Ok .. however I've found that mostly that any tightly held '-ist' views, usually holds back thinking.
That's exactly why I added the "basically" qualifier.
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Ok .. however I've found that mostly that any tightly held '-ist' views, usually holds back thinking.
Once error prone self-replication becomes observable, retrogressive traceability over geological timeframes, becomes virtually impossible. The conclusion that 'things would be different' is thus not necessarily self-evident.
I think its fair to propose a spectrum of intention among various "higher" animals.OK. I didn't start with the opinion I have now, but one of my objections is that language seems to be driving perception here: two different words, therefore binary states - either organisms have intent or they don't. So, when they do we call it 'intent', when they don't we call it a 'mechanism', and we shouldn't confuse the two. But what if it's a spectrum rather than binary? How would we determine that? In the process of answering that, what do we call it?
Connecting back to the OP, those questions probably seem inane unless one accepts emergence. So, do you think organisms ever exhibit emergent behaviors?
Absolutely.....So, do you think organisms ever exhibit emergent behaviors?
As I understand it, the explanation, such as it is, is that iterating simple rules can give rise to (unexpected) complexity, both in mathematics (e.g. the Mandelbrot set fractal) and the physical world...
I think emergent behaviour is often seen to be surprising, unpredictable, and a little mysterious because, although we can visualise the behaviour of the elements and their interactions with their neighbours, most of us are not cognitively set up to visualise the behaviour of the patterns of interactions between many elements; it's one step beyond our capacity.
As for your amoeba, and possibly insects, there's no evidence for real purposeful intent that I'm aware of. Seems entirely plausible that they are just running some complex biological directives. But I'm certainly open to contrary evidence.
Consciousness seems to fit the defining characteristic of the "emergent phenomena" category.....Therefore a natural question arises: What reason do we have to combine these two sets under the common header of "emergence"? ....
What do my expectations have to do with anything? In fact I dont expect evidence. I think the behavior of amoeba is explicable without evoking intent. But should we learn things that force me to rethink this, then I'll rethink it.Mmm. Hence my unanswered challenge to Frumious. If your expectations of future evidence are no more than "I'll know it when I see it," we don't have much to discuss. Were it, "Show me this and I'll believe," it's a different story ... provided it's not the typical ridiculousness that results when such a challenge is thrown to unbelievers about God: "Show me God and I'll believe in God." Uh huh. Sigh.
What do my expectations have to do with anything? In fact I dont expect evidence.
I think the behavior of amoeba is explicable without evoking intent. But should we learn things that force me to rethink this, then I'll rethink it.
What we're looking for is a description of how amoebas (etc) behave, including the causes of their behavior. That should be enough.Happy accidents are always possible, but it's hard to find something you're not looking for.
Consciousness seems to fit the defining characteristic of the "emergent phenomena" category.
Once we can say with more certainty what exactly consciousness is, and how it works, then we'll know with more confidence. But for now, "seems like an emergent phenomenon" fits well, as we have so many other examples of emergent phenomena, and no better category to assign it to at the moment.
Deciding what in advance you'd like to find is the wrong way to go about this. Observe without prejudice, then describe.
No, but you learn to be aware of it and use various methods to counter it....No one observes without prejudice....
Its what you dont want to hear?(Case in point)
No, but you learn to be aware of it and use various methods to counter it.
.. oops .. brain fade on my part ... I got that completely wrong! You are right. (Apologies for that ..)essentialsaltes said:I submit that if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs didn't wipe out the dinosaurs... things would be different.SelfSim said:Once error prone self-replication becomes observable, retrogressive traceability over geological timeframes, becomes virtually impossible. The conclusion that 'things would be different' is thus not necessarily self-evident.
Wisdom surely has some input here(?) ... I think of wisdom as being the basis behind things like falsification and peer review.The checks come in the form of falsification tests and peer review.
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But if I have knowledge, wouldn't you expect me to use it? And doesn't that knowledge lead me in one direction vs. another? To be completely without prejudice is pure randomness. Knowledge is prejudice.
Wisdom surely has some input here(?) ... I think of wisdom as being the basis behind things like falsification and peer review.
Accumulation of wisdom permits us to see things from perspectives other than from our own prejudices. The key is becoming familiar with those prejudices.
This is the perennial problem with our categorization of the natural world, a generalisation of the sorites paradox - how can one distinguish separate categories in what are, for all intents and purposes, continua? The answer seems to be that we generally take a utilitarian approach and centre categories around the most common or striking values or types in our everyday experience, using whatever suitable delineating boundaries we can establish, often fuzzy. For example, we do this with 'age', and the electromagnetic spectrum, which are fairly simple one-dimensional categories; but we also do it with categories that are fuzzy in many dimensions, like 'life', 'alive', 'species', 'mind', etc.Kind of. No doubt humans have more cognitive ability than amoebas. Hopefully you're aware, though, of Leibniz's criticism of Descartes in matters of degree? (I think it was Leibniz criticizing Descartes' principle of action, but I could be mistaken). The basic question is: Where do you draw the line? Pasting weighty words onto intent such as knowing, deliberation, and volition may sink the amoeba ship and win you the semantic debate, but you fail to then properly consider the amoeba's mechanism of action. And though one can discuss the extremes, the median cases are impossible to assess. On which side of the line is a lizard, a fish, a plankton, etc.?
In my experience, intent is generally reserved for organisms that direct their behaviour in ways recognisably similar to our own, i.e. that have minds, some level of consciousness, and that 'think' (i.e. sophisticated information processing), using a specialised organ (brain) that can map the world and produce an internal model to predict and select future behaviour strategies based on the stored results of previous behaviour (learning, knowledge). Basing behaviour on a representation or abstraction of the world, on dynamic modelling, gives it a level of indirection, or 'aboutness' that is associated with intentionality.All you really succeed in doing is distinguishing a form of high intent from a form of low intent ... and if you prefer I use a different word for low intent, I really don't care. Let's do it. But we're right back to the same discussion about the same question: Does an amoeba have low intent? It certainly seems so, since they entrap/surround their food. They reach out for it rather than sitting idly and waiting for the food to come to them.
But that is itself an example of anthropomorphic projection, the intentional stance writ large. An amoeba doesn't have the capacity for thought - a cognitive sense of self, or capacity for planning and forethought; if that level of cognitive capability was possible without a brain, we wouldn't need or have brains.So, yes, at a low level that indicates an awareness of environment (there's food to my left), planning (I should send a pseudopod left rather than right), and action based upon that knowledge (reaching out and absorbing the food). Intent - low level though it may be.
'Chaos' occurs when the output of a system is sensitively dependent on its initial conditions; it's an exponential divergence in output or outcome for arbitrarily small differences in input or starting conditions, but it is deterministic.Again, the indicator I'm leaning toward is activity that can only be described with chaos - there are multiple solutions and an inability to predict which solution the system enacts. I don't know if anyone has specifically studied such a thing in the case of amoebas, but that's where I'll hang my hat. If none of their behavior is chaotic - is fully demonstrable as deterministic - then I'll concede they have no intent and we can discuss whether the next step up the chain has intent. If some of their behavior is chaotic, then what say you?