4 ms·

If he's grounding his argument in an attempted revival of teleology (and it sounds like he is, via Aristotle's 'final cause')—the project sounds pretty doomed.

If he's grounding his argument in an attempted revival of teleology (and it sounds like he is, via Aristotle's 'final cause')—the project sounds pretty doomed. Of course if he does manage to pull that off well, it would be /very/ interesting. Considering it's paywalled, though, I won't be looking into myself.

danielam 10y ago
I'm not sure how you justify calling a "revival" of teleology doomed. It may have been discarded by the early moderns, but it was discarded without a genuine rebuttal ("new" metaphysical theories were simply proposed where teleology was dismissed). However, as Aristotelians and Thomists argue, efficient causality cannot be understood without final causality. Without final causality, it cannot be explained why certain causes produce certain effects and not others. Furthermore, biology is saturated with functional accounts of organisms. Dismissing these functional accounts as merely "useful fictions", as it is often done when the challenge is posed, undermines far more than the dismisser seems to realize, and raises more questions than it answers. In the case of information as it is discussed in the paper, Feser first discusses the technical sense of "information" which is exactly the one Shannon is concerned with, i.e., the syntactic sense. The semantic content is provided by the observer which is to say it is not inherent in the physical states that are being used to represent bits (which itself is observer dependent). Following this line of thought, Searles argues that computational states are assigned to physical states and are thus as artifactual and conventional as chairs. The computationalist naturalists cannot rebut Searle's charge without invoking notions which are broadly Aristotelian in nature. It's worth getting a hold of a copy of the paper if you can. In lieu of or in addition to the paper, some of his blog posts delve into related subjects that clarify these points. I also recommend Feser's books on related subjects which are known for their lucid prose and clear explanations. Good places to start are "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" and then "Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction". Aquinas was decidedly Aristotelian and the scholastic philosophers broadly speaking were heavily influenced by Aristotle.

danielam 10y ago

I'm not sure how you justify calling a "revival" of teleology doomed. It may have been discarded by the early moderns, but it was discarded without a genuine rebuttal ("new" metaphysical theories were simply proposed where teleology was dismissed). However, as Aristotelians and Thomists argue, efficient causality cannot be understood without final causality. Without final causality, it cannot be explained why certain causes produce certain effects and not others. Furthermore, biology is saturated with functional accounts of organisms. Dismissing these functional accounts as merely "useful fictions", as it is often done when the challenge is posed, undermines far more than the dismisser seems to realize, and raises more questions than it answers. In the case of information as it is discussed in the paper, Feser first discusses the technical sense of "information" which is exactly the one Shannon is concerned with, i.e., the syntactic sense. The semantic content is provided by the observer which is to say it is not inherent in the physical states that are being used to represent bits (which itself is observer dependent). Following this line of thought, Searles argues that computational states are assigned to physical states and are thus as artifactual and conventional as chairs. The computationalist naturalists cannot rebut Searle's charge without invoking notions which are broadly Aristotelian in nature. It's worth getting a hold of a copy of the paper if you can. In lieu of or in addition to the paper, some of his blog posts delve into related subjects that clarify these points. I also recommend Feser's books on related subjects which are known for their lucid prose and clear explanations. Good places to start are "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" and then "Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction". Aquinas was decidedly Aristotelian and the scholastic philosophers broadly speaking were heavily influenced by Aristotle.