[FRIAM] towards a description of a goal-function relation

[Jon Zingale]

The model as I understand it this far begins by considering a room with
a thermostat which regulates the temperature of the room via a mechanism
involving a bent piece of metal. Further, there is a dial on the thermostat
so that a person that is dissatisfied with the present goals of the
thermostat can change those goals by acting on the dial functionally.

A list of functions that the thermostat may serve include: keeping the
metal bent a certain amount, keeping the room at 70, keeping the room at
80, increasing the entropy of the universe contingently, etc... While
some of these functions persist for any perturbation of the list
(keeping the metal bent and increasing the entropy of the universe, say),
a person in the room may select functionality for less trivial reasons,
they wish to be cooler in the room and a rigor-centric thinker may like
a way to speak carefully about these less stable, more transient, and
functions of human interest. Evolutionary theorists, for instance, may
wish to understand how the goals of organisms across generations change
as environmental forces act on the class of the organisms possible
functions, how the functions vary from generation to generation. I am
starting this thread with the intention to develop a language for speaking
about control systems like the thermostat and to explore a function-goal
distinction.

The way I can imagine one getting away with excluding the collection of
functions from the collection of goals is that they may actually be of
a different type. This isn't to say that we can't wrap goals up in the
clothes of a function and thus construe goals as functions, but doing
so is a very real operation across categories. It is in this sense that
I wish to begin exploring Nick's insistence that function and goal
be treated as different.



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