it'd be nice if we had compact, intuitive language for talking about the fitness advantages and the stresses that are their mirror image that caused an evolved feature to be selected for without resorting to speaking of an evolved feature's "design goals" or "purpose"
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Replying to @chaosprime
What’s wrong with “purpose”? I see that “design goals” is misleading (implying erm a design with goals), but “the purpose of the heart is pumping blood” seems legit to me? (Perhaps I have Stockholm syndrome from reading Millikan, and no real person uses “purpose” like this?)
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Replying to @tTikitu @chaosprime
(Cards on the table I think Millikan is right about a lot of stuff, which is bewildering, nearly a category error, for a professional philosopher.)
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Replying to @tTikitu
i think it's still misleading in the same way "design goals" is. like, it's rare for an organ or much any other biological system to just do one thing, and talking about "purpose" leads us to regard the most obvious thing it does as its "purpose" and other things as side effects
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Replying to @chaosprime @tTikitu
which isn't a distinction that exists in the dynamics shaping these systems
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Replying to @chaosprime
Gotcha. Millikan talks about “proper functions” which is mayyyybe less prone to forcibly singular-ising. But maybe this is not a problem of terminology but attitude anyway?
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Replying to @tTikitu
"proper" still has that weird line drawn between what it *should* be doing and the rest of what it *is* doing, but at least it's plural, lol. terminology vs. attitude: maybe? but, y'know, neural nets gonna neural net and terminology is gonna drag you toward its grounding
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Replying to @chaosprime
Oh that’s deliberate! To be able to talk about eg a defective organ, which has a proper function which it doesn’t perform. Only “the rest” isn’t necessarily excluded: *all* the historically-selected stuff becomes proper functions. (Iirc, it’s been a while.)
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