Intent

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.

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I submit that if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs didn't wipe out the dinosaurs... things would be different.

Resha Caner said:

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?

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I think its fair to propose a spectrum of intention among various "higher" animals.

Humans are capable of quite grandiose and far out desires, and the requisite planning to fulfill them. My neighbors dog intends (I think) to play catch with me when she consistently shows up on my porch before I do.

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.

Resha Caner said:

....So, do you think organisms ever exhibit emergent behaviors?

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Absolutely.

The social "rules" for bird-of-paradise mating rituals (for example) are not something you could ever describe purely in terms of atomic particle science.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

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.

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Thanks for your post. I guess I was under the impression that emergentists were pushing for something more than, say, Conway's Game of Life. Presumably you are using simple examples as analogies for how emergence is thought to work, but when push comes to shove the real question is whether the analogy holds, no?

The key principle here is your idea that the emergent property is qualitatively different from the underlying substrate. Keeping in mind that condition of an emergent property, I want to focus on explicability.

Suppose we consider two sets. One contains instances of demonstrable emergence (e.g. Conway's Game of Life, natural flocks of birds, etc.). The second contains instances of arguable emergence (e.g. intent, consciousness, etc.). The explicability of the first set is fairly easy and straightforward. Consider the flock of birds: structural (and visual) phenomena emerge from the flocking of birds in a way that seems choreographed and yet is in fact a result of the "spatial rules" that each individual bird makes use of in their flight. Thus the emergent property of the dynamics of the flocking might be said to be qualitatively different from anything we see in the individual birds. Therefore in this case we have a "qualitative difference" that is clearly (and demonstrably) explicable.

But what if we turn to something from the second set, such as consciousness? This is where my initial criticism comes to bear, and also where the real meat of the argument resides. With consciousness we have a qualitative difference that is not explicable in the same way a flock of birds is. It is not demonstrably explicable, and I'm not sure how many emergentists would even claim that it is arguably explicable so much as that it will be explained at some point in the future. Therefore a natural question arises: What reason do we have to combine these two sets under the common header of "emergence"? The first set is demonstrably emergent; the second set is not. What inferences are available to us to conclude that the second set is an instance of emergence (and will be explained as such in the future)?

This counterargument is very much in the way of a "god of the gaps" counterargument. The thrust is that the (poor) argument follows this form: "We were ignorant about phenomenon X in the past; it turned out to be explained by emergence. We are ignorant about phenomenon Y in the present; therefore phenomenon Y is explained by emergence."

Since I don't want the posts to grow too long I will leave it there for now. I will just say that the precise concept of "qualitative difference" is something of a sticking point (hence my scare quotes above). I'm not sure what precisely your understanding of that concept is, but it may become central to the exchange.

zippy2006 said:

....Therefore a natural question arises: What reason do we have to combine these two sets under the common header of "emergence"? ....

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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.

Resha Caner said:

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.

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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.

Resha Caner said:

Happy accidents are always possible, but it's hard to find something you're not looking for.

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What we're looking for is a description of how amoebas (etc) behave, including the causes of their behavior. That should be enough.

Deciding what in advance you'd like to find is the wrong way to go about this. Observe without prejudice, then describe.

I do think an amoeba's behavior can be described deterministically, with allowances for natural atomic randomness. But I'm applying my layman's science knowledge here.

durangodawood said:

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.

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(Case in point)

Resha Caner said:

...No one observes without prejudice....

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No, but you learn to be aware of it and use various methods to counter it.

zippy2006 said:

(Case in point)

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Its what you dont want to hear?

If you have a better attitude toward this, I'm all ears.

durangodawood said:

Its what you dont want to hear?

If you have a better attitude toward this, I'm all ears.

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Sorry, that comment was directed more to Frumious than to you. Your explanation is basically exactly what I described to him as a layman's approach to emergence.

essentialsaltes said:

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.

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I submit that if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs didn't wipe out the dinosaurs... things would be different.

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.. oops .. brain fade on my part ... I got that completely wrong! You are right. (Apologies for that ..)

Post self-replication, retrogressive traceability is clearly evident.

I was thinking about pre self-replication .. which isn't necesarily retrogressively traceable .. (different topology for abiogenesis).

Resha Caner said:

The checks come in the form of falsification tests and peer review.
..
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.

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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.

Resha Caner said:

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.?

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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.

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.

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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.

I'm not saying that this is how people decide whether to call an action intentional, but that it seems to me that when they use the concept literally, they're usually implicitly distinguishing that category. It seems to me that, to keep its semantic utility, the literal use of intent should be restricted to that category, and when the concept is used to describe behaviour outside it, it is anthropomorphic projection using the intentional stance, i.e. viewing behaviour in terms of mental properties that are not actually present, but that, as cognitively familiar terms, help us construct a meaningful or interesting narrative for it.

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.

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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.

This is why it's I think it's important to recognise when the intentional stance is used; e.g. a raindrop on the window isn't really contemplating, then deciding, then choosing the path of least resistance down the window, a thermostat doesn't really think "Is it warm enough for me to switch off yet?", then make a decision to switch when it thinks the temperature is just about right.

Infants and children seem to be primed to interpret events in the world in terms of anthropomorphic narratives (i.e projected sentient agency), which is probably a by-product of innate predisposition to Hyperactive Agency Detection, and their developing theory of mind. This tendency persists into adulthood, by which time the distinction between the reality and the anthropomorphic narrative is usually well understood; nevertheless, the anthropomorphic narrative is often the preferred way to interpret activity, and can be a source of entertainment or amusement (as in cartoons and movies of animals behaving like humans, and the predilection for dressing up pets).

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?

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'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.

Given that amoebae use external chemical concentration gradients to detect food particles and organise their movement, and that their internals are fairly dynamic, it wouldn't surprise me if putting amoebae into a uniform environment, i.e. even lighting conditions, without chemical gradients, etc., would produce pseudo-random or chaotic movement, as any movement would result from small unpredictable variations in their internal conditions.

Chaotic behaviour seems to me a rather poor indicator of intent - all kinds of simple natural phenomena display chaotic behaviour, from Brownian motion to the path of lightning strikes. It seems more likely that we should expect to see a relatively low incidence of chaotic behaviour in living things, as goal-oriented behaviours are more likely to tend towards common paths or solutions to particular goals (although an injection of chaotic behaviour is sometimes used to make life difficult for predators).