Will,
--- On Tue, 7/15/08, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> And I would also say of evolved systems. My fingers purpose
> could
> equally well be said to be for picking ticks out of the
> hair of my kin
> or for touch typing. E.g. why do I keep my fingernails
> short, so that
> they do not impede my typing. The purpose of gut bacteria
> is to help
> me digest my food. The purpose of part of my brain is to do
> differentiation of functions, because I have .
Actually, I agree with that, good point. No matter what kind of system,
designed or evolved, it has no intrinsic purpose, only a purpose we interpret.
Purpose in other words is a property of the observer, not the observed.
> If you want to think of a good analogy for how emergent I
> want the
> system to be. Imagine someone came along to one of your
> life
> simulations and interfered with the simulation to give some
> more food
> to some of the entities that he liked the look of. This
> wouldn't be
> anything so crude as to specify the fitness or artificial
> breeding,
> but it would tilt the scales in the favour of entities that
> he liked
> all else being equal. Would this invalidate the whole
> simulation
> because he interfered and bought some of his purpose into
> it? If so, I
> don't see why.
No, it certainly wouldn't invalidate it. That is in fact what I would do to
nudge the simulation along, provide it with incentives for developing in
complexity, adding richness to the environment, creating problems to be solved.
> > So unless you believe that life was designed by God
> (in which case the purpose of life would lie in the mind of
> God), the purpose of the system is indeed intrinsic to the
> system itself.
>
> I think I would still say it didn't have a purpose. If
> I get your meaning right.
>
> Will
Yes, that's what I would say (now). Here's the clearest way I can put it:
purpose is a property of the observer - we interpret purpose in an observed
system, and different observers can have different interpretations. However, we
can sometimes talk about purpose in an objective sense in the observed system,
*as if* it had an objective purpose, but only to the extent that we can relate
it to the observed goals and behavior of the system (which, ultimately, are
also interpreted).
Which is another way of showing that when we examine concepts like goals,
purpose, and behavior, we ultimately come back to the fact that these are
mental constructions. They are our maps, not the territory.
Terren
-------------------------------------------
agi
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