<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>Hmmmm! I wonder how Glenn would react to our requesting him to play this game. I hate it because it depends so powerfully on the meanings of the words in the question but I love it because it gives me a number. And of course because of the company it puts me in. Who couldn’t enjoy a game that puts me in the same space as Ludvig Wittgenstein</div><div><br></div><div>Glen, will you play? Just for kicks!</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>{</div><div> "currentVector": {</div><div> "deterministic": 0.5,</div><div> "reductionism": 0.5,</div><div> "empiricism": 1,</div><div> "materialism": 1,</div><div> "teleology": 0.01</div><div> },</div><div> "closestPhilosophers": [</div><div> {</div><div> "name": "Daniel Dennett",</div><div> "cosineDistance": "0.04"</div><div> },</div><div> {</div><div> "name": "Werner Heisenberg",</div><div> "cosineDistance": "0.05"</div><div> },</div><div> {</div><div> "name": "David Hume",</div><div> "cosineDistance": "0.05"</div><div> },</div><div> {</div><div> "name": "Niels Bohr",</div><div> "cosineDistance": "0.05"</div><div> },</div><div> {</div><div> "name": "Ludwig Wittgenstein",</div><div> "cosineDistance": "0.05"</div><div> }</div><div> ]</div><div>}</div><div dir="ltr">Sent from my Dumb <span style="font-size: 17pt;">Phone</span></div><div dir="ltr"><br>On Aug 7, 2024, at 2:12 PM, Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin@simtable.com> wrote:<br><br></div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Nick, <br><br>How do we think about "Telos"? I can't help myself - "Dan wheel out our one-trick TensorPony" :-)<br><br>Nick, this time you need to give us your tensor wrt to the philosophers and scientists that have discussed telos according to Dan so I can get a sense of where you are coming from. Copy and paste your result here. And then you can suggest other dimensions or questions to ask to modify the space.<br><br> <a href="https://guerin.acequia.io/telosTensor.html">https://guerin.acequia.io/telosTensor.html</a><br><div><image.png></div><br><br><br><br><br> <div></div></div><div dir="ltr">Dan picked these folks to establish the spanning set of the space.<br></div><h2 style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman"">Philosophers and Scientists on Telos</h2><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Aristotle:</strong> Introduced the concept of telos, arguing that everything in nature has a purpose or goal it strives to achieve, which is fundamental to understanding natural processes.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>David Bohm:</strong> Proposed the theory of the implicate order, suggesting a deeper, orderly reality underlying apparent randomness, resonating with teleological thinking.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Ludwig Boltzmann:</strong> Focused on statistical mechanics and the behavior of gases, emphasizing probabilistic interactions without invoking purpose.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Jean-Paul Sartre:</strong> Proposed the existentialist view that life has no inherent meaning, and that individuals must create their own purpose, avoiding teleological explanations.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Michel Foucault:</strong> Analyzed power, knowledge, and discourse, focusing on societal structures without invoking teleological explanations, instead emphasizing historical and social processes.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Richard Feynman:</strong> Known for a pragmatic and non-teleological approach to physics, emphasizing mathematical descriptions of physical phenomena without resorting to purpose or goal-directed explanations.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Immanuel Kant:</strong> Distinguished between appearances and the noumenal world, arguing that teleological judgments are heuristic and do not reflect the actual nature of reality.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Max Planck:</strong> Believed in a fundamental consciousness underlying reality, stating that all matter originates and exists by virtue of a force governed by a conscious and intelligent mind, suggesting a teleological dimension.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Erwin Schrödinger:</strong> Explored the fundamental order and purpose in living systems in his work, suggesting that physical laws govern biological processes with an underlying direction.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Daniel Dennett:</strong> Rejected teleological explanations in favor of evolutionary and mechanistic accounts of consciousness and cognition.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Friedrich Nietzsche:</strong> Rejected teleological explanations, emphasizing that life and the universe do not have inherent purposes or goals, and critiqued teleological views as human projections.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Roger Penrose:</strong> Proposed ideas about the cyclical nature of the universe and the role of consciousness in quantum processes, hinting at a purposeful direction in both physical and mental realms.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Thomas Aquinas:</strong> Integrated Aristotle's ideas into Christian theology, emphasizing that everything in nature has a purpose designed by God.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Albert Einstein:</strong> Believed in an underlying order and simplicity in the universe, often speaking of the universe as comprehensible and governed by rational principles, which can imply a teleological perspective.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Ilya Prigogine:</strong> His work on dissipative structures suggests that systems self-organize into ordered states, implying a form of goal-directed evolution toward complexity.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>John Archibald Wheeler:</strong> Suggested that observers play a role in bringing the universe into existence, hinting at a teleological aspect where the universe's structure is influenced by the presence of observers.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Karl Marx:</strong> Rejected teleological views of history, emphasizing material conditions and class struggles as the drivers of historical change.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Stephen Guerin:</strong> Explored the idea of autocatalytic processes in the universe's self-organization, indicating a teleological aspect to the evolution of complexity and structure.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Hans Jonas:</strong> Argued that living organisms exhibit a fundamental purposiveness and that life itself has an inherent teleological nature.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Henri Poincaré:</strong> Analyzed celestial mechanics and dynamical systems, focusing on deterministic chaos and system behavior without teleological implications.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>James Clerk Maxwell:</strong> Developed equations describing electromagnetic fields in a purely mathematical way, without implying any teleological purpose.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Jacques Derrida:</strong> Emphasized the instability of meaning and critiqued metaphysical systems that impose teleological structures on language and thought.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>John Archibald Wheeler:</strong> Suggested that observers play a role in bringing the universe into existence, hinting at a teleological aspect where the universe's structure is influenced by the presence of observers.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Ludwig Wittgenstein:</strong> Focused on the use of language and meaning derived from its context, avoiding metaphysical explanations that imply purpose or goal-directedness.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Niels Bohr:</strong> Emphasized probabilistic outcomes in quantum mechanics, grounded in empirical observations and avoiding teleological interpretations.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Paul Dirac:</strong> Developed quantum mechanics and quantum field theory with a focus on mathematical formalisms, describing particle behavior without implying purpose.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:</strong> Proposed an evolutionary teleology where the universe and life progress toward greater complexity and consciousness, culminating in the Omega Point.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Richard Feynman:</strong> Developed the path integral formulation, suggesting that the universe selects the path that minimizes action, which can be seen as a mathematical form of goal-directed behavior.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Stuart Kauffman:</strong> Proposed that the universe and life self-organize through autocatalytic processes, indicating a teleological aspect to the development of complexity and order.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Thomas Aquinas:</strong> Integrated Aristotle's ideas into Christian theology, emphasizing that everything in nature has a purpose designed by God.</p><p style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:medium"><strong>Werner Heisenberg:</strong> Described fundamental limits on measurement and predictability through the uncertainty principle, avoiding any notion of purpose in physical systems.</p></div></div></div></div><br><br><br>Here's my result copied using the "copy my Elos Tensor" button on the page showing the closest philosopher/scientists to me, according to Dan.<br><br><div><image.png></div><br>{<br> "currentVector": {<br> "deterministic": 0.1,<br> "reductionism": 0.1,<br> "empiricism": 0.1,<br> "materialism": 0.1,<br> "teleology": 1<br> },<br> "closestPhilosophers": [<br> {<br> "name": "Stephen Guerin",<br> "cosineDistance": "0.00"<br> },<br> {<br> "name": "Aristotle",<br> "cosineDistance": "0.23"<br> },<br> {<br> "name": "Plato",<br> "cosineDistance": "0.25"<br> },<br> {<br> "name": "David Bohm",<br> "cosineDistance": "0.30"<br> },<br> {<br> "name": "Ilya Prigogine",<br> "cosineDistance": "0.32"<br> }<br> ]<br>}<br><br><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Aug 6, 2024 at 3:09 PM Nicholas Thompson <<a href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>Dear Phellow Phriammers, <br></div><div><br></div><div>Ever since the days of Hywel White (GRHS) I have puzzled over the fact that telic language so often appears in physics discussions. I used to tease Hywel that Psychology must be the Mother of Physics, because he had to use psychological terms to describe the motion of particles. More recently, I have the same sort of discussions with Stephen Guerin who wants to use telic language concerning the path of photons and least action. (I hope I have this right, Stephen). You all have been tempted to think I am just trolling, but I don't think I am. I think there may be places where such descriptions are appropriate. I do think, for instance, that the relation between the first derivative of a function and any point in that function is analogous to the relation between the motivation of a behavior and the behavior itself. <br></div><div><br></div><div>i am back to weather again, after a vacation from it for my obsession with unsuccessful vegetable gardening. Here is a quote from an Atmospheric Dynamics text which is laying out the Coriolis Force. </div><div><br></div><div style="margin-left:40px"><b>What happens if we consider the hockey puck moving equator-ward relative to the rotation of the Earth. In the absence of applied forces it <i>must</i> conserve angular momentum. Upon being pulled equator-ward in the northern hemisphere the radius of rotation of the puck begins to increase.Consequently, an anti-rotational relative motion<i> develops</i> <i>in order to</i> conserve angular momentum, <i>[Italics by NST</i>] </b><br></div><div><br></div><div>In the view of folks on this list, is this an appropriate use of telic language, and why or why not? Stephen has a defensible argument in favor of it's appropriateness, the only such argument I have ever heard. ( I don[t buy the premises, but the argument is sound) I am wondering about the rest of you.</div><div><br></div><div>Nick<br></div></div>
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