Are 'Functions' And 'Doings' Real In The Universe?

Are 'Functions' And 'Doings' Real In The Universe?

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2012/0...e-universe

Are biological "Functions" and "Doings" real in the universe? According to most scientists, "no." They are mistaken manners of speaking. You see, in all of physics, there are only "Happenings," not Functions in the biological sense, in which the function of the heart is to pump blood. Nor are there Doings. Balls rolling down hills are not doing anything at all.

What is the function of your heart? Darwin would answer that it is to pump blood. But your heart makes heart sounds. Why are these causal consequences of beating hearts not the function of your heart? Darwin would answer that you have a heart because it was selectively advantageous for your ancestors to have a heart that pumped blood. Hence the function of your heart is to pump blood, not make heart sounds.

Three points are crucial here: i) The function of your heart is a subset of its causal consequences, here pumping blood, not making heart sounds. ii) A Kantian whole is an organized being in which the parts exist for and by means of the whole and the whole exists for and by means of the parts. You are a Kantian whole, as is a bacterium. iii) You and the bacteria are at a level of complexity where most complex things will never exist in the non-ergodic universe above the level of atoms.

Thus, when Darwin tells us that the function of your heart is to pump blood, he is also telling us why hearts and you exist in the non-ergodic universe.

This last paragraph is the central truth I wish to point to: Once a complex Kantian whole exists in the non-ergodic universe above the level of atoms, we can legitimately discriminate the causal consequences of the parts that help sustain the Kantian whole from causal consequences of the same parts that are mere side effects.

The former causal consequences, here the heart pumping blood, are the legitimate Functions of the parts, and are no longer mere Happenings. Functions of parts help explain why complex Kantian wholes exist in the universe above the level of atoms.

Physics has only Happenings. Why in biology are Doings not just Happenings?

Kauffman has some further thoughts relating to information:

Information Theory Does Not Apply To The Evolution Of The Biosphere

We live in the Information Age. Some physicists believe that information is a fundamental aspect of nature. All such theories rest on the adequacy of information theory. In this post I shall argue that information theory does not apply, is, in fact, useless, with respect to the evolution of the biosphere.

There are two major approaches to information theory: Shannon's theory and that of Kolmogorov-Chaitin.
In Shannon's theory, he considered an "information source," containing "messages" in a pre-stated alphabet. The binary string 0100101001 is an example of a message. Different messages may occur with different frequencies in the information source. Shannon was able to compute the information transmitted down an "information channel" to a "decoder." The channel might be noisy, so the decoder receives a degraded version of a given message with "mistakes" with respect to some of the symbols in the symbol string.

In the Kolmogorov-Chaitin theory, one does not consider an information source. One considers, in a pre-stated alphabet, a specific symbol string, e.g., 0100101001. The information content of the string is the shortest program on a universal computer that can compute this string as an output. While the information content is itself uncomputable, for one cannot prove that a given program is the shortest one, this definition of information has had wide application.

But neither applies to the evolution of the biosphere.

Evolving cells and organisms are Kantian wholes, in which the parts exist for and by means of the whole and the whole exists for and by means of the parts...