[FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?
glen
gepropella at gmail.com
Thu Aug 8 09:44:59 EDT 2024
No. I interact with the bullshit generators enough at work. I don't feel the need to do so in my personal life, as well. But I appreciate the invitation.
On 8/7/24 19:25, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> 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
>
> Glen, will you play? Just for kicks!
>
>
>
> {
> "currentVector": {
> "deterministic": 0.5,
> "reductionism": 0.5,
> "empiricism": 1,
> "materialism": 1,
> "teleology": 0.01
> },
> "closestPhilosophers": [
> {
> "name": "Daniel Dennett",
> "cosineDistance": "0.04"
> },
> {
> "name": "Werner Heisenberg",
> "cosineDistance": "0.05"
> },
> {
> "name": "David Hume",
> "cosineDistance": "0.05"
> },
> {
> "name": "Niels Bohr",
> "cosineDistance": "0.05"
> },
> {
> "name": "Ludwig Wittgenstein",
> "cosineDistance": "0.05"
> }
> ]
> }
> Sent from my Dumb Phone
>
> On Aug 7, 2024, at 2:12 PM, Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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 <https://guerin.acequia.io/telosTensor.html>
> <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.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 <mailto: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.
>
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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