Aristotelian Prologue

Generalities#

Aristotle begins his History of Animals by tarrying with some generalities.

Homogeneous vs Heterogeneous#

First, a distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous composite parts, which should better be thought of as the distinction between the homogeneous or “material” and the structural.

cf. The Origin of Information, in particular the “Refutation of the solutions proposed” section.

There are some errors in Ruyer's argument since we still have the notion of information compression, etc., but the overall idea is unproblematic. Basically, the structure that is inherent in information isn't taken into account when information is quantitatively measured, a perfectly legitimate and meaningful chunk of information, say, a code written in rust, while highly structured, may not be meaningful to a medieval scholar, and may not really be distinguishable from a chunk of gibberish. “The measure of information, like all measurement, must be made intelligently and relative to a certain mental context” - things only emerge internal to a broadly speaking logical framework. The point is also often made clear in textbooks of information theory, but people seem not to take it seriously.
“The supposed initial state of the universe, with free energy maximized and entropy minimized, represents a homogenous order and not a structured order.” Minimal entropy, or minimal Kolmogorov complexity; the latter is better to illustrate, since the sequence \(00000\ldots\) has an entropy as small as possible.

Completed morphology versus ontogenesis#

Second, while pointing out that the ancient authors were interested first of all in the process of formation of each animal (which is strange, since there's no notion of genesis), namely ontogenesis, Aristotle deemed it as important to consider the formed animal, and further preferred first to describe completely formed animals (what does complete mean? - substantial form). This is in connection to his doctrine of teleology.

Heterogeneous parts require final cause#

In the four types of causality, all whose structure is homogeneous can be explained by the efficient cause. Heterogeneous parts require in addition, for their explication, another kind of cause, that is called the final cause, and which Aristotle calls

“the end”, telos;
“in view of which”, to ou eneka;
“why”, dia ti.

He doesn't use abstract expression such as “final cause” or “finality”. A cause of any kind is such only through a principle of unity of real objects or elements of these objects.

A living being is a being which is born, grows, develops, comes to maturity, and finally through a process in the reverse direction, declines and dies. As all change is motion, the order of living is the order of all which has in itself the principle of its own change - that is, endowed with spontaneity, a fortiori in its operations and its actions.

Heterogeneity in the structure of certain beings is there, because they are living beings. The living being moves itself entails as a consequence that it is composed of heterogeneous parts.

Since one single and identical thing could not be motive force and the thing moved at the same time and in the same way, all living operations involve and require the differentiation of certain parts capable of acting one on another. Heterogeneity of parts is required for the very possibility of that causality operating on itself which characterizes the growth of living beings.

Hence no effort is made in clearly defining what is living ("spontaneity"). That which is living is given, and from there the presence of heterogeneity can be entailed.

And this differentiation should make up a certain order, that is, the heterogeneous parts of the living being should organize into the whole (the living being itself). The living matter is hence organic.

The finalism of Aristotle is an attempt to give a reason for the very existence of this organization.

From Man to Nature#

Gilson defends Aristotle's anthropomorphism, that is, evaluating the parts of other animals in terms of those of the human body, with a Kantian-flavour argument, which doesn't seem right:

In knowing himself man knows nature in a unique way, because in this unique case the nature that he knows, he is. […] In fact, all the rest of the universe is and remains for him the external world. Since then there is no other knowledge for each of us other than our own knowledge, things known exist for us only in relation to ourselves, and among these things there is only one that we can apprehend directly in itself, and that is what we are and what each calls "I," "me."

But in order to know himself, he must know nature in a certain way. Human body, the biological human, in contrast to the human soul, is external to the inhabitant of that body. By adopting anthropomorphic view, one is not making a mistake, but is taking a certain point of view, and the certain point of view correlates with the why of adopting this point of view, and further endows a certain form of meaning and category to the words and the objects in the world.

To the question "How does nature produce beings made up of heterogeneous parts?" he responds by another question: "How
does man fabricate objects made up of such parts?" Art imitates nature; it must be then that nature proceeds in a manner
analogous to that of art.

Now all fabrication presupposes the image, concept, or ideal of the object to be fabricated. And except for habitual acts, there ought to be a reason for what we do, without which in our mind nothing happens (but note the unconscious - it doesn't seem like all unconscious acts are habitual acts).

Difficulty of the final cause#

How it could be that something which does not yet exist could direct and determine that which already is, though it be only to conduct its operations or direct its growth.

A certain sort of backward causality seems to be involved here. Similarly, when one consider the constructive generation of time (the continuum), one must first think of the beginning and the end of an interval, in order that the points in between the two can be generated. Other notion of generation of the continuum doesn't make sense, in particular the one that involve Zeno's paradox, which is the standard one. This is in fact the problem of the possibility of motion: even a simple motion needs an end that is yet not existent, seemingly.

Comments#

Heterogeneity versus Homogeneity#

Interestingly by introducing heterogeneity, the problem of meaning and coding emerges, in conjunction with the epistemological problem that is central to artificial intelligence. Organism/structure is essentially, from an informational point of view, patterns. As pure geometrical extension a la Descartes, bodies are devoid of structure and pattern. To discern pattern and structure in pure geometrical extension is to do pattern recognition, and in the present days pattern recognition is done by data fitting: from the raw descriptions of homogeneous geometrical extension one tries to approximate a pattern.

Homogeneous parts	Structure/Heterogeneous parts
Numerical Data	Equation
Raster image	Vector image

We see that the latter is closer to the abstract, the ideal, and pertains to meaning, while the former is material, concrete, and is what is regarded as flesh-and-bone. (Now, but, what does the word “closer” mean?) One way to look at it is that under a duality between numerical data that is to approximate, to fit, an equation, and the equation itself, is the duality between living beings and their substantial forms, the forms being their telos, and the telos embodies an ideal, and determines the meaning of organized structures of concrete stuffs. (Need to rephrase in a better language)

Mechanism is closely associated with set-theoretic mentality, or reductionist mentality: it is believed that by knowing the atomic, the “fundamental”, the higher-order structures can also be known.

Emergence is about the emergence of meaning rather than “order”, though the two should be more or less the same.

One oft-used argument against final cause is precisely based upon meaning, that is, the meaning that is perceived by those advocating for final cause is only meaningful apparently - but what does it mean that a meaning can be objective? Objective in what sense? Objective in the sense of a subjectively (which doesn't mean “arbitrary” but “for a certain purpose” “under certain meaning” - well, it is in some sense arbitrary) defined objectivity.

The primacy of the final cause#

Aristotle's argument is made with analogy, but the primacy of the final cause should really be based upon meaning. Without a purpose no meaning can be generated, since, for example, quote Andre Bauer:

It is meaningless to discuss representations of a set by a datatype without also considering operations that we want to perform on the set.

A set is "thing in itself", or the data, and the representation of the set is information - a datatype. Without considering operations that we want to perform on the set, that is, without considering the coding scheme, it is meaningless to discuss information. Here a pragmaticist attitude, in the sense of Peirce, manifests itself, but it is also schematically Kantian.

It may be supposed at least that this force internal to the process in living beings is related to intelligence, whether it be that it directs itself toward intelligence as its end or descends from it as its cause. These are legitimate metaphysical speculations, and, in a sense, inevitable.

Some Gilsonian gibberishes#

Another cause of confusion in discussions about teleology has to do with the introduction of the notion of "life." This is not an
Aristotelian notion but a Platonic one. "Life" exists for Plato; Aristotle only knows living beings. One should not then imagine that the cause of teleology should be tied to that of "vitalism." We need not here define living beings as such. This is not our object. We only say that their correct description does not necessarily imply the appeal to a special force which is called "life."

The special force which is called “life” is the spontaneity that is present in living beings, and living beings are living. I don't see the point of this paragraph. It seems that the whole point of moving away from words like “life” and “vitalism” is a certain sort of political correctness. And in the above (2nd) quote Gilson himself used the word “force internal to the process in living beings”.