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December 26, 2018 - September 16, 2020
we’re the only species (so far) endowed with an elaborate kit of thinking tools.
evolution is a process that depends on amplifying things that almost never happen.
The task is made difficult by a feature it doesn’t share with other scientific investigations of processes (in cosmology, geology, biology, and history, for instance): people care so deeply what the answers are that they have a very hard time making themselves actually consider the candidate answers objectively.
We’re not the Godlike geniuses we sometimes think we are, but animals are not so smart either, and yet both humans and (other) animals are admirably equipped to deal “brilliantly” with many of the challenges thrown at them by a difficult, if not always cruel, world.
The problem with dualism, ever since Descartes, is that nobody has ever been able to offer a convincing account of how these postulated interactive transactions between mind and body could occur without violating the laws of physics.
It is not that we can’t deny them; it is that we won’t deny them, won’t even try to deny them.
Human culture itself is a more fecund generator of brilliant innovations than any troupe of geniuses, of either gender.
The reverse-engineering perspective is ubiquitous in biology and is obligatory in investigations of the origin of life.
Orgel’s Second Rule: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”
reverse engineering, when conducted with due attention to the risks and obligations, is still the royal road to discovery in biology and the only path to discovery in the demanding world of prebiotic chemistry of the origin of life.8
can there be reasons without a reasoner, designs without a designer?
Aristotle identified four questions we might want to ask about anything: 1.What is it made of, or its material cause? 2.What is its structure, or its formal cause? 3.How did it get started, or what is its efficient cause? 4.What is its purpose, or its final, or telic, cause?
Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.
There are three different but closely related strategies or stances we can adopt when trying to understand, explain, and predict phenomena: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance
Evolution by natural selection is not itself a designed thing, an agent with purposes, but it acts as if it were (it occupies the role vacated by the Intelligent Designer): it is a set of processes that “find” and “track” reasons for things to be arranged one way rather than another.
The chief difference between the reasons found by evolution and the reasons found by human designers is that the latter are typically (but not always) represented in the minds of the designers, whereas the reasons uncovered by natural selection are represented for the first time by those human investigators who succeed in reverse engineering Nature’s productions.
Evolutionary processes brought purposes and reasons into existence the same way they brought color vision (and hence colors) into existence: gradually.
The how come question asks for a process narrative that explains the phenomenon without saying it is for anything.
as long as we have an answer to the how come question, in terms of physics and chemistry, it really would be something like paranoia to ask for more.
Evolution by natural selection starts with how come and arrives at what for.
A central feature of human interaction, and one of the features unique to our species, is the activity of asking others to explain themselves, to justify their choices and actions, and then judging, endorsing, rebutting their answers, in recursive rounds of the “why?” game.
our capacity to respond appropriately in this reason-checking activity is the root of responsibility.
Those who cannot explain themselves or cannot be moved by the reasons offered by others, those who are “deaf to” the persuasions of advisors, are rightly judged to be of diminished responsibility and are treated differently by the law.
The space of reasons is bound by norms, by mutual recognition of how things ought to go—the right way, not the wrong way, to play the reason-giving game. Wherever there are reasons, then, there is room for, and a need for, some kind of justification and the possibility of correction when something goes wrong.
This “normativity” is the foundation of ethics: the ability to appreciate how reason-giving ought to go is a prerequisite for appreciating how life in society ought to go.
social normativity and instrumental normativity. The former, analyzed and celebrated at Pittsburgh, is concerned with the social norms that arise within the practice of communication and collaboration
The latter is concerned with quality control or efficiency, the norms of engineering, you could say, as revealed by market forces or by natural failures.
we need both kinds of norms to create the perspective from which reasons are discernible in Nature.
Reason-appreciation did not coevolve with reasons the way color vision coevolved with color. Reason-appreciation is a later, more advanced product of evolution than reasons.
Wherever there are reasons, an implicit norm may be invoked: real reasons are supposed always to be good reasons, reasons that justify the feature in question. (No demand for just...
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the biologists’ practice is a direct descendant of the reverse engineering of artifacts designed and made by other human beings, which is itself a direct descendant of the societal institution of asking for and giving reasons for human activities.
(An excellent source on this algorithmic view of chemical cycles in cells is Dennis Bray, Wetware 2009.)
we see the gradual emergence of the species of reasons out of the species of mere causes, what fors out of how comes, with no “essential” dividing line between them.
Natural selection is thus an automatic reason-finder, which “discovers” and “endorses” and “focuses” reasons over many generations.
The Need to Know principle made famous in spy novels also reigns in the biosphere: an organism doesn’t need to know the reasons why the gifts it inherits are beneficial to it, and natural selection itself doesn’t need to know what it’s doing.
Reasons existed long before there were reasoners.
competence without comprehension,
Darwin didn’t extinguish teleology; he naturalized it,
The space of reasons is created by the human practice of reason-giving and is bound by norms, both social/ethical and instrumental (the difference between being naughty and being stupid). Reverse engineering in biology is a descendant of reason-giving-judging.
Free-floating rationales emerge as the reasons why some features exist; they do not presuppose intelligent designers, even though the designs that emerge are extraordinarily good.
IN ORDER TO BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW WHAT ARITHMETIC IS.
Before Turing’s invention there were computers, by the hundreds or thousands, employed to work on scientific and engineering calculations. Computers were people, not machines.
A huge Design Space of information-processing was made accessible by Turing, and he foresaw that there was a traversable path from Absolute Ignorance to Artificial Intelligence, a long series of lifting steps in that Design Space.
Both Darwin and Turing claim to have discovered something truly unsettling to a human mind—competence without comprehension.
we have good empirical evidence that competence doesn’t always depend on comprehension and sometimes is a precondition for comprehension.
What Darwin and Turing did was envisage the most extreme version of this point: all the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more competent—and hence comprehending—systems.
while Darwin discovered evolution by natural selection, Turing invented the computer.
Distribution of expertise or understanding of this sort is a hallmark of human creative projects, and it is clearly essential for today’s high-tech artifacts, but not for all earlier artifacts.
Undoing some of their most tempting mistakes, while creating the ontology of the scientific image, has been a major task of modern science.
Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other.
