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

[Eric Charles]

Not to change anything there, but to add some nuance:

It MIGHT be the case that the set of all possible *goals *and the set of
all possible *functions *is isomorphic. Nick's assertion (100% for evolved
systems, tentatively for the vast majority of control systems) is that *for
any given system* we will find that the goal and the function differ. The
goal of one system might well be the function of a different system.

What are some of the issues we identified in our discussion?

This distinction is fairly intuitive for the evolutionary biologists in the
group, because the "evolutionary function" is more or less a given.

The distinction is less intuitive for many others on the list, because (I
hypothesized at the end) the *function *of our standard-discussion control
systems is determined by a third party. For example, that the thermostat
functions to "regulate temperature throughout the house" from the
perspective of the homeowner.

Ultimately we identify both function and goal experimentally, and the two
labels develop because two things differentiated experimentally (i.e., for
the same reason different chemicals were differentiated by the early
experimental chemists).

Example:

Certain gulls that nest on the ground clear broken eggs away from their
nests.

Does this serve an anti-parasite function or an anti-predation function?
Well, ethologists did a boatload of experiments, and comparison of the
behavior of other species, and it showed that the behavior serves the
evolutionary function of reducing predation. Closely related species that
nest on cliffs, where there are not predators, do not exhibit the behavior.
Experimentally thwarting the egg clearing behavior increases predation
rates on intact eggs still in the nest. No relation was found with parasite
load or loss of eggs or young due to sickness. (Jon rightly pointed out
that traits can serve many functions, and that "the function" just a
shorthand for something like "we are pretty sure this is the most important
one." We could easily pick different examples to show adaptation that
optimizes the intersection of various functions.) Birds that, in the past,
removed broken egg shells from around their nest, reproduced more
successfully than birds that did not, due to egg removal reducing
egg-predation incidences, and now all
female-birds-in-that-species-with-eggs-in-their-nest exhibit that behavior.

What is the goal of the birds? Well, you might think the goal of the birds
was to thwart predation. It wasn't that long ago that evolutionary
theorists thought it would all be that simple... but there are
more experiments. To study the function, we studied what *happens to the
gull *and its eggs and its young. To study goal we study *what the gull
does*. Turns out, the gull doesn't change its behavior based on risk of
predation, including whether it sees predators on the regular, whether
neighboring nests or its own nest has been hit, or other similar factors
(it changes other behaviors, but not this one). When we start seeing what
it does or doesn't clear away, we find that it clears all sorts of things
away, and lots of those don't affect predation rates.

What we end up with, when issues are experimentally investigated in depth
is most typically as follows: Members of Species A reliably generate Goal X
under certain circumstances. In the current environment B, which we have
reason to believe is similar to the ancestral environment in key ways,
striving for Goal X produces Outcome Y, where Y promotes survival of the
individual and/or the individual's offspring. Thus Y can be presumed to be
the evolutionary function.



-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 12:32 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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