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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

"we have no evidence it is"

I mean everything that's considered evidence of evolution could also be considered evidence of teleology: the entire process of the universe creating new forms of novelty, from matter to biology to ultimately possibly some sort of technological singularity.

"we have a lot of evidence that seems to say it isn't"

What is there that exists that is fundamentally incompatible with teleology existing or makes it highly unlikely?

"if it were, it would have massive implications in other fields that we haven't seen any evidence for, either."

What makes you think that you would see evidence for it if it existed? (Or rather, what makes you think that most or all evidence in favor of teleology couldn't be explained by some other non-teleological process?)

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> everything that's considered evidence of evolution could also be considered evidence of teleology

No. Teleology has a goal in mind and evolution has been seen to run down dead ends many, many times. All of the extinct species are dead ends.

> What is there that exists that is fundamentally incompatible with teleology existing or makes it highly unlikely?

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.

> What makes you think that you would see evidence for it if it existed?

If we can't see something, or measure it in any other way, or otherwise provide evidence for its existence, then why should we ever behave as if it existed?

> evidence in favor of teleology

I've yet to see any actual evidence in favor of teleology in evolution. Non-teleological explanations are simpler and they also explain all of the weird crap we see. In addition, our non-teleological theories have allowed us to predict quite a bit about how biology works in the real world. That mix of simplicity and increased predictive power makes the non-teleological theories a lot better than the previous teleological ones.

"No. Teleology has a goal in mind and evolution has been seen to run down dead ends many, many times. All of the extinct species are dead ends."

The best way I've heard it described is like dropping a marble into a bowl. The marble will go up and down and wobble around but will eventually settle at the bottom of the bowl. In other words, it would basically be encoded into the universe as a preference that over time would win out.

"All of the extinct species. The fact the human eye has a blind spot whereas the squid eye does not."

Just because not all matter in the universe is condensed into a single point doesn't mean that gravity doesn't exist. Sometimes things get further apart, sometimes things get closer together, but gravity still exists.

"That mix of simplicity and increased predictive power makes the non-teleological theories a lot better than the previous teleological ones."

I'm not arguing that teleology is a better scientific theory than evolution; it's not. But just because it's a crappy scientific theory (well, actually it's not even a theory) doesn't mean that it's less likely that there are some sort of teleological forces baked into the universe, e.g. a preference for the creation and preservation of novelty.

It sounds like you're using analogies to "prove" your point, rather than using evidence to prove and analogies to illustrate. This is a very common theme in my experience with arguments in favor of an external force guiding evolution (and other unprovable subjects). If we're not careful, thinking by analogy can lead us to believing incorrectly that irrelevant attributes of the analogy actually apply to the universe.

Except I'm not arguing in favor of an external force. Tokenadult said there was no external force, I said we can't know if there is an external force.

> I said we can't know if there is an external force.

Can you know for sure you're not the Queen of England?

Depends on your definition of 'know'. There is an entire subfield of philosophy devoted to this question.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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. ;)

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.

> 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.

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 ...

> With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct.

Outside of math (and by extension, mathematical models and virtual computer systems), there is no such thing as "correct". We have physical models we tend to rely on because they give good predictions.

But there's no "correct" explanation for physical phenomena. Newton's mechanics were "correct" until Schroedinger and Heisenberg showed they weren't. And I'm sure within a hundred years, we'll have an even better model than modern quantum mechanics.

> Lastly, your "raise more questions than they answer" is the hallmark of philosophical problems ...

Yes, and it is also a hallmark of bullshit and the content-free.

The reasoning that "All X have the property Y. I have something here that is Y, therefore it must be an X" must be a classic logical fallacy, no?

> With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct.

But that's not where you started out, you started with (at least) two hypotheses that fit the facts:

> I mean everything that's considered evidence of evolution could also be considered evidence of teleology

Comparing right to wrong would be quite a straw man.

If you have say two networks that are based on different choices of perspective in coding a MDL with wildly differing lengths and better performance of the larger one, I would be highly suspicious as to whether the the poor performer is properly built from a sensible simplifying metric.

In terms of a general intuition of how the choice of similarly expressive representations affect complexity, one can look to Kolmogorov Complexity. For any two languages used to compute the KC of some string, there is only an additive translative constant for each possible input. The asymptotics of how each language grows its representation with respect to input size by far will dominate such translative overheads. This is sufficient for philosophical purposes. Although in the practical case these choices matter and MDL was created specifically to treat these practicalities.

Actually this topic has moved beyond philosophy. There is a beautiful and simple mathematical argument and formulation of Occams Razor in terms of the universal prior of Solomonoff induction.

For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_inference and http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability.

This is another but similar concept of an incomputable strategy with optimal predictive power http://hans.math.upenn.edu/~ted/203S10/References/peculiar.p... predicated on picking the simplest explanation.

In a practical setting complex theories or models with lots of explanatory variables tend to overfit the data. In machine learning, regularization or picking a proper prior and things like Minimum Description length in forming networks are instances of penalizing complexity for better predictive power. In decision trees, pruning is another example. In genetic programming picking the smaller and or faster of two similarly performing programs substantially reduces its tendency to overfit.

> 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.

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.

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/

Definitely agreed about the lack of evidence for teleology among evolution, but I don't think false starts, extinct species, etc... are counter evidence to teleology really. They'd just be evidence of an imperfect process attempting to reach that goal.

Having a destination in mind doesn't mean you know exactly how to get there, right?

It seems like admitting a 'blind teleology' would relegate the argument to complete meaninglessness; a teleology that behaves as if it were random is not worth talking about.

Does it have to be blind or random though?

A path finding algorithm is clearly teleological, but also has false starts. That doesn't make it 'blind' or 'random'.

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