Dear Harry Hamlin Ricker III,
First of all, thank you for your very kind words. I am glad you liked my essay and found it interesting.
Regarding your comment on omission I made at the introductory part of essay - it was a consciously made exclusion. While I do believe the question concerning 'Final Cause' is an important one, I think that it is irrelevant in this context or at least in the frame I set in my piece. Let me briefly explain why.
1) I focused on our capacity to distinguish between systems with ASOG (ability to set original goals) and those without - regardless of their motivations.
2) Most importantly we are very often (always?) not aware about real motives of our own actions, let alone motives of actions of others. How many times we think we do something for one reason, to discover (upon a deeper reflection) that we have done it actually for a different reason? We rationalize, we explain to ourselves different things. I do not want to go too deep into psychoanalysis here, but there is a limit to introspection.
3) There are multiple motives for our actions - rarely if ever there is only ONE / FINAL CAUSE. If you think about 'putting a man on a moon' - there were:
- multiple parties involved (USA and USSR),
- in each of them multiple people involved,
- each of them with multiple motives.
Hard to disentangle this. However, regardless of the motives and causes - a man was put on a moon. And this was a novel idea for which a plan was devised and executed. The way in which I interpreted the essay's topic focuses on exactly that question: is a system able or not to set such kind of novel goals. Nevertheless, you are right in saying that multiple potential interpretations of the essay's topic exist and one might understand it also in a way in which a moral question 'WHY' becomes relevant.
Once again, thank you for your time and input.
Kind regards,
Pawel Konzal
