It might be easier for you to say this, but that is a matter of avoiding the point. Instead of acknowledging that the concept which we know as "the universe" is a false concept, you are accepting it as true, and proceeding from that premise. Of course it's easier that way, because you have your starting point already laid out for you. However the falsity of it misleads you. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps. But I still don't have enough reasons to say that 'the universe' is a false concept. Ironically, I believe that, despite the 'reductionist' reputation that physics has, perhaps a more parsimonious reading of our physical theories is that the 'whole universe' is actually the most fundamental entity (if there is something transcendent of it, it can't be known scientifically).

Actually, these "laws" you refer to are the product of human knowledge. Human beings have created these laws in their efforts to describe activities observed. — Metaphysician Undercover

In a sense, I agree. But we can create them because we undeniably observe regularities in natural phenomena. Of course, we cn be wrong that this intelligible order we observe really exists but I would say it is more reasonable to say that than the reverse.

Why would you conclude this, it makes no sense to me. To begin with, "God" is not defined as "the good". The good is what a human beings seeks, and we do not necessarily seek God. Further, if one does seek God, it is impossible for a human being to know God in an absolute way, so that person would always be seeking to be closer to God, never reaching the fulfillment you refer to. — Metaphysician Undercover

How so? In all (or at least most) theistic religions and philosophies, it is assumed that God is what fulfills our deepest yearning. As St. Augustine said at the beginning of the Confessions "our hearts are restless until they rest in You [God]". It is natural to say that God is also the highest Good - or even Goodness itself, it that is true.
I don't think that 'being fulfilled' implies that activity stops. It just means that the will stops seeking fulfillment outside God. This doesn't imply that the will can't seek to deepen its participation in God's goodness. Perhaps we are using the word 'fulfillment' in different ways. To me it means that the will doesn't seek anymore satisfaction outside God. But this doesn't imply that the will can't deepen its participation in the communion with God. Same goes for knowledge: knowledge can be deepened but the mind doesn't seek knowledge outside God once it is in communion (or union depending on the theistic model).

But this method only works to an extent. If you divide a hadron into quarks and gluons, the hadron has a lot more mass than the sum of its parts. This is a feature described by the energy mass equivalence. The mass is a product of force, the strong force. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with that. In this case, the mass of nucleons isn't just the sum of the masses of its components but it is also given by the mass of the interactions.

This BTW shows that in contemporary physics that mass can't be interpreted as a measure of the quantity of matter. In fact, I would even say that mass is an abstract property no more real than energy.

The word 'design' almost always implies a designing agency, which is not what I mean by ‘purpose’. Rather, I’m pointing to the deeper philosophical issue of how order emerges from apparent chaos — — Wayfarer

This is what I dismiss as incoherent. We know that order does not simply emerge. The second law of thermodynamics supports this knowledge. Therefore we need to assume an "agency" of some sort as the cause of order. If the agency is said to act with purpose, but not with design, this wouldn't really make sense to most people. How could there be purpose without a goal for direction? However, I fully understand and respect the problem which you are bringing to my attention. I believe I've addressed this in my reply to T Clark above.

I proposed a distinction between intention and purpose. "Intention" implies an end or goal which is sought through action and this is how "design" is commonly used. But we also commonly allow that there are purposeful acts which lie outside the boundaries or constraints of the concept of "intention". This is exemplified by the reality of accidents, and accidentals. An accident is not a part of the intentional design yet it is still purposeful. And accidents are very useful in the production of knowledge as we learn from them. Trial and error for example is full of accidents, and knowledge often progresses through a determination of what is impossible. And this is how I class the so-called random mutations of evolution, as purposeful accidents.

That is how I understand the problem of the appearance of emergent order. Accidentals are the results of purposeful actions of an agent, which appear to be chance occurrences. The issue however, is that this does not completely remove the need for intention and design, in an absolute sense. Accidentals fall outside of the intentional goal which lies behind those purposeful acts that are apprehended as accidents. So it is still necessary to conclude a designing agency, i.e. an agent with a goal of some sort, telos. Even orthogenesis, which you propose, requires a designing agency to support the existence of an overall goal. The problem being how to support the reality of a goal, or end, without it being derived from a designing agency.

But I still don't have enough reasons to say that 'the universe' is a false concept. — boundless

I do have those reasons, and I mentioned some, the failure of science where the current theories reach their limits. These are issues like dark matter and dark energy in physics, and the need to assume random mutations and abiogenesis in biology. As I said, what these failings indicate is not that we need to extend conventional theories further, but that the theories need to be replaced with something fundamentally different, a paradigm shift. Therefore the current concept of "the universe" is a false concept.

if there is something transcendent of it, it can't be known scientifically — boundless

That is the whole point. Evidence indicates that something does transcend what is known as "the universe", and what can be known scientifically. That is why the need for metaphysics is very real, and why physicalism must be rejected. Observation based knowledge is severely handicapped in its ability to apprehend the totality of temporal reality. All observations are of things past, and the future cannot be observed in any way whatsoever. This means that observation based knowledge, empirical sciences, are only accurate toward understanding half of reality, the past, while the future lies entirely beyond scientific apprehension. We can predict what will come to pass, based on observations of the past, but this in no way indicates that we understand the nature of what is in the future.

I don't think that 'being fulfilled' implies that activity stops. — boundless

I think death is what is implied by that statement of Augustine, where he says "rest in You".

agree with that. In this case, the mass of nucleons isn't just the sum of the masses of its components but it is also given by the mass of the interactions. — boundless

No the mass is not given by "the mass of the interactions", it is given by the force. This is the basis of the energy-mass equivalence. And "force" is an extremely difficult concept to grasp, especially if we remove the mass required for momentum, to conceive of a force without any mass, to allow that the energy-mass equivalence represents something real. If the energy-mass equivalence is real, then there must be a force, called "energy", without any mass. This force would turn out to be nothing but the passing of time itself. Since the principles of physics don't allow us to conceive of a force without some sort of momentum, in application the photon must be assigned some mass, to account for its momentum, this is "relativistic mass".

The Fine Tuning Problem is a relevant example that is often pointed to in terms of cosmic teleology. Nagel addresses this sort of thing for instance, we have a number of prominent physicists, with a "multiverse" (i.e. everything possible happens) being another common way to try to explain the observations. Just for one example, the extremely low entropy of the early universe is a prerequisite for life, and yet, based on any non-informative prior it seems like it should be exceedingly unlikely. And this is true for a great many observations, for phenomena that do not appear to be directly related. Hence the idea of "fine tuning."

I had a thread before on how the Von-Nuemann-Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics actually explains this as well as Many Worlds, since only those paths that resulted in consciousness would ever collapse and be "actualized/crystalized" (the growing crystalizing block universe). This would make consciousness, and thus intentionality, and presumably final causality, fundamental to the universe as well though.

Or there is the Fifth Way, which is often misunderstood, but represents an argument from observation related to teleology.

That is true, in a way, but it was because the thinkers of those times were schooled in, and trying to improve on (or supersede) the metaphysics and philosophy of their day. — Wayfarer

I wasn't trying to use your affection for Burtt as an argument against your position. It just struck me after reading @Metaphysician Undercover's comment that he is right - Galileo et. al. were creating a new mathematical science, but they were keeping in the intention/goal directedness in the picture, even though it wasn't stated explicitly. It was bound up in their religious understanding. I guess the problem for you is that aspect has been lost as the world has become more secular. For me, that isn't a problem. I'm not a theist and I'm comfortable with a metaphysics without intention, at least in the limited realm of science.

modern science gave rise to this split (or ‘bifurcation’) between lived experience and scientific abstraction, which is very much what this thread is concerned with. — Wayfarer

I think that's only true for people who don't recognize that the metaphysics of science does not make sense as an organizing principle for all of reality. No metaphysical position does, including the teleological approach you favor. There is no one size fits all metaphysics, at least not an effective one.

There are a number of different ways in which intention can be the cause of the movements of things, without intention being within the thing that is moving. Since we observe the activities of things, and notice that many are moved by intention, while the intention which moves them is external to them, (including chains of causation), it makes sense that non-sentient objects could be moving in intentionally designed trajectories without us being aware of the intention which sets them on their way. — Metaphysician Undercover

This seems like the whole infinite regress problem. A rock is moving with intention, but the intention came from outside it. Where did that intention come from? From the other rock that knocked into it? Where did it's intention come from? How far back do we have to go? When is intention actually inside something non-sentient?

Often though, there is an inclination to make intention synonymous with purpose. This would mean that all cases of purpose are intentional. However, I think it is probably more productive in the long run to maintain a conceptual separation. This would mean that not all instances of intention are conscious, and also that not all instances of purpose are intentional. This allows versatility to the concept of "purpose", providing freedom from the restrictions of an end, or goal, which "intention" imposes. Purposeful acts could be carried out without being directed toward any specific end, such as in the case of some forms of trial and error perhaps. — Metaphysician Undercover

This all seems very convoluted to me. A distinction without a difference. I just don't get it. I don't think there's any reason for us to trudge down this path any further.

I think it is the only reasonable way of looking at things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Boy. This is a disappointing response. Puts an end to the conversation.

the one teleological principle I’m willing to defend — even if it’s heresy in mainstream biology — is orthogenesis: the idea that there has been, over evolutionary time, a real tendency toward greater awareness, self-consciousness, and intelligence. — Wayfarer

Well, of course there has been. When you start at zero complexity, zero consciousness, the only place to go is up.

I often think while observing the insect world, that there seems to be an excess of awareness. A vibrant interactivity going on. A kind of bursting with life, which seems to outstrip the basic necessities of finding food and procreating, in their specific evolutionary niche. — Punshhh

This is from Antonio Damasio's "Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious." Damasio is a well-known cognitive scientist.

Once we are capable of consciousness, what we become conscious of is the contents of our minds. Minds equipped with feeling and with some perspective on the world around them are conscious and are widely present in the animal kingdom, not just in humans. All mammals and birds and fish are minded and conscious, and I suspect that so are social insects. — Antonio Damasio - Feeling and Knowing

I question if there is a meaningful distinction between strong and weak emergence. — boundless

As I noted, you and I are just too far apart on this.

I would say that we have a similar understanding, — boundless

I strongly disagree.

Another point is that, perhaps, in order to have an acceptable explanation of life and consciousness, physicalism needs at least to be 'expanded' or corrected in some ways. — boundless

We've been through this. The physicalism you seem to be talking about is the reductionism you and I both reject.

Nuff said.

I would even say that mass is an abstract property no more real than energy. — boundless

Mass is energy. Energy is mass. Your conception of what is real and what is not doesn't make much sense to me.

Yes, at first glance it does seem obvious that evolution has moved toward greater complexity and intelligence — after all, here we are! But what’s usually called ‘orthogenesis’ is actually rejected by mainstream biology, because it suggests that evolution has an inherent direction or goal - and according to theory, that’s not how natural selection works.

Evolutionary theory treats adaptations as responses to local conditions, not steps on a ladder. While some lineages have become more complex, others haven’t — many species have stayed much the same, or even simplified over time (think crocodiles).

The concern is that orthogenesis smuggles in telos without providing a mechanism ( :yikes: ) and so risks anthropocentrism — imagining that evolution was “aiming” at us. Darwinian theory never tires of assuring us that many species are much more successful, in evolutionary terms, on account of them having survived for far longer periods of time than h.sapiens (that, after all, being a measurable criterion, unlike ‘higher self awareness’.)

That’s exactly why the issue is relevant to the broader question of purpose. The mainstream rejection of orthogenesis isn’t just based on empirical considerations — it reflects a deep philosophical commitment within modern biology to explaining everything in terms of material and efficient causes (genes, mutations, selective pressures), while rejecting any appeal to formal or final causes as unscientific, a hangover from archaic patterns of thought.

Indeed -- and I think Nagel goes into this as well -- it's precisely the pointlessness of the repetitive biological drives you cite, that causes many people to question the whole idea of purpose or meaning. It looks absurd, — J

Imagine that you could look inside a computer, to observe the micron-scale transistors blinking on & off, processing billions of bits of meaningless 1s & 0s. The close-up view would look no more purposeful than an icecap that melts from a mountaintop, into a series of streams that meander across the landscape, motivated only by gravity*4, guided by contingency, and eventually merging with the sea at gravitational equilibrium. Aristotle would say that the water seeks its proper place --- perhaps like an elephant, impelled by some mysterious purpose, journeying to the mythical graveyard.

The seeking-the-sea analogy may sound absurd, unless you back-off and look at it from a cosmic perspective. For example, the computer is motivated by bits of electricity (efficient cause) and guided by computer logic (formal cause). But the purpose behind the process is the Intention*3 of the Programmer (first cause). And the output (final cause) may not be known until the computation runs its course.

Likewise, when you look at biological Evolution*1 from close-up, it may seem pointless. But, from a cosmic perspective, when you compare the Big Bang scenario to the blue-green world we ambitious upright apes have civilized, the system has changed over time, dramatically. Hence, the cosmos presents the "appearance"*1 of a positive, teleological Purpose. Unfortunately, it is still processing (incomplete & imperfect), and may not have reached its final form. So we can't see the End, or the beginning. Hence, the "telos" is implicit, but unknown. :nerd:



Excerpts from a Quora Forum question : Is evolution a random process without any direction or purpose? If so, what is the significance of evolution? https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-purpose-or-direction-to-evolution

*1. The whole point of modern evolutionary theory is that it explains the appearance of purpose (or telos, if you prefer) emerging from a purposeless process. There is nothing within evolution that indicates the existence of telos.
Note --- Darwin didn't attempt to explain the intention or goal of the evolutionary mechanism. It just endlessly cranks out widgets for no reason. But his example of artificial Selection by human farmers, to "improve" their plants & animals, necessarily required some vision of a future goal, and intentional motivation to manipulate natural systems to serve human needs & desires

*2. The key is whether purpose requires intent. If purpose requires a pursuit of a goal or telos, then intent would be required. This form of intent is subjective and presumes a host, such as an intelligent agent. Hence, evolution can have no purpose, scientifically speaking.
Note --- For pragmatic Science, teleology is taboo. But Philosophically speaking, why not entertain a theory of teleology, if no more complete explanation is available? The arrow of time is pointing at what & where?

*3. Evolution is a process... processes don't have aims in themselves... although they may be set up to purposely get a given result by an intelligent thing, or have intelligent things as parts in the process.
Note --- A digital computer has no philosophical goals. It simply computes until the computation ends. But a program has an intended function : the purpose.The "intelligence" is in the programmer, not the program. Likewise, teleology is in the First Cause, not in the mechanism.

*4. your premise is not right. Evolution has no goal. Evolution is just an observable fact. Like gravity. Gravity has no goal, it just has effects i.e. attraction. Evolution has no goal. But it has effects. The effect of the evolution, as we know, is the passing of the genome. This effect demonstrates itself in the species as heritable traits.
Note --- Every Effect has a Cause. This quote considers only the Material and Efficient causes. But ignores the First (intention) and Final causes (goal). Teleology assumes that an on-going process has all four causes.

*5. Everything looks designed. The difference is in the choice of the engine driving it. Evolution says it’s random mutation and natural selection exclusively. Others say that those evolutionary processes were directed by a designer, presumably God. The science is the same, the appearance of design is the same. The difference is how it was done - randomly or directed. That is, belief in God or not.
Note --- The impression of design is an inference in the mind of the observer, who has experienced intentional creativity in human culture. Darwin could avoid the implications of divine Selection, by assuming the world was eternal, and that gradual evolution was going nowhere fast. But today, the journey from formless Bang to a civilized planet presents the "appearance" of design & direction. But who or what is selecting for fitness, and filtering-out unfit forms. Can we call that Natural Design, and leave the "who" as an open question?

:clap:



Screen grab of a lecture given by Terrence Deacon some time in the past. Excerpted from How Nature's Heirarchical Levels Really Emerge (video).

I had a thread before on how the Von-Nuemann-Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics actually explains this — Count Timothy von Icarus

Forgotten that thread, thanks for mentioning!

This is what I dismiss as incoherent. We know that order does not simply emerge. The second law of thermodynamics supports this knowledge. Therefore we need to assume an "agency" of some sort as the cause of order — Metaphysician Undercover

I think the deeper philosophical issue here revolves around the problem of self-organisation — or what Aristotle might call self-motion. How can living systems arise from non-living matter? How can purposeful activity emerge in a world governed by entropy? How can something move or structure itself?

That’s precisely the question I’m exploring through Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature. His project is to show how order can, in fact, emerge from thermodynamic chaos — not through external design or miraculous intervention, but through specific kinds of constraints and relational structures that arise in far-from-equilibrium systems. He calls this “emergent teleology,” and while it’s a naturalistic account, it isn’t reductionist in the usual sense.

But even if we accept Deacon’s account of how purposive structure can emerge naturally, there remains the deeper metaphysical question: whence those constraints?

That’s where something like the Cosmological Anthropic Principle strikes a chord — the idea that the fundamental constants (or constraints?) seem to lie within a very narrow range necessary for complex matter to exist and for life to arise. Whether one interprets that as evidence of design, necessity, or simply a selection effect is, of course, open to debate.

Or more to the point, it’s an open question — and I think that’s as it should be.

//ps - that linked video above is by Jeremy Sherman - he's a kind of Deacon acolyte, presents many of Deacon's ideas in informal videos on Youtube. Has a sense of humour and a quirky style -looks worth knowing about.//

@Wayfarer @Metaphysician Undercover

It struck me just now why I find the teleological approach to understanding the world so distasteful. It's disrespectful to the universe - to reality, to the Tao - to try to jam it into human boxes. It's arrogant and self-indulgent. I really do hate it.

I get what you're saying, especially if telos is taken to mean forcing reality into the shape of our own agenda. But it doesn't necessarily mean that.

The Tao doesn’t strive, but it does flow, and whatever flows, has to flow somewhere. Water 'seeks the low places' not because it was told to, or because it suits human ends, but because of what it is. To notice that is not to impose a purpose, but to witness the natural pattern in things.

I’d agree that when teleology becomes a way of carving up nature to fit our needs or narratives, then it’s missing the point. But if it’s a way of attending to the inner coherence of things then it might be closer to reverence than to imposition.

Water benefits all things and does not compete. It stays in the lowly places which others despise. Thus it is close to the Tao. — Tao Te Ching, trs Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English

And it's not too far distant from the Aristotelian:

The word telos means something like purpose, or goal, or final end. According to Aristotle, everything has a purpose or final end. If we want to understand what something is, it must be understood in terms of that end ...Consider a knife. If you wanted to describe a knife, you would talk about its size, and its shape, and what it is made out of, among other things. But Aristotle believes that you would also, as part of your description, have to say that it is made to cut things. ...The knife’s purpose, or reason for existing, is to cut... ...This is true not only of things made by humans, but of plants and animals as well. If you were to fully describe an acorn, you would include in your description that it will become an oak tree in the natural course of things – so acorns too have a telos. — Aristotle, Politics, IEP

I’d agree that when teleology becomes a way of carving up nature to fit our needs or narratives, then it’s missing the point. But if it’s a way of attending to the inner coherence of things then it might be closer to reverence than to imposition. — Wayfarer

I think it’s probably needless to say I don’t agree with this.

If we want to understand what something is, it must be understood in terms of that end ...Consider a knife. If you wanted to describe a knife, you would talk about its size, and its shape, and what it is made out of, among other things. But Aristotle believes that you would also, as part of your description, have to say that it is made to cut things. ...The knife’s purpose, or reason for existing, is to cut... — Aristotle, Politics, IEP

A knife is designed and made by humans to cut. I think that is a bad analogy for the kind of goal or purpose you have been talking about. It implies there is a designer and a creator, an idea which, as I understood it, you have rejected.

Be that as it may, I wasn’t trying to reopen the argument, I was trying to explain why I reject itso strongly.

A knife is designed and made by humans to cut — T Clark

But he also refers to natural things, acorns and foals. Elsewhere the distinction is made between artifacts and organisms, but here the distinction is not that important in this context - only that artifacts have purposes imposed by their designers while organisms have purposes that are intrinsic to them.

But he also refers to natural things, acorns and foals. Elsewhere the distinction is made between artifacts and organisms, but here the distinction is not that important in this context - only that artifacts have purposes imposed by their designers while organisms have purposes that are intrinsic to them. — Wayfarer

That’s why I said I think it’s a bad analogy. As I said, I don’t really want to reopen this whole argument.

That’s why I said I think it’s a bad analogy. — T Clark

But is it an analogy at all? Isn’t it pointing to something real — not metaphorical, but actual?

Let me try a different analogy. One of the motivations for developing differential calculus — or at least one of its consequences — was its application to aiming artillery shells. This had a huge impact on warfare, military capability, and by extension, the political outcomes of military campaigns.

Now, if you’re an artillery officer, all you need to know is how to aim — and that’s what Newtonian physics helps with. Your tables and calculations tell you how to fire accurately. That’s one kind of aim — and it’s the kind physics is concerned with. And it made a huge difference!

But there’s also another level of aim: why you’re firing, why you joined the army, what the war is about — and none of that appears in the physics. Yet it’s still part of the aim. Physics models the trajectory, but not the reason.

In the same way, when Aristotle speaks of telos, he’s not always invoking a designer’s intention or a conscious goal. He’s pointing to the formative structure of things — the way they unfold, and what they tend toward in their becoming. The acorn doesn’t “intend” to be an oak tree, but neither is its development just accident and brute cause.

It’s not just a matter of aiming shells. The analogy extends to science itself. The amazing discoveries of modern science — calculus, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics — give us incredible power to manipulate and control. We can aim more accurately, build better tools, send probes to the outer planets.

But the question of what all this is for? That’s not a scientific question. It’s a philosophical, moral, or spiritual one. And it’s exactly the kind of question that the language of telos is trying to keep alive — not in a dogmatic sense, but in the sense that human beings and living systems don’t just happen, they mean.

It don't make sense, and you can't make peace.

This seems like the whole infinite regress problem. A rock is moving with intention, but the intention came from outside it. Where did that intention come from? From the other rock that knocked into it? Where did it's intention come from? How far back do we have to go? When is intention actually inside something non-sentient? — T Clark

Actually "final cause" was intended to put an end to the infinite regress. Any chain of causation would begin from an intentional act. If it wasn't begun in a freely willed act of a human being, it began as a freely willed act of God. I don't think God can be classified as "sentient".

It struck me just now why I find the teleological approach to understanding the world so distasteful. It's disrespectful to the universe - to reality, to the Tao - to try to jam it into human boxes. It's arrogant and self-indulgent. I really do hate it. — T Clark

I find it odd that you say this, because I think the exact opposite is the case. "The universe" is just a human concept, it refers to the way that we perceive and understand reality. This is analogous to the ancient humans who had a geocentric universe. Our current conception is really not much further advanced.

To say that reality is confined to this human box called "the universe" is an arrogant self-indulgent attitude of certitude. It suggests that we have reality all figured out, and it all fits into this concept, "the universe". But the reality of intention and free will don't fit into this concept, and this demonstrates to us that a significant part of reality actually escapes this determinist concept of "the universe".

Furthermore, the concept of God is meant to remove reality from that human box. It acknowledges that there are all those aspects of reality which do not fit into the human box. It is required, to account for how weak and fallible the human box actually is, and defend us against that confident, arrogant attitude that human beings have it all figured out, and it all fits into this box called "the universe". So contrary to what you say, the scientific approach is to jam reality into the box of human experience, empiricism, while the teleological approach, which accepts the reality of free will and intention, allows for a vast aspect of reality beyond what we can experience with our senses.

I think the deeper philosophical issue here revolves around the problem of self-organisation — or what Aristotle might call self-motion. How can living systems arise from non-living matter? How can purposeful activity emerge in a world governed by entropy? How can something move or structure itself? — Wayfarer

I look at all of this type of concept, "matter", and "entropy", as products of how we relate to aspects of the world which appear to remain the same as time passes. But along with that which remains the same as time passes, there is also change. And change cannot be caused by that which remains the same, it must have another source. Therefore there is no question of how does life arise from matter, or emerge from a world governed by entropy, because those principles only apply to that part of the world which stays the same, while life is a cause of change, therefore it is a completely different part of reality.

Consider that "matter", and "a world governed by entropy", are principles, laws of physics. Laws of physics apply to an aspect of reality which we know as inanimate. However, there is a very significant part of reality which we simply do not know about, and this includes the cause of change, which itself includes life. And when I say "change" here, I'm talking about 'real change', not the deterministic actions of matter, which are predictable by science, which are not real change because they are just a continuation of that which remains the same. If you believe in free will, then you believe in 'real change', change which is not a continuation of that which remains the same, and is therefore not predictable by science.

When we accept free will, and 'real change', there is no issue of how could life arise from non-living matter, because "matter" is a concept which does not allow for real change and doesn't apply. Therefore it is impossible that life arose from matter because the concept "matter" doesn't extend to that aspect where life is derived from. That's why there is dualism. Furthermore, there is no issue with purposeful activity arising from a world governed by entropy, because "entropy" is a similar concept which applies to that aspect of the world which remains the same. But "entropy" is much more interesting because it is the word that applies to the part of reality which escapes that which remains the same. As time passes, energy is supposedly conserved, as a law of that which stays the same. In reality, some escapes as entropy, so "entropy" refers to this part of reality where real change is possible, and happens.

That’s precisely the question I’m exploring through Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature. His project is to show how order can, in fact, emerge from thermodynamic chaos — not through external design or miraculous intervention, but through specific kinds of constraints and relational structures that arise in far-from-equilibrium systems. He calls this “emergent teleology,” and while it’s a naturalistic account, it isn’t reductionist in the usual sense. — Wayfarer

It appears to me like you are getting sucked in by physicalism. Stop that, and look at the true nature of free will.

That’s where something like the Cosmological Anthropic Principle strikes a chord — the idea that the fundamental constants (or constraints?) seem to lie within a very narrow range necessary for complex matter to exist and for life to arise. Whether one interprets that as evidence of design, necessity, or simply a selection effect is, of course, open to debate. — Wayfarer

We need to respect the fact that fundamental constants or constraints do not cover the entirety of reality. There are aspects of reality which escape these, these constants do not apply. This is where we find "entropy" for example. The energy of a system remains constant (fundamental constraint) however, some actually gets lost (entropy). So "entropy" really refers to an aspect of reality which doesn't play by the rules.

I like this description. Apokrisis is a smart guy. When he says "non-reductionist physicalist model" I think he means one without reference to just the intentionist/teleological explanations this thread is about. Keeping in mind that I often misunderstand him. — T Clark

Hah. I'm usually arguing a case a step more sophisticated. And this is indeed an issue I am wrestling with right now in its most general physicalist sense.

In short, I argue from the point of view of systems science with its basically Aristotelean understanding of hierarchical order and causality. The key thing is how a new state of global order can only emerge by simplifying the local degrees of freedom as the "stuff" from which the new state of global order is being constructed from.

So strong emergence becomes the emergence of a new level of topological organisation that imposes itself on the materiality that underpins it, and thus allows itself to be that which it is. Some globally persistent new state of order.

A simple example is to have the functional thing of an army, you have to turn a random mob of humans into a battalion of soldiers. The army as a "thing" has to be able to shape the parts that make it. Humans in all their free variety have to be turned into the standardised and replaceable units that can't help but then embody the identity of an army as a military machine.

So of course you have to start with some raw material. But that matter has to be transformed by top-down formal and final constraints. And the way this happens is not by the emergence of new properties in some magical fashion. It is by the suppression of the wide and rather random variety of properties that the raw material may contain. You have to knock the rough humanity out of the civilians and limit their behaviour to that befitting their new imposed sense of military purpose. Turn them into the cogs that fit the larger machine.

So for hierarchical order, less is more. Raw matter lacks limitation. Limitation is what then can shape it into something that is like the cells of a body, or the neurons of a brain, or anything else that comes to seem like a unity of purpose expressed as the assembly of standardised parts into a functional whole.

Talk about emergence gets slippery because it is too often framed in a reductionist fashion – a collection of parts already have the necessary properties and so their assembly into a whole is already fore-ordained. The whole adds nothing more in causal terms.

But the systems view says nope. You need global constraints to shape the raw material into the functional units which now come together in a natural way to express that global purpose driving the whole show. It is necessary to form or shape the local degrees of freedom to ensure you already start with the "right stuff".

Emergence strikes the wrong note in these discussions as it implies a flowering of some internal potential. A something from nothing metaphysics that then always begs the metaphysical question.

A systems view flips this on its head. Emergence is really the opposite thing of a narrowing of possibilities at one level of being so that the explosion of possibilities can appear at a new higher level of topological order.

The problem for a bar magnet is that all its dipole iron atoms jiggle freely in all directions. But impose a magnetic field and this global restriction forces them to abandon their former rather random civilian life and line up with a military precision. A constrained dipole can become the organised point in a magnetic field.

So I think that is the root of it. Stop thinking of emergence as the surprise of getting something out of nothing. Think instead about getting something useful or higher level in its order out of the active limitation of the random everythingness of all the other things that raw and unconstrained materiality might be getting up to for not good or functional reason.

Emergence is the collective whole that arises when some source of open-ended potential is turned into a tightly-marshalled collection of degrees of freedom.

And this systems approach applies just as much to physical systems like magnets and phase transitions as its does to living and mindful systems.

The only difference is that physical systems can't encode their global constraints. They just are globally constrained in this emergent fashion. The Big Bang expanded and cooled and went through a rapid series of phase transitions that organised it in the way we know.

Life and mind then lucked into codes – genes and neurons – that could act as internal memories for the kind of constraints that would organise them into organismic selves. They could represent physical constraints – which have to exist concretely in space and time – as information that could now be deployed at any place or moment of the organism's own choosing.

So that was a huge shift from an entropic to an informational system. But then just more of the same in terms of the causal holism that is the deep metaphysical story of any "system" in the sense that Aristotle defined.

It appears to me like you are getting sucked in by physicalism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Heaven forbid :yikes: But to truly win a battle, you must fight your opponent on his strongest grounds.

Life and mind then lucked into codes – genes and neurons – that could act as internal memories for the kind of constraints that would organise them into organismic selves. — apokrisis

Brilliant post, as always — your framing of emergence via the simplification of local degrees of freedom to allow for global order is spot on, and I’m strongly drawn to that systems-theoretic rehabilitation of formal and final causation. In fact a lot of what I'm reading now arises from my encounter with your posts on biosemiotics (along with phenomenology).

But there’s one phrase I want to call out: “life and mind then lucked into codes.” That feels like the crucial hinge in the story.

The emergence of codes — systems of symbolic representation that are arbitrary, rule-based, and capable of being interpreted — seems to me not just an evolutionary convenience but an ontological shift, a change of register. There’s a crucial distinction here that Howard Pattee describes (here): even if a system is entirely physically describable, its function — as a code, a memory, or a measuring device — is not derivable from that physical description. It requires selection among alternatives, and that involves interpretation, choice, or constraint relative to a purpose.

The concept of selection, natural, cognitive, or any other form, implies a choice of alternatives. The alternatives may be considered real, virtual, or states of a memory, but in any case, as with measurement, the language of fundamental physical laws is at a loss to predict what alternative is selected or even describe the process of selection which, by definition, must occur outside the system being described.

That’s not just a matter of epistemic framing; it’s an ontological distinction — between a system as matter-in-motion and a system as meaningful, functional, or intentional.

So when we say life “lucked into codes,” we’re brushing up against the point where selection, memory, and meaning enter the scene. And it’s not clear — even in the most sophisticated systems models — that these can be accounted for within physicalism. Hence my interest in Deacon and Juarrero, who cover these kinds of issues.

In the same way, when Aristotle speaks of telos, he’s not always invoking a designer’s intention or a conscious goal. He’s pointing to the formative structure of things — the way they unfold, and what they tend toward in their becoming. The acorn doesn’t “intend” to be an oak tree, but neither is its development just accident and brute cause. — Wayfarer

I believe that this is a key insight here.

I wonder, however, that perhaps we can even think of an even more general notion of 'goal-directed action' or final cause. Before continuining with my post, I'll now make a distinction between 'laws of nature' and 'order of nature'. 'Laws of nature' are our theoretical descriptions of the regularities of phenomena. 'Order of nature' is, instead, the order that we might assume there is in nature as an explanation of the regularities themselves. I don't think we can 'prove' that this order exist but it seems a reasonable hypothesis to assume there is.

I believe that if one assumes the existence of such an 'order' there are interesting consequences here. Of course, we must assume that the 'laws of nature' allow the existence of life. We and other living beings exist, so we should infer that a supposed 'theory of everything' should not contradict this. But if the 'laws' reflect an 'order' and if we assume that such an order is intelligible, we have to assume that life has always been a potentiality in this order. If this is true, we can't really understand that 'order' without understanding life.

All analogies have a limited value but the analogy of the acorn seed and the oak is relevant here. When the right conditions are met, from an acorn seed an oak can arise and develop. In the same way, when the right conditions are met, living beings come into existence. If there was not a potentiality, however, the arising of life would not be intelligible and if we assume that nature is intelligible, this would imply that the arising of life would be simply impossible.

Of course, the reductionist might argue this alone doesn't prove much. For instance, he might argue that life might be a 'potentiality' in analogous way that we might say that 'pressure of a gas' is a potentiality. But 'pressure of a gas' is a property that can be fully comprehended by examining the properties of the particles that compose the gas. I honestly have never found a convincing argument that shows that life and consciousness can be understood in a similar way as 'temperature', 'pressure' and so on 'emerge' from the properties of the constituents of an inanimate object. The issue is contentious.

But, of course, even if it were right that life and consciousness do not 'emerge' in the same ways that pressure, temperature etc do, not even in this case we should conclude that they do not emerge. I believe that here the Aristotelian concepts of 'potentiality' and 'act' help. If life and cosnciousness can't be understood by solely pointing to the properties of the physical constituents of a living and/or conscious being, then, perhaps, the 'potentiality' might be understood as a property of the intelligible order of nature or the universe itself, i.e. the whole that 'contains' both the beings and their parts. So, perhaps, we can't fully understand life and consciousness without understanding the intelligible order of the cosmos itself.

Notice that even for the non-living things, we can understand their 'behavior' in reductionist and holistic terms. The pressure of a gas can be understood as arising - 'emerging' - from the properties of its constituents. But it can also be understood as a potentiality of the intelligible order of the universe. We can understand the behavior of a gas with reference to the laws of nature. Another example might be the evolution of the universe described in cosmology. We do have a model of how the universe* evolved, how the expansion, the decrease of temperature and so on allowed the formations of stars, galaxies and so on. These features can be understood in terms of the properties of their parts but also as features that emerged from the evolution of the cosmos. The same goes, perhaps, for life and consciousness. It seems unlikely, though, that this 'emergence' of life and consciousness can be understood in reductionist terms.

If life and consciousness can't be understood in reductionistic terms, then, reductionism is not a good way to understand things. This doesn't exclude all forms of physicalism, just the reductionist/mechanicist ones. Also the question "why there is the potentiality for the 'emergence' of life and consciousness in the first place?" remains. Perhaps, there is a transcendent reason for that potentiality. But I don't think that it can be 'proven'. But if reductionism is false and a non-reductionist phyiscalism were right, then I believe that 'telos', 'potentiality', 'act' should be considered something that pertains the order of the cosmos.

I hope to respond to the rest later.

*Edit: I think it's important to note that here I am saying that when we talk about the evolution of the universe, we talk about the universe as a whole. What is fundamental in the description is the whole, not the parts. Ultimately, features like stars, galaxies and so on 'emerge' because the universe evolved in such a way. This doesn't negate the fact that we can understand the properties of, say, a star in a 'reductionist' manner. But what I am suggesting is that reductionist picture is not the whole story. In fact, what is fundamental in the description is the whole cosmos, not the 'particles' or the 'parts' present in it. Perhaps, this 'holistic' description might help us to understand how life emerged. So, maybe, a physicalism that takes the whole cosmos as the fundamental reality can explain life. But such a physicalism is quite different from the reductionist/mechanicistic one. To summarize: ultimately, life arose because the universe evolved in a certain way and in that evolution at a certain point the conditions necessary for the arising of life were met. At that point, the potentiality for life, enfolded in the 'order' of nature, actualized.
Edit 2(final): a beatiful quote from the physicist-philosopher David Bohm summarizes what I was saying, I believe: “It may indeed be said that life is enfoldes in the totality and that, even when it is not manifest, it is somehow 'implicit' in what we generally call a situation in which there is no life." (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, chapter 7, p. 246)

I honestly have never found a convincing argument that shows that life and consciousness can be understood in a similar way as 'temperature', 'pressure' and so on 'emerge' from the properties of the constituents of an inanimate object. — boundless

Agree that it's a hard problem!

Notice that even for the non-living things, we can understand their 'behavior' in reductionist and holistic terms. The pressure of a gas can be understood as arising - 'emerging' - from the properties of its constituents. — boundless

However, and this is something that I picked up from one of the sources I mentioned earlier, organisms try to persist - they try to keep existing. Inorganic matter has no analogy for that.

Many decades ago, I had the set of six books by Swami Vivekananda on yoga philosophy. Vivekananda's concept of 'involution preceding evolution' is an aspect of his philosophical framework that bridges Eastern spiritual thought with Western scientific ideas. In this understanding, involution refers to the process by which consciousness becomes increasingly involved in or identified with matter, transitioning from subtle to gross manifestations. This is essentially the descent of consciousness into material form.

Evolution, then, is the reverse process - the gradual awakening and return of consciousness to its original state. Rather than consciousness emerging from matter (as materialism suggests), Vivekananda proposed that consciousness is already present in a latent, involved form, and evolution is simply its progressive unfoldment and manifestation. 'What is latent becomes patent'.

He thought that this framework reconciles Darwinian evolution with Advaita. He saw biological evolution as one layer of this broader process, where increasingly complex organisms provide better vehicles for consciousness to express itself. The ultimate goal of this evolutionary journey is the complete realization of our true nature - what Vedanta calls mokṣa.

Can't see it gaining many followers in evolutionary biology but to me it's an attractive, alternative paradigm.

A simple example is to have the functional thing of an army, you have to turn a random mob of humans into battalion of soldiers. — apokrisis

The problem with this example, is that ultimately the principles which turn the mob into a battalion, come from the minds of individuals, members of "the mob" who are the leaders. So your portrayal, global constraints (the army), shaping the raw material (the soldiers), to express the "global purpose driving the whole show" is incorrect. There is no such "global purpose". The purpose comes from the local minds of the individuals who are the leaders of the army. Purpose does not come from this global thing called "the army".

Your inclination to avoid reductionism, yet maintain physicalism is misleading you. To properly understand reality we must follow the reductionist principles, which are correct, to their base, where we find that something further, the immaterial intent is beyond that, as the thing which creates or produces matter itself. This is why @Dfpolis in his Aristotelian representation, places the basic intent to create, as internal to matter itself. It must be local, rather than global. But I think that the proper interpretation of Aristotle puts the basic intent of final cause as transcendent to the matter, but in a local sense. This allows final cause to give matter its basic form, transcending it internally, with the form coming from beyond the boundaries of matter to the inside, while Df thinks its immanent to the matter.

Each individual member of the army must have the desire to follow the plan, and be a member of the army, or else they go rogue. So final cause must be portrayed as inherent to the local freedom of each part, rather than as a global constraint.

As I noted, you and I are just too far apart on this. — T Clark

Fair enough. Nevertheless, it has been an interesting discussion for me.

We've been through this. The physicalism you seem to be talking about is the reductionism you and I both reject. — T Clark

Yes! I think that reductionist versions of physicalism have serious problems. But this isn't the case for non-reductionist versions. After, 'physicalism' can be a very broad category.

For example, at the end of my previous post I mentioned David Bohm. I don't think that he was a physicalist but I do believe that his ideas of 'implicate order' and 'explicate order' are not incompatible with physicalism per se, only with its reductionist variants.

Mass is energy. Energy is mass. Your conception of what is real and what is not doesn't make much sense to me. — T Clark

Well, the ontological status 'mass-energy' is a rather controversial topic, I believe. For instance, this is how the famous physicist Richard Feynman introduced the concept in his Lectures:

In this chapter, we begin our more detailed study of the different aspects of physics, having finished our description of things in general. To illustrate the ideas and the kind of reasoning that might be used in theoretical physics, we shall now examine one of the most basic laws of physics, the conservation of energy.

There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law—it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy. It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same. (Something like the bishop on a red square, and after a number of moves—details unknown—it is still on some red square. It is a law of this nature.) Since it is an abstract idea, we shall illustrate the meaning of it by an analogy.

I believe that our concept 'mass-energy' either corresponds or represent a property that physical systems have and which can be measured. I don't think it is a 'thing' or anything substantial. I'm not sure what you are taking issue with.
The points I was making do not rely on a particular ontological position about 'mass-energy', 'momentum' etc. If they are simply 'abstract ideas', as Feynman put it, nothing really changes.

I do have those reasons, and I mentioned some, the failure of science where the current theories reach their limits. These are issues like dark matter and dark energy in physics, and the need to assume random mutations and abiogenesis in biology. As I said, what these failings indicate is not that we need to extend conventional theories further, but that the theories need to be replaced with something fundamentally different, a paradigm shift. Therefore the current concept of "the universe" is a false concept. — Metaphysician Undercover

... And I don't beleive that questioning those things you mentioned is enough to abandon the concept of the 'universe' as a totality. Dark matter and dark energy give us testable predictions. We might not have a good understanding of them but this doesn't mean that we won't in the future. Abiogenesis is the consensual view among the scientific community. Unfortunately, I have not a training in biology so I'm not sure if there are valid alternatives. I believe that there is perhaps something missing in our current understanding of biological evolution. But evolutionary theory had an incredible success and it can't be denied. I believe that there are rooms for 'refinements', so to speak. In fact, I believe that problems occur when one wants to insist on a reductionist reading of evolution.

Anyway, if you believe that our understanding of the history before the arising of life is wrong, what do you think happened? How do you explain the arising of life?

That is the whole point. Evidence indicates that something does transcend what is known as "the universe", and what can be known scientifically. That is why the need for metaphysics is very real, and why physicalism must be rejected. Observation based knowledge is severely handicapped in its ability to apprehend the totality of temporal reality. All observations are of things past, and the future cannot be observed in any way whatsoever. This means that observation based knowledge, empirical sciences, are only accurate toward understanding half of reality, the past, while the future lies entirely beyond scientific apprehension. We can predict what will come to pass, based on observations of the past, but this in no way indicates that we understand the nature of what is in the future. — Metaphysician Undercover

How do your points here about the past square with what you said before with respect to our understanding of cosmology, biology etc?

In any case, I would agree that our understanding of 'reality' is limited and, also, that the reductionist 'paradigm' doesn't help.
At the end of one of my previous posts I mentioned a quote by physicist and philosopher David Bohm: “It may indeed be said that life is enfoldes in the totality and that, even when it is not manifest, it is somehow 'implicit' in what we generally call a situation in which there is no life." (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, chapter 7, p. 246). Now, if life is understood as an implicit potentiality within the intelligible order of the cosmos - and not something to be understood in terms of the properties of the particles that 'make up' living beings - I believe that a physicalist model of life is possible. I believe that reductionism is wrong but reductionism is not the only possibility for a physicalist.

Of course, this might not be true. But unless there are convincing arguments that show that the 'potentiality for life' (or consciousness) requires a transcendent cause non-reductionist physicalist models aren't excluded, that is models where the 'fundamental reality' is the whole. After all, even, say, a star might be understood in a 'reductionist' way but, at the same time, according to our present cosmological model, the very coming into existence of a star is possible because the universe has evolved in a certain way.

Admittedly, what I am saying here is sketchy at best. But, again, all theories start as sketchy ideas.

I think death is what is implied by that statement of Augustine, where he says "rest in You". — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't want to derail the thread to a discussion about theology but I just note that, apparently, 'death' wasn't what Augustine had in mind given that he was a Christian. Of course, you might say that, perhaps, if 'heaven' is a static state perhaps it is equivalent of death. I am not sure about that but I do think that it is an interesting point.
On the other hand, I believe that St. Gregory of Nyssa had a quite dynamic understanding of the state of the blessed (which he called 'epektasis'), where the participation of the blessed in the communion with God will forever increase. In a sense, this means that the desire for the Good will never be satisfied. But at the same time, the blessed do not fall away from the communion because they know that they can't find ultimate peace, happiness and so on anything except God. In a sense, however, I would say that even in this dynamic model the blessed yearning for the good is satisfied in the sense that they stopped to seek elsewhere the source of their happiness. Would you agree at least with this?

No the mass is not given by "the mass of the interactions", it is given by the force. This is the basis of the energy-mass equivalence. And "force" is an extremely difficult concept to grasp, especially if we remove the mass required for momentum, to conceive of a force without any mass, to allow that the energy-mass equivalence represents something real. If the energy-mass equivalence is real, then there must be a force, called "energy", without any mass. This force would turn out to be nothing but the passing of time itself. Since the principles of physics don't allow us to conceive of a force without some sort of momentum, in application the photon must be assigned some mass, to account for its momentum, this is "relativistic mass". — Metaphysician Undercover

Force and interaction are synonyms in physics. And nowadays fundamental interactions are understood in terms of exchange of particles. The best known example is the photon which is the mediator of the electro-magnetic interaction. The photon has energy, therefore it has mass via the mass-energy equivalence. It does not have 'rest mass' (or 'rest energy') because it travels at light speed. But a photon has a quantity of energy.
I am pretty sure that the mass of the nucleons is understood as due to the masses of the quarks and, also, of the masses of the mediators of the forces between them.

However, and this is something that I picked up from one of the sources I mentioned earlier, organisms try to persist - they try to keep existing. Inorganic matter has no analogy for that. — Wayfarer

Right!

Many decades ago, I had the set of six books by Swami Vivekananda on yoga philosophy. Vivekananda's concept of 'involution preceding evolution' is an aspect of his philosophical framework that bridges Eastern spiritual thought with Western scientific ideas. In this understanding, involution refers to the process by which consciousness becomes increasingly involved in or identified with matter, transitioning from subtle to gross manifestations. This is essentially the descent of consciousness into material form.
... — Wayfarer

Interesting, thanks. It seems more or less what Bohm said even if, I believe, the starting point was the opposite (however, I don't believe that Bohm's view were physicalist...).

Anyway, I believe that you can build a physicalist model that incorporates principles like potentiality, actuality and so on. I believe that some reject them because they believe they imply something transcendent, idealism or whatever. But it isn't necessarily the case.


I am not a physicalist myself but I respect physicalist models that are not reductionistic. I even believe that, once reductionism is abandoned, even a physicalist can make sense of many things associated with 'spirituality'.