An Illustration of Science's Neglect of Purpose as an Explanatory Factor with Regard to Almost Anything

Excerpted from: http://bigthink.com/ideas/18091

Concerning an interview with David Albert. a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, whose research is mostly concerned with issues of the foundations of physics. Titles heading the interview were: Where Philosophy Meets Science and The Profound Violence of Time

It would of course help to understand the following commentary if the entire transcript of the interview with David Albert were to be read first, but there were just too many pages for me to copy here. In any case, I've added the relevant parts to which my comments were directed:

ROY NILES on February 5, 2010, 7:54 PM

Extremely interesting until we get to this part:
“Note that the set of events depicted by the movie being shown in reverse is just as much in accord with everything we believe about the laws governing collisions between billiard balls as is the movie being shown in the correct direction. That is, if you were shown a movie like this and asked to guess — just based on your familiarity with the laws of physics, just based on your familiarity with how billiard balls behave when they collide — if you were shown a film like this and asked to guess whether it was being shown forward or in reverse, you wouldn’t be able to tell. Physicists express this by saying that the laws governing collisions between billiard balls are symmetric under time reversal, okay? And what that means more concretely is — a law is said to be symmetric under time reversal if it’s the case that for any process which is in accord with that law, the same process going in reverse — that is, the same process as it would appear in a film going backwards — is also in accord with that law. So we say that the laws governing collisions between pairs of billiard balls are time-reversal symmetric. Good.”

Me: But this is not true in the sense that we actually would be able to tell. Because the balls originally lost some momentum – one before hitting the other, and then the second losing momentum until running out of room or energy. In a reverse of the filming, the balls would both visibly or measurably gain momentum.
So whatever law is governing collisions between pairs of billiard balls, it doesn’t seem to be the one of time-reversal symmetry.
I can’t help but think that somehow I have to be wrong about this, because I can’t imagine how, otherwise, everyone else in the know here would seem to have to be.

ROY NILES on February 6, 2010, 1:10 PM

But let me comment further relative to this part:
“Once again, it appears as if although the theory does an extremely good job of predicting the motions of elementary particles and so on and so forth, there’s got to be something wrong with it, okay, because we have — although we have very good, clear quantitative experience in the laboratory which bears out these fully time-reversal symmetric laws, at some point there’s got to be something wrong with them, because the world that we live in manifestly not even close to being time-reversal symmetric.”

Me: Because perhaps the world we live in has to contend with purposive behaviors of those forms of energetic activity we’ve designated as living. It’s the reversal of purposive behaviors that can’t be seen or envisioned as a symmetrical process.
I’d go further in proposing that nature’s laws are purposive, life-giving being within that purpose or not.
If so, time-reversal symmetry breaks down accordingly.
And if purposive, we don’t know why, not knowing why there had or have to be laws to begin with (assuming they had a beginning and weren’t always here). But we should know in any case that we can’t reverse, with any form of symmetry, the purposes to which those laws are put.

ROY NILES on February 6, 2010, 3:00 PM

And try reversing the film of these billiard shots and observe the time reversal symmetry.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xep51_turkish-semih-sayginertrick-shot-sh

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Addendum: More will be said about all this later, but for now, consider this: Laws have a use, so one could argue that usefulness is essential to their purpose. To reverse "time" would be to destroy that useful purpose - that sequential order in nature that these laws seem universally devised to regulate.

And so if what exists at any point in time results from a conversion of diverse forces, purposive or no, any symmetry expected to be found with a reversal of that conversion just wouldn't be there. The web of causation that would need to reverse itself so obediently is in the end as vast as the universe.

On the Dubiousness of Purpose

I got myself involved in an on line discussion of morality the other day, a subject I'd sooner have avoided, except for the prospect of being as fatuously remarkable as the next guy on that subject. And of dealing directly, as it turned out, with a self-described public intellectual. And so was I dubiously honored, with some of the commentary/evidence to be posted here as a reminder to avoid such temptation in the future. (Names will be altered to preserve my innocence.)

And so awkwardly I begin:

"M**, it occurs to me that what you've done here is fail to present your definition of morality in terms of its evolutionary purpose, instead defining it in terms of a long term goal with which our metaphorical evolution has always had a problem in abstracting from its perceptions of the immediate natures of its needs.

Rules of behavior are of course not in themselves the goals they're meant or best expected to attain. Instead such rules in the metaphorical eyes of our evolutionary apparatus were meant to serve a more immediate purpose - which some natural selective force over time could well have fashioned to fit the goal of human welfare.

Except it seems that time enough has not yet passed to witness that achievement.

Leaving us with the questions as to which strategies and tactics we're prone to use for short term goals might fit such long term purpose as well. Getting us back to a consideration of whether a focus on the nature of the purposes that fuel our expectations might make the answers easier to find.

And no, I'm not referring to the possibility of divine purpose but to purposive expectations endemic to the mechanisms of all living and choice making entities."

But then the big man replied: "Evolution, of course, doesn't have a purpose. But more to the point, to me evolution enters into the picture only early on, in endowing us (and probably other primates) with an innate sense of right/wrong and justice (as seen in the behavior of bonobos, for instance). After that, it's our ability to reflect on things that really gets ethics off the ground."

So then I say:

"M**: - I refer to evolution as purposive, and in particular with respect to the "purposive expectations endemic to the mechanisms of all living and choice making entities.'"

Then you say flat out that "evolution doesn't have a purpose" - but add that nevertheless and early on, it endows us (and probably other primates) with an innate sense of right/wrong and justice.

Which would seem to require some facility on their part for choice based on purposive expectations and the like. (Or would it not?)

Evolution then viewed from your perspective as purposive, serving what we have come to call a purpose, but unable to in any way, even in the guise of life itself, to see that purpose coming.

Talk about a category mistake, you seem to have come up with a whopper."

So then this reply from M:

"I have no idea what you are talking about (italics mine). Evolution does not have a purpose because purposes are things that are characteristic of conscious beings - so that's out unless you subscribe to intelligent design. Evolution "endowed" us with a moral instinct simply because natural selection apparently favored such instinct in a limited form in certain species of social primates. So?"

So I say:

"So natural selection favors certain outcomes but in retrospect did so to no purpose. Ridiculous.

No I don't subscribe to intelligent design by some entity separate from life itself, nor do I subscribe to the Neo-Darwinist position which is even more magical.

I had thought it would be clear to you that with its sometimes slow and plodding trial and error ways, life has managed to engineer its own designs. But clearly I've had you wrong."

And then I add: "To recapitulate what I've proposed here as to an alignment between evolution and purpose, I had referred to evolution as purposive, in particular with respect to the 'purposive expectations endemic to the mechanisms of all living and choice making entities.' Later stating that 'with its sometimes slow and plodding trial and error ways, life has managed to engineer its own designs.' And as an aside, nothing in that view requires the assumption of either teleology or teleonomy. The predictions made by organisms are always to some extent inaccurate, but not unwitting (as teleonomy would require). They are intentional and therefor purposeful. They work in the end because they are consequential."

M** then replies to me as follows:

"As for purpose in evolution, as I said, unless one believes in ID it's nonsense. Come to think of it, even if one *does* believe in ID it's nonsense.

I have absolutely no idea what the phrase "purposive expectations endemic to the mechanisms of all living and choice making entities" could possibly mean."

And I conclude this exchange with:

M**, if you were really interested in knowing what purposive expectations and the like might mean, you could simply google the phrases.

Adding to all in general: "-- of course moral behavior is relative to the particular circumstances.. It's based on what we have learned to sense that others in that particular culture would expect us to do. This same expectational mechanism exists in all biological cultures. (And yes, M**, I've been advised that even bacteria have their own little separate cultures.) I also have some idea as to how these mechanisms evolved, and with what commonality of purpose. But this is clearly not the time or place to expand upon such a thesis."

So there it is folks. Out in the open. I'd long wondered why purpose is seldom if ever used when explaining the evolution of, for the best example, behavioral traits - as if the behaviors themselves, done for whatever temporal purposes, were purposively irrelevant,

And voila, as for purpose in evolution (at least in the publicly intellectual view of things), it's nonsense. Did I mention this guy was an evolutionary scientist?

First Cause or First Strategy?

A question prompted by musings on strategy, such as this latest thought:

It seems necessary that in defining what we mean by "life" we recognize that all life forms need to have some learning capacity to predict and expect future events.

The initial forms had to learn to seek out energy. It's not likely that the first such forms didn't learn by happy accident that the first acceptance of energy was something that bore repeating. And when its source inevitably waned, had to have "learned" that effort had become needed to search out more or receive it from a different source.

So shouldn't we now use a definition more as follows:

Life: A self-sustaining chemical reaction (or energy system) with strategic parameters and learned expectations. (Predictive becoming redundant in that context.)

Prompting what some will see as the greatest of all heretic suppositions:

Is it possible that the universe itself is no less than a collection of infinitely short term strategic operations all acting with the most immediate of purposes that form an infinite tapestry of unintended and unpredictable longer to longest term consequences?

I made some notes as a guide to what I hoped to add later, and then decided why not just store them here in the interim and see what that action does for my creative process.

Meaning of the universe, or in the universe, or to the universe ??

The universe seems to be a vast questioning organism, strategies developed in a trial and error series, that resulted in incremental advances in the nature of new questions structuring the strategic functions as they multiply, with what we have had to label "energy" as both their material and their "fuel" (hence the hypothesized entropy of the available supply? - which may in reality be inexhaustible?).

"Cause and effect" could just as well be the metaphorical first question, first problem, first option, first strategic choice, first strategic decision leading to next question, in an exponentially expanding omni-dimensional pattern of a trial and error progression throughout all of time's metaphorical existence.

Whatever potential the universe has had for the application of natural law, that law would have developed in concert with the strategies that found them controlling - laws that concurrently gave these strategies their operational parameters.

Rather than string theory, etc., think strategic geometry. Think a constrained randomness.

Nature of universe not predetermined, not deterministic, but yet deterministically random with an unpredictable progression of incremental inevitabilities.

Or not.

The Ugly Truth about Beauty?

A recent Seed essay contained comments that we are hardwired with several natural instincts for knowing truth - referring to beauty as one of these to illustrate that a sense of truth seems inherent in our very make-up.

My comment in turn is that statements like this are fanciful at best.  A sense of beauty is less than reliable as an indicator of truth, as the appearance of beauty is often used to conceal truth or to mimic it. Beauty offers an incentive to approach with the expectation of finding desirable qualities within the object that projects it. It is not a quality in and of itself, but an illusory representation of those qualities.

Yet in studying nature, we can't seem to help but apply our "understanding" of the way life projects beauty to natural objects in general - as if their beauty was also created for a purpose and as a signal that these too were objects of desire.

We are wired to make accurate predictions, but in my view it's not a sense of truth that is inherent in our make-up, but a sense of the most probable - about which we are of course frequently mistaken.

We almost certainly have "premises" built into our calculating mechanisms that make truth less than obvious from the outset.  Before we acquired some facility in the use of abstractions, our more primitive mechanisms would have included the built-in equivalent of these concepts if and when they added to our chances of survival.  And these mechanistic "assumptions" will have had a margin of error - which guaranteed then and now that any resulting predictions will be less than absolute where "truth" is concerned.

One important example seems clear - that there is a presumption built or wired into our calculating mechanisms that all cause and effect stems from an initial purpose, so that any accurate or reliable conclusions will need to have first taken an element of purposefulness into account. We evolved by the necessary "assumptions" that other life had a strategy similar to ours, and that nature was the fountain of this life and therefor of its purposefulness as well. And while our more rational mechanisms have since been able to see in the abstract that this purposefulness may have begun with life rather than preceded it, our hardwired mechanisms still operate from an opposite presumption.


But as assumptions go, there is at least a third possibility, if not a probability, that purposefulness does exist elsewhere in the universe wherever there are other life forms, and that somewhere some of these forms have or had the propensity to interfere with whatever other such forms are out there. But whether or not they are responsible for any of the beauty we observe in the universe - representative or not of some universal truth - is for the moment highly uncertain.


And as a corollary to the above commentary, my feeling has been that If there is some conceivable purpose behind, or involved with, the evolution of the universe, it is nevertheless unlikely to be one that's immediately responsive or amenable to human persuasion. And thus its "beauty" would likely be indifferent to any demonstrations of our adulation.

On the other hand we clearly have good reason not to trust in nature's beneficence. It's the effort to earn that beneficence through an appeal to its proverbial "good nature" that will be essentially unproductive.