[FRIAM] On old question

[Marcus Daniels]

Call me old-fashioned.   I don't think it means anything to claim understanding of a system unless one can take it apart and put it back together; it is what design requires.  There are a lot of systems one can’t understand at that level, either because they don’t yield to reduction or because one is either not allowed or equipped to take a wrench to them.   With those systems, one can only play prediction games and ideas about function are just stories people tell themselves to keep from going mad!



On 10/26/18, 1:03 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:



    Well, to be fair, Nick launched the thread with the meaning of "function" that includes teleology. And Rosen's whole shtick is an attempt to address what it means to leave purpose out of science.  But Rosen's formulation of anticipation does identify the temporal part of construction.  And he does it in a cool way by talking about how a system can "model" it's goal state ... so that vision of the goal state kindasorta simulates reverse causation where the (expectation of the) future guides the past.



    I don't think that scaffolding relates to anticipation if it's created and maintained by *others*.  Anticipation is a kind of self-scaffolding, maybe.



    On 10/26/18 11:27 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

    > It seems like teleology has been introduced by the word /scaffolding/.  I'm not sure how that is useful unless it is just an observation that there are components that tend to be introduced earlier in the development of an organism.





    --

    ☣ uǝlƃ



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