Our self structured capacities

Taken from the notes for a new book:

The human brain has restructured itself continuously since our species’ strategic needs and purposes diverged from those of our nearest ancestors - since we left the trees as they say to resourcefully walk about the earth.  The time taken for that measurably huge difference in the brain’s physical and functional complexity is evidence enough, for me at least, that these differences could not possibly have been brought about by mutational accident, and not even by a series of intelligent responses to any such a series of evolutionary events.
What must have had to happen were constructive responses to the “intelligence” of anticipation, based on our functional abilities to analyze our conceptions of strategic needs and responses to those from the very similar to the very different needs of others in the predictively foreseeable future.
And it bears repeating that the structural work required WAS done by our physical resources, and even if somehow magically directed from afar, needed the brain itself as an onsite observer and problem discerner as well as immediate construction trier and corrector of the inevitable series of construction errors.

Accidentally Acquired Intelligence?

Accidental Intelligence?

An accident can’t make something choose that has no ability to make a choice.  It can’t confer intelligence on something that can’t choose to use it.  So if an entity that’s supposed to be living can react to an accident by choosing a different path, then that entity has made a choice that the accident has caused it to make. Intelligence was at work within that entity as well as, in my view, “outside” of it.
Does that mean the accident itself was intelligently directed?  Not necessarily, as more likely intelligently created for what had likely been a different purpose.  It also means the living entity was intelligently devised, because being alive requires the ability to intelligently react.
Then how or why could intelligence be at work outside of that entity as well?  Because it took an outside event to produce the initial something that intelligence has evolved to advantageously react to.

So if we have an intelligent system that needs to evolve for the purposes of better taking advantage of accidents, then we’ve either had accidents that have always existed along with the intelligence that accidents then served to evolve, or had intelligence that created accidents as potentially beneficial, or accidents that, illogically, created intelligence (or had a form of logical accident that we can only conceive of as magical).
So then do we have what appears to be an evolving series of more effective accidents, which would seem to mean then that accidents were self created for a purpose?
Because the apparent paradox here is, first, that we’ve had accidents that have created intelligence. (Which would seem to be a logical impossibility).
Or second, intelligence that then created accidents for its own evolutionary purposes. (Except that, as another logical impossibility, intelligence had somehow not needed accidents to reach the stage where it began to need them.)
Or third, that accidents and intelligence somehow have existed for all of time as separate phenomena, each being necessary for the other to exist at all.
(Possible if only because of the impossibility of having nothing.)

And take mathematics for example, which many of our educated brethren see as evidence for a non-intelligent universe that follows its fixed rules in an automatically mechanical fashion, and yet if its systems haven’t learned to do these things intelligently, won't that mean they've never needed to be taught them?  The universe then being accidentally mathematical?
So again we come back to the only alternative set, a magical creator of these phenomena with conflicting purposes, or as some will say, no purposes, while they also say any appearance of purpose at all is accidental - since purpose requires an intelligence that these accidental forces did not have - because of course they could not - unless by magic.

What’s left then?  Can an intelligent universe have created what only appear to be accidents, or did an accidentally directed one create what only appears to be intelligence, yet at the same time do so in the presence of an unexplainably intelligent observer from which our more intelligent creatures have somehow now evolved?
Some observing physicist will now raise the possibility that multiple worlds exist which are also (or apparently) intermingled - one for example that’s unintelligently accidental (and neither frozen nor chaotic) and one that’s intelligent, yet not with any accidents available for that intelligence to have ever found the need to use.  (Neediness being logically unable, in my book anyway, to exist without a purpose.)
The question remains that since we, as humans, must use a trial and error method for the exercise of intelligence, how compatible is that to existing with an intelligentless system of accidents, unless it may have happened that accidents are not entirely a non-intelligent procedure?
In other words, if all’s said and done, there must be an element of intelligence to every accident, no?
And if intelligence cannot be accidentally caused, I must ask again, have all accidents been intelligently caused? 

Time Reversal and the like. Can we know the logically impossible to be possible?

John A. Wheeler, re A Life in Physics, page 347, commented in effect as follows:  You will say that the time reversal view of a torn piece of paper being ‘untorn' could never happen.  But in fact it could happen albeit with an incredibly small probability.  You and the universe won’t live or exist long enough to see it happen, yet in principle two torn sheets could weld themselves into a single mammoth sheet.  And the molecules of perfume that have spread to fill a room could migrate back and regather on the starlet who entered the room.

Wheeler’s argument appears to be then that no matter how unlikely the possible, the improbable is not the same as the impossible.
There are clearly several things wrong with this argument, logically as well as scientifically.  First, how did the reversal of a change somehow become a reversal of the “time” it took to make the change and then reverse it?  That would appear to be the problem whether time is seen as a separate dimension or a measure of the ongoing changes of all other dimensions in the here and now.
And if time is in fact a measure of the rate of change, then the sequence of those changes will continue to move in the direction that allows each bit of sequence to replace the other but never to effectively undo each others “doing.”  A happened sequence in other words cannot have never happened.
Further, a scientific theory that fails to recognize the role of purpose in all of the events it studies is not a proper demonstration of scientific logic.  A situation where nature will inevitably find some purpose for reversing the strategic processes that led over countless eons to the evolution of its regulated laws is simply not going to occur, as an intelligently devised strategy allowing it to start all of its systems over and reinvent those laws will not be found. If any thing is impossible, changing the beginnings of a system that has theoretically had no beginning seems to be that thing.

But, to take another tack, can’t something be illogically possible?  And if so, then anything is logically possible, right?  No.  Why not?  By our definition of sense and nonsense, okay?
But then, on the one hand, am I not playing with the necessary ambiguity of our words in order to offer evidence of the clearly impossible?  Yes, but on the other hand, I’d be violating all the rules of the game to claim to know, logically or illogically, that the logically impossible is possible.

Everything in the Universe is Intelligently Constructed for the Purpose of being Intelligently Operated

It remains a mystery as to how intelligence must have always existed if it's true that nothing could exist without it's help.     It's not explained by Gods or magic either by the way.  Those of us who don't believe everything in the universe but life is dead are likely to be accused of creationism, but all of them as well are required to believe that Gods and magic came from nothing, as otherwise they'd be neither godlike nor magical.  Just being mysterious doesn't seem to fill their teapot.

New book in development stage

I've changed the title of this blog to reflect the ultimate direction I've taken in my writing journey.  I'm preparing a sequel to the book below, re trust and deception, to demonstrate that these central aspects of biological intelligence did not arise, all by themselves and magically, from non-intelligent elements that are supposedly predominate in the universe.

Life, THE Evolutionary Force of Nature

I finally wrote a short book about my hypothetical views on evolution, and the basic functions from which all life has essentially evolved itself.

It's called: The Strategic Intelligence of Trust.
Subtitle: Life, an Evolutionary Force of Nature.

You can read the introductory preview here.  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008OMUDBW

It's main theme (trust versus the deception of distrust) has only been hinted at here earlier.  And life's methodology of deceptively evolving itself may also interest you.

Here's the blurb I wrote for the Amazon Kindle version:

This book will hopefully present a new understanding of life as an evolutionary force of nature.  It's the author's philosophical look at some of the latest science where our biological evolution is concerned.  But in particular, it focuses on a new hypothesis where trust, and its functional counterpart, deception, have been proposed as the primary intelligent and causative functions of all life on earth.  And not just as life's behavioral tactics, but as its most necessary strategic traits. Without which, life as we know it could not have evolved at all.
With over 40 years of experience as a professional investigator of human foibles, he provides support for a number of relatively new ideas that concern the way we, and other life forms, have used these strategies over the last few billion years to both acquire and serve an extremely odd diversity of purposes.
The reader should be aware, however, that these central themes won't sit well with either the Creationists or the staunch devotees of neo-Darwinian selection theories.  Particularly since the author hopes to further demonstrate that all evolution is the proximate result of the entity involved reacting strategically to its experience.  And that all of the above are acting in concurrence with this quote from Charles Sanders Peirce:
"In the pragmatic way of thinking in terms of conceivable practical implications, every thing has a purpose, and its purpose is the first thing that we should try to note about it."
If you can handle that, you should want to read this book.  If you can't, perhaps you shouldn't.

Determined to be Free?

We are free to choose because we have to choose.  To not choose is to choose not to, even if, as a result, it's to choose to die.  To be deprived of our ability to choose, completely, is our, the chooser's, death in any event.  

Our purpose, primarily, is to choose.

Everything, it seems, in the universe is both required and allowed to choose.
(Whatever is anticipatorily aware in any case.)

Sequence. Next to Purpose perhaps in Importance

These comments were first made at the Rationally Speaking Blog, 5-14, relative to the advocacy of precognition.  I thought I'd put some of them here lest I forget:

The physics of causation requires that all changes are sequential, and even when symmetrically reversible, must reverse in sequence. The prospective future, for example, if it could somehow, in some cockeyed causative directional theory, circle back to the present, it could only do so in what had by then become that future. The future only exists in our anticipation, not in physical reality.

All causes and effects are merely sequences of change. There is no actual present that's not both our past and future at virtually the same time. There is no absolute stillness in nature, quantum entanglement, etc., or not

No strategies without sequentiality either.

Without sequence, no experiments could be fashioned at all, nothing could be built to last a second, nothing would be predictable, and there would be no mathematics that these very somewhat delusional physicists need as their primary assessment and predictive tool.

Now if you want to argue that since our scientific logic is at best probabilistic, we can't say that anything is true to a certainty, then I'd have to agree. But to then ascribe a reliable degree of certainty to our most extreme examples of improbability requires a most unreliable stretch by any of our forms of logic.

Two concepts that seem unfalsifiable are the propositions that our somethings could not have come from nothing and that all these somethings must change in a sequential order.

Added 5-15:  Causation goes in all directions and (I'd argue) has to have been essentially indeterminate for the universe to evolve in any logical sense at all. But it's not my purpose to make that my argument. All of the things that move in all of those directions do so in an irreversible sequence of change.. They can change directions and change their very substance, but cannot change the sequence in which all of this occurs.
The argument for this seems similar to the one for determinism, but is radically different. Sequences don't determine choices, and determinism is all about the decreasing, if not entirely absent, effectiveness of choice.
And as to precognition, no, it does not count that somebody was able to accurately predict what they think was the result of having seen it in what we imagine is the future. And no precognition experiments have proven otherwise.

Added  1-15-14:   Both change and sequence are other than linear.
Causation comes in all directions, as must their resultant series of sequential dimensions.  But to the observer, sequence is as directionally observable as its observational capability will allow. And it’s always in the “now” direction.

Posted today as a Big Think comment (to: Brains Are Automatic, But People Are Free)

If our choices have not (or had not) been predetermined, we are then free to be affected by random circumstances, i.e., by the randomness of probability as opposed to the determinedness (and thus pre-determinedness) of certainty. Freed from the fixed to the flexible - from reactive to proactive determining, perhaps.

So then, at least according to my logic, the choice at hand is not so much between determined or undetermined as it is between determined and predetermined. And the future limits of the predetermined lie somewhere between the certainties and uncertainties of oncoming time and the lines to be drawn there by its sequential changes.

As it would seem that, by well informed choices, we can willfully act to both determine and predetermine their effects for an uncertain period, but that the perfectly informed and active predetermination of anything, by anything, for all of time, should be seen as logically impossible.

The corollary to this is, of course, that what we choose to do today would seem to be for us (rather than for our past) to most willfully, successfully, and responsibly determine.

From this site: http://www.atheistexile.com/2012/01/16/explaining-purpose/

"Roy Niles

Posted February 2, 2012 at 4:37 PM

* it seems you’re coming awfully close to attributing the state of the universe to an “intelligent regulator”*
Not really. More likely (and over-simply) over endless time the strategies by which its elements have evolved to anticipate the necessity to react to each other (defensively, cooperatively, etc.) have become the equivalent of intelligent and purposeful responses.
And it’s clear that nature’s consistent behavioral probabilities – that we observe as lawful – are so because there’s likely a logical self-regulatory process involved.
Even if these concepts (and Hoffman’s version is only one example of such anticipatory theories) hold value for deists, theists, etc., that’s their problem. It’s like saying that biological self-engineering is wrong because it gives value to a creationist’s version of self design.
The universe is responsible for its own evolution, and if seen as godlike, its in its consistently self regulated re-creation. Big question is where these energetic particles and their strategies came from and what sort of universal culture retains, disseminates and evolves them. (But in spite of some theories to the contrary, I’m fairly sure that these somethings did not come from nothing.)
And again, there’s much more to be said about the topic, but I’m still evolving my own version of its understanding."

Awkward but hopefully informative.

This Baron P person just won't let me leave his stuff alone! Example just posted at Acquired Purposes:

"1-4-12: Sequential Dimension

I have decided (or discovered) that there's such a thing as a sequential dimension. Some have referred to a similar concept as the dimension of time, but have seemed unaware that time is actually our measure of change, and change has no choice except to be sequential. Otherwise there'd be no such thing as measurable "time." And we then are led to see that time shows us nothing if not measurable sequence.

I'll leave it at that while I study this a bit to see what else has been written or discussed in this area, since as far as I've learned to date, it seems very little.

But wait: If the above is so, causation, as measured by the sequential dimensions of change is by that measure endlessly multidimensional. And universal strategies, for example, must be effectively sequentially dimensional!! And they causatively go in all directions, so how does that fit into a dimensional paradigm? (Considering of course that in theory, energetic nature never stops. And that sequence is not necessarily reversible.)

Lots of thought to ensue here!!"

Lots of luck with this one, pal. Considering that everything that occurs in the universe is to some extent an intelligently generated accident.

Proposal?

Here's a new comment from Baron P (at Acquired Purposes) that some may find interesting, as he's put the provenance of deception in a place I wouldn't have ordinarily expected to find it:

"The 'survival' strategy of the universe's energetic system is to learn of and anticipate the 'known' and concurrently expect the 'unknown.' Thus organisms with conscious connections to their surroundings learn to anticipate events and consequentially come to trust the anticipated.

And to distrust those signals that have not been to the same extent expected. And the signalers learn in turn to make signals conform to their competitive and predatory needs, and thus these 'deceptive' actions (as the more abstract thinkers have come to call it), have arisen and continue to fuel the evolutionary advancement of all purposive strategies."

Interesting?

Evolution By Everyone

Interesting exchange with Dr. David Sloan Wilson at his blog, Evolution for Everyone

http://scienceblogs.com/evolution/2011/05/whats_evolution_got_to_do_with_1.php

The following is slightly redacted, but hopefully not too far out of context:

On the subject of the function of traits, Dr. Wilson had commented that, "Not all traits are adaptive; they can be a product of drift, a byproduct of other traits, or adaptive in the past but not the present."

I commented: But that's the point, at some time in the evolutionary past, all traits were strategically successful behaviors somewhere. The question being, did these organisms then generate their strategies from experience, or if you are to continue arguing that they didn't, what was it that so magically produced them? Or did these first forms somehow cause their functions (as you seem to suggest) and functions somehow caused their strategies in turn?

Dr. Wilson was kind enough to answer: "I have difficulty understanding what you are driving at. If we restrict ourselves to adaptations that evolve by natural selection, it's true that they are strategically successful by definition, but this begs the question of how they evolved in the total population (e.g., by within-group vs. between-group selection, natural vs. sexual selection). If we consider the non-adaptive side of the evolutionary coin, then your statement "all traits in the end evolve from strategically successful behaviors" appears to be just plain wrong. Can you clarify what you are driving at, including what you think I am trying to hide from?"

["Hiding from" was an echo of something he'd said earlier, but I noted it was with reference to the new work being done under the headings of adaptive mutation, or self-engineering, or facilitated variation, or anticipatory systems, etc.]

I then left this answer for the record:

"OK, I'll summarize some of what is being discovered as succinctly as I can without making it an argument:
The cells that retain the memory of an experience then pass on that memory to those they have been divided into. Inheritance of acquired memories of experience, no? And many generations appear to be affected - and the effects of this experience can't be completely erased from the genome if the experience itself is replicated or repeated in a particular environment. And this seems one of the ways that cells evolve to anticipate and deal strategically with a multitude of problems.
Because it seems to be the present case with most social species that their form of culture is a preserver of learned strategies, some of which by reason of their effectiveness will become instinctive, and our earliest life forms may have started that instinctive process by passing the memories of learning directly through cell division. While later on when sexual selection and the like evolved, the mechanism for passing on what would be needed as socially instructive was a "culture" that required its lessons taught at least by example - and thus evolved our methods of communication for sharing memories that was more efficient then cell memory copying, especially as that original method of procreation did not apply all that well to multi cellular organisms.
Which leads one, or at least me, to opine that all evolution from the getgo was and had to have been a social/cultural phenomenon. Learning creates strategies which create forms to fit, which gain experience that strategies adapt to, and through cultural sharing by example or advances in communication, spread the impetus for readaptation throughout the groups accordingly.
Cultures assist in the heritability of acquired characteristics: Cultures provide the platform for their strategic development and purpose, and in addition help "spread the word" that accelerates the acquisition of these strategies "instinctively."
Strategy is the function of intelligence. The form alone has no intelligence. It can't choose, even though it's a cause of choice. The function chooses form and/or chooses how it will be caused to adapt.
There's more of course, but cutting to the chase, I don't think there is a non-adaptive side of the evolutionary coin and that indeed it's more than possible that "all traits in the end evolve from strategically successful behaviors. Posted by: Roy Niles | June 1, 2011 4:43 PM "

If I get an interesting response I'll post it here. Unless I get blown out of the water, in which case I'll deep six this whole posting.

**

Ok, I got a response from Dr. Wilson that, "This is cool stuff." However, "I think it is too extreme to say that all aspects of evolution are anticipatory. Good old fashioned Mendelian genetics still accounts for a lot."

And I said, "But having an anticipatory function doesn't negate the utility or purpose of these other processes. We, in short, anticipate the accidents of nature - without the one we wouldn't need or have the other."

Acquisitionally on Purpose

I want to "borrow" something I just noted on the blog Acquired Purposes, author, BaronP. He wrote:

"A lot's being written now with titles such as 'Why do humans reason?' and 'Arguments for an argumentative theory.' Interesting but as usual no-one is looking at our system's deeper evolutionary purpose. The points they are missing in a nutshell are these:

Our predictive systems are using probabilistic logic in one sense, but not necessarily as in Bayesian or other factual premise driven systems. Because what we in our subconscious processing are looking for are familiar patterns, and we assess them not so much for consequences of expected behaviors but for past purposes that those patterns must (from historical assessments) represent.
The problem then becomes one of how those predicted or predictive purposes might help us to anticipate the tactical natures of apposing learned or inherited strategies.
The probabilities depend on the perceived purposes, hence the premises involved are not so much factual as conceptual.
The concept of conceivable purposes. "

Something I hadn't heard of before, although I too am a big fan of purpose in its various guises.

I hope the writer doesn't mind that I cited this, or that I intend to pursue this aspect of the matter further.

(Perhaps as my conceptual motivation?)

To Thine Own Selves Be True Or Not To Be

OK, I'm going to run the following up the flagpole with no warning, explanation, introduction or excuse:

With regard to the enigma posed by our capacity for self-deception, the first key to the puzzle is the fact that in virtually all human cultures, deception connotes dishonesty, and dishonesty is fundamentally immoral.

A further key to be considered is that along with many animals, we humans have several higher level assessment systems, or selves, that communicate with each other, but are essentially unable to monitor the apposing assessment operations. Hence their machinations, if and when, have been de facto concealed.

And, as to the self appearing to deceive another self, immorality, as humans see it, would not have been a factor - nor become a hindrance to the evolution of our biologically deceptive functions. Primarily because these now inherent calculative strategies have been derived from largely successful results of various species' past experiences, where consequences were less dependent on the "truth" or purity of the data than on its relevance to the tactics that best addressed the problems. And this stratagem is not so much about the invention of new data (although if need be that will happen) as the determination of that relevance by what seems to fit the situation, and the selective exclusion of what seems not to. So that in the end, the functional segments from which the accuracy of some data will be effectively concealed have almost from the start "agreed" to the arrangement.

Thus despite what we instinctively tend to feel, deception has no moral implications in that dynamic. A "self" will be deceived, but not be lied to. Because it "trusts" the deceiving self to do, or to have done, the manipulation of the data for their mutual benefit. This inducive self is not there to determine "truth" for it's own sake, but to discern whatever elements of probabilistic fact will make the system work.

(Example - to alleviate the paroxysm of fear sparked by the emotional self, the more motivated rational self will consciously select out data to reassess the probabilities of success, until everyone involved feels happy with the arrangement, and their new vision of the eventual consequences - the accuracy of which needs only in the end to be approximate.)

But then the argument will be, if the self in question knows it's being "deceived," that's really not deception - because there won't be any need or reason to accept the accuracy of the input, which had been the only purpose of the exercise. The answer is, in my view, that the "agreement" the systems have with each other calls for the manipulative act to happen when the deceiver determines it's supposed to, so that the self it happens to won't know this in advance or want to know it. Obviously it's a malleable arrangement and not all that cut and dried, as there's certainly more overt and suspicious manipulation going on within the systems, but which will largely involve the efficacy of the strategic process, rather than a question of the "motives" of the parties.

All this a lot like the "white lies" arrangements that we have with one another in most if not all human societies.

And is it this inherent inability of our internal systems to monitor and direct their operations without any form of moral compass that's led to consequences of self-deception that are self-destructive? Especially so, the more this evolutionarily cobbled system seems to evolve itself - or the more "human" we animals have become?

And have the moral strictures within our various cultures had to evolve accordingly to counter this very problem - to deal with the weakness externally that we can't overcome internally?

And how successful will such strictures ever be, when so far we've treated this as a problem generated by some fantastical external forces, i.e., good and evil, rather than by our self-concealed internal machinery? (Or machinationry if I may coin the term?)

Stay tuned.

Everything Is Always Next

The progressive nature of the universe is self-determinate, not determinate as in the predetermined.

Causes must determine effects in a consistent fashion by virtue of our universe's laws because of the intrinsic logic that we've found these laws to represent.

Such progression is what we've come to call intelligent. In other words, it seems the universe has organized itself in ways that have allowed it to determine it own future - and to do so with predictable consistency.

And these determinations are seen as consequential in an ongoing series of immediate results which are themselves determinative in their turn. No certainty of the predeterminate will be had or needed.

It's this consistency that will give us our expected future with its elements of probability and meaning.

Because all our laws, as far as we're now able to determine, are laws of probability. Not laws from some lawgiver that actuate the certainty of some immutable and ultimately meaningless progression of obeisant commandments and unvaryingly inevitable results.

And if the universe, as logic alone must dictate, cannot have come from nothing, and shows such order and what we conceive of as design, then it can only have designed itself. And if life is part of that design, and its design continues, it would seem that life would need to be a participant in the self-designing process. And that some equivalency of life elsewhere in the cosmos always has been.

Has What Has Happened Had To?

There is no such thing, I've lately come to feel, as the inevitable. The factual assumption that something was unavoidable because otherwise it would have been avoided is now for me a flawed proposition. It's much like saying that if it could have been, it would have been. Or if it hasn't happened, that's because it couldn't have happened - not yet being possible in the "now" of its yet to be fully written destiny.

Except that in tomorrow's "nowness" our destined somethings must continue to be born and flourish - so that tomorrow's inevitability can and will have derived its certainty from what was only possible today. And the day after tomorrow will predictably find a newer version of the inescapable revelations of certainty's evolving role in nature.

What's involved here is/was a basic assumption that the universe is lawful and obeys its laws without question - thus inherently predictable via the concept that unquestioned laws are unquestionably compliant. Random events always reduced to mere surprises from the unknown natural mechanisms that logic has told us must certainly exist somewhere in the cosmos to cause our wonder.

But if that logical assumption is flawed, so is the logic fashioned to fit its implications. Because for one thing, by some unknown reason, we've been given or acquired choices - not in my view needed (even as illusions) if laws that regulate causation are unquestionably reliant. Which makes me think again about the predictability function of these things we describe as laws, and to suspect that, reliable as they are, they will not guarantee that equal causes will have exactly equal effects if at the same time we accept that there is some level of indeterminacy in the universe.

Leaving us with a system that operates with perhaps the highest degree possible of probability, yet to at least the smallest degree short of a certainty. And so I've come to doubt, and effectively disbelieve, the proposition that the inevitable is such because it's truly unavoidable.

*********

And let me add the following as somewhat relevant to the above:

Would not a deterministic universe require all reactions to forces be theoretically predictable to a mathematical exactitude? And that once started, the progress of causative events could not vary one iota from that "time" to the end or endlessness of that universe's time, if either such an eventuality could have been destined to occur?

So in a deterministic universe, where the future effects of any causative event would never be in doubt, no predictive mechanism would seem needed absent of "doubters" evolving first to then fashion some calculative apparatus to maintain stability within an heretofore automatic process. Yet such selective mechanisms are here with us, and if, as some claim, illusory as to purpose, there'd be even less reason for their tangible forms to follow their illusory function.

It's as if somehow the illusion was needed of an indeterminate course in nature so as to preserve the secret from the expected inhabitants of that universe that they were making seemingly necessary choices for no reason except the need for them to believe that to exist at all, such decisions were necessary. (Some trickster god at work perhaps?)

So then is the supposedly pre-directed universe, its causative process without need for intentionality to sustain its effectiveness, nevertheless concerned with deliberately misinforming its formative mechanisms that direction and purpose must be decided by the mechanisms themselves? Doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense as an evolutionary prerequisite. Determinism not making a hell of a lot of sense in turn.

Towards a Hierarchy of Purpose

Considering ranking needs by relative importance of their purposes, rather than assuming purpose depends on some fixed importance of the needs it will serve.

It seems I'm still stuck on the subject of purpose, having been inspired to write or rattle off the following - on the same blog I referenced previously at:

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/02/cartesian_metaphors.php

"Your brain operates as a question asker and answerer at the same time. And it can still be working on questions that it raised within itself from birth. And still questioning all its earlier answers as well as questioning the basis of its earlier questions. So when sensory inputs give it something that it "senses" might have a bearing on these earlier decisions, which in some sense are always open questions, it pays a form of conscious attention.

And that attention comes in the form of a question as well. Each question becoming a vote for itself as first in the order of importance. And the brain also has a hierarchy of managerial processors who by consensus rule on that importance, with a constant stream of such rulings going on.

Arbitrated at all times by the metaphorical executive centered in the emotional part of the brain which has from the beginning offered the rest of the mechanism a set of purposes for both raising questions and seeking out their answers.

And deciding continuously, with assistance from the more conscious input from its rational section, which of those purposes will best be served by its further examination of tentative answers in the order of their tentatively determined importance, or significance if you will - that order in turn gauged in the end by how these earlier purposive efforts can be expected to assist in dealing with its most pressing purpose of assessing the consequences of any actions that are under consideration for giving service to its most immediate needs. The purpose then of which we will be the most conscious.

Or something like that. Posted by: royniles | February 18, 2010 2:18 PM"

Now I'm not sure how much of the above is close to what really happens, but it seemed like a reasonable rant at the time. Even though the question at hand was about consciousness, which I decided to address as a function of purpose. Which nobody else seems to be doing.

And in the course of laying down this piece, I began to realize that in addition to there being what some have called a hierarchy of needs, which our cognitive systems have been "designed" to address, there must be a hierarchy of the purposes that go along with those needs. As in a way, our essential purpose as living beings is to satisfy the needs that the very existence of life requires. And the purposes may not be ranked in accordance with any particular need, but with a relative importance of each need. And that will depend on the expectations of when it becomes necessary for our satisfaction and how. A hierarchy that won't be consistent with the presently constituted need-ranking hypothesis.

And needs after all create purposes. And those purposes in turn progressively refine and add to the needs that serve them.

Giving me something new to think about which hadn't been on the conscious agenda at all before today.

(Since posting the above, I have noted that the "hierarchy of purpose" concept is not exactly new, as the psychologist William McDougall [1871 - 1938] viewed the mind as an hierarchically integrated system of purposes. I discovered this when I also thought "purposivism" might be a good word to coin, and found that term also used with respect to the 'purposive psychology' theories developed in large part by McDougall.)

Beneficent Animus?

If there's anything that would seem to require a modicum or more of disrespect in the list of authoritative systemics, it's Game Theory. So here's my latest contribution to that free floating need.

Response to a post at http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/02/too_many_fastballs.php#comments,
self-explanatory as to its purpose::

"The irony here is that game theory, which treats life's strategies as gaming within a set of theoretically presumptive rules, isn't even predictably accurate when compared with our most entertaining varieties of actual games where rules are made to fit. And yet here you seem to be arguing that if strategies were changed, the teams that change them would win more often. Ridiculous. These theories are wrong precisely because they don't account for the innumerable counter strategies that each team can "choose" from within the rules of the particular game.
Then apply this to the game of life where we don't yet know some of the most basic rules, and thus some of the most basic strategies and counter strategies so far devised by biological forms. Game theory which presumes to be operational within those rules can never be more predictively accurate than the accuracy of those presumptions.
(Which I might add, don't even presume there's a significant switch at some point between our short term and long term predictive apparatus.)
Posted by: royniles | February 11, 2010 3:27 PM"

Hope that helps.

Maybe this will help as well, as far as counter strategies are concerned:

"The essence of any effective strategy may be in the options available to reveal or conceal its purposes or intentions. The default position of any strategic move is its openness to view - it's revelatory nature. Our first strategic options of choice may have been in the learned (and later instinctive) concealment of that move, in whole or in part, and before, or during, or even after it's done. Without having such options available, or making use of such, you may perhaps have a choice of optional goals, but have access to extremely limited set of options for obtaining them. Evolution may have taught all surviving strategists that openness in competition is virtually never as effective as strategies with an element of surprise or at least concealment. (Even a shark will conceal as much of its approach and intentions therewith as effectively possible.)"

(From a work in progress.)

10-28-2013:  Actually that last bit was quite silly, as I missed seeing the point that all gaming strategies are by their nature deceptive.   No-one ever tells the other side or sides what their strategies are unless they will be seen as so unbeatable that the game is destined to be won before it starts.

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.