I haven't snipped here, because the context is important, and the last
post was a while back. Apologies to those who couldn't care less...

 wrote:

> > From: john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins)
> > The mistake is to infer from our use of intentional metaphors that
> > anything we can describe in that way must be intentional (which is what
> > we have when we infer from the intentionality of a Shannon-designed
> > system to any other natural system that any Shannonesque system must be
> > intentional also). It is simply projection.
> 
> Intention in the sense of a conscious entity deliberately wishing it
> and contriving it to be the way wished, is not observable, so the
> presense or absense of that kind of intention is metaphysical,
> unscientific, not worth discussing here. It doesn't make any difference
> whether some design is planned by a conscious entity, or merely
> survived best among alternatives because it works best in practice for
> assuring the fecundity and survival of the design (or meta-design, the
> program/genome that causes the actual design). The key thing is whether
> there's a working design that arranges to communicate information
> effectively, then to analyze whether that design uses analog or digital
> engineering practices. If it is close to a linear amplifier, with
> meaningful data values across most of the range of near-linear
> performance, where the difference between two different data values is
> significant rougly proportional to the amount of difference, then it's
> analog. If it's nonlinear to the point of forcing data to reside in a
> fixed number of potential wells (attractors), and all values within any
> such well are treated essentially as the same, while values in
> different wells are treated as different, then it's digital. The DNA
> system for carrying genetic information through the generations, and
> for transcribing that information to proteins etc., is clearly digital
> in design, although some modifications of it such as balance in two
> reading frames of single gene, and many other regulatory mechanisms,
> seem to be analog in design.
> 
> > "Noise" in one formalisation can be a
"signal" in another - consider
> > using a different frequency of a TV signal to carry, say, the stock
> > reports. The picture may be degraded by that interference, and be noise
> > relative to the TV signal. What is noise depends on the uses made by
> > humans, or on descriptions of processes made by humans.
> 
> No, what is noise vs. signal depends on the design of the actual system
> being used, not on how humans interpret it. Even before humans knew DNA
> existed, the DNA system was already digital in design, and damage to
> DNA was noise in that system. As for your multiple TV messages: Two
> different signal systems are running in parallel, both designed the way
> they are, one analog and one digital in old systems with stock ticker
> coded during vertical refresh, both digital in new digital-TV systems.
> If you don't happen to be looking at the other signal, it doesn't mean
> it's inherently noise, although it may be noise to your purpose if
> there's noticeable cross-talk. (But in the new digital systems, there's
> zero cross-talk between different signals within a single "channel".)
> 
> As for your remarks about goal-directed processes in biology: A design
> (arrived at by natural selection) may quite deliberately seek a goal,
> without any metaphysical consciousness or intelligence or whatever we
> might imagine. It's simply a goal-directed process, nothing more. It
> doesn't plan to seek the goal, it just does what it does, which is to
> do specific things designed (selected for) to best go toward that goal.
> The goal of one mechanism in a cell, for example, is to replicate DNA,
> and it accomplishes that goal quite nicely most of the time, often
> enough to assure survival of that genome nearly as-is.
> 
> > By being able to refer to the state-maintaining processes as
> > teleomatic, and where necessary as teleonomic, without implications
> > of agency or purpose, allows us to make clear distinctions between
> > different kinds functional systems without anthropomorphic confusion
> > such as trailed the publication of Dawkins' 1977."
> 
> Are we in agreement? Such a process is seeking a goal, not with any
> kind of consciousness such as awareness of the goal in some sort of
> thought process, merely as an adaptive way to seek that goal, merely as
> survival of any program that seeks that goal and non-survival of
> alternative programs that don't seek that goal, if the particular goal
> benefits longterm survival of the program in the genome? So we can say
> such-and-such creature is seeking such-and-such goal, with the
> understanding or agreement we're not talking about conscious
> intelligent planning?

Of course. I think that "design" is an exemplar term based on that with
which we (humans) are most familiar, but that rather than projecting
design into the non-agency world, in fact design is just a particular
instance of the broader class of dynamics of which natural selection in
biology is a subset.

The problem is that "design" is really something we only *think* we have
a handle on. But anyone who has done any actual design, of working
systems or aesthetic patterns, knows that most of it is trial, error
elimination, and retention of successful outcomes, just like natural
selection. Unfortunately, those who think design is a magical thing
often failt o see that this is the process by which an engineer or
artist is able to model a system or problem, because that trial and
error elimination occurred in the past, with others, and that they are
the heirs, almost literally, to the selective retention. Ins hort, they
are educated.

But using that term in evolution imports implications of teleology,
whether we take care to avoid the implications or not. *Lots* of error
comes form taking that metaphor literally, based on a false
understanding of human design.

The idea that teleology is a *subset* of teleonomy, and that of
teleomatics, is the exact inverse of the traditional "default" or
"naive" view, and it is rather hard for the nonspecialist to conceive.
So I prefer to use "quasidesign" for teleonomic behaviours, and simply
talk about "law-governed" dynamics for teleomatics. "Design" is
something that truly *is* teleological (and then we have to ask, how is
it that this is the telos/goal, and how is it that the system - the
human in most cases - knows how to achieve it? Both questions are, of
course, amenable to teleonomic explanations in terms of natural
selection and its cultural analogues).
> 
> > The use of the term "design" is yet another metaphor. Evolution
> > doesn't design things - it makes things look to systems that do
> > recognise design - us - as if they were designed. Dawkins calls this
> > designoids, I call it "quasidesign" (where "qua
si" means "as if" in
> > Latin). Selection doesn't design - it quasidesigns.
> 
> The Darwin method of design is mutation to make new designs at random
> plus raw fecundity greater than one to make enough copies to exhaust
> available resources plus natural selection to weed out the poor designs
> leaving only the best of the lot. It's one method of design. Lots of
> humans use somewhat the same method, even if the mutations are less
> random. For example a business will produce several new products and
> see which ones sell the most, and eliminate the ones that don't sell
> much, and keep the ones that do. If you want to call the process, the
> verb, "quasidesign" instead of "design", that's
fine with me. But the
> result of the process, or of more engineering-style design, is the
> noun, a design, and the noun is properly a design in both cases. If you
> don't like the noun "a design" to mean a blueprint or other algorithm
> for making something or performing a task toward a goal, perhaps we can
> call it "a method" or "a program" or "an
algorithm" etc. which is
> totally neutral as to the way the blueprint was arrived at (truly
> designed or merely selected among alternatives)?
> 
> The verb "to (quasi)design" has three main versions (and lots of gray
> between the three):
> - Figure out in your head how to do something, try it, when it fails
> figure out what went wrong and fix just the specific thing that you can
> see went wrong with the failure mode strongly affecting your re-design,
> repeat until you can see no further obvious way to make it work better.
> - Figure out in your head how to do something, try it, when it fails
> start from scratch, perhaps with a new design team, or with some
> alternate idea that was dismissed at first, repeat trials until you
> happen upon something that works well enough.
> - Try totally random variations of some earlier idea, testing to see
> which work best, eliminating the ones that don't work well at all,
> replicating and further varying any that work best, never stop
> experimenting so long as surplus resources area available.
> 
> The first version is clearly entitled to be called "to design", maybe.
> The third version is how natural selection works, "to quasidesign".
> The second version is how humans do it much of the time, and I'm not
> sure whether it qualifies as "to design" or not.

I have my own preferences, given above.
> 
> > And the recognition of that design lies totally in our pattern
> > recognition capacities.
> 
> Ah, I see the fallacy in your logic: You've suddenly switched the word
> "design" from a verb to a noun from the previous sentence to that. The
> phrase "that design" is not grammatically correct if
"design" is a
> verb, only if it's a noun. The verb, the method by which that was
> obtained, may be the act of quasidesigning, but the result of that
> method, the thing which was obtained, was a design, for example a wing
> design, or a metabolism design, or a DNA-replication design, etc.
> (replace "design" by "method" or
"algorithm" if you wish).

You really want to make a semantic argument here? This is a matter of
real systems and what they do, not of whether I have verbed nouns, or
nominalised verbs.

If you prefer, replace "that design" with "the outcomes of that design
process"...
> 
> > And *we* evolved to both design and recognise design.
> 
> Now you're *really* confusing word usage" The first
"design" in that
> sentence, in the phrase "to ... design", is clearly a verb. But the
> second is unclear. Is "design" an adjective, a quality, there? We
> recognize the quality of something being design(y), we recognize the
> "design" in something? But is it the process, or the result, that we
> recognize as design(y)? Is it a designy process or a designy result we
> recognize? Do recognize the result as having good design, or do we
> recognize the process to reach it as having undergone the engineering
> discipline of design? When we observe biological design, we can't
> directly see the process by which it was obtained, but we can clearly
> see the result, nicely functional bird wings, highly accurate DNA
> replication, etc. I think it's clear that that second use of "design"
> must be a noun to be true to fact, what we actually recognize in
> nature. Some people, mostly IDers (proponents of Intelligent Design),
> upon seeing a good design, a well-functioning device, will jump to the
> conclusion that the process to obtain it must have been true designing
> in the engineering sense, rather than NS doing its "quasidesigning"
> process.
> 
> If you insist we can recognize design as a verb, I say you are grossly
> mistaken. Most people can be easily fooled, upon seeing a good design
> (noun), a nicely working device, into mistakenly believing that it must
> have been (consciously) (intelligently) designed (verb), and have
> difficulty accepting that it (noun) was merely the survivor (noun) of a
> huge experiment (verb) where any design (noun) that didn't work was
> flushed (verb) and only the best accidental design (noun) survived
> (verb). (Note the actual parts of speech above don't match
> grammatically, but instead are written to match the usage of
> (quasi/intelligent)design-process (verb) and design-result (noun) I'm
> distinguishing. If you wish, replace "(verb)" by
"(process)" and
> "(noun)" by "(result)" throughout that paragraph.

Oh, Robert, really. It is pretty obvious that I am referring to a
process and an outcome here. Parts of speech matter only when they
conceal a logical fallacy. Can you point to the one I am committing here
in my admittedly loose terminology? If you like, Use the ones defined by
Locke in _Essay on Human Understanding_, although I have many other
fallacy taxonomies in my library.
> 
> > I have larger ambitions than that. I think that intentional language
> > ought to be restricted to systems that are actually capable of having
> > intentions. So I was to drop "function" as well as
"goal", "purpose" and
> > "design" from descriptions of the natural world, and
realise that these
> > intentional aspects of things actually reflect the nature of our models
> > rather than the nature of the modeled things (unless we are dealing with
> > intentional systems, like us).
> 
> I have a counter ambition. We cannot be sure *any* system whatsoever,
> even our own brains, truly have volition. If we drop such language from
> natural systems, in honesty we must drop all those words from our
> language totally. I would prefer we accept that volition is
> metaphysical, and simply define the words in a functional rather than
> metaphysical way, like the way behaviourist psychologists describe what
> they observe. ...

If you want to be such a hard-assed behaviorist, fine - I think that
kind of reductionist behavioriam is the science of denying the bleeding
obvious, myself. We do have intentions, and we do have volition (and
they can be given an increasingly sophisticated neurological account).
That is not really the issue - it is whether or not that terms and
connotations that we apply to *them* are to be usefully used of systems
that are not exemplary, such as natural selection. It is my experience
that doing this may make it easier to describe NS to novices, but that
it imports category mistakes because we ascribe intentions and narrative
structures to processes that really don't have them.

Human intentions may be the results of NS processes (and they surely
are), but they do, and most other NS processes don't, have narrative
structure. The worst categorial error one can make is to think that what
we do heuristically must be a fact of the things we learn *about*.
Aristotle made that error; it's time to drop it.
-- 
John S Wilkins PhD - www.wilkins.id.au
  a little emptier, a little spent
  as always by that quiver in the self,
  subjugated, yes, and obedient.  -- Seamus Heaney
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