3 ms·
Fighting is a strong word. I wouldn’t say we are, but perhaps you want to fight about that? :) > Which is it, are they too complex, or too simple? Poison jars
by SllX 3y ago
Fighting is a strong word. I wouldn’t say we are, but perhaps you want to fight about that? :)
> Which is it, are they too complex, or too simple?
Poison jars are not simple. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, the basic idea is that you place a collection of venomous insects and animals within a jar together and they essentially kill each other; the theory being that the poison from all of them would be concentrated in the survivor which would then be fed upon by larvae of which the last surviving larvae would hold the more complex poison.
It’s an imperfect analogy, but to break it down: the jar in this analogy is Earth, and everything living on it is competitive in a way which results in a complex but violent system of interactions. The jar could also be a given ecosystem smaller than Earth. The poison is is the result of the struggle. It’s an old Chinese idea, if you want to look it up look up “Gu” with “poison jar” in your search terms. The actual use of the poisons aren’t any more interesting to me than rhino horns or Astrology but the form of production itself is interesting, but I digress.
This complex system of interactions is basically life as we know it, and while it is not always clear to us how an interaction causes a significant impact on us either specifically or generally, we do know that occasionally something seemingly unrelated to us does. Earth is a closed system full of biomass quite literally the world over.
> Whether a phenomenon is emergent, or the result of intention, depends on how we're thinking about it. It's a rhetorical choice, stylistic, not a matter of fact. It has to do with how you're telling the story, with whether its a character or the environment that does the thing.
These are mutually exclusive. Emergent phenomenon can be caused by the complex interactions of intentional acts, but the phenomenon themselves have no intent. It’s not merely a rhetorical choice, because ecosystems tell no stories, we can only ascribe stories to them. Or put another way, I’m anti-ing your entire conception that an ecosystem of any sort at all would take any kind of action against an individual species within it because that would require an ecosystem to have some form of intent. Even if you didn’t mean it literally, it is a turn of phrase which encourages in others to see something in the natural world that simply isn’t there.
That you can get bit by a tick that causes a beef allergy is interesting and the tick, the cause of the allergy and what exactly happens that is beneficial to the tick are interesting questions; but the only intent here is the tick taking a bite out of its food because it was hungry and it does what ticks do. Unfortunately this also causes a beef allergy in some people but that is neither here nor there from the perspective of the tick or the environment from which it came.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoI did a search but didn't look closely enough, so I had taken the jar comment to mean "mere container". Thanks for explaining. I'm not sure I like the metaphor because everything in the jar is doomed, there are no opportunities for the alternatives to arise that the jar must choose between and no circumstances where that choice then affects the survival of the jar. Because I recognize that many are uncomfortable with the idea that things without brains might make choices, I was trying to speak in a way that let "choice" be a stand in for a scenario where selective pressures on some group of species cause an adaptation in some other species which benefits the survival of the initial group. "Intent" being added by the storyteller (me) to help with the explanation, but without importing any claims about cognition. I was avoiding taking a stance about whether the ecosystem makes a choice in the more traditional sense, with cognition in the mix, because I don't have any evidence of that, and I probably never will. But you're taking a stronger position. You're saying that it absolutely does not have the capacity for intention. That strikes me as unknowable, how can you be sure? Presumably this: > because ecosystems tell no stories, we can only ascribe stories to them My dog tells no stores, but I think it's reasonable to talk about her intentions. When I'm playing a game against an adversarial AI and it attacks or defends, it's reasonable to talk about its intentions. We are the storytellers, we get to decide which part of our stories are the setting (emergent phenomena) and which parts are the characters (intentional action). They're mutually exclusive for any given story. But you can always tell a different story where the white blood cell is no longer an emergent phenomenon of the immune system but is instead a defender of the realm. As long as the stories are helping you make falsifiable predictions at the end of the day you're still going science. > Even if you didn’t mean it literally, it is a turn of phrase which encourages in others to see something in the natural world that simply isn’t there. As mentioned, I was avoiding taking a stance about it because panpsychism is out of scope here, but I did mean it literally. Science can't even establish an objective understanding of human intention. Some would say all phenomena are emergent phenomena and the notion that intention is a delusion. I'm not one of those people, but that's where stasis among cognitive neuroscientists is. We're nowhere near where we'd need to be to assert that a complex system does not have whatever it is that we do, we can't even be sure that we have it. That's why I want to defend my habit of treating things like ecosystems as if they have intentions, we can't know objectively either way, so it's fair game for creative explanation. It's also more fun.