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I argue that telos is a human template, an overlay of plausible explanation under a set of presuppositions. - All good and orderly in its place, but not the goal here! — tim wood

If I’ve understood you properly given the context of your previous posts, you argue that there is no goal-striving to anything in nature, including to trees’ behaviors. Or are you saying that goals are not the goal of this thread as was outlined in the OP? In which case, I thought it obvious that I was obliging your questions to me with my answers. (to be clear, this in my longwinded last post to you)

If the former, however, OK—but on what rational grounds does this argument stand?

Someone earlier referred to paths of least resistance. That's the best way I can think of to think about life in itself. Somehow - no doubt in its DNA - it follows a path of what is, for it, a kind of least resistance, or greater reward. No telos at all. Looking at Aristotle is worthwhile. Arguing Aristotle is just so much of how many angels fit on the point of a pin. — tim wood

To say that it follows the path of least resistance already presupposes telos, because it is going somewhere, and to be going somewhere presupposes telos. It's like trial and error, this presupposes telos, because the agent practising trial and error must necessarily distinguish between error and success. Likewise, the thing following the path of least resistance must distinguish between resistance and non-resistance, in relation to where it's going (success). Otherwise it would just be swept along by natural forces. But this is not the case, it is an agent going somewhere, distinguishing success from failure, as the path of least resistance, in relation to this, going somewhere.

For the claim, sure. But is that claims in your backyard, or trees? Do you burn claims in your fireplace, or firewood? The OP is about how it is ante claims, before thinking. We can approximate that by trying to follow the lead of real being. Imagine you have one beloved tree in your backyard and I come to chop it down. What of your claims then? It cannot be both firewood and tree. Don't you see that? — tim wood

No, I will not allow you to invert our positions here. The claim was yours not mine. I call it "tree", you call it "firewood". You are the one claiming that it cannot be both. Even if you cut the tree down, I would still call it "tree" and you would call it "firewood". You haven't provided an argument for your claim that we cannot both know the same thing under different terms.

See, you need to give me reason for me to adjust to your claim. Trying to force me, by cutting down the tree does not give me reason. The application of force only makes me more steadfast in my resistance to your claim.

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Someone earlier referred to paths of least resistance. — tim wood

Yeah. So how does every particle, every event, know how to follow the path of least action? How do you accommodate this “weirdness” that infects even classical physics in your metaphysical picture?

But that is just the failure of language to accommodate the tree's living. It - the tree - doesn't follow; it doesn't go. It just is, from moment to moment. — tim wood

Science can talk of grades of telos - physical tendencies or propensities, biological function, psychological purpose. So finality or anticipation can be treated as something that comes in obvious grades of complexity.

Then you just need a general story on how complexity arises. That is where pan-semiotics slots in. There is information bound up in a system’s history of constraints that gives it the tendencies it will express in the future.

This only gets truly weird on the micro scale of quantum events where now - as in quantum eraser experiments - choices experimenters might make in the future can act as constraints on an event’s past. Time itself gets caught up in the least action principle.

But the point is that finality is profoundly part of physics. And it’s exact understanding still an open question.

It is not something to be dismissed. It is a forefront issue.

Due to time, I’ll be forthright in my views and not beat around the bush. My bad in advance if I’m currently too cranky.

There can be anthropomorphism at play in any of our judgments concerning awareness and will. Our judgments of these can just as readily be clouded, if not utterly flawed, by an ego-driven anthropocentrism which states that “if it is not that precise form which only humans can experience, then it cannot exist in any other form in any non-human lifeform”. This mindset can often be found in ethology (the empirical, scientific study of animal behavior): animals cannot hold emotions such as anger or fear because emotions as we know them are only found in us human, therefore no animal can hold emotions of any form, period! (who gives a sheit about their limbic system being pretty much the same as our own, especially when regarding primates). Same can be said with arguments for awareness, will, and reasoning: if it is not that specific form which only humans can do, then it cannot in any way exist in any other form anywhere else. The reasoning as to why this is never given, only the assertion.

the tree has no eyes. — tim wood

An empirically demonstrable conclusion we all know of, but I don’t understand its significance when addressing a tree’s awareness in sensing, and consequent propensity toward, gravity and sunlight. Since it’s the capacity to sense—regardless of what and of means—which defines a sentient being as such, are you arguing that trees cannot sense either gravity or sunlight?

It has no mind. — tim wood

This is contingent upon how mind is defined; Varela et al. (who uphold the concept of autopoiesis) would disagree. But granting that here a mind is implicitly defined as that which necessarily correlates to a central nervous system, no, trees cannot have a mind thus defined because they are not planarians, arthropods, or chordates (with vertebrates as a subset of the latter).

It has no space or time. — tim wood

This is an unsupported assertion. I’ve often heard it said even of mammals. As though dogs have no memory of where they’ve been and who they’ve interacted with in the past and no anticipation of what is to come in the future. But they don’t think of beginnings and ends to the universe like we do, so our anthropocentrism then quickly concludes that they only live in a non-temporal present. (this is contrary to evidence, if it needs to be said) Of course trees have no theory of time and space. But to say that their behaviors are not governed by before and afters (time) or by distances and proximities (space) is … at best utterly unsubstantiated.

In terse overview of what I’m here upholding, trees are not humans, nor are they vertebrates—and so do not have attributes only applicable to humans and vertebrates. This, however, does not argue against trees holding awareness conjoined goal-strivings—to be clear, of a non-human, non-vertebrate kind.

Addressed differently, what set of processes differentiates trees from rocks if not awareness conjoined with goal-striving being found in the former but not the latter? And if trees are to be indistinguishable from rocks in being solely governed by entropy, then on what grounds does one argue that trees are lifeforms rather than inanimate matter?

Somehow - no doubt in its DNA - it follows a path of what is, for it, a kind of least resistance, or greater reward — tim wood

So, basically, your view is that ‘stuff just happens’. So really there’s nothing to be gained by discussion.

'Reason and revelation' are defined and understood as different domains in philosophy of religion. — Wayfarer

Do you believe reason and revelation are independent domains just on the basis of religious authority? Or do you have your own reasons? I would prefer to see an argument from you.

The whole point about 'revealed truth' is that we learn something from it, which you can't learn by any other means including reasoning. — Wayfarer

I think it depends on what you mean when you say that things are learned by means other than reason. In one sense it is true that nothing is learned by pure reason, because there is no pure reason. Things are learned by experience, but experience in itself yields nothing without the concepts that are derived from reason, or to put it more accurately, there is no experience without concepts derived from reason, and I would argue that this includes religious experience or revelation.

Can you think of any example of knowledge derived from religious experience or revelation which is truly beyond reason? Surely as soon as anything is articulated it becomes reasonable if it is to be at all intelligible, no? (Pure nonsense may evokes some feelings, but as soon as you want to talk about those feelings I would say that you have entered the domain of reason).

That's a deep question, obviously. You could answer with Wittgenstein: 'that of which we cannot speak'. But the problem with that answer is that it indeed does leave a great deal to conjecture; — Wayfarer

Nothing I have read of Wittgenstein (and I have read quite a bit over the years) indicates to me that he thought that ethics, aesthetics and religion are beyond reason, but merely that they cannot be precisely articulated in propositional or empirical terms. Literary works, for example, are not "beyond reason" even though they are not characteristically concerned with presenting deductive or inductive arguments to support standpoints.

Thinking in Sellarsian terms you have the "scientific Image" of the world and human life (the space of causes) and the "manifest image" of the world and human life (the space of reasons). Sellars wants to give priority to the former, but really the former is derivative of the latter, which is a point that I believe Wittgenstein would have endorsed and disagreed with Sellars about.

The space of reason is the whole of life, and this agrees with Hegel's "the Rational is the Real" and also with Peirce's understanding of reality as semiosis, as well as Kant's "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind?".

I don't think so, they could just look at the things which we call "trees" as firewood. That's what we're talking about, calling the same thing by different words. I called it "tree", tim called it "firewood".

You are making them into two distinct things, but that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about knowing what a thing is. One person knows the thing as "firewood", another knows it as "tree", the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

The problem with your argument is that a living tree is not merely firewood and in fact is not even suitable in its present green condition to serve as firewood. It is therefore highly implausible that anyone would have seen a tree to be nothing more than firewood. And even if someone did they would be seeing a tree, from a narrow perspective of utility, as firewood, not seeing it first as firewood and then broadening their perspective to see it as a tree.

So, contrary to your last statement knowing something as firewood and knowing it as a tree is not the "same thing" at all, but these knowings constitute two very different perspectives on one thing;and the 'one thing' is the tree, not the firewood.

Do you believe reason and revelation are independent domains just on the basis of religious authority? — Janus

No, it’s a matter of definition.

Can you think of any example of knowledge derived from religious experience or revelation which is truly beyond reason? — Janus

I gave one already, from Buddhism. Another would surely be the myth of the Burning Bush and the dispensation of the Ten Commandments.

Nothing I have read of Wittgenstein (and I have read quite a bit over the years) indicates to me that he thought that ethics, aesthetics and religion are beyond reason — Janus

What I meant was that you might argue that what is 'beyond reason', is that of which W. said 'that of which we cannot speak'.

But he does seem to contemplate the transcendent in his writings. I was thinking of this:

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

and also:

It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.

(Ethics and æsthetics are one.)

and

6.432
How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.

The space of reason is the whole of life — Janus

Again - I think that is vain. Reason has limits and scope. To say that is not to deprecate reason; I think the traditional understanding is that reason points to something beyond itself, which is what I'm referring to as beyond reason or trans-rational.

I've been perusing Jacques Maritain on this very question via an online text called The Range of Reason and also The Cultural Impact of Empiricism which I am finding generally congenial to my outlook.

I gave one already, from Buddhism. Another would surely be the myth of the Burning Bush and the dispensation of the Ten Commandments. — Wayfarer

Explain exactly how you think they are beyond reason.

As to Wittgenstein's,"The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world."

it needs to be put in context. For the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus the "world is the totality of facts, not of things". The totality of facts is the shared public world, the world that can be represented propositionally. Obviously, though, this by no means constitutes the limits of reason, it is more of an empirical horizon. I am sure that Wittgenstein would never agree that ethics, aesthetics, or religion cannot be reasoned about. Indeed what content is there in those domains that is non-conceptual? How could there be non-conceptual (non-reasoned) content at all?

Reason has limits and scope. — Wayfarer

What, then, are it limits and scope, and what exactly lies beyond it? The point, for me, is that experience is always already mediated by reason, and thus it is always already meaningful.This is not to say that experience is literally a process of reasoning, but that everything that can have any meaning beyond mere sensation or feeling has its roots, its genesis, in reason. Of course there 'is' 'something' 'raw' 'prior' to reason, but 'it' cannot be anything without reason; that is the point I am trying to make.

(Wittgenstein is speaking differently about something else when he says that in the world there cannot be any value; he is referring to a world considered merely as a sum of empirical propositions; the prosaic world of everything that is merely "the case').

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"Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it." I am simply trying understand what "life" in this sentence means. — tim wood

'Life' here must 'mean' something imagined to be absolutely unfathomable, indeterminate. In fact life does "answer to reason" insofar as it is intelligible at all. We might imagine there to be something unintelligible 'lying beneath' the intelligibility of life, but what could that 'something we know not what' ever really be for us beyond whatever we can think or imagine about 'it'?

I've been perusing Jacques Maritain on this very question via an online text called The Range of Reason and also The Cultural Impact of Empiricism. — Wayfarer

I read a little bit of Maritain years ago, and I thought his grasp of modern philosophy was superficial at best.

Or is it just some kind of mechanics that is obvious when well-explained. — tim wood

Well that is the big question. Can you succeed where others have failed?

We can of course find approximative and perturbative mathematical techniques that do work well enough to solve problems as if they were simply a matter of determinist mechanics. But that then is to ignore the metaphysical mystery of how nature arrives at its rather more exact solutions.

In passing, your definition of telos as encompassing what you have listed seems to broaden and stretch telos beyond the limits of any original significance. If telos is that broad, then it means merely that there's a cause - and that's already presupposed! — tim wood

Or else it deflates the rather inflated notion of telos that folk have in the first place. I prefer to look at it that way.

It avoids being a mind~world dualist, while accepting that mechanistic physics is only talking about half the cause in its stress on the material, rather than the formal, causes of physical being.

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"Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it." I am simply trying understand what "life" in this sentence means.

Life will not answer to reason (logic) because reason and hence science can't encompass the fullness our experience of life and I don't think this has sunk into our psyche's, we simply have not understood the implication. I don't think life can explain itself because life is based on luck, on an accident, which as such does not submit to an answer.

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I'm thinking that DNA is the current flavour of formal causes. Do you have a different candidate? — tim wood

Yes, DNA is the canonical example of formal cause or top-down constraint here. So my position - the semiotic one - is about generalising that.

Thus I recognise a major discontinuity in nature, as well as an underlying continuity, when it comes to telos.

Life and mind are different in that they have the memory mechanisms to encode the information that constrains their material dynamics. Organisms are different in that they have autonomy and what we would mean by true purpose. Physical systems only have tendencies or propensities as they reflect the information that is encoded externally in their environments.

So I am not arguing anything mystical.

My response to the OP quotes was that they looked to get things the wrong way round. The material world is already reasonable or intelligible because its dynamism is formed or shaped by constraints. Life and mind are just the same story, with the twist that organisms can remember habits of constraint and so start to act from their own stored context of goals, purposes and reasons.

I lean toward regarding the "mystery" as an artifact of a certain kind of thinking. — tim wood

But the “how” of the least action principle is an important question to tackle if you are interested in developing new physics.

Unlike a particular or accidental mystery - like perhaps the glass of water on your desk - it is a general or universal level mystery. If you want an emergent or thermal model of time, for instance, then the metaphysical issues raised by the principle of least action are at the centre of that.

Here's the thing: the tree has no eyes. It has no mind. It cannot have any kind of conception of itself - I don't even know if "itself" is right. It has no space or time. It reacts to things according to its DNA and it also does things. I imagine that its reactions are a complete description of its experiences - experiences that are neither more nor less than signals in transit through the body of the tree. — tim wood

What the tree is doing is not properly described by "reaction". The tree is growing, and growing is not reacting. One is goal oriented activity, the other is not.

Agreed! But that is just the failure of language to accommodate the tree's living. It - the tree - doesn't follow; it doesn't go. It just is, from moment to moment. — tim wood

Nor is it correct to say that the tree "just is", because it is always active, growing, producing leaves, photosynthesizing, loosing leaves, producing flowers, producing seeds, etc..

I point out to you that there is a difference, I think a fundamental difference, between a living, growing, possibly beautiful and inspirational, tree and the pile of firewood it could be. It cannot be both. You appear to deny that. Please make clear how I could come and take ax to your tree and reduce it to firewood, and it is still your growing, living tree. If you're playing word games, I'm not interested. — tim wood

All right, now you given me the reason which I asked for. Now I can agree with you that there is a difference between knowing the thing as "tree", and knowing it as "firewood". You've disclosed that "tree" refers to a living growing thing, whereas "firewood" refers to an inanimate thing to be burned. Now you've given me an acceptable principle of differentiation, one is alive, the other is not. I would say that your argument is that to know the tree as a living thing is to have a better knowledge of it than to know it as an inanimate thing, and I agree. Do you agree with me, that we ought to have a certain respect for living things which we do not owe to inanimate things, we being within the class of living things ourslves?

Goal-striving seems to require a capacity for anticipation. How, in a tree? — tim wood

Do you not see anticipation in photosynthesis, seed production, and growing in general? How can anyone deny that these are goal oriented, purposeful?

The problem with your argument is that a living tree is not merely firewood and in fact is not even suitable in its present green condition to serve as firewood. It is therefore highly implausible that anyone would have seen a tree to be nothing more than firewood. — Janus

OK, if your point is like tim's, that the "tree" is alive, and the "firewood" is not, then I agree with you. As I said, to make this differentiation requires a further reason, and you have given it by distinguishing the one as being alive, and the other as not. Now the question is how does this differentiation qualify as knowledge? On what principle does the distinction between a living thing and an inanimate thing, i.e. being able to say that the tree is alive and the firewood is not alive, qualify as knowing something? Unless this distinction can be justified, then it is just another case of an arbitrary determination to say that one is alive and the other is not.

Another would surely be the myth of the Burning Bush and the dispensation of the Ten Commandments. — Wayfarer

Hmm, the Burning Bush might qualify to deny the distinction between a living tree and firewood.

Yes, well, you haven’t addressed a single one of my three questions to you.

The question then becomes, is there any way to hear - discern in some way - what arborism might be saying, expressing it in tree terms? — tim wood

What it is definitely saying is that trees have a metaphorical ‘point of view’ which is a literal awareness of other, and that there therefore is something it is like to be a tree. But your hypothesis is maybe putting the cart before the horse. We’re yet working on establishing that trees can sense things.

From your reference: "The term was introduced in 1972 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells." What has this to do with mind? — tim wood

The connection can be found here and here within the article I’ve linked to. One doesn’t need to read Thompson’s book to get its basic meaning—it's entitled Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Although it’s a very interesting book to read, if one holds an interest for the topic(s).

I’ll do my best to address the rest after you answer these three questions I previously asked which address the very issues you’ve specified:

Since it’s the capacity to sense—regardless of what and of means—which defines a sentient being as such, are you arguing that trees cannot sense either gravity or sunlight?

[…]

Addressed differently, what set of processes differentiates trees from rocks if not awareness conjoined with goal-striving being found in the former but not the latter? And if trees are to be indistinguishable from rocks in being solely governed by entropy, then on what grounds does one argue that trees are lifeforms rather than inanimate matter? — javra

Notice I’m not speculating on what it’s like to be a tree (e.g., we obviously hold no conceptualization of what it could be to flourish only when other creatures eat our body parts so as to spread our zygotes about in order that they might grow—animals eat fruit to spread the tree’s seeds about when addressing the function/purpose of fruit). Rather, I’m attempting to rationally argue that trees are sentient beings by virtue of being living things. Or at least attempting to figure out how it could rationally be supported that trees are not sentient.

For me poetry is a kind of reason, so we may be operating with different conceptions. I would say that poetry is as much from the trees as it is from the human. The reasons of things are intrinsic to the things; I don't think of them as arbitrary human fabrications.

I read a little bit of Maritain years ago, and I thought his grasp of modern philosophy was superficial at best. — Janus

It’s more that he thinks that what passes for philosophy in modern culture is superficial.

Here is a simple hierarchy of the different levels of cause according to E F Schumacher:

Cause - Minerals
Stimulus- Plants
Motive - Animals
Will - Humans

One is goal oriented activity, the other is not — Metaphysician Undercover

All living systems display homeostasis, which non-living systems do not.

life is based on luck, on an accident — Cavacava

Noted

All living systems display homeostasis, which non-living systems do not. — Wayfarer

I hear you, but that really doesn't say very much. And, it is a bit of a deceptive principle, perhaps an oversimplification, because we need to inquiry as to what is the purpose, or the reason for this homeostasis. Then we see that living things grow, multiply, and carry out activities in the world, so the concept of "homeostasis" does not properly represent what the living system is doing. Despite the fact that we say "all living systems display homeostasis", it is not a fact that the concept of "homeostasis" displays what the living system is doing.