Re: Human design and natural "design"

Michael Nuwer wrote:
> dkomo wrote:
>
>>Let's back up a bit. First of all, the intent of my original post was
>>to characterize human design accurately and distinguish it from what
>>nature does at the level of biological evolution.
>
>
> It is not clear to me what you have in mind when you refer to "human
> design." What is the object of the design? Do you mean the individual
> human who designs a house in their imagination (that is, conceptualizes
> the house) and then proceeds to construct the physical structure? Or do
> you have in mind humans as a group who have designed, say, modern
> computing technology? Would you include social institutions and cultural
> rules and norms in the set of objects that are designed by human?
>

Yes to all of the above.

It's easier to give examples of human design than define it. Thus I had
in mind software and hardware design; writing of books, articles and
Internet posts; writing of songs, both the music and the lyrics;
creating works of art such as sculpture and paintings; ballet
choreography; making of movies; discovering new mathematical theorems;
discovering new facts of nature, developing theories to explain them,
designing experiments to test the theories; designing houses, bridges,
office buildings; designing new models of cars.

And so on. I've probably left a great deal out.

What I don't consider design is the solving of crossword puzzles or
finding the solution to a math problem.

>
>>I don't see how this
>>is "based on the notion that humans somehow stand outside of nature."
>>That assertion never even crossed my mind. And frankly, I don't see
>>that it has much to do with analyzing intelligent (human) design.
>>
>>The view that nature doesn't design, but produces organisms that appear
>>designed is the received view in biology. I put in my post thinking
>>that it is a conservative position. I don't necessarily agree with it,
>>but it gives me a starting point. This is a view that Richard Dawkins
>>has used many times in his books, and, if I'm not mistaken, so has
>>Stephen Gould.
>
>
> And it is a view that may well apply to human technology and social
> institutions.
>

This is what I call reductionism. It isn't the only way to view design.
The responses I've gotten in this thread and the identical one in
talk.origins pretty much fall on two ends of the spectrum:

1. The holistic view: nature is intelligent and is a designer. Human
design is just one specific example of the self-organization that is
prevalent throughout the natural world. So in this view both nature and
man perform design.

2. The reductionist view: nature does not design anything. There is a
process called evolution which produces "artifacts" that appear designed
but really aren't. This same evolutionary process extends to
*everything* that man does, including design. It's ok to consider human
design as special only in terms of the artifacts humans produce, but it
must be recognized that the same mindless processes as in biological
evolution go on in the human world of design.

I started out with a view in my original post that was mid-way between
these two: nature does not design, but man does, and this human design
process is substantially different than biological evolution, although
there are similarities in terms of generating alternatives and selecting
the better ones to attain the final design. The main difference is that
human design involves intentionality and a vision of what the design
should be. This provides a target for the whole process, something that
is entirely absent in biological evolution. This target is why I called
human design a "cybernetic" process.

I think I've come to be more sympathetic to the holistic view. I think
it's the paradigm of the future for biology. The reductionist viewpoint
really doesn't belong in biology. It smacks of the rapidly disappearing
world view of classical 19th century science.

>
>>Then the view that humans perform intelligent design which is different
>>from what nature does is likewise, I thought, a conservative view.
>>What's so controversial about this view?
>>
>>I mentioned emergence because emergent processes can operate with their
>>own laws that are different than the laws in the levels below. For
>>example, newtonian mechanics is an emergent process of matter in bulk,
>>as pointed out by Robert Laughlin in _A Different Universe_. Matter in
>>bulk is governed by newton's laws, which are quite different than the
>>laws of quantum mechanics, even though matter is ultimately composed of
>>quantum particles: electrons, neutrons, protons and so forth. With
>>matter in bulk we are now in the deterministic world as opposed to the
>>probabilistic quantum world.
>>
>>And so I think is the case with the human design: it is an emergent
>>process with different laws than the random variation and selection that
>>governs evolution.
>
>
> The use, in this thread, of the term "human design" is not at all clear
> to me, but if I were to replace it with a notion of a complex
> technological system or social organization, then I would maintain that
> the ideas of variation and selection may well govern their evolution. Of
> course, by changing your definition, I might just be mudding the waters.
>

I don't agree with this. Design by teams or large social organizations
is just individual design which is pushed up several rungs on the ladder
of emergence. Keep in mind that Minsky wrote a book called _The Society
of Mind_ where he proposed that the human mind was a large collection of
interacting "agents", so that what appears to be individual design is
actually group design. We consider it individual design only because
these agents are locked inside a single brain case.

> But the point that I believe is significant is this: It seems to me that
> although _individual_ humans have the ability to design things as a
> consequence of the capacity for conceptual thinking, it is not at all
> clear that this ability extends to a group or collective entity -- at
> least not in any straightforward, additive way.
>

I don't understand why it isn't clear. Emergence as collective activity
of simple interacting agents is pretty familiar by now.

> Human engineering as purposeful action lead to human created
> technologies, but, it seems to me, there is an important sense in which
> it is more useful to say that these technologies evolve and avoid saying
> that these technologies are designed. This is, of course, tricky because
> individuals use their cognitive abilities to solve particular
> technological problems. But I think that it leads to errors if we then
> say that humans as a group designed the technology, because to design
> implies intentionality and purpose.
>

This may be facile, but I think that group mind and group intentionality
are pretty straightforward ideas. To me design at this level is also a
cybernetic process, and it is not ok to consider it as being similar to
biological evolution.

> Like the evolution of biological organisms, human technology evolves via
> a process without intentionality; working only by a self-interested
> principle of success (i.e. focused problem solving); yielding systems of
> intricate adaptive design.
>

Human technology involves a great *deal* of intentionality! That's why
it is so different from evolution, which has no foresight or direction
at all. I'm not denying that human design can involve serendipidy as
well, but even if there is *some* intentionality, if you try to tie it
too closely to evolution you make a serious error.

>
>>I'm suggesting that human design can be analyzed
>>from the viewpoint of a cybernetic control system, and that evolution is
>>most assuredly *not* such a control system!
>
>
> I don't think human design (that is, complex human institutions) can be
> usefully analyzed from the viewpoint of a cybernetic control system.
> There are important problems that arise in the modeling of information,
> learning and knowledge.
>

What are these problems?

I have to modify the control system idea when it comes to artistic
design. There may not *be* a target for an artist as there is for an
engineer, for example. The design may just appear straight out of the
"subconscious". Jackson Pollack and his drip paintings come to mind.


--dkomo@xxxxxxxx


>
> Michael Nuwer
> nuwermj at potsdam dot edu
>


.

Relevant Pages

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