Autoteleology July 16, 2011
Posted by Michael in Uncategorized.add a comment
Autoteleology is the property of having a self-referential purpose: one’s existence is one’s goal. Usually “goal” refers to a mental state, because that’s the form that human goals take. But here I mean goal in a broader sense: a goal is a state of affairs that a thing — organism, cybernetic system, whatever — by its nature tends toward.
Autoteleology is a signature of life; living things are virtually always autoteleological,[1] while nonliving things very seldom are.[2] Darwinian theory offers a good explanation for this prevalence: effectual autoteleology will always be rewarded. But in truth Darwinian evolution owes more to autoteleology than vice versa. Evolution, and life itself, depends on autoteleology in its simplest and purest form — the drive to live. Without that, or without the intrinsically autoteleological goal of reproduction, evolution as described by Darwin could not occur. This point is one of three significant claims I make concerning autoteleology: autoteleology is more fundamental than evolution, and necessarily precedes it.
The second claim is that autoteleology is physical but universal — any physical system, regardless of the material that constitutes it or the forces that drive it, can be autoteleological, if it is so arranged that it tends to further its own existence.
The third claim is that autoteleology is antientropic — it counters the statistical probabilities that lead to entropy increase, diminishing that increase or even (locally at least) reversing it. The third claim is perhaps the boldest, so I will elaborate.
To begin with, note that the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy always increases, is not a fundamental physical law along the lines of Einstein’s laws of relativity or Newton’s laws of motion. Rather, it’s a statistical law, like Boltzmann’s law relating temperature and pressure in gases: if follows from the aggregate properties of large collections of randomly interacting molecules. If the interactions cease to be random, the law may lose its rationale.
Consider Maxwell’s demon. Maxwell’s demon is a mechanism imagined by James Clark Maxwell around 1870 that coaxes a non-random outcome from the random interaction of molecules through a simple but clever control system: a door between two containers of gas that the demon slides open only to allow fast molecules to pass in one direction slow molecules in the other. While the consensus among physicists is that Maxwell’s demon ultimately cannot defy the second law of thermodynamics (on one widely-held account, because of the unavoidable entropy cost of the information processing the demon must do), there is also a consensus that it might avoid the second law within certain limits of space and time — the piper must ultimately be paid, but later and somewhere else, not here and now.
Efficacious autoteleology, like Maxwell’s demon, seeks a local outcome that defies the second law of thermodynamics. It seeks to increase the probability of the system’s existence by means of some combination of persistence, growth and reproduction, each of which represents a maintainance or increase in local order. Moreover, this is accomplished by non-random behavior, non-random because it is driven by knowledge, whether that knowledge be engineered, evolved, acquired or computed.
Autoteleology raises many questions, including deep ontological questions. This should not be surprising, because autoteleology is among other things a form of self reference, and self reference is the source of some of the oldest and thorniest paradoxes in philosophy.
Most such paradoxes, however, are only logically paradoxical, while being physically unproblematic. There are no physical dillemas posed by a fellow who says, “Everything I say is a lie,” only logical ones. Autoteleology is different. Its implications are quite physical.
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Notes:
[1] The two exceptions being (1) when altruistic behavior provides significant genomic advantages (e.g. survival of genetically close relatives) and (2) when organisms capable of choosing their own goals (human beings) choose goals that are not autoteleological (such as the goal of defending one’s country). Other cases that might appear at first glance to be exceptions are not, when fully analyzed: symbiosis, for example, is a case of organisms supporting other organism’s continued existence as a means of pursuing their own continued existence.
[2] The only known exceptions being certain systems engineered by humans, such as satellites that maintain orbital stability by firing rockets when necessary.
