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> All of the extinct species. The fact the human eye has a blind spot whereas the squid eye does not. The fact cancer is possible. If I had a biology textbook c

> All of the extinct species. The fact the human eye has a blind spot whereas the squid eye does not. The fact cancer is possible. If I had a biology textbook closer to hand, I could go on at length. Those examples don't prove much, they just demonstrate that any goal there could be is not aligned with the fate of those species. You seem to be arguing against the assumption that teleology would imply some sort of perfection (for some somewhat arbitrary definition of perfection) The truth is that there is an epistemological problem here. For all we know, the universe was created by Mr. X who _wants_ us to think there is no teleology. Deception could be the very goal. There is absolutely no way for us to verify this, so there is also no reason to state categorically that there is no teleology. You could make an analogy with a (pseudo) random number generator. How do you distinguish between a real and a pseodo RNG? You can't, really. There are some statistical tests. But if someone is determined to fool you, they can just feed you X amount of GBs of data from a true random source, and only then start to feed you an infinite amount of zeroes. I'm of course not defending the idea of teleology, just saying that epistemologically speaking, we have no basis for ruling it out nor accepting it.

SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
> Those examples don't prove much, they just demonstrate that any goal there could be is not aligned with the fate of those species. And the simplest explanation is that there is no goal at all. Claiming otherwise is an extraordinary claim, and you know what they say about those.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic, there is no compelling philosophical argument why it should hold. Philosophers of science are still debating whether it is a valid heuristic; meanwhile, scientists don't invoke it all that much, I believe. They care about whether an explanation is right, not simple.
  - Retric 14y ago
    All philosophical arguments are meaningless. Five happy Moon's sang the Macarena. Truth is beauty. There is nothing grammatically wrong with those sentences, there is no way to philosophically disprove them, and they have nothing to do with the physical world around us. PS: I am not saying philosophy is useless, just it's a search for something other than meaning... perhaps truth. ;)
    - andreasvc 14y ago
      Disregarding the fact that there actually _was_ something grammatically wrong with that sentence, I think that is a misconception of philosophy. It's not supposed to prove or disprove much (except in certain areas dedicated to logic perhaps). I don't see philosophical arguments as meaningless, and to claim so is to make a very philosophical claim ... What is meaning anyway? I don't think anybody really knows the answer to that. But perhaps you meant to say that these arguments won't lead to any concrete results, and there I'd have to agree with you.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
    > The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic. ... They care about whether an explanation is right, not simple. I disagree entirely. Given two explanations that are "right" in that they explain the observations, and one is very simple, and the other involves vast mysterious unknowns, I would say that there is a strong philosophical argument in favour of the simple explanation. Especially when complex suppositions like a "goal" of evolution have the characteristics that people are drawn to them for emotional reasons, they raise more questions than they answer.
    - andreasvc 14y ago
      With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct. The preference for simple explanations is only a bias for lack of a better criterion to choose; but typically there are lots of more substantive reasons why one explanation is better than the other (e.g., by looking at how it ties in with other theories). The idea of simplicity is quite arbitrary. In machine learning there is an analogue in Minimum Description Length learning. It turns out that there the kind of representation is crucial; a hypothesis can be minimal under one representation, but not the other; ergo, what is "simple" is not a straightforward question, and therefore the heuristic is somewhat arbitrary. A "goal" to evolution may sound complex to you, but from an information theoretic perspective, the opposite, namely actual, complete randomness, is the most complex thing possible ... The whole point of this is: we don't really know, the best we can say is "I won't assume things I don't have evidence for." Lastly, your "raise more questions than they answer" is the hallmark of philosophical problems ...
derleth 14y ago
> epistemologically speaking, we have no basis for ruling it out nor accepting it So we provisionally rule it out, like how I provisionally rule out the possibility I'm the current king of the Royal Kingdom of Thanatopsis.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  That's a bit of a straw man. I could expect some kind of evidence for you being a king, whereas a goal behind the universe or evolution is a metaphysical matter. But yeah, we rule it out provisionally.
rcthompson 14y ago
We do have a basis for rejecting the hypothesis that there is an intelligence "behind the scenes" that is imitating a non-teleological process. It totally untestable and does not make useful predictions about the world, so you can't do anything with it scientifically. All you can do is say "hey, it could be true" and that's the end of the conversation. Science is not about saying which hypotheses could possibly be true, it is about determining which hypotheses are likely to be true given the evidence and which are unlikely, and where possible quantifying that likeliness (via statistics). A hypothesis that can neither be supported nor refuted by any empirical evidence has no place in science. This isn't to say that we rule such a hypothesis out as impossible, but just that science has nothing useful to say on such a hypothesis. To go to your analogy of determining whether something is a source of random numbers, of course if you only make your decision based on the first 10 million numbers you cannot distinguish between a true RNG and a source that provides 10 million random numbers and then all zeros. Bringing that analogy back to the hypothetical intelligence guiding the universe, if you only look at the first 13 billion years or so (current best estimate of the age of the universe), you can't tell the difference between a truly non-teleological universe and a universe guided by an intelligence that intentionally makes the universe act like a non-teleological one for the first 13 billion years and then starts doing something totally different (e.g. causes a scientifically unexplainable apocalypse in 2012). But what's the point of saying this? You're effectively saying that absolutely anything could happen at any time, because there aren't really any fundamental laws, just the will of a hidden intelligence that can do whatever it wants to whenever it wants to. In summary, read this comic and replace "string theory" with "hidden intelligence guiding the universe": http://xkcd.com/171/ http://xkcd.com/171/

SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago

> Those examples don't prove much, they just demonstrate that any goal there could be is not aligned with the fate of those species. And the simplest explanation is that there is no goal at all. Claiming otherwise is an extraordinary claim, and you know what they say about those.

andreasvc 14y ago
The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic, there is no compelling philosophical argument why it should hold. Philosophers of science are still debating whether it is a valid heuristic; meanwhile, scientists don't invoke it all that much, I believe. They care about whether an explanation is right, not simple.
- Retric 14y ago
  All philosophical arguments are meaningless. Five happy Moon's sang the Macarena. Truth is beauty. There is nothing grammatically wrong with those sentences, there is no way to philosophically disprove them, and they have nothing to do with the physical world around us. PS: I am not saying philosophy is useless, just it's a search for something other than meaning... perhaps truth. ;)
  - andreasvc 14y ago
    Disregarding the fact that there actually _was_ something grammatically wrong with that sentence, I think that is a misconception of philosophy. It's not supposed to prove or disprove much (except in certain areas dedicated to logic perhaps). I don't see philosophical arguments as meaningless, and to claim so is to make a very philosophical claim ... What is meaning anyway? I don't think anybody really knows the answer to that. But perhaps you meant to say that these arguments won't lead to any concrete results, and there I'd have to agree with you.
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
  > The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic. ... They care about whether an explanation is right, not simple. I disagree entirely. Given two explanations that are "right" in that they explain the observations, and one is very simple, and the other involves vast mysterious unknowns, I would say that there is a strong philosophical argument in favour of the simple explanation. Especially when complex suppositions like a "goal" of evolution have the characteristics that people are drawn to them for emotional reasons, they raise more questions than they answer.
  - andreasvc 14y ago
    With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct. The preference for simple explanations is only a bias for lack of a better criterion to choose; but typically there are lots of more substantive reasons why one explanation is better than the other (e.g., by looking at how it ties in with other theories). The idea of simplicity is quite arbitrary. In machine learning there is an analogue in Minimum Description Length learning. It turns out that there the kind of representation is crucial; a hypothesis can be minimal under one representation, but not the other; ergo, what is "simple" is not a straightforward question, and therefore the heuristic is somewhat arbitrary. A "goal" to evolution may sound complex to you, but from an information theoretic perspective, the opposite, namely actual, complete randomness, is the most complex thing possible ... The whole point of this is: we don't really know, the best we can say is "I won't assume things I don't have evidence for." Lastly, your "raise more questions than they answer" is the hallmark of philosophical problems ...

derleth 14y ago

> epistemologically speaking, we have no basis for ruling it out nor accepting it So we provisionally rule it out, like how I provisionally rule out the possibility I'm the current king of the Royal Kingdom of Thanatopsis.

andreasvc 14y ago
That's a bit of a straw man. I could expect some kind of evidence for you being a king, whereas a goal behind the universe or evolution is a metaphysical matter. But yeah, we rule it out provisionally.

rcthompson 14y ago

We do have a basis for rejecting the hypothesis that there is an intelligence "behind the scenes" that is imitating a non-teleological process. It totally untestable and does not make useful predictions about the world, so you can't do anything with it scientifically. All you can do is say "hey, it could be true" and that's the end of the conversation. Science is not about saying which hypotheses could possibly be true, it is about determining which hypotheses are likely to be true given the evidence and which are unlikely, and where possible quantifying that likeliness (via statistics). A hypothesis that can neither be supported nor refuted by any empirical evidence has no place in science. This isn't to say that we rule such a hypothesis out as impossible, but just that science has nothing useful to say on such a hypothesis. To go to your analogy of determining whether something is a source of random numbers, of course if you only make your decision based on the first 10 million numbers you cannot distinguish between a true RNG and a source that provides 10 million random numbers and then all zeros. Bringing that analogy back to the hypothetical intelligence guiding the universe, if you only look at the first 13 billion years or so (current best estimate of the age of the universe), you can't tell the difference between a truly non-teleological universe and a universe guided by an intelligence that intentionally makes the universe act like a non-teleological one for the first 13 billion years and then starts doing something totally different (e.g. causes a scientifically unexplainable apocalypse in 2012). But what's the point of saying this? You're effectively saying that absolutely anything could happen at any time, because there aren't really any fundamental laws, just the will of a hidden intelligence that can do whatever it wants to whenever it wants to. In summary, read this comic and replace "string theory" with "hidden intelligence guiding the universe": http://xkcd.com/171/ http://xkcd.com/171/