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

[Eric Charles]

I'm not a huge fan of larding.... but I'm going to attempt it below.

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


On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 12:09 AM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you, Nick and Eric, for the corrections, direction, and help as I
> grapple with these ideas that you both are so familiar with. Taking a
> step back, it appears that evolutionary theorists identify *function* in
> the *epiphenomena* arising from *underlying mechanisms*. <I'm not sure
> what you mean by "mechanism" here, but I'm leaning towards agreement.
> Function can be identefied independent of mechanism.> What connection the
> epiphenomena have to the mechanisms can often be elusive, illusory, and
> hotly debated. <Yes. Nick and I have been putting forth well worn
> examples, but in the moment there is often hot debate, including assertions
> that certain complex phenomena are non-functional (spandrals, genetic
> drift, etc.). For example, there are decades of arguments about the
> function of primate mating strategies (monogy, polyandry, polygyny), the
> liturature is huge and gnarled.> Must the mechanisms related to a flowing
> river give rise
> to a meaningful[Ȣ] function? Moreover and seemingly less to the point,
> evolutionary functions are sought after that can be identified as being
> preserved inter-generationally in some sense. <Well... kinda....  I would
> say that, among evolutionary biologists, "Because it serves an evolutionary
> function" is a strongly desired answer to the question "Why did X preserve
> inter-generationally?"> The survival of gulls is
> an *unintended consequence* of selection upon eggshell removal. <I'm not
> sure I would phrase it that way, but it seems like a plausible phrasing.
> That would be one way of emphasizing the "natural" part of the "natural
> selection" metaphor. Gulls that removed egg shells out-reproduced those
> that did not and, as a result, over countless generations, we now only have
> gulls that remove egg shells. (In that species.) However, contra examples
> of domestic-animal selection, there is no being that is intendeding the
> consequence for the gulls; and in that sense, it *is* unintended.>
> While *goals* are related to the satisfaction of the individual, the
> *function* is not so simply defined. As Nick has pointed out many times in
> our conversations, *function* may better be understood in relation to a
> concept of *design*[‖]. Perhaps it would be better to imagine *function*
> as
> needing to satisfy the specification of some *design*[※]. <Yes, in Nick's
> solution to various conceptual problems in evolutionary theory, "function"
> and "design" and "adaptation" become roughly (possibly completely)
> synonymous. The three terms get at the way the organism matches it's
> circumstances, which we can only tell through experimentation and
> higher-order comparisons of various kinds.> The styrofoam
> herding robot *knows nothing* of styrofoam, the bent metal in my thermo-
> stat *knows nothing* of comfort, the maple pod *knows nothing* of the
> journey or what it means to be distributed evenly, and the gull makes
> no connection between removing shells and predation. However the theory
> is to account for function, it will need to be in a language capable of
> describing *side effects* as *first-class citizens*. <That sounds
> promissing.>
>
> Eric relates the discovery of a goal-function distinction in evolutionary
> theory to the discovery of the surface tension-PH distinction in chemistry.
> Whether intentionally identified or just a side effect of his argument,
> surface tension and PH are decidedly examples of intensive quantities and
> so are of a type best characterized by contravariant functors[⁂]. <It
> would seem that was accidental, but maybe it was a fortuitous accident!>
> The
> connections here to contravariant logical notions (pullbacks, sections,
> equalizers, finite limits, etc...) may have very real manifestations wrt
> how we *must* investigate such ideas *empirically*. Ideas like this are
> hinted at in Lawvere's work, but also seem to trace back further to
> thinkers like Clifford Truesdell and others that struggled with rational
> thermodynamics. From what I gather from those works, there ought
> to be a tight connection between the logic of a notion and the methods
> we employ in coming to understand the notion. <This whole paragraph
> sounds plausible... but it would probably be a pretty long discussion
> before I fully understood what you were getting at. The last part sounds
> very Pragmatic (philosophically).>
>
> To the extent that this much may be passable, I hope to find some time
> this week to work through the possible connection to contravariant
> functors, to reason further in analogy to free constructions, and extend
> the analogy to *exaptations* and *spandrels*. Again, I invite additional
> corrections, comments, and nuance.
>
> Jon
>
> [Ȣ] By meaningful I exactly mean non-arbitrary. I would say that notions
> like *energy* and *momentum* are *meaningful* to the physicist, for
> instance,
> not because they are *arbitrary* but because they have a *privileged*
> place
> relative to the *art* and the artisans that work there. The scientific
> enterprise is a meaning-making enterprise and to say that such-and-such
> idea is meaningful to the artisan is to emphasize its value relative to
> the art.
>
> [‖] In a parallel post, I attempt to spell out a mathematical construction
> that I believe can be an example if not a template relating design,
> epiphenomena, and higher-order structure in mathematics. That this
> construction can alternatively be interpreted as a post hoc justification,
> gives a limiting case for not needing a designer to have a *design*.
>
> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/How-is-a-vector-space-like-an-evolutionary-function-td7597965.html
>
> [⁂] Footnoted again, but this time with an added emphasis on page 20:
>
> https://altexploit.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/1992-categories-of-space-and-quantity.pdf
> "
>
>
> *By contrast, an intensive quantity-type is a contravariant functor,taking
> coproducts to products, from a distributive category, but now afunctor
> whose values have a multiplicative structure as well as anadditive
> structure.*"
>
> [※] To act as touchstones, I am adding this list of functions:
> 1. herd styrofoam (http://www.verena-hafner.de/teaching/didabots.pdf)
> 2. maintain a comfortable temperature in the house
> 3. spread seeds far and evenly
> 4. avoid predation
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