Russ,
In his article, The Companion in Bird's Life, Konrad Lorenz took after
MacDougall for his failure to realize that while behavior is directed, and
behavior has a function, it is never the function toward which behvior is
directed. W Powers makes a very similar point in his analysis of control
systems, although he is on your side concerning mind, I think.
Please take a look at Lorenz's law in the following publication.
http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/Texts/1985-1989/Ethology_and_the_birth_of_comparative_telenomy.pdf
At the time, I was using the word purpose for what I think you have in mind
when you use the word intention. I think there are many classic examples of the
kind of thing you are looking described in the article. The bibliography
sucks. I am sorry.
I have written quite a lot about intentionality. As you may know, it has two
quite distinct (but related) meanings, one referring to the object of directed
action, and the other to a more technical philosophical meaning which you can
find referred to in
http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/Texts/2000-2005/Intentionality_is_the_mark.pdf
Pretty much all of my work is up in the website
http://home.earthlink.net/~nthompson/naturaldesigns
The lowest level is an abstract of each of the cited papers in Published Work.
If you click on the abstract, the entire paper should down load. For some
reason I never bothered to explain that in the site. One of these days.....
Now you know everything I know.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Russ Abbott
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Sent: 9/9/2009 9:23:29 PM
Subject: Intention (was emergence seminar)
I think we're asking the same question. I want people to ask themselves why
they are asking about emergence. What is it that brings them to that point.
Isn't that what you're saying?
In any event, I have read EVO-DEVO. Very good book -- as are his other books.
On a completely different subject, although this may be a bit off the track of
your experience as a research scientist, I wonder if you can offer some insight
and instinct and intention. I've been thinking lately about the line between
them.
Clearly some animal behavior is robotic instinct. (I know I've heard of some
good examples of cases in which you interrupt an insect that looks like it is
building a nest and put it down a few inches away, and it starts all over again
-- or something like that. The goose egg behavior on this page is another
example. I'm surprised that I haven't been able to find more.)
And clearly (at least to those of us who are willing to attribute intention to
animals) some animal behavior is intentional. There were some recent
experiments in which chimps(?) had to figure out that they could retrieve a
stick from a container which they could then use to retrieve a reward. This is
new, innovative behavior, not a learned trick.
So my question is, have biologists identified where one sort of behavior
becomes the other -- or probably better, where the lowest level intentional
behavior has been observed?
-- Russ
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 7:55 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi, Russ,
It's my least favorite of the seven questions. To me, the question my be
recast as, "What light's your wick in the world to which the label emergence
has been attached.?" I know you wouldn't know if from my posts on Friam but I
spent most of my career working as a research scientist on forms of
communication ... bird song, babies cries, whining, for instance. As a dyed in
the wool materialist, I have always been fascinated by the question of how
things come into being and why they have come to take the form that they do.
Rather than using the question to build a wall around emergence, I would hope
that we will use it to develop a list of all the things labeled emergent that
have challenged the imagination of group members.
Have you read Sean Carroll's book on EVO DEVO? For years I sat in a psychology
department listening to sterile arguments concerning nature and nurture. And
now, by god, we know how it works, and neither nature nor nurture -- in the
sense that their protagonists understood them -- had anything to do with it. I
am so glad that I lived to learn how nature makes an organism.
nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Russ Abbott
To: [email protected];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
Group
Sent: 9/9/2009 6:20:13 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Emergence Seminar
Since I won't be there, let me suggest a pre-requisite activity.
Discuss why do you (or anyone else) want to define emergence?
In saying that I'm not suggesting that emergence should not be defined --
although I now think that it is unfortunate that the word has become so widely
used. What I want to do is to prompt you to talk about what it is that leads
you to want to define emergence in the first place. It seems to me that it's
impossible even to begin to answer the questions listed below until one has
developed for oneself an intuitive idea about what it is that one wants the
word emergence to capture. That's where I would suggest you start: what is your
possibly vague sense of the sorts of things you want the word emergence to
refer to. Once you have clarified that for yourself I think the questions below
will be easier to deal with -- as will the papers in the book.
-- Russ
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]>
wrote:
All,
The emergence seminar, such as it is, will have its first meeting this thursday
(tomorrow) at Downtown Subcription (which is at Garcia and Agua Fria). I
suggest that we devote the seminar, at least in its early stages, to the
collection, EMERGENCE. Why a collection? Why a seminar? Because, as I keep
saying (sorry), I want to articulate the different views on the subject. One
thing I noticed about academics is their desire to exclude ways of thinking
from discussions. So academics tend to scoff. I think the mark of a truly
educated (smart, knowledgeable) person is the ability to hold more than one
idea in his or her head at once..... to compare and contrast. Bedau and
Humphreys, in their introduction, invite us to engage in this kind of analysis
by bearing in mind a set of seven questions, as we read each of the authors.
These are:
1. How should emergence be defined? (by reference to irreducibility,
unpredictability, ontological novelty, conceptual novelty, and.or supvenience
(whatever that is?)
2. What can be emergent: properties, substances, processes, phenomena,
patterns laws, or something else?
3. What is the scope of actual emergent phenomena? (Is emergence a rare
phenomenon, or broadly distributed in physics and biology as well as in
psychology?)
4. Is emergence an objective feature of the world, or is it merely in the eye
of the beholder.
5. Should emergence be viewed as static and synchronic, or as dynamic and
diachronic, or are both possible?
6. Does emergence imply or require the existence of new levels of phenomena
with their new causes and effects?
7. In what ways are emergent phenomena autonomous from their emergent bases?
Tomorrow, as a warm up; it would be interesting to see what preconceptions we
hold on these questions.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology an d Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
