Teleology & evolution: Stephen Talbott's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 06, 2016, 13:12 (3092 days ago) @ David Turell

Thank you for this superb analysis of the different points we have been discussing for so long. I have selected a few more quotes which could scarcely offer a clearer case for the intelligent cell and for the argument that organisms intentionally pursue their own individual purposes. (Although he mentions "something new", he hasn't really got onto evolutionary innovations yet.) These points need to be considered as a whole to get the full picture. To start with, I see the third essay is entitled ‘The Intentional Organism', which already suggests the above. -“A rather odd urgency sounds through all this earnest insistence that, while organisms certainly look as if they possessed intelligent agency, we should not be so foolish as to be compelled by the evidence of our own eyes.”-I don't suppose you are too keen on this observation, after your fifty years of dogmatic insistence that cells only look as if they are intelligent.-“In reality, the organism's life is a continual “self-redesigning” — or, better, a self-expressing, or self-transforming. Its parts are not assembled once for all; they are grown on the spot during development, so that the functional unity of the organism — the way its parts play together, and even what the parts are — obviously must be changing all along the way.”-If we bear in mind that organisms are communities of cells, it is clear that cell communities are continually cooperating (play together) to produce all the processes that accompany the colossal range of behaviour that goes to make up an organism's life, but please note:-“Biologists speak incessantly of mechanisms and of machine-like or programmed activity in organisms. But this is empty rhetoric. No one has ever pointed to a computer-like program in DNA, or in a cell, or in any larger structure. Nor has anyone shown us any physical machinery for executing such program instructions.”-If cell communities are not programmed, how do they take their decisions if not with their own intelligence? However, in partial defence of David's dogmatism, I would still suggest that once an organ like the liver or kidney has been invented, the cell communities perform their tasks more or less automatically, i.e. without “thought”, until they are confronted with problems. I've never worked in a factory, but I suspect that in the days before automation, workers would perform their allotted tasks in the same way. I don't know Talbott's view on this.
 
“As we have seen, the life of the organism is itself the designing power. Its agency is immanent in its own being, and is somehow expressed at the very roots of material causation. It brings forth this or that kind of growth with no need for the artifice of an alien hand arbitrarily intervening to arrange parts and causal relations this way or that. The choreographing is brought about, it would appear, from that same depth of reality where the causal forces themselves arise, not from “outside”.-If the agency is immanent in its own being, we have an autonomous inventive mechanism. I'd be interested to know just what he is referring to with his “alien hand”, but once an autonomous inventive mechanism is in place, by definition it won't need to be dabbled with. (But see below re source.) The only “outside” causal forces would then be environmental conditions, which either demand or allow change. -“At the same time, we ourselves possess varieties of conscious activity that other organisms do not. When I refer to the organism's intelligent agency, or its purposiveness, or its directed coordination of means to serve particular ends, I do not imply anything equivalent to our own conscious purposing or planning. But neither do I suggest something inferior to our particular sort of wisdom and power of action. If anything, we must consider organic life — for example, the life of our cells — to be an expression of a higher sort of intelligence and intention than we ourselves can yet imagine consciously achieving in the technological realm.”-Talbott has obviously encountered his own equivalent of a David Turell! The intelligence of organisms (i.e. cell communities) is not to be equated with human consciousness.
 
“It needs adding, finally, that our recognition of intelligent and intentional expressions does not require us to understand everything about their source. The existence of intelligence does not oblige us to say where that intelligence comes from." -I can't find any indication of Talbott's beliefs on Google, but I suspect from his moderate, balanced, carefully reasoned tone that he is an agnostic! (You may have told us already, David, but I can't remember.) Thank you again for this essay. I'm looking forward to the next two.