right. If 'woof woof' is the best you can do, I excuse myself.

— Pneumenon

I'm afraid I do not see the link between "get your shit together and take care of yourself" and "SUBMIT TO THE PATRIARCHY WOOF WOOF."

This isn't worth engaging except to point out that it isn't.

And here's the one before that. Want to keep going?