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Consciousness 18 — Tinbergen's Four Questions

7/3/2020

11 Comments

 
PicturePhoto from the Nobel Foundation archive.
In my last (long) post, I noted that “I think a more natural joint to carve a philosophical place for consciousness is in the biological realm where life responds to biological forces in order to survive. … I acknowledge that this view of consciousness raises a lot of questions. To try and answer them—at least as well as the current state of science allows—we’ll need a comprehensive understanding of this position.” And I said that “In my next post, I’ll introduce a framework that can help lead us through that kind of comprehensive explanation.”
 
Where should we look for such a framework? We could turn to Aristotle since his empirical studies of plants and animals led him to be considered the founder of the science of biology. During his observations and classifications, Aristotle developed a framework known as the four causes. And he said, “we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause.” The four kinds of causes are described briefly as:
 
  1. The efficient cause. This is something outside of the thing that is under consideration, which is responsible for the origination of that thing. For a table, this is a carpenter.
  2. The material cause. This is the material “out of which” a thing is composed. For a table, this might be wood.
  3. The formal cause. This is the form or shape of a thing which makes up the general definition of that thing. For a table, this could be its blueprint.
  4. The final cause. This is the goal or the purpose (telos in Greek) for which a thing originated and at which it aims. For a table, this could be dining.
 
These causes—arguably better translated as “explanations”—weren’t considered to be separable and mutually exclusive things that all operated on their own. Rather, they are just different aspects that work together to explain something in its full context. This line of thinking about biological organisms remained successful for about 2000 years. It was developed and used by Neoplatonists in antiquity, Averroes and Aquinas in the Middle Ages, and right on through to the 19th century. An elderly Charles Darwin even famously said, “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle.”

Looking at these four causes now, however, we see that Darwin undermined them completely. The four causes are static, they lack any sense of evolutionary history, and the final telos cause has been flipped upside down by Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning.” As the world got to grips with that, Julian Huxley (who was the grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley) gave us an updated evolutionary framework in his 1942 book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. That looked at three major aspects of biological facts: 1) mechanistic-physiological, 2) adaptive-functional, and 3) evolutionary or historical aspects.
 
This is much better, but the final framework that evolutionary biologists still use today came a few decades later from Nicholaas Tinbergen. Tinbergen won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for his contributions as one of the founders of ethology (the study of animal behaviour), and his 1963 paper “On aims and methods of Ethology” has “become a classic that gives evolutionary students of behaviour a basic framework for their agenda. Tinbergen proposes, in what has subsequently become known as Tinbergen’s Four Questions, that to achieve a complex understanding of a particular phenomenon, we may ask different questions which are mutually non-transferable.”
 
What that phrase ‘mutually non-transferable’ really means in this case is your classic 2x2 matrix with 2 options for each of 2 different variables. In this case, Tinbergen considered static vs. dynamic views as well as proximate vs. ultimate views. The static view looks at the current form of an organism. The dynamic view looks at the historical sequence that led to it. The proximate view considers how an individual organism's structures function, whereas the ultimate view asks why a species evolved the structures that it has. Setting up this 2x2 matrix yields the following four areas for consideration:
 
  1. Mechanism (causation). This gives mechanistic explanations for how an organism's structures currently work. (Static + Proximate)
  2. Ontogeny (development). This considers developmental explanations for changes in individuals, from their original DNA to their current form. (Dynamic + Proximate)
  3. Function (adaptation). This looks at a species trait and how it solves a reproductive or survival problem in the current environment. (Static + Ultimate)
  4. Phylogeny (evolution). This examines the entire history of the evolution of sequential changes in a species over many generations. (Dynamic + Ultimate)
 
This framework adds the important consideration of ontogeny to Huxley’s three major aspects of biology. (How did he tell the story of a frog without the story of a tadpole?) The fact that Tinbergen arrived at four considerations is perhaps why “it has been repeatedly pointed out that this concept is derived from Aristotle’s Four Causes.” A paper called “Was Tinbergen an Aristotelian? Comparison of Tinbergen’s Four Whys and Aristotle’s Four Causes” thinks that “in general, they parallel very well” but honestly that feels a bit forced to me. (Try to match them up to see for yourself.) Tinbergen apparently never mentioned Huxley or Aristotle, but regardless of his inspiration, he now has the “standard framework in the behavioural sciences.”
 
If that’s the case, then why hasn’t consciousness already been considered using this framework? I was sure someone would have done this already, but I couldn’t find it. In fact, one of the top search results for “Tinbergen and Consciousness” was a paper called “The Mind-Evolution Problem: The Difficulty of Fitting Consciousness in an Evolutionary Framework” written by Yoram Gutfreund in 2018 in Frontiers in Psychology. I’ll say more about that later but let me quickly trace the history of this difficulty.
 
Firstly, Tinbergen wrote in the 1950’s and 1960’s at the height of the behaviourist movement in psychology which tried to get rid of cognitive studies. Perhaps because of this, Tinbergen himself thought his framework did not apply to consciousness. As he wrote, “Psychology does not come into contact with objective study of the lowest levels such as the reflex level, because introspection does not reach them. At the higher level, introspection brings us into contact with an aspect of behaviour that is out of reach of objective study. … As scientists, we have to recognise the duality of our thinking and to accept it.” Duality?! Well I think I see a fatal flaw in his thinking about this.
 
Even Dan Dennett, however, apparently subscribed to this separation of consciousness from ethology. In his doctoral thesis “Content and Consciousness”, published in 1969, Dennett is described as saying that “in the intentional case the antecedent (intention) cannot be described or defined independently from the consequent (action), it [therefore] cannot be properly regarded in terms of cause and effect in the natural sciences’ sense; antecedent-consequent relationships in the behaviouristic or ethological tradition (stimulus-response relationships) however can. These approaches are incompatible.” To untangle that jargon, Dennett meant that we couldn’t grasp our intentions as they arise and separate them into a standard model of cause and effect. I believe this is a problem we can solve now, but even the man who later called evolution a “universal acid” didn’t originally see how it could eat into this particular method of studying consciousness.

In fact, The Oxford Companion to Consciousness notes, “Conspicuously absent from [Tinbergen’s] ‘classical’ ethology were issues involving consciousness. Thus, in ethology as well as in behaviouristic experimental and comparative psychology, questions of animal consciousness and related ones involving emotion and subjective experiences in general largely became taboo. To recognise a broadened view of ethology that encompassed cognitive, emotional, and conscious processes, Burghardt (1997) added a fifth aim, the study of private experience.”
 
When neuroscientists finally broke through these taboos in the 1980's and developed the field of Consciousness Studies, they kept some of this separation intact. As the founder of animal cognition studies Donald Griffin noted: “Crick and Koch (1998), leaders in the renewal of scientific studies of consciousness, take it for granted that monkeys are conscious. But they prefer to defer investigating nonhuman consciousness because they claim that ‘when one clearly understands, both in detail and in principle, what consciousness involves in humans, then will be the time to consider the problem of consciousness in much simpler animals.’” This might seem like prudent behaviour, but I agree with Griffin who further said, “Restricting scientific investigation to the most complex of all known brains may be unwise, however, for insofar as consciousness can be identified and analysed in a variety of animals, certain species might turn out to be especially suitable for investigating its basic attributes.”
 
Many neuroscientists have indeed studied the evolutionary origins of consciousness (see especially Feinberg and Mallat, and LeDoux), but not using Tinbergen as far as I can tell. In the paper I mentioned earlier about “The Difficulty of Fitting Consciousness in an Evolutionary Framework”, we can partly see why. The author Yoram Gutfreund noted that “the question of how the mind emerged in evolution (the mind-evolution problem) is tightly linked with the question of how the mind emerges from the brain (the mind-body problem). It seems that the evolution of consciousness cannot be resolved without first solving the ‘hard problem’. Until then, I argue that strong claims about the evolution of consciousness based on the evolution of cognition are premature and unfalsifiable.” But I already dismissed the worst of the hard problem in my post about it.

So, scientists remain unable, unwilling, or uninterested in tackling the philosophical problems of consciousness. They have also, in my view, drawn too small or too large a circle around the term to accurately describe it. What about philosophers? Can they attack these problems from their side?
 
In a lecture series from The Great Courses about Mind-Body Philosophy, the professor Patrick Grim of SUNY Stony Brook made a sketch of this in his final lecture titled “A Philosophical Science of Consciousness?” He proposed that we need an integration of philosophy, brain science, and AI in order to stand a better chance of grasping consciousness. He didn't have this new science worked out yet, but he offered: “a sketch of a speculative plan. First, figure out what consciousness is by figuring out what consciousness is for. What does it do that other cognitive processing could not? Second, analyse the process in abstract terms. What function is needed to produce the process we’ve identified as what consciousness is for? Then move to concrete specifics. How does the brain perform that function?” He finished by imagining that AI researchers could then build simulated brains using these discoveries and see where that got us in a kind of looped project with all sides informing one another for further progress. That iterative scientific process sounds great, but Grim entirely missed out on 2 of Tinbergen’s 4 questions. He only proposed we look at the 1st (mechanism) and 3rd (function) from my list above. He entirely ignored the 2nd (ontogeny) and 4th (phylogeny), which provides a striking example of the lack of evolutionary thinking among philosophers.

Well, let’s rectify that as best as I can. In my last post, I said consciousness involves living organisms, governed by the laws of natural and sexual selection, sensing and responding to biological forces. With that in mind, I think we can gain a lot of detail about this general definition by stepping through Tinbergen’s four questions one at a time. So, that’s what I’ll do with my next four posts. Please bear with me as I work on that for a while.


--------------------------------------------
Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema
Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory
Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?
Consciousness 16 — A (sorta) Brief History of Its Definitions
Consciousness 17 — From Physics to Chemistry to Biology

11 Comments
James of Seattle link
7/3/2020 05:11:46 pm

Just a sec. [picking up pieces of exploded brain ... not sure I found them all]

Aristotle!!! Four causes!!! And you noted that it’s really four parts of the explanation of causation!!! [yes, I’m (over?) excited, because I see this as the correct path for explaining consciousness. Woot!]

I have to admit I’ve never heard of Tinbergen, nor his 4 questions. (Good thing he wasn’t a disciple of Peirce, or he would have had to trim it down to 3 questions.) I’m very interested to see how you develop these, so, hurry up!

As for the relation between the four causes and the four questions, you are very correct (in my humble opinion) that they don’t line up, at least in regard to consciousness. Here’s why: the first question, MECHANISM (in all caps to distinguish from other mechanisms, see below), lines up squarely with Aristotle’s efficient cause. The remaining three questions all pertain to Aristotle’s final cause. The second question, ontogeny, describes the Mechanism for creating the MECHANISM (notice caps). The third question, Function, explains why the MECHANISM, and so too the Mechanism, is being created, and this tracks most closely with Aristotle’s final cause. The fourth question, Phylogeny, essentially describes the mechanism which creates the Mechanism and how this hooks it to the Function. I look forward to seeing whether your takes line up with mine.

I should warn you that if the above is correct, as I think it is, then understanding consciousness will include understanding not only the MECHANISM, aka efficient cause, but also the material cause, aka the input to the MECHANISM, and the formal cause, aka the output of the MECHANISM. And possibly worse, as I believe Consciousness involves representation, the MECHANISM here will have to be broken into sub-mechanisms, at least one of which will have a formal cause (output) which is the representation, and this representation will become the material cause (input) of another interpretation mechanism. Note, it is the interpretation mechanism that determines the “meaning”, aka the Function, of the process. So in Dennett’s terms, the consequent (the interpretation) cannot be separated from the antecedent (the representation, which contains the “intent”, aka mutual information).

Again, looking forward to your takes.

*

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SelfAwarePatterns link
7/3/2020 07:33:18 pm

Tingergen seems to have completely been overlooked by all the evolutionary neuroscientists. I checked in Feinberg and Mallatt's book as well as LeDoux's. Even Ginsberg and Jablonka, who have the most comprehensive historical overview I've seen of consciousness studies in their book 'The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul', have no reference to him.

So you might be coming up with something completely new. Looking forward to it!

Reply
SelfAwarePatterns link
7/3/2020 07:34:26 pm

Forgot to sub.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
7/3/2020 08:21:44 pm

Thanks Mike! I don’t have their books to check the indexes so I really appreciate that. I did google them specifically but never found a link, so it’s really great to have that confirmed. I have to thank David Sloan Wilson for the Tinbergen idea. He quotes those 4 questions all the time.

(By the way, DSW has agreed to interview me for his website about evolutionary epistemology. I could not be more excited for that to begin. He’s sending me written questions soon.)

James — Sorry man! But I got a great chuckle out of that though.

I think I’d need to have a few drinks with you and have you sketch all those ME/Me/mechanisms in a wiring diagram on a napkin for me to fully grok it.

Be sure to check out that Aristotelian paper for their attempt to match the four causes up.

http://ishe.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/HEB_2013_28_4_3-11.pdf

As a quick summary (and so I can keep it straight), they said:

1. Efficient cause / mechanism
2. Final cause / function
3. Formal cause / phylogeny
4. Material cause / ontogeny

They gave full justifications for each of these, but like I said, I found it more than a bit forced. If I had to map Aristotle (which I find to be the less comprehensive one), I’d say:

1- Efficient cause (carpenter) might be my biological forces shaping consciousness through natural and sexual selection.
2. Final cause (telos) is the teleonomy that emerges from what Darwin later preferred to call Natural Preservation.
3. Formal cause (blueprint) would I guess be genetic maps of DNA?
4. Material cause (wood) is the biochemistry building blocks as far as we know, but that’s highly contested.

Looking at that, I don’t think any of Aristotle’s causes fully exhaust any of Tinbergen’s. They’re kind of a weird hodgepodge that don’t tell the whole story if you confine yourself to them.

A quick preview while you wait for me would sound something like a set of hierarchies for each of the 4 questions that collectively tell the comprehensive story of all of the different aspects of consciousness. I’m hoping that doesn’t turn into too unwieldy a chart at the end of it all, but I’m still working on it.

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SelfAwarePatterns link
7/3/2020 09:36:14 pm

Ed,
The nice thing about reading the Kindle editions is that they're always easy to pull up and do a full text search on.

Congratulations on the DSW interview! I assume you'll post a link once it's live?

Wilson once made a remark on his old ScienceBlogs site, which unfortunately is now consigned to oblivion, that truth is his god and science his religion. It's a statement that many would accuse of scientism, but that bullishness on science made a big impression on me.

Reply
James of Seattle link
7/4/2020 07:09:55 pm

Ed (or Mike, or anyone that might read this), if you’re ever in Seattle, let me know, I’ll show you where the good coffee is. [I guess I could do the other drinks, but it’s been a long time, and my expertise in that area is not the same].

I haven’t read that paper (and I will after this, I promise, ahem), but I think both you and they are making the same mistake. You’re thinking of one process instead of two. A single process will have the form input, mechanism, output, which for Aristotle was material cause, efficient cause, formal cause. The problem is that final cause refers to a second (but prior in time) process, namely, a process whose formal cause, i.e., output, is the mechanism (efficient cause) of the first process.

So looking at the papers breakout, we get:

1. Efficient cause / mechanism (of process 1)
2. Final cause / function (the purpose of process 0, which is to create the mechanism of process 1)
3. Formal cause / phylogeny (this is mislabeled, because phylogeny describes evolution, which is the mechanism of process 0)
4. Material cause / ontogeny (this is correct for the material cause of process 0, the process which creates the mechanism in #1 above)

So to look at your version:
1. When you speak of anything working through natural selection, you’re describing the mechanism (efficient cause) of process 0.
2. Again, final cause refers to the function/value generated (or intended) by process 0.
3. DNA (and the proteins, etc., the DNA eventually produces) is the output of process 0, i.e., the formal cause of process 0 (and it is the mechanism, or efficient cause, of process 1).
4. The biological building blocks are indeed the inputs for process 1, as opposed to process 0 (unless you’re talking about the building blocks of natural selection, which is process 0).

So to restate, you can talk about material, efficient and formal causes for a given process, say process 1. They map to input, mechanism, and output, respectively. But if you want to talk about the final cause for process 1, you need to refer to a prior process, process 0. The output (formal cause) of that process 0 becomes the mechanism (efficient cause) of process 1. The value or function (final cause) of process 1 is determined by process 0.

Does this help? [feedback highly desired]

*

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Ed GIbney link
7/5/2020 02:14:49 pm

Mike — You bet I won't keep that interview to myself! I have no idea what the timeline for that will be. Or if it will even happen to be honest. I got him hooked for it with my article reviewing Naomi Oreskes book, but maybe he's reading my other stuff now and slowly backing away like Homer into a hedgerow.

Funny you say that about his quote impacting you. I was active in a "Sacred Naturalism" group on facebook a few years ago. Its biggest leader has kinda moved on, but someone else posted a video there yesterday with something similar. I've only watched the first few minutes of it, but in describing his "Religious Naturalism" he said "reality is my god and data is my scripture." I kinda liked that. Although I prefer to just like reality and data without weighing them down with religious baggage.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcAlqMeyeaW-Lx9uENNYbDzjq2-ESR8uJ&fbclid=IwAR2eidwyNjk2zf3R67KWUteoO76U2gpHG6lcpB7ws39b4IS5JVsygd7vbhg

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SelfAwarePatterns link
7/5/2020 02:31:31 pm

Ed,
Michael Dowd is one of the few people with the title "reverend" whose views I don't immediately dismiss. But I agree, I prefer to just deal with reality without the religious metaphors.

I don't think Wilson, with his statement, was positioning himself in the Dowd camp, just expressing how important science is to him, how central it is to his worldview.

Anyway, hope the interview happens and looking forward to it if it does.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
7/5/2020 03:14:21 pm

James — I assure you I'm not thinking of consciousness as one thing or one process. I see "it" (and I don't even like calling consciousness an it because I think it's not a noun and its easier to mistake it as one when you use the pronoun for it like I just did three times in this parentheses) as a bunch of interrelated processes that altogether capture most of what people call consciousness with or without various modifying adjectives.

As for your take on this, I do think input->mechanism->output is a fine way to examine any one element of this collective set of processes, but I think you're really shoehorning Aristotle into that in way that's not true to his meaning. You have his formal cause as the output, but if his example for that is a blueprint, then that's not really what comes afterwards; it's another input. Using a dualist's vocabulary, you could even call it a mental / informational input as opposed to the physical input of the material (wood) cause. And your take on the final cause (telos) being a second whole previous cause (with it's own material->efficient->formal process?) just doesn't jive with my understanding of telos/purpose/Platonic ideal that is supposedly what things are made *for*. Let's get to some specifics though.

I don't perfectly follow your analysis of the paper's four matches, but I think that's because we both agree that it's just a tortured set of comparisons that don't really fit together. I'm fine dropping any worries about what that author thought.

As for your comments about my quick take on what the 4 Aristotle causes are, let me go through them step by step to be clear.

--> 1. When you speak of anything working through natural selection, you’re describing the mechanism (efficient cause) of process 0.

I think mechanisms are more proximate than this. It's the specific details about what is materially happening. It's not the abstract labelling of the functions that these produce. I know I said, "Efficient cause (carpenter) might be my biological forces shaping consciousness through natural and sexual selection" but that's just shorthand for the actual details.

--> 2. Again, final cause refers to the function/value generated (or intended) by process 0.

I would put this slightly differently. I don't see final causes as *generated* by prior processes. I see final causes as continually emerging through whatever is *preserved* from the current environment. Those prior functions are potential candidates for the (never actually final) final cause, but they could go away or be co-opted for another purpose depending on what needs arise in the current environment. This is why final telos causes are hard to make sense of in a post-Darwinian world. Nothing is final.

--> 3. DNA (and the proteins, etc., the DNA eventually produces) is the output of process 0, i.e., the formal cause of process 0 (and it is the mechanism, or efficient cause, of process 1).

I agree DNA is the formal blueprint, but I would peg the biochemistry of protein building as the mechanism. Efficient causes (carpenters) are really nonsensical in a post-Darwin world, so I don't think you can equate them to mechanisms. I should have said that earlier in point 1 too.

--> 4. The biological building blocks are indeed the inputs for process 1, as opposed to process 0 (unless you’re talking about the building blocks of natural selection, which is process 0).

This reminds me of my long article on "Replacing Maslow with an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs." In there, I went through all of the needs for each of E.O. Wilson's 7 realms of biological sciences that make up the consilient study of all of life. At the very bottom, with biochemistry, you need basic building blocks of chemicals and an environment to bring them into contact with one another over long periods of time. As you go up the ladder, molecular biology needs biochemistry; cellular biology needs molecules; organismic biology needs cells; sociobiology needs organisms; and ecology needs societies. The final field of evolutionary biology studies how all of these change over time, and like you say here, I say that it needs it's own building blocks for natural selection to occur, which are basically the same as what biochemistry needs. That brings us back to where we started for the ongoing iterative process of biology. I drew it as a circle of trees that make up a forest. (Arrows in circle might have helped make this clearer.) If you want to call those process 0 and process 1, I'm fine with that as long as I can put a line over the 01 process to imply that it repeats (0101010101....).

Does that feedback help?

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James of Seattle link
7/6/2020 04:57:48 am

That feedback helps enormously. Your mindset is directed at the large scale, and I need to be sure to address that.

My challenge is to make you understand that input->mech.->output applies equally to the large scale. BTW, don’t know if you’re watching Bryce (don’t know his last name) @neuroyogacara on Twitter, but he just brought this up in terms of Markov Blankets. It’s the same thing. The inputs and outputs of a mech., any physical system, is the Markov blanket. And they nest. So you can talk about the inputs and outputs of a human eyeball, but you can also talk about the input of a primordial soup, the operation of a biosphere, and the output of a specific human eyeball, say, my left eyeball. Or you could stop at the output of my DNA in an ovum. Just depends on what you’re trying to explain.

So you say mechanisms are more proximate than this. And I’m saying if you think of mechanisms more expansively, you might understand things differently. When I use the term “mechanism”, I’m using that expansive sense, because I don’t think there is a better word.

[BTW, I’m not claiming this is what Aristotle meant. I’m claiming this is the correct way to understand things, and Aristotle’s version is, to the best of my knowledge, closest. Also, BTW, I have locked my humility in the basement for the sake of brevity. I could be wrong about this stuff, but I need someone to explain why.]

Regarding final cause, I appreciate your recognition that things get repurposed, but I don’t think we should get hung up on the word “final”. The original word was Telos, for distant, right? In any case, if we think of final cause as the purpose/function/what for, you cannot explain the these just given the material, efficient, and formal causes. You have to reference something that happened before, and *everything* that happened before is just prior causation, prior material,efficient,formal causes, prior mechanisms (in my expansive sense). And there are just two ways prior events can impact the event in consideration, and that’s by producing the input or by producing the mechanism, “producing” being used in an expansive sense. Producing could just be “arranging”, so when we use a dead computer as a paper weight, the final cause doesn’t reference why the computer was produced, but instead, why it was situated on a pile of paper ... because it was heavy. But that situating is a separate, prior process, with the computer ending up on the paper as the formal cause, the output. The “purpose” is best applied to that prior event. Something (in this case, someone) had a goal of keeping the paper in a stack. The input was a stack of paper and a dead computer. The mechanism was a person who moved the computer onto the stack. The output was the computer on the stack. But these were prior to the mechanism in question, which is the computer sitting on the stack. The input, the material cause, in question is a strong breeze, the mechanism is the dead computer (and gravity/friction), and the output, formal cause, is the stack still in a stack.

Final word on your last paragraph: it is absolutely consistent with the expansive understanding of mechanism that it have internal mechanisms, internal structure, such as loops, and changing internal states. This goes for computers running programs, and it goes for natural selection.

*
[if this changes anything, let me know. Otherwise, looking forward to the next installations]

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Ed Gibney link
7/6/2020 05:39:41 pm

James — I’m totally with you on the multi-level usage of mechanisms. Expansive mechanisms are still proximate to me. What I was trying to distinguish was the difference between mechanisms and functions. I’m with Tinbergen that these are separable ways of looking at what is going on. Both are needed though. And both can be sized at any level of Markov blanket. I think you and I will see (one specific human) eyeball to eyeball on this as I go forward.

Okay, I think updating Aristotle’s four causes for a post-Darwinian world would be a very fine project. In fact, if I know my brain, I’m going to do that in 3 years and think I invented the idea. ; ) I’ve been confused by your use of his terms, but I bet you could redefine them and get them to fit your inpit-mechanism-output process. My MBA lingo wants to call that a “value chain analysis” of the linear end to end process (which repeats and repeats) and so of course it makes sense to look at something that way if it really does map everything accurately. Which, how could it not in a causal universe?

Good. Thanks for explaining. I hope you feel motivated to keep reworking Aristotle. Keep the humility locked away for all ambitions! (Claims? Humility is useful. But I love a good try. Obviously.)

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