E. Coli vs. Linux (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, May 24, 2010, 00:23 (5297 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: What I'm attempting here...is to cast doubt on the idea that life *had* to have been designed. Our economy wasn't designed: in fact, direct design tends to destroy it. (This goes for both governments, uncouth businessmen, and cartels.) Generally: a nation prospers the more it allows individual actors free rein to use its resources.
> 
> I think any disagreement here is due to a different view of what constitutes design. Perhaps we need to distinguish more clearly between design and teleology.
> -I don't think this is possible. The word "design" connotes if not denotes a teleology. You don't design something to have no purpose. While it is true that the object may have no idea that it has a purpose, the designer still had a goal in mind: a word that is interchangeable with teleology. -> You want me to "abandon the notion of human interference and simply go back to when governments didn't exist and it was just people trading things. There was no "invention" of the economy. It is a word that is simply applied to describe what it is that people do to get what they need." But people doing something = human interference. Every single transaction is the result of a conscious decision. When a human first offered to give another human a chunk of meat in exchange for a fur coat, he did so with full knowledge of what he was doing. What follows is a process of evolution, leading eventually to the complexities of whole economic systems ... but every single stage of that evolution has been the result of conscious decisions, although the overall systems were not planned. Each decision, then, is a design, but beyond each individual goal there is no teleology leading to a system. That's why I said your analogy would only hold up if you believed that individual cells also took conscious decisions to make a leg, eye, backbone, penis, brain etc. My personal interpretation of evolution is the same as yours: no teleology ... which means that life was not "designed" in the sense of it being orientated towards a particular system or goal. But the first transaction was designed by its participants (i.e. it happened because two men deliberately chose to perform an action), and all subsequent transactions have been the result of intelligent "interference", so I would argue that while there is no "direct" design of the overall economy/evolution, your analogy strengthens the case for "direct" design of the original mechanisms that gave rise to them. 
> -I wasn't being abstract enough. Though I disagree that each of these transactions you discuss here are a "design," perhaps this should be better. -Economic ideas play in ecological systems anytime even molecules interact. (depending on the system of course) It's not limited to human transactions... I was trying to suggest this when I discussed ecology. -Unless you're ascribing deeper intelligence or decision-making skills to to molecules. -As for the rest, I still can't get past the point that a design has a purpose. If we have no purpose (as it is strongly suggested) I have a difficult time de-linking teleology from design. I don't get it.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"