vale, vale hombre. :))

human more often try to solve problems from top to bottom and not bottom up, no?

...but were Wolfram to do so, I'd heartily concur. Once the range and breadth of forces acting on artifact design overwhelms the individual's ability to design and optimize, artifact evolution takes on the same kind of emergent, invisible hand character as natural evolution. Evolutionary processes governed by no single guiding intelligence are called "teleonomic", by analogy with "teleological"...

--BF, still avoiding real work

around dawkins, eh :))

if teleonomic is understood as "behaviors that can be viewed as resulting from some hypothesized purpose" (Floyd Allport), is your "invisible hand" not somehow out of the game?

The Allport definition sounds like teleology, not <*teleonomy*>. Here's a snippet from an extended abstract for a paper on chaos and <*xp*>:

Teleonomy is the science of adaptation. It is "the quality of apparent purposefulness in living organisms that derives from their evolutionary adaptation". The term was coined to stand in contract with teleology. A teleological process is one that is planned in a purposeful way by a sentient, intelligent being. Artifacts that emerge from such a process are the products of foresight, and intent. A teleonomic process, such as evolution, produces products of stunning intricacy without the benefit of such a guiding intelligence. Instead, it blindly accrues information about what has worked, exploiting feedback from the environment via the selection and survival of fitter coalitions of such insight. It unwittingly choreographs a grand audition of a horde of variations on what it has learned thus far, culling the also-rans, and casting the winners in its next production. It hoards hindsight, and uses it to make "predictions" about how to cope with the future.

The extended abstract can be found at
http://www.laputan.org/chaos/chaos.html

I'm trying to gear up to either finish that paper, or spin out chunks of it, so comments are eagerly solicited...

--BF, enjoying a lovely autumn afternoon in August in Illinois

not so emportant. has to be done by literate later reviewers. In the literate world that is peopled by purposeful, sentient, intelligent - and I might say individual - beings nothing else is thinkable.
As reading e.g. Maturana/Varela's The Tree of Knowledge tells me thinking counter-literately is really difficile for us here.

This book contains a nice illustration. It's a pelican or some other fishing bird on a tree with lots of formulae on gravitation, windspeed and light-refraction in it's brain so that it can compute where ideally the fish's and its own path intersect. Now if hunting for nutrition is no purpose, what is one then?

so the value of the net is for a user, that you can go there in the sense of <*teleonomy*> and play freely with unexpected connections, put it together to a purpose later on. or is this preteleonomic?? however. in this state even reading on the screen functions, but as soon as there is a purpose envolved my brain is screeming for paper. can´t help it. no answer possible before i haven´t found one ...

i am glad to go back to summer soon

i would prefer to stress the term "progressive teleological regression" to describe the state of programming, simple because of "schizophrenia" and "progressive but regressive" :

"A theory of schizophrenia maintaining that the disorder results from a process of active concretization, i.e. a purposeful returning to lower levels of psychodynamic and behavioral adaptation which, while it may prove momentarily effective in reducing anxiety, tends ultimately toward repetitive behaviors and results in a failure to maintain integration. The term is Silvano Arieti's and was chosen because the disorder itself is viewed as progressive, the direction is regressive and the regression itself appears to function as though it had a purpose, i.e. it is teleological"

i am still not confident in how to make a difference between teleonomy or teleology. there are too many different schools around. and with the word <*teleonomy*> the term economy comes up too easily :))

just come back to that example once more. A purpose is a literate* abstraction of a complex set of drivers.

It is no question at all of staying in or even going back to the literal world. It's only a question of what we want to and can retain from that world. One thing for certain that I do not want to keep are religious wars. Desparate programming is one form of trying to keep something, eXtreme Programming (<*xp*>) is another. Yet there are many many other forms.

Teleology is for archeologists, <*teleonomy*> for us.

PS.: Please, don't always seduce me into this kind of difficult association chains.

* I use this expression of systems whose communication and reflection processes are heavily dominated by writing and reading.

i was waiting for your reaction :)) to that. but i thought more that you would take this quote: "In 1980 with the success of Apple, Tandy, and Commodore IBM began to take serious interest in microcomputers and adopted the Apple's strategy: software development by independent publishers, and open architecture."

just flew over the pap, glinting out of them mud. Sorgfalt ist halt durch nichts zu ersetzen.

Nevertheless, some of the critique of the paper, not critque of your snippet, is right. those guys are not consequent enough to see that apple left the good path and some IBM DON had to save Woz's work. That was and is my point. Seeing the first pattern is easy, seeing the second requests a lot of counter thinking, reading, feeling. Above all this is also Marshal's most important lesson.

Aber wirklich: so schlampat wie ichs jetzt gemacht habe, geht's nicht.

un otra part of the ibm story, told by dan bricklin.

a) i read the p. teleologic r. the way bf. is suggesting (retreat == regression). Im also interested if it was meant that way, Mariann.

b) I wrote something radical about purpose further above (fisherbird) but surely every clearly recognizable dominant driver (purpose in the mind)is embedded in and connected to global or at least larger context and plays a part in teleonomic phenomena, be it guided by the invisible hand or not. Now I even don't know if I compiled this thought in the right way and what every and all readers will or will not do with these words.

I'll try to write down some comment on chaos tonite.

Yes, I think you are drawing the teleological/teleonomic line about where I do. The fiserbird knows it is hungry, and knows that it somehow can control its orientation and trajectory in a way so as to not imperil itself as it takes a crack at supper. The fisherbird's DNA, however, doesn't know that it knows how to make a fisherbird. Instead, its genome, dispersed as it is across every member of the species, collectively encodes it's best bet as to how to keep building fisherbirds. This hard won trove of information knows how to recruit atoms and hold them together long enough to build fishbirds, let them learn how to eat, and to ultimately reproduce. This is a feat that is still way beyond what we sentient primates know how to do. This information is a priceless treasure, but it's never known what it means to be aware. In a way, it's just buffeted about by its consequences...