[FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

[Stephen Guerin]

Nick,

How do we think about "Telos"? I can't help myself - "Dan wheel out our
one-trick TensorPony" :-)

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.

     https://guerin.acequia.io/telosTensor.html
[image: image.png]





Dan picked these folks to establish the spanning set of the space.
Philosophers and Scientists on Telos

*Aristotle:* 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.

*David Bohm:* Proposed the theory of the implicate order, suggesting a
deeper, orderly reality underlying apparent randomness, resonating with
teleological thinking.

*Ludwig Boltzmann:* Focused on statistical mechanics and the behavior of
gases, emphasizing probabilistic interactions without invoking purpose.

*Jean-Paul Sartre:* Proposed the existentialist view that life has no
inherent meaning, and that individuals must create their own purpose,
avoiding teleological explanations.

*Michel Foucault:* Analyzed power, knowledge, and discourse, focusing on
societal structures without invoking teleological explanations, instead
emphasizing historical and social processes.

*Richard Feynman:* Known for a pragmatic and non-teleological approach to
physics, emphasizing mathematical descriptions of physical phenomena
without resorting to purpose or goal-directed explanations.

*Immanuel Kant:* Distinguished between appearances and the noumenal world,
arguing that teleological judgments are heuristic and do not reflect the
actual nature of reality.

*Max Planck:* 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.

*Erwin Schrödinger:* Explored the fundamental order and purpose in living
systems in his work, suggesting that physical laws govern biological
processes with an underlying direction.

*Daniel Dennett:* Rejected teleological explanations in favor of
evolutionary and mechanistic accounts of consciousness and cognition.

*Friedrich Nietzsche:* Rejected teleological explanations, emphasizing that
life and the universe do not have inherent purposes or goals, and critiqued
teleological views as human projections.

*Roger Penrose:* 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.

*Thomas Aquinas:* Integrated Aristotle's ideas into Christian theology,
emphasizing that everything in nature has a purpose designed by God.

*Albert Einstein:* 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.

*Ilya Prigogine:* His work on dissipative structures suggests that systems
self-organize into ordered states, implying a form of goal-directed
evolution toward complexity.

*John Archibald Wheeler:* 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.

*Karl Marx:* Rejected teleological views of history, emphasizing material
conditions and class struggles as the drivers of historical change.

*Stephen Guerin:* Explored the idea of autocatalytic processes in the
universe's self-organization, indicating a teleological aspect to the
evolution of complexity and structure.

*Hans Jonas:* Argued that living organisms exhibit a fundamental
purposiveness and that life itself has an inherent teleological nature.

*Henri Poincaré:* Analyzed celestial mechanics and dynamical systems,
focusing on deterministic chaos and system behavior without teleological
implications.

*James Clerk Maxwell:* Developed equations describing electromagnetic
fields in a purely mathematical way, without implying any teleological
purpose.

*Jacques Derrida:* Emphasized the instability of meaning and critiqued
metaphysical systems that impose teleological structures on language and
thought.

*John Archibald Wheeler:* 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.

*Ludwig Wittgenstein:* Focused on the use of language and meaning derived
from its context, avoiding metaphysical explanations that imply purpose or
goal-directedness.

*Niels Bohr:* Emphasized probabilistic outcomes in quantum mechanics,
grounded in empirical observations and avoiding teleological
interpretations.

*Paul Dirac:* Developed quantum mechanics and quantum field theory with a
focus on mathematical formalisms, describing particle behavior without
implying purpose.

*Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:* Proposed an evolutionary teleology where the
universe and life progress toward greater complexity and consciousness,
culminating in the Omega Point.

*Richard Feynman:* 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.

*Stuart Kauffman:* Proposed that the universe and life self-organize
through autocatalytic processes, indicating a teleological aspect to the
development of complexity and order.

*Thomas Aquinas:* Integrated Aristotle's ideas into Christian theology,
emphasizing that everything in nature has a purpose designed by God.

*Werner Heisenberg:* Described fundamental limits on measurement and
predictability through the uncertainty principle, avoiding any notion of
purpose in physical systems.



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.

[image: image.png]
{
  "currentVector": {
    "deterministic": 0.1,
    "reductionism": 0.1,
    "empiricism": 0.1,
    "materialism": 0.1,
    "teleology": 1
  },
  "closestPhilosophers": [
    {
      "name": "Stephen Guerin",
      "cosineDistance": "0.00"
    },
    {
      "name": "Aristotle",
      "cosineDistance": "0.23"
    },
    {
      "name": "Plato",
      "cosineDistance": "0.25"
    },
    {
      "name": "David Bohm",
      "cosineDistance": "0.30"
    },
    {
      "name": "Ilya Prigogine",
      "cosineDistance": "0.32"
    }
  ]
}



On Tue, Aug 6, 2024 at 3:09 PM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Phellow Phriammers,
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> *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 must
> 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 develops in order
> to conserve angular momentum, [Italics by NST]  *
>
> 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.
>
> Nick
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru present
> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20240807/a0366578/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 71511 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20240807/a0366578/attachment.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 2315 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20240807/a0366578/attachment-0001.png>