Dear Stefan,
first time that someone has the same first name as me :-)
It is no question for me that we can describe parts of the macroscopic world in terms of goal-oriented behaviour. This is exactly the crux of the essay's contest question. We *can* do it - because there is indeed goal-oriented behaviour! The hard question for me (and probably also for you) is how dead matter can give rise to life, consciousness and aims and intentions.
We only can describe parts of the macroscopic world in terms of aims and intentions, because obviously there are really such aims and intentions present in the world. I wrote my essay because i had the intention to participate and to share my thoughts. Even if the microscopical level would totally determine my aims and intentions, i nonetheless have consciousness and are somehow 'able' to think about the essay contest's questions. The big question is how a 'bunch of quarks' can emerge to a phenomenon that has space- and timeless features (we can imagine thinks far away from our location and far away from our present time).
Stefan, you wrote
"I thus conclude that goal-oriented dynamics - formulated mathematically or not - is part of essentially every successful theory of the macroscopic world. And successful macroscopic theories should be taken as seriously as their microscopic counterparts."
I think here you miss a crucial point. Not all theories of the macroscopic world are formulated in terms of goal-oriented behaviour. For example Special Relativity, or the behaviour of galaxies. I used the term 'behaviour', because there is no other suitable word (at least in german language - or is there one?). But galaxies are a dead bunch of aggregated particles, following some dynamics according to the mathematical laws discovered so far.
You are correct that a rock cannot / should not be described as an agent. You write then
"At this point a mechanistic model of your macroscopic dynamics no longer works. Instead I will switch to a theory involving goals and intentions."
Yes, in practice a mechanistic model does not work anymore. But this hasn't prevented many scientists to claim that if one had all the initial data for a specific time and enough processing power, one could calculate the future behaviour of my arm. Surely, it does make more sense to describe the behaviour of my arm in terms of goals and intentions, but this - and here is the crux again - does only make sense, because there exists goals and intentions at all in the universe, goals and intentions which aim to describe someone other's goals and intentions. The question how this can come about at all in the universe, is left unanswered (for good reasons).
Personally, i think that it is not only impossible in practice to forecast at which point in my future my arm will reach out for a glass of water, but also impossible in principle. But this does also not solve the main question scientifically, because it is only a belief of mine.
Although it seems possible that our world could be fully determined by the physical laws, what does this assumption add to our understanding of aims and intentions other than they are merely rigid illusions? If the world is fully determined, the predetermined thoughts in my mind in this moment i write these lines of reasoning are dictating me to write that this kind of determinism would be very strange. Strange because it must be orchestrated such that it leads to an appropriate answer to your comment on my essay site! How can this be possible without both of us having physically interacted ever? The only explanation i know of is, that there are quantum correlations sieved out over time so that the ones left over, are all consistent with each other (in a strange way, because not all human communication is per se consistent).
If i assume nonetheless this scenario to meet reality, then i arrive at quantum correlations and information flow in quantum systems. Since we need a kind of entanglement for this scenario, some kind of unexplained behaviour of the microworld is inclusive, either as the question of what this fundamental randomess means, or as the question of how an individual measurement result is choosen from the multitude of possibilities. I have also no answer to the question why in a multiverse it should be me to observe the particle taking the left way and my alter ego in the other world observing it taking the right way and not vice versa.
Surely, galaxies have not the kind of rigidity and the kind of flexibility as living systems. And i agree that you identified - at least for life as we know it - some properties of the latter. I do not know whether these properties are necessary for some conscious entity, but according to Darwin i would think they must. But as i wrote in my essay, the problem with Darwinism is that it does not fit into an assumed to be fully deterministic world. In the latter, the process of evolution would evolve in every single detail in the same manner as we assume it to have happened - if we would trace all trajectories back to their origin. At this origin there had to be a highly ordered initial condition to lead to Darwins results. But here i come up with an exception: If many ordered initial conditions lead to Darwins results (one way or the other), then his theory would be not much in conflict with radical determinism. But again, how precise and of what nature should these initial conditions be to lead to meaningful conversations between two bunches of quarks (me and you:-) which never interacted in the past?
At the end of your essay you wrote
"Summing up, we have seen that goal-oriented macroscopic dynamics is equally real as goalfree microscopic dynamics. Moreover, goal-oriented macroscopic behavior is compatible with goal-free microscopic laws, if the macroscopic entities under question are sufficiently flexible and sufficiently rigid. Under these circumstances mindless mathematical laws can give rise to aims and intention."
Surely, macroscopic dynamics is equally real as goalfree microscopic dynamics. This is only the case because there exist goals and intentions that can be described as such (but it must not necessarily be described with these terms. As i remarked above, some people think that it can at least theoretically be described with goal-free microscopic laws). The circumstances you describe for mindless mathematical laws to give rise to aims and intentions are those that are in the middle between rigidity and flexibility. Let me note that i cannot see how these mathematical laws - although i only assume here that they indeed do exist - should be facilitated to give rise to aims and intentions. Although it sounds logical that life occupies the realm between the flexible and the rigid, i would not claim that these characteristics ground the path for life to be possible from an emergent point of view.
Let me shortly also cite a sentence from Ines Samengo at your essay page:
"But I know that people working on insect behavior, for example, can reproduce their actions to a remarkable precision, they truly behave as tiny robots."
This is no wonder, since we humans can also predict the behaviour of our fellow friends in many cases. But this does not mean that we are robots. The insects have a rather small space of goals and intentions and therefore i would expect that the prediction of such behaviour is possible. The more interesting question is whether some kind of God can *to a remarkable precision* predict the actions of humans, since from the perspective of God our space of behaviour may be equally small than that of an insect.
Thanks for your comment and for your essay. Your identification of rigidity and flexibility as a necessary ingredient for life is very interesting.
Best wishes,
Stefan Weckbach
