George Gantz,
Thank you for reading and commenting on my essay, and I would particularly like to thank you for the question about teleological bias (T-bias). This is a term that I am not altogether satisfied with. First off, the word teleological carries a certain amount of religious or spiritual baggage I wish to avoid. In its most basic definition, I intend it to convey the subjective feeling or goal within a sentient being, no matter how primitive, to survive and flourish.
In reading your well-written essay, I noticed my own internal definitions of many of the T-biased words we both use have substantially different meanings to the way you use them. I think I would need to construct a George-Jim Rosetta Stone to translate between them. I find it useful to slightly redefine several of the most common words used in these discussions. These are phenomenal definitions. A sentient being is nothing more than an individuated organism, which is connected to and reacts to the variations in its environment by way of receptor and proprioceptor nerve endings. By this definition a worm can be sentient. Intelligence is the quantitative and qualitative capacity to process and organize information. By this definition, the computer Watson is highly intelligent. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment. An agenda somehow comes out of this and presents itself directly to the subject.
It would occur to us in retrospect that the veracity, completeness and therefore the predictive power of this internalized observation of reality would serve an organism well. But this would beg the question: how, on the evolutionary trail, did an organism's acquisition of an agenda to extract meaningful and relevant information for survival arise? Somehow, it must be connected to existential threat. But how does the organism come to sense that existential threat? My simplistic answer is that an organism's nerve endings, no matter how primitive, provide the initial feedback. All sentient beings have skin in the game. But there still remains the problem of how that feedback might be converted into consciousness and the sensation of jeopardy.
{Insert hand waving here}
Once the sense of jeopardy has been detected, the obvious back reaction would be a teleological bias to fulfill the dual agendas: stay in the energy flux and avoid destruction. This would require the organism to choose a path through phase space that would provide the requisite energy flux or reservoir needed to maintain the dissipative state of the organism in order to be able to selectively navigate this evolutionary landscape. Adaptive response to the environment occurs over a temporal spectrum from real-time to the life of the species. This would go for the tubeworms living near a steam vent or, as more neural circuitry is thrown at the problem in service of this agenda, an investment banker competing for her share of the billions in bonuses available to maintain herself far from equilibrium.
I generally try to avoid the use of the word 'intentional' as it can be confused with the less descriptive philosophical term of art denoting the content or object of consciousness. This definition is unfortunate. Here, I will attempt to provide you with a more complete picture of what I'm trying to get at with the term T-bias as it applies to sentient beings with intelligence and consciousness but it does not apply to any systems or processes that do not have these attributes. It is exclusively a property of life.
Which is to say, I agree with your essay up to the point where you introduce cosmic intention. When you assume the existence of that which is to be explained, then all further explanation stops. Indeed consciousness is mysterious. They don't call it the hard problem for nothing.
Self-identity and self-interest progress in stages. Right after I am born, with my first inklings of self-awareness my identity and my self-interest stop at my skin. Then as I discriminate myself from my immediate surroundings and the active agents within it I soon come to the awareness of my dependence upon these other active agents for my well-being: my family, my friends and my community. I develop a feeling of what is good for these extensions of myself are good for me. And as I extend my self-definition outwards to my school, the company I work for, my country and finally, if all goes well, the entire globe with its social, economic and political connectivity, and with its ecology and environment, it is in my enlightened self-interest to become one with everything. The greatest good for the greatest number might become the end of this outward self-definition, but this is only half the story. This final step is too easily perverted. Utilitarianism has been used for human sacrifice. The final step of enlightened self-interest is to bring back a balance to what I call the I-thou symmetry. If I do not value and protect my own being as an individual then the whole point of my being is lost. This concept is beautifully contained in the Golden rule and in Kant's contrapositive formulation of the categorical imperative: "do not do to anyone else what you would not have done to you."
As you noted, we have the standard model of particle physics. Just think, if the sciences had been properly funded we could have had the deluxe model!
Best regards,
Jim Stanfield
