How A Single Metaphor Transformed Biology
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- Опубліковано 27 сер 2024
- One of the oldest debates in biology is whether we can use teleological language like: 'goals,' 'purposes,' 'functions,' 'wanting' etc. in a scientific way. Descartes' machine metaphor combined with natural selection seems to render it near-useless, but what if we took it seriously again?
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#vitalism #descartes #aristotle
"Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public."
- JBS Haldane
Such a good quote 😆
As a researcher in molecular biology and someone with a keen interest in philosophy, I'm impressed with this channel. I really appreciate the work you put into these videos! Thank you 😊
As slacker polymathic, autodidact who spent decades hunting and slaying scientific cows propelled by food and a self guided victory over teenage obesity, I am extremely impressed with this channel and also very much appreciate the work, skill and breadth you put into these videos.
I do also ‘dabble’ as a generalist technical leader in an emerging field that sits at a the nexus of microbiology, entomology, mycology, biochemistry (etc) and pursuit of efficient biomass circularity. The breadcrumbs of our adventures to date are littered with extraordinary mechanisms continually being revealed spanning soil science, animal and human health and nutrition, nature based homeostatic harm reduction (some like this word “pathogen” which studiously ignores “flow”), bioremediation, and some feel, a pathway towards escape from the lethal arms race we are losing with non-human life know as antimicrobial resistance.
Not to mention, biopolymers, pest reduction, drought resistance (in soils) and a few other fun rabbitholes, or should I say fire hydrants I try to drink from while interacting with gatekeepers (most often inadvertently) who are the unfortunate result of the nested dogmas and hyperspecialized, perversely incented, scientific naked emperors I have just watched you dismantle (5 vidoes inso far) with a clarity and an aplomb, in delicious fashion. I instantly admire and want to try emulating you in my relevant contexts, having just found you this morning.
But for now, hallelujah! Thank you. Will be mining your vids for more gems from now on. Read you were off finishing a paper and your masters (didn’t note the date), so all the best, and look forward to your summary teachings whenever that happens 🙏🏼
PS Have your touched on the work of Robert Rosen anywhere in your library?
I think it's all about quantifiability and quality, QUANTIFIABILITY goes into the depths and gives us precision where as QUALITY explores different possibilities gives us accuracy. Now in nature as a whole consist of both but there is a hierarchy of their relative abundance among subjects. Quantifiability being the highest in the lowest level of subject i.e. Mathematics and quality being the highest in the highest level of subject that is social science. NOW BIOLOGY being in the middle its hard to balance both the perspectives. I GUESS.....
Holy shit this is so well made, I had to do a double take when I saw this video had less than 1k views, you should post this video in some biology subreddits to help it get more traction, this is as well made as some of the 100k+ subscriber physics channels I've watched!
Thanks so much!!
So happy I found this channel. I'll be sharing it widely as it deserves to be more widely known.
I don't think that viewing life as a machine is wrong, its just a super complicated organic one, but its so interesting how you show the machine point of views changing the approach to how people understand life and the flaws that come with that physiology way of thinking.
You might argue that machines want things as well. Mostly to obey their owners will because if e.g. my computers freezes all the time, i will trash it and get one that does. This is also a form of selection.
@@Faquarhlthat doesn’t actually exemplify computers acting in an organic way
Piece of nuance you’re missing. Aristotle applied teleology not just to biology but also to mechanics themselves. If you read physics or on the heavens you’ll find earth wanting to move towards the centre and fire wanting to move away from it.
I stumbled upon your video and loved it, I myself is a registered nurse, but I have been very unsatisfied with the solely mechanistic view of biology since my training days. Don’t get me wrong it’s a great tool for navigation but it’s definitely not the entire picture. After working through COVID, I recently resigned. Lately I have been reading philosophy book and decided to go back to Uni for a philosophy and psychology degree. Your video is really informative and points exactly to the direction of my interest. I am glad there are people out there that shares the same view and perspective.
Thanks so much, glad to see my videos being watched by an RN!
I recommend Biosemioticans like Terrence Deacon or Claus Emmeche !
Well explained and really well produced, you have a talent!
Thank you. Will watch this every day 👍 Best 12.5 minutes of my life!!!
Wow amazing that I had such an impact on you!
Very enjoyable video, very well produced, I liked.
Thank you!
About cactus spikes, primitive cactus live/lived in jungles and forests and have spikes that help them climb trees like vines. The defensive-only function came later, when the majority of them had adapted to drier enviroments. The genus Pereskia is a good example of primitive tree climbing cacti. :)
Man your channel is sooooooo good i want to learn advamced biology and this channel helped me understand genetics so much better
Hi. I have to say - this was an amazing video, and extremely refreshing, given that I'm a biology master's student myself. But I just wanted to share one "problem" (if you will) with the organicism approach over the mechanistic approach... the problem is that there's no thread to hang on to - no scaffolding, and that you might be tempted to "give up" because "it's too complex". I imagine that if the theory of natural selection hadn't come along - which is undoubtedly a mechanical theory, I agree - and you chose not to work with the assumption that everything CAN be reducible, you would never progress in any explanation. I don't see how this kind of thinking, apart from the fact that it makes you feel good, is helpful in really thinking about a problem. I want to know - and I ask this genuinely - if you know of any examples of breakthroughs in science that came without adopting a mechanist approach?
Liked and subscribed, btw. Beautiful video!
Hey! Thanks for the like and subscribe appreciate it. Certainly there are plenty of examples, I'll outline the most straightforward one I can think of (let me know if you want more):
As a biology masters student, I'm sure you've heard of Gap genes in Drosophila somewhere along the way. The mechanicist way of studying them would be to work out what genes are involved, draw a nice little circuit diagram to work out which is activating/repressing the others and we'd be more or less done.
But the problem is, the same gene network can generate very different functional patterns depending on concentration of the genes, strength of activation/repression and so forth. So having a static network of genes is not enough. We need to look at what the network does as a whole. When we do this (with experiments + mathematical modelling), you find that you can get extremely morphologically different patterns with the SAME network.
So in short, we can't reduce down to individual genes because they don't really matter. Morphology emerges from the interaction of the whole network. And yes, this is a pretty specific example, but every organism has to go through development with very similar kinds of gene networks, which face the same difficulties when reducing to single genes.
If you're interested in the details, this all comes from Johannes Jaeger's work. He has a UA-cam channel which is super helpful, and I'll link a paper too:
ua-cam.com/video/S5bO5Ky-CWU/v-deo.html
doi.org/10.1002/bies.201900226
I know with just this one video it seems as though organicism is just some "feel good" idea. I can assure it is not, but it may take me a few more videos to convince you. - Jake
I also remember a video showing how numerous HOX genes work together to make an organism, some hormones made by cells could stimulate or repress nearby cells causing differentiation to happen, if only one gene was focused on, we wouldn’t;t get the picture of how an organism forms. I don;t know if this is related to what you;re talking about or not
I can totally understand the problem of thinking of natural phenomena in a reductionist way, thinking you can fully understand a complex and intricate system dividing it in it's constituents and studying them separately, I agree that a lot of the time it lets us not fully prepared to study the world, the thing is that I believe that this intent language is not a very good frame to apply onto the universe, it's too anthropocentric, we should not assume that phenomena (even in the case of biological phenomena) works in a similar way that we experience ourselves.
Fair enough. It took me a while to get used to it, particularly because it seems (at first glance) to be quite unscientific. I would highly recommend this book to potentially change your mind, if not at least give you a more in-depth defence of teleology in biology: doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316402719
A second comment- now that we have devoted ourselves to developing more complex machines (such as software built on neural nets needed to do something as trivial as distinguish a dog from a dolphin ) I think the argument that machines are necessarily simple/comprehensible/predictable has to be thrown out the window. Even much simpler mechanical devices are built from unpredictable material components, giving them the ability to defy our expectations (ask anyone about the mysterious personalities of vintage cars for example). Modern science was mostly successful because it deliberately engineered unrealistic, simplified scenarios (like samples of pure chemicals to study properties), allowing basic principles to be extracted through reductionist thinking. But the second you throw even a handful of pure chemicals together into a mixture those models stop being useful in making predictions (e.g if you put a half dozen different weak acids in solution together, then calculating the resulting pH becomes an impossible mess, not unlike the three body problem in physics). Reductionism is what has reached its limits, and was always a failed mode of thinking in biology (look at the failed promises from the human genome project for example).
I'd just add that what has reached its limits isn't Reductionism, but rather what's reached its limits is the notion that humans are able (or should be able) to understand the pieces or the way the pieces are assembled in these systems... e.g. you mention AI, and although I wouldn't say AI "understands", say, biology or language, the premise of some AI applications is that somehow neural networks are (or will be) able to _reduce_ this systems into mathematical models able to do accurate predictions (models that won't be understandable step by step by humans, but that will be _reductions_ of the actual system).
I think that Evolution by Natural Selection (what Richard Dawkins called Blind Watchmaker) perfectly explains why organisms appear to have purpose but still are machines (in the sense that they obey the laws of physics/chemistry).
Also, I wonder why Driesch's experiments proved that sea urchins aren't machines in the sense I used above? Is it the definition of machines that they cannot work if you halve them? I always thought of the machine metaphor as meaning that the parts/atoms of organisms work in deterministic ways (ignoring the problem of quantum mechanics randomness for the sake of the argument) described by physics/chemistry.
Driesch's sea urchin paradox is solved by each stem cell still carrying the information to build the whole. If he had halved the cell nucleus/genome instead, it wouldn't have worked at all. According to your understanding of the machine methaphor, the sea urchin embryo is no machine, but a single (stem) sea urchine cell is.
Everything that exists obeys the laws of physics - that's a very poor definition of a machine. The machine metaphor is limited and leads people astray - but so do all the other philosophical metaphors people claim are valid. I think that, with our limited cognitive abilities, we will need to do some more evolving, ourselves before we are able to understand life and living things more accurately.
Reminds me of Michael Levin. I wonder if he qualifies as a modern day Organicist.
Yup. He proved vitalism.
When the bus starts moving, people tend to fall backward because they “want” to maintain their (stationary) state of motion. But if they, indeed, WANTED to maintain their state of motion, why did they get on the bus to begin with?
Your channel is incredibly underrated! Best videos I've come across in a while! I'm not a biologist but the way you explain things and put them in historical context makes your material very accessible to anyone interested. My mind makes many clicks while watching 😊
At 9:30, the divided embryo can develop into two individuals because each cell has its own full copy of its DNA, not half. I dont understand what the "impeccable logic" of the vitalists is referring to or why that would be evidence against the mechanistic view.
@@armandaneshjoothis is a silly definition of mechanical
Thank you for the ideas shared and so well presented.
Hello!
I'm an Italian viewer, sorry for my English.
I love your videos. I think that you have a incredible ability to explain and manage very difficult topics. I'm really interested about this arguments and read some philosophical books that talk about those.
I think that it's really fascinating the philosophical solution written by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Edipus. The desiring-machine isn't neither mechanicist nor vitalist concept. For me it's really difficult to explain it properly in English and i suggest you to read something about it, in particular it could be nice for you read the whole book "One Thousand Plateau" by Deleuze and Guattari.
Thank you for all the videos, I'm suggesting them to my friends.
Grazie mille Giacomo! The kind words mean a lot, I’ll check out those books:))
I found this video cinfusing because there are some important false premises, such as "dividing an organismo into 2 pieces will leave only half of information " or "if we underand humans as genes this will lead to racism.
The problem with the machine model is that every model is limited. When the model cannot explain something we would expect it to explain, we just call it "emergent properties ". Making a model that goes from atom to corruption and culture is impossible, and each model has its value and limitations.
As Gestalt Psychology said: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Organicists really offer a circular argument: organs want to do things because the body wants and the body wants because the organs work together.
Good to see someone re introducing this old topic from philosophy of biology into modern audiences , the sebate seems to be forgotten but has been actively discussed by psychologist like Kantor or Skinner or biologists like René Dubos , who want to talk more about organisms acting as a whole units but that interact with their environment, theleological language seems to be hated by phycisist , it implies non physical language adjusted to physical things , but that seems that way to us because we have assumed the cartesian view, that there are a physical mechanical world alongside a non physycal non mechanical world, dualism is the root of confusion within mechanicists.
It's quite refreshing to see a UA-cam channel with an honest yet different scientific viewpoint! This brings up a lot of problems I had with modern scientific approaches (specifically for biology in the case of your channel) where holistic and or more open minded approaches to the sciences are seen as unscientific in comparison to hardline reductionism. I still think reductionism is useful and it obviously has been for many things that we have discovered and invented, but I feel like by only looking through this lense not only are we negatively affecting our scientific potential but also our general philosophical worldview, since reductionism and determinism lend themselves to quite nihilistic and rather gloomy worldviews.
I'm a reductionist, and I don't think that a wolrdview being gloomy is in any way a proof against it. In fact, I'm also a nihilist, and I don't think that thinking that things don't matter, matters.
In fact, the organicist approach that was shown in the video looks to me like a repackaged mechanicist approach with a changed name. The parts are all the same, but they are grouped differently.
So I just wanted to ask, what is a holistic approach that you know of that would be considered scientific when examined?
As the video mentioned, the intelligent design movement brought a lot of disdain into the field.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Dr. Michael Levin here. His research is the next chapter in this story, and, in my view, definitely points toward the notion that there is agency at every level of biology - and, I believe by extension, everywhere in the universe, even subatomic particles.
I think the problem isn't that we think the universe is a machine but it's our definition of what is a machine that is problematic, for example a machine can very much recreate itself after being cut into pieces if it was designed to do so. Eventhough I'm more into computer science, there are actually a lot of parallel that i could draw to a biology, a machine to me is just something that give out an output when receiving an input, or responding to a stimuli in this case. With such a general definition everything is a machine, human greeting others when they meet is a machine behavior, tree grow when nutrients are supplied and conditions are met is a machine behavior, the printer start to print when pressing the print button is a machine behavior. Basically it's just an abstraction tool to describe the behavior of a system like it's a single entity. Being a machine doesn't mean not alive since it's just a mapping of stimuli and behavior. Even in a real machine like a printer, it work because of electricity, and electricity is electrons moving in a direction, but if you look at the individual electron, it's moving randomly, pumping into other electrons and getting push/pull around by electromagnetic forces, but zooming out and on a fast enough time scale, we can see that electrons move in a direction. That still doesn't even mention the circuit board of the printer, which if we look at the molecular level of it, we won't even be able to tell it's a structure. It's so complex that it might as well be consider "alive", it want to move in a direction because of energy potential differences, it want to print the paper according to the signal from the computer so it pull the paper in.
The problem with Descartes view is that he describe everything with the very fundamental building block, but at any stage a higher construct could interact with a lower one which would be left out.
You wouldn't be able to look at each individual drop of paint of the Mona Lisa and comprehend the painting, it's only when we look at all of the drops at the same time that we could process the painting.
Which I think have less to do with whenever an organism have goal and purpose but more about how we choose to describe the thing going on around us.
@@armandaneshjoo I guess there are a lot of definition for "machine"
But "computer" is different from a "machine" is a bit counterintuitive for me
@@armandaneshjoo i mean thats how physic call "machine" but that isn't what people think of when they use the word
The anima was just a specific part of the soul. The greeks certainly believed that the soul would separate from the body, since the soul went to the underworld but the body didn't. In fact most modern Christians received their beliefs about the soul from the greek tradition, not from anything christain.
@@armandaneshjoo Indeed, not everyone agrees on what happens to us after we die. I was just making sure that comment readers knew the "Christian idea of the soul" referenced in the video isn't a christian idea, it is also a greek idea. The actual biblical christian idea of death is that death is the opposite of life, that death is a sleep, that the dead know nothing.
Magnificent view of the world, and magnificent way of thinkining it by Aristotele and Descartes, I would argue that mechanistic views lead to some huge advancements in experiments, but at the core of it the ideas of Aristotele were right.
Just Aristotele have to deal with such a level of complexity that the ideas didn't lead to useful experiments, I think Descartes were neccessary to advance, but now is time for Aristotele ideas to take back.
Bro your videos are absolutely amazing I am really glad I found your channel
I honestly feel like there is truth to all perspectives shared in this video. Despite there being back and fourth debate about which perspective is correct, and there being contradiction between different parties attempting to explain and understand biological systems I think there is some truth to each perspective. For me, finding the rough edges of a theory is really the goal, not to discredit it entirely. By taking what is good from one theory and working off the bits and pieces which don't quite sit right with novel evidence and discovery I think we are slowly converging towards a more accurate theory of biology (and the world broadly).
Yes I’d mostly agree with having multiple useful perspectives. The machine one has been useful in the past, and gives us some understanding of the biological world. No doubt whatsoever. But to get a better/different/more complete picture we will need new ones, e.g. the agency perspective.
I touched on this need for multiple perspectives in my most recent video: ua-cam.com/video/A4yzK-8OGtc/v-deo.html
Mechanistic approach breaks around the size of what ribosomes do(or a bit bigger). Like everything smaller is quite deterministic, flow of atoms, concentrations and so on but you go bigger and the amount of interactions destroy any easy way to describe it mechanistically
Great video. Thought stimulating. Thank you.
I found it interesting that William Paley appeared to change Biological Teleology from a non-dual (holistic) perspective to a God-Nature dualism. I'd never even heard of him before.
Organisms are both machines and agents who want to do things and have complex inner lives and state. They are not reduceable to simple, single function mechanisms but at the same time the machinery of the organism is what makes it go, and it cannot vitalistically decide not to do what that arrangement of parts would do.
"Recognizing the unity of physicochemical processes at the molecular level means that vitalism has lost all function. In fact, since the birth of thermodynamics, the operational value of the concept of life has only diluted, and its abstract power has declined. Today, life is no longer questioned in laboratories." --Nobel Prize winning physicist Francois Jacob.
the organism is not merely the individual, to a degree it is the species in toto and in another sense it is part of the organs of the larger organism life as a whole from the deepest depths to the rarest airs, this planet is alive and each thing thrives in relationships of various levels and extents with aims and purposes quite different at each stratification yet unified up and down the line from virions on up. one thing, made of every individual thing, each made of many individual things oriented into their purview of reality.
ua-cam.com/video/vaJcmWjMNwo/v-deo.html
I think it's all about quantifiability and quality, QUANTIFIABILITY goes into the depths and gives us precision where as QUALITY explores different possibilities gives us accuracy. Now in nature as a whole consist of both but there is a hierarchy of their relative abundance among subjects. Quantifiability being the highest in the lowest level of subject i.e. Mathematics and quality being the highest in the highest level of subject that is social science. NOW BIOLOGY being in the middle its hard to balance both the perspectives. I GUESS..... 🤔
Jake, if you are not familiar with Kant's Critique of Judgment you will probably find it interesting. In the second part of that work he considers that certain "regulative ideas" (teleology) were necessary to enable the understanding of biology. The problem arises from the assumption that the mechanical model of the universe was a complete description of our experience. An Aristotelian idea relevant here is his distinction between a formal description (what a thing is) and its material composition. The form or substance persists through material changes and even development.
you should make a followup explaining alot of the things you say here such as how you just state how alot of the arguments are wrong without explaining and i want to see it more in depth
We can't live without intentionality. There is no such thing as pure objectivity. Where does the subjective end & the objective begin?
Great video! A robust challenge to the mechanistic metaphor for biology is long overdue. One idea for you would be to explore the phenomenon of convergent evolution, as direct evidence of something very much like teleology. In this case, the "biophesphere" (for lack of a better agent) seems to have some goals that it achieves repeatedly, starting from different points of departure. E.g., not only atoms do not explain wings, not even cells do, because wings have evolved independently (birds, bats, etc.). The ends have been the same, even though the implementation details are completely different. Be that as it may, a video (or two) on convergent evolution would be extremely cool!
I am so astonished that the concept of "atma" written in old sanskrit texts of sanatan dharma and the greek concept of anima are almost similar . But ya as a hindu I still observe the world as the rainforest view 😊.
Very well explained! Thank you! Every new generation at some point has to stop for a moment and take up for scrutiny all the basic asumptions they are working under. My favorite authors are Maturana & Varela and their concept of autopoiesis.
"they're just a bundle of chemistry. They don't have brains"
The issue with this is always "brains are just a bundle of chemistry too, and they DO have brains."
Excellent video. Really well researched and delivered!
This is deep
dude i love your info. please continue
I love these philosophical videos
Great video
Thanks :)
Human "decisions" are predetermined by neural activity in the subconscious mind up to a full second before you consciously "decide" anything. The "cells are just chemistry" argument could equally be applied to the human brain itself.
I love your content, at the risk of sounding rude - invest in a better microphone. this account is worth it imo
I have to be honest I never understood the organicist idea that you can have intrinsic teleology without also having vital forces.
Because, if on the level of efficient causes, only the basic ones acted out by the basic physical components are featured, won’t it mean that it’s just those basic physical principles which imply all the movements of body parts central to biology?
In other words, that reductionism is sufficient for accounting for biological phenomena.
Would love if someone could explain that to me.
In my point of view it's silly to look at what Descartes said and think it's the "end-all-be-all" to how organisms really are (machines). I think his view can be used as a TOOL to help us analyze organisms to their molecular structure, like, view them as machines. I don't see why both things can't be true at the same time: organisms an be seen as machines, in terms of functioning and they also can be seen as living entities, that have purpose and are free to make decisions that can't always be predicted. Why can't both of these views be correct at the same time? Saying organisms aren't machine-like is wrong when their functions can be very clearly be described and they're not just random, "godly", animated psychic energy and also saying they're just machines is missing the point "why"? We can't answer why, so they can't be just machines.
Very nice.
Thanks!
Thank you 🙏
I’d love a video on Micheal Levin! A great example of how thinking teleologically isn’t just more accurate it’s actually more useful!
Einstein's Spinoza, where God is the conscious soul of Nature, and Nature is the physical body of God.
An organism sustains/perpetuates itself. That is what distinguishes it from dead matter. All organisms do this. Do you know any organisms that don't do this?
Another world changing French philosopher !
Incredible, thank you very much ! I was thinking about it, the phrase that I absolutely agree with is when you say about the genome "the map of the world has become the world" this is exactly what's happening today, many people think about the genes as the only drive for human components which is false, the genes only describe how our body works, it's like an instruction book for some other force that put these instructions to application, but in no case this instruction book is in itself the only cause for it's own realization ! you are the best person that described it so far ! thank you really much. And also here is a rhetorical question I always ask to people who say genes are the only thing that drive the human body, without something external realizing it, I tell to them : well, then why would the body follow some random bunch of atoms "genes" deep in their cell, why would the human body follow some specific instructions hidden deep in it's cells ? The only answer is that "there must be something making the body act according to these genes" !
Btw I'm coming from "oases of wisdom", I have many ideas about this topic (materialism vs necessity of a non physical existant) that I would like to give (mail in my "info" section of you are interested 👍)
But anyway I'm happy to finally find someone talking about this subject, thank you very much again !!
Thanks for the kind words! I see from your channel that you're a creationist, which makes me super glad that you're not just dismissing the channel outright haha. I did another video on genetics specifically here: ua-cam.com/video/zpIqQ0pGs1E/v-deo.html for more details. Personally, I would say I am a theist of some form that hasn't thought hard enough about it. Would be keen to here your thoughts on biological agency which is the video I'm working on at the moment and will be up in a couple weeks or so :)
@@SubAnima Thanks ! I saw the video about genes and it's totally true, Mendelism is taught everywhere in high schools (I had genetics in medical school that year and we didn't refute it yet !) even if it totally fails to explain the reality of things. Thinking about it there is this field called epigenetic that really shows how our environment plays an extremely important role on how we behave and how our genome express itself, epigenetic only gives a very small "power" to genes and shows how our environment affects our behaviour in a much greater extent (by greatly influencing the way our genome express itself, showing that two individuals with the exact same genome can have some completely opposite behaviours and characteristics), and what's interesting about this implication is how some behaviours we have can have an influence over the expression of our genome which further more refutes materialistic determinism claiming the opposite !
Btw I'm a Muslim that's why I decided to talk about creationism (because the materialistic Neo Darwinian point of view is so much over rated in academies even if it has some serious contradictions with human behaviour, most of the time they reject the soul's existence because it can't be proved (for some reason many falsely believe that: non proving the soul = refuting the soul). In the opposite we can show that the non existence of some non physical entity having an influence over the matter of our body is a contradiction to the human behaviour, thus showing the existence of the soul by refuting it's non existence.
for some reason most of creationists are Christians but I didn't see any contradiction talking about it as a muslim 👍.
Thanks again for the videos you make ! I will be glad to see your next video about biological agency and share some more ideas there 🙂
Another great video. BTW I subscribe to your channel, but your newest production never showed up on my feed. I just happened to look up your channel to see if you had recently uploaded and found it that way. Stupid algorithm.
Hey thanks for letting me know and for the support again :) I guess there’s not much I can do about it unfortunately though :( Turn on the bell perhaps? But seriously, thanks for watching again!
Wonderful presentation. Just one point: "why the camel?" Cacti evolved in the New World so one of the Camelids would be more appropriate. They at least moved into South America before Cacti evolved.
Humans are social creatures and as such we like to infer intent even when there is none. From ancient humans believing that natural forces were the work of gods, to persistent superstitions like the gambler's fallacy, and apparently even to scientists who should know better. The mere appearance of intent does not imply actual intent.
Single celled organisms can appear to have intent, and can even appear to experience pain, but they don't. Our human tendency to superimpose human characteristics onto non-human things fools us.
I am not a scientist, I'm just interested, but it seems to me a driving force behind biology is the quantum world. Quantum physics controls many processes within cells and even behaviour such as migration. We can study and observe quantum physics but no-one really understands it. Indeed, some scientist suggest it is the basis of the whole universe as a quantum field. Who can say such a field doesn't extend to an infinite intelligence that exists beyond space and time?
@@thureintun1687 It is a possibility. You pays your money and takes your choice. You cannot say there is intelligent design or God behind the universe. You can only say what if there is or what if there isn't. It comes down to belief. If you say, what if there isn't, then you are saying everything in the universe can be understood, explained and demonstrated. Science is an awfully long way from that especially when it comes to the origin of the universe and of life, its origins and consciousness, especially human. If you say, what if there is? then you need to answer the questions like, If God is all powerful and all good, why is there so much suffering in the world? All I can say is that there is a reasonable and logical solution to the second quandary and more questions than answers from scientists.
How can you empirically prove vital force? If vital force is not mystical then it can be detected, right? Moreover you are saying organism have goal oriented behaviour then who is deciding the goal? You also want to not mix the intelligent design theory with science but you also want to support vitalism in a scientific manner! You are saying that organism's goal is defined when all systems working in co-ordinated manner but the existence of the organs itself needs the existence of basic laws of physics and chemistry. If you remove physics and chemistry and try to explain it goal oriented vital force then itself it's becoming pseudoscientific😒.
Great video, I just wanted to point out the fact that the modern "christian" concept of soul is not actually christian; the immortal soul that thinks, feels and can live independently of the body is Platonic dualism and although there are indeed several interpretations, it's never mentioned in the Bible.
Dr. Michael Levin can answer some of your questions profoundly and freshly.
There is a big risk of confusion here. The mechanical view of life use a metaphor on the machines created by humans, that is created by life. It is not life that look like machine, it is machine that look like life, because machines are an extension of life, like the tool is an extension of the arm. More precisely, they are an extension of human societies. But there is also machines not created by human societies. A star can be seen as a machine, but a wild machine, not artificial machine created by humans. Other examples are volcano, rivers, minerals, organic molecules, life. Life is a very complex wild machine, a new paradigm that have emerged from the simpler wild machines. We often look to common traits between life and machines, but it help a lot to enumerate the differences we observe between wild machines and artificial one:
- Artificial machines rely on order and can break when external events interfere, while wild machine resist to external chaos, chaos is even required for them to work properly
- Artificial machines are often produced from a blueprint, an exact reproduction. Variation and deviations are a defect, often breaking them. Wild machines never reproduce identically, variations are the key to evolution and survival
- Artificial machines are controlled by humans while wild machines are self-organized
- Artificial machines are produced, fueled and repaired by an external agent (humans) and their purpose is set by this agent, wild machines auto-reproduce, auto-repair, use its environment as fuel, with no clearly defined purpose
As Hofstadter puts it, life has a “tangled hierarchy” of causation, unlike the simple bottom up of most modern machines. The idea in biology is simply that at each level of scale, life is playing the game of natural selection, from proteins and enzymes to cells and tissues, to organs and organisms. At each level there is a threshold of sophistication based on available physical, chemical, and structural potential, but they are not at all independent, rather they are in a dynamic dance: both competing and collaborating in a self-sustaining way.
The point then is that selective pressures can come up from the inside just as they come down from the outside. This is not at all like modern machines but since it doesn’t completely escape classical determinism, people still argue that it is just a very complex machine nevertheless. Obviously it is a semantic point, words are not meant to capture concepts once and for all, they are cognitive scaffolding for building an ever-greater understanding. So call it dead or alive, just know that we still have a long ways to go.
Haven't organisms been around a hell of a lot longer than machines? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that machines are constructed by humans based on the model and templates of organisms?
THE MEANING OF LIFE IS TO STAY ALIVE. THEN, TO BECOME AN ADULT. IT'S SIMPLER THAN IN RELIGEON.
Thank you! Did you actually get a formal education and hold on to ability to think critically? May your ability to see through the trees find good ground in hearts and minds of others!
The purpose of biology shall be to generalise rules not do them individually that’s the job of paychology
BETTER TO SAY. "THE SURVIVAL OF THE SURVIVORS."
Driech’s idea doesn’t make much sense to me. The cells he separated were omnipotent stem cells, each able to give all kinds of cells, therefore a whole organism.
Take a human arm out and give it all it needs to create a body, just like a machine, it will not recreate the whole organism or even a small part of it.
@@armandaneshjoo bravo , well explain
The problem is that to have a goal, you have to have a consciousness. You liver does not have a goal "I want to filter blood", just as a stone does not have a goal "I want to fall down". It just falls down (or filters blood). Therefore, to look for goals where there is no consciousness is absurd. In order to say "I want to...", there has to be an "I".
Now for purpose, that is different. Your car does not have a goal "I want to transport people" (because it has no consciousness). It, however, has a purpose "to transport people"; because that purpose was given to it by men who designed it and who themselves have consciousness.
Similarly, while cells cannot have goals, they can have purposes - but unlike (absurd) goals, purposes would be given to them by a different agency, by somebody who himself has consciousness.
So if biological entities have a purpose, that purpose was not given to them by the entities themselves.
"to have a goal, you need to have a consciousness" I am not sure
I liked how you brought it back to "vitalism." Well done and thoughtful. Though, why the omission of Evolution? Seems to me, the next step would be to explicitly recognize that we are evolved creatures, materially connected to the earliest life forms on Earth. That's where you'll find answers to 'Life's drive'.
People offer a fleeting salute to Evolution on Earth, but very few seem to really internalize it into their own being.
I believe this is the next philosophical, intellectual challenge, or at least the one that needs pursuing the most. Because it helps clarify so many riddles we love puzzling over.
I am an evolved biological thinking machine, a product of Earth's processes. Given the reality of DNA, my body has a direct link to Deep Time. My consciousness is produced by my body which is the cumulative sum total of all the days I've lived/experience. A filament in Earth's pageant of Evolution.
You speak so confidently
i feel like life can also just be a machine that wants to do stuff
crazy good content ! :D
I think it's convenient that for René Descartes(who is a human being), the only living being with desires and goals is the human being itself, same old anthropocentrism bs
This was hip and cool 😎
Wow thanks means so much from you sir 🥰
Ever read "the universal one" by walter russell?
The biologist J. B. S. Haldane observed that "Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public."[59][60]
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology_in_biology
I think you’re arguing for a distinction without a difference when you juxtapose Aristotle to William Paley. The fact is in Genesis, God orders calls forth the creation and endows every created thing with the ability to reproduce after its kind. This generative ability is within them, just as Aristotle postulated.
I do appreciate how you are challenging, the mechanistic and deterministic models for the universe because they definitely have done a lot of damage.
A consequence of this, which you may be missing, however, is the absolute necessity for a mechanistic universe in order to support the belief in a nontheistic universe.
The argument from teleology is one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God. You can’t escape it because the logic is more than compelling. It’s irresistible.
It was the design he observed in the universe that eventually, after 50 years, led Anthony Flew to reject atheism and embrace theism, although he never became a religious believer.
Umm you claim that anothy became a theist or believes in theism no anothy is not a theist he's a deist it's just christian apologist saying that because they want to feel they one over atheist to their side and intelligent design is considered pseudoscience for the most part
@@miguelatkinson
Please reread this to see if you can understand it. I can't.
Who or what is an anothy?
If it's Anthony (Flew) you're talking about (I literally could not tell. No cap, misspelled the same way twice.), you’re going to have to explain to me the difference between a "theist“ and a “deist."
You seem butthurt and I don’t know why. I specifically said that Anthony flew did not become a believer.
I suppose the reason for dumping teleology is more like positivism: you can't measure or verify a "purpose" empirically, so then one doesn't exist (which, while maybe a fair acknowledgement of the limits of "pure science", to me just shows why we need other fields like philosophy as well, and they are no less important to human knowledge). Another reason may be that it often gets associated with anthrocentric religious ideas - the whole "God made man in His image" stuff, and even potentially morally dubious ideas like the "great chain of being" that was used to justify racism and other forms of iniquity directed at other human beings. But what if we took a view that maybe each creature has its own "telos" or purpose no less valid than any other's? What if we dump the anthrocentrism? A bat is not "less evolved", it is the pinnacle of bat-kind in the same way we are of human-kind, and the purpose of its line - at least up to today - was to fill the role of bats, just as ours is to fill the role of humans. Traditional and indigenous cultures were much less anthrocentric in their religious/spiritual ideas; e.g. animisms where everything, even rocks, have a "spirit" are quite common if not even ubiquitous.
It's also interesting to note the "way of knowing" employed toward the end - using our ethics, our heart, sense of goodness/Meepness, as a guide for charting the territory where "pure brute measurements" leave off.
The videos are good but the explanations seem to be incomplete
As with most of these philosophical views, nature versus nurture, enviroment versus genetics, goals versus mechanics, order versus chaos, there seems to be a a misunderstanding.
The whole point about natural selection is to explain how simple things become complex, that includes life being more specialized, this means that the appearence of 'goals' shouldn't come as a suprise. But the problem is when one then extrapolates backwards, and thinks that matter or chemistry has 'goals'. Sure one is free to use language as one wants, but when one does so, one essentialy blurrs the same fact as calling humans 'machines', or mere parts of a whole 'life force' or 'will of god'
Pragmatically speaking, it just seems like diffrent lables for the same thing. Am i a machine? or am i 'life'? If im as much of a machine, or as much of an 'life' as a bloodcell, then im not really sure what they are disagreeing about, if im equivalent to all life-
Well. I kind'a like the premise of the video. Alas, watching the part about Aristotle's conception of the soul pained me as someone who studied Biology and Philosophy and specialized in Philosophy in Aristotle and especially his treatise 'De Anima'.
First, whether or not the conception of the Soul as expounded in 'De Anima' is anything like the christian conception of the Soul, depends crucially (pun intended) on which christian conception of the soul you pic. There is no sigle, unified 'Christian concept of the soul' and that's already where this is going awry. Many of them are influenced by the Platonic conception of the soul which has some commonalities with the Aristotelian (to little surprise as Aristotle was the pupil of Plato, after all) or are influenced by the Aristotelian conception of the soul, to the point of being directly based on the Aristotelian conception of the soul. So, quite clearly there are christian conceptions of the soul that have a a lot in common with the Aristotelian one. I won't get into the question of the eternity of the soul and it's seperability from the body it is located in, but suffice to say, as we enter into the realm of the human soul the Aristotelian case isn't as clear cut as you make it out to be, either.
Second, the soul is not described by Aristotle as the collection of active abilities of the organism. The soul is that by virtue of which the living being as a whole (body and soul) has active abilities. It is the principle (arche): it is causally - in the sense of the Aristotelian causal theory most importantly as causa formalis - responsible for those active abilities. It is also not a collection of those faculties as those faculties are only potentially seperable (because they are definitionally independent), but not in actuality, according to Aristotle. So, the soul of plant is not "made up of it's ability to grow and reproduce", but to define a plants soul you need to refer to the nutritional faculty - while a human, who possesses all faculties of the soul, is not a mere collection of these extra faculties adde up on that of the plants, but it is necessary to give al those faculties to define a human soul - and in actuality they are not seperable in the human soul.
Finally, this way of thinking about life is not in itself called teleology, but it *implies* teleology. That living beings have goals and purposes is not the same as them "wanting to grow upward", as the latter implies intentionality. Intentionality is not required for Aristotelian teleology, though. Though the goal of an acorn is to grow into an oak-tree, it's not having the intentional state of 'wanting' to grow into an oak-tree.
Noted: Anima required. Emergence like game theory.
Go back and see the why that fulfills the needs.
To live is to do our duty.
You misunderstand "the only thing I know for certain is that since I think therefore I exist". It's not about humans, it's about self. That the only thing you can know for certain is that you are thinking right know
Why does mechanistic reduction "kill the universe?" Why would believing that everything, including human beings, do what they do according to deterministic behaviors lead to the belief that life is not alive? Descartes classic maxim "I think, therefor I am." doesn't exclude all other beings from existence. It does the opposite. The fact that you think, and that all you are is a complex organic machine, means that the assumption that anybody else you know is also thinking is predicated on the fact that you know that they are almost identical to yourself on a mechanistic level. You're not them, you don't think their thoughts, but your mechanisms are empirically similar, so you must assume that they are also thinking and existing just as you are. This logic extends also to other animals, in fact all other organisms. Why on earth would that logic lead to the reduction of other obviously extremely similar machines to ourselves to *unliving, inanimate objects unto which cruelty is impossible to visit?* Isn't it fair to assume that our thoughts, our consciousnesses, are a mere window into the automatic, deterministic processes of the brain which organize our actions toward evolutionary success? Isn't it fair to assume that anything else exhibiting behaviors of any kind peers through a similar window into their own mental processes, no matter how relatively simple those behaviors might seem to us?
How is it that ethics actually demands the abandonment of mechanistic determinism?
Yeah, it turns out that Descartes had it backwards. Of course, Descartes and his contemporaries didn't know anything about biology or evolution, so we shouldn't be surprised his ideas turned out childish. How about: "I Am, Therefore I Think Am" ?
I believe thinking people would do themselves a favor by considering the "Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide," that to me, seems like the most fundamental dualism of our human condition.
Jake, Thanks for these wonderful thoughtful videos.
When I saw this video, I was ready to not like it for being too simplistic. But I was wrong. It is actually brave enough to reexamine foundations. My own view is that for all practical purposes, even a single cell is goal-seeking. They solve problems and are adaptive. Call it a goal seeking machine. Is it conscious? I have no idea. Certainly not super sophisticated consciousness. But a little spark of it? Don't know either, but can't simply dismiss it. See the work of Michael Levin with his Picasso frogs. Cells clearly show signs of having goals and "figuring out" how to achieve them. Our collective scientific view needs to be tweaked. I think that organisms may be better thought of as a collection of cells or a collection of assemblies of cells that "want" this or that and actively seek and form mutually beneficial "partnerships".
Michael Levin.
I see a lot of Daoist vantage points in your video. Are you
Particularly interested in eastern philosophy?
Science looks at the world from the inside out. It has it backwards.
I've recently stumbled upon this channel. While I do agree that organisms can be seen as biological machines, it doesn't encompass their entirety. I'd be keen to explore an alternative paradigm backed by robust scientific research and results. Nevertheless, we can't ignore the advancements in natural science brought about by the machine paradigm, even if it doesn't capture the full picture. Importantly, a point that seems to be overlooked is Aristotle's assignment of purposes to non-biological entities, such as stones. He posited that their movement was due to a "natural place" in the cosmos. In his view, objects like stones naturally gravitated towards the Earth's center, which he considered the universe's center. This movement was the stone's "final cause" or purpose: to reach its designated place at the center. This paradigm is now bankrupt. I hope you do not want to resuscitate it.
@SubAnima So, you want to return to Animism but not intelligent design?
I think an organicist-style, non-reductionist way of doing biology would be incredibly useful yes.
@@SubAnima It was an interesting initial presentation. I’m not convinced yet. It’s a pretty radical proposal your offering. You intimated that you’d be giving a further presentation to expand upon your point. Perhaps, then I will be convinced. Do you know when that video is likely to come out?
Teleology is most often employed by people advancing an intelligent design hypothesis and it seems to me that all the evidence you offered in your presentation could just as easily be employed to such ends. That being said, if you don’t mind my asking, do you rule out an intelligent design hypothesis and, if so, why?
Yes, there will be several more videos coming out with more details. I’m hoping the next one to be done in about two weeks.
It seems radical but there are a lot of people working on it already. I would suggest reading Organisms, Agency and Evolution by Denis Walsh if you are interested.
I would rule out intelligent design in the young earth creationist sense of spontaneous creation 10,000 years ago. There is too much evidence for evolution to believe that.
But that’s not an issue for Christians. Many many theologians have found ways to get a theology to be compatible with evolution - I recommend reading into Teilhard de Chardin’s work or Michael Ruse’s book “Can a Darwinian be a Christian?” I plan on making videos about this eventually.
Though, adding in agency to biology does raise some interesting theological questions that don’t seem to all be answerable by science e.g. “why do we live in a universe where organisms happen to have goals?” and “where do the goals come from?” I would be wary of immediately inserting God in to answer these as ‘God of the gaps’ arguments dont tend to end well for theologians. But they are interesting nonetheless.
This probably puts me in the minority of evolutionary biologists where I see some kind of intelligent design possible, at least in principle. I would have to see the specific argument though and it cannot be in conflict with the scientific evidence (read about Galileo’s two books principle if you are interested).
And no, I don’t buy ‘irreducibly complex’ arguments. Because they are unnecessary. There are better ways of getting theology to work with evolution that are way more coherent. E.g. biologos.org/common-questions/what-is-evolutionary-creation
@@SubAnima Interesting. That’s a measured and reasonable answer. I’ll look into Denis Walsh’s book.
I didn’t raise irreducible complexity, but I have heard some examples of it I can’t see a way around. Since you raise it, would you mind elaborating on that point?
Something doesn’t have to be beneficial for it to evolve. I made a video on this already: ua-cam.com/video/Bbzw5Ym8ies/v-deo.html