Re: "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello

Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:

 

[snip]

 
Here the difference he proposes between organisms with and without
"agency" isn't that we know the biochemistry in one case and not in the
other, it's a specific claim about how they function and how many
degrees of freedom the individual organism has with respect to their
evolutionary hardwiring.
 

Degrees of freedom is one notion Dennett explores to bootstrap “free will”.

 
He defines a "feedback-control system" for agency that has the following
features:
 
- a goal
- behavior(s) suitable to reaching the goal
- perception that verifies whether the goal is achieved
- a feedback loop between them to repeat the behavior until the goal is
achieved
 
 
The thing is, living things don't *have* to function with this kind of
organization. You could have an organism that chemotaxes towards
nutrients & absorbs all it encounters and chemotaxes away from toxins or
chemicals associated with predators/bad environments and reproduces once
it's reached a certain size, and evolutionarily speaking that's a
perfectly cromulent organism; if it can survive and spread this way it
will. Insofar as it has the "goal" of eating or breeding or avoiding
predators however that goal is evolution's goal more than the
individual's. The nature of the goal and the specific behaviors it
engages in to meet it change over the generations via evolutionary
processes. Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
"how does this organism interact with its environment" and the feedback
loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".
 
 
But if you have a living thing that *does* have this kind of
organization then "goals" have a different definition for it.
"Evolution" still has the "goal" of it eating but the way this is
behaviorally implemented means the individual itself can be described as
having this goal in a completely different sense, that manifests
differently. You can even get differences between "evolution's goals"
and "the individual's goals" - usually not with eating but for example
you can have goal-driven animals evolve the drive to have sex, although
from an evolutionary point of view the actual goal is reproduction.
 

Hmmm, is this evolution’s goal stemming from Tomasello himself? Not liking
the idea of evolution having goals. First the outcome of evolution itself
can stem from several factors, selection being one. Given drift, neutral
evolution, and the prevalence of junk DNA in humans and other organisms,
evolution seems too happenstance for goals. Goal directed evolution is the
stuff of orthogenesis or omega point. Complexity of human brains or
evolution of complexity itself if I recall Gould on this is a drunkard’s
walk constrained against a lower boundary.

That said teleology should be watered down to teleonomy (Mayr) or apparent
goal direction in organisms due to their “programming” and is an outcome
not a target. One needs to differentiate also between the proximal focus
and distal (ultimate) when looking at evolutionary outcomes. Proximate
causation happens at the level of physiology and so called “goals” obtain
here as organisms negotiate their environment for food and such. Failures
resulting in reduced reproductive output will “reprogram” future
generations away from those failures.

Said reprogramming may result in long term trends over generational time,
but that trending (eg- cognitive complexity) cannot be interpreted as an
evolutionary goal as trends can result in devastating dead ends especially
if the ecological context or fitness landscape shifts dramatically.

Sure humans and octopods have converged upon cognitive complexity, but so
many other species haven’t.

And this is where adaptive evolution is being considered. I dare say most
evolution is not adaptive.

[snip rest]