Abstract
How shall we understand apparently teleological systems? What explains their persistence (returning to past trajectories following errors) and their plasticity (finding the same trajectory from different starting points)? Here I argue that all seemingly goal-directed systems—e.g., a food-seeking organism, human-made devices like thermostats and torpedoes, biological development, human goal seeking, and the evolutionary process itself—share a common organization. Specifically, they consist of an entity that moves within a larger containing structure, one that directs its behavior in a general way without precisely determining it. If so, then teleology lies within the domain of the theory of compositional hierarchies.
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Notes
The present discussion is agnostic about what has been called “downward causation,” more specifically about whether higher-level explanations are reducible, either in principle or in fact, to lower-level ones. I coined a new term, upper directedness, in part to distance this discussion from that one.
Notice that the way we may best understand the causation may vary with perspectival scale. If we took the whole balloon to be the focal entity, rather than atom 42, and considered the collision between two balloons, the cause of movement in each balloon would be lateral, like that between billiard balls. At the same time, and without contradiction, the movement of each atom within the balloons would be partly upper directed.
Importantly, the relationship of interest here is only that between structure and contained entity, not movement in some larger frame of reference. It does not matter, for example, that both balloon and atom 42 are moving at 65,000 miles per hour around the sun. What matters is that from the perspective of atom 42, the balloon as a whole is moving quite slowly.
It may be that in organisms, unlike machine, pure lateral causation is rare in that most parts are to some degree activated and directed by enveloping fields of various kinds. Consistent with the present view, I am tempted to say that this is what makes organisms so teleology rich and machines so teleology poor.
It might seem that certain coordinated behaviors in organisms—perhaps certain courtship displays—are also counterexamples, in that they appear to be both laterally directed and teleological. They seem laterally directed in that each individual appears to be programmed with an exhaustive set of responses to the likely behavior of a conspecific, with no upper structure providing direction. If that is right, the question then arises whether they are teleological. If the two organisms are thinking and motivated animals, then there is certainly a teleological component to their behavior as individuals. (See discussion of human motivation below.) But the issue here is whether their joint behavior, the behavior of the pair considered as a unit, meets the requirements for teleology, whether their joint behavior is persistent and plastic. A pair of interactors could be mutually regulating while the pair as a unit moves undirected in the phase space (like a pair of orbiting masses, each regulating the other, while the center of gravity of the pair drifts through space).There is also the issue of whether the trajectory of the pair is plastic. Courtship displays in particular typically have rather strict limits on starting conditions. In sum, for purely laterally caused coordination among individuals, the existence of persistence and plasticity is—I think—an open question.
In some seemingly teleological systems, one of the contained entities may be a control system that directs the containing structure, apparently violating the stability requirement. For example, captains direct ships. How we are to understand this in hierarchical terms depends on which entity we treat as teleological. If the teleological entity is the captain, then for him the ship is a stable upper structure which gives persistence and plasticity to his movements within it, just as it does for a rat. If the teleological entity is the whole ship, including the captain, showing persistence and plasticity in its trajectory across the ocean, then the magnetic field of the Earth or the field of the satellite GPS that the captain uses to steer the ship is the upper structure. And it too is stable. The situation is similar for a cell with its contained DNA, functioning to some degree as a captain-like control system.
The spatial hierarchy—air within the house, including its windows, heating/cooling systems, thermostat, etc.—is not irrelevant here. It is no accident that the physical structure that makes the state-space structure possible is also hierarchical. As it turns out, in non-spatial phase spaces, physical hierarchical structure is an easy way to achieve upper directedness, although not the only way.
Ecological context is relational, of course. The ecological context for an evolving honey bee is different from the ecological context for the flowers evolving in the same area. For present purposes, the ecological context is the set of selective factors that are relevant to the organism in question.
Normally in thinking about plasticity, we think of repeated runs of the system from different starting points within the same enveloping field, which in the turtle examples would mean the same environment. But in this example, there are five somewhat-different environments. However, the assumption is that those environments were sufficiently similar—in terms of selection pressures exerted by predators—that the five runs count as a kind of plasticity.
Interestingly, two levels of hierarchy are involved in many biological systems. The evolution of persistent and plastic physiological systems is itself a persistent and plastic process. In other words, we might say that a “primary” hierarchically structured adaptation process—in the present case, the evolution of the heart—produced a “secondary” hierarchically structured physiological system—the heart’s ability to correct for irregularities. We can take this terminology a step further. A torpedo shows persistence and plasticity but it is also a device that was designed by secondary hierarchically structured systems, the minds of its designers, making it a “tertiary” hierarchically structured system.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Robert Brandon and Carl Simpson for invaluable comments/suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript. Also many thanks to Kriti Sharma, Greg Wray, Dave McCandlish, Dave Raup, and the Duke Philosophy of Biology Discussion Group.
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McShea, D.W. Upper-directed systems: a new approach to teleology in biology. Biol Philos 27, 663–684 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-012-9326-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-012-9326-2