Purposelessness and DNA Propagating

Question

Positivist evolutionary biologists claim that living beings are nothing but byproduct of purposeless random evolution. (For example, say, a flower is just a DNA propagating machine.)

I am especially interested in assigning meaning to the existence of, in this example, the flower. Unless there is a designer and unless the designer reveals his intentions (for example I make a video game, and I know the purpose of a particular object within the game), or, unless one possesses the totality of knowledge (impossible), aren't such claims just I-know-it-all attitude?

Are there scholarly discussions of "purpose" and related topics along somewhat above-mentioned lines?

Answer 1

If you want to deny the existence of the category 'meaning', you have to do that in the realm of.. meaning..! To be a mind grappling with the world, you must create some kind of account of minds, personhood, meaning. That precedes the discussion. So to use that following discussion to dismiss minds and meaning is tautological!

We can do a great deal to explain the natural world through heuristic reductionism, looking at causes and effects. But at some point, as feedback grows between adaptive fitness to niche, and reforming of the niche, you have to observe, this is no longer chemistry, and becomes about choices based on mental states. We as a species, can no longer be accounted for in our modern choices, by regard to material causes and conditions. Describe a single mental state, by modelling every neuron in a human brain, is beyond the computational power of every computer on Earth - or it was a few years ago anyway. So we develop a heurustic explanatory layer, and that simplifies things a lot, computationally. We imagine we are going from the ground up, but really we have proceeded from the top down. We begin with ourselves, and our experiences.

The flower emerges as a result of dynamics across a fitness landscape. But heuristically, as a matter of simplification only, we ascribe meaning and purpose to outcomes.

DNA is a kind of record of evolutiinary adaptions to niche. A kind of simulation in a certain subjective localised sense, of the niche. A kind of informational model, with implicit virtual reality simulation of the world, with a suite of responses ready for it. Brain science supports the view our consciousness is like that too, with a right brain mainly helping manifest an apparently objective but highly processed world 'out there', and a left brain mainly occupied with being a thing in that experienced world. So this model unites a picture of chemistry, biology, and psychology. And pictures meaning as in principle reducible to atoms and the void, but in practice existing as a heuristic explanatory layer supervening on the world, for reasons of computatiinal simplicity. We share 'meaning' and 'design' by invitation of one another into particular abstractions and their dynamics.

Answer 2

If you were designed with a purpose, by a designer, for example to have a special blood type or be super-intelligent to solve a critical planetary problem, would this control your consciousness so that you could not be anything else? The designer can have his intended purpose for you, and you may fulfill it, but if you can gain an introspective self-consciousness (apperception) you are not bound by another's purpose for you, and you can create your own meaning and purpose in life.

Conjuring up a book quote for you, regarding deterministic existence, implied by exterior purpose.

Jacques Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, page 20

The future is not present, but there is an opening onto it; and because there is a future, a context is always open. What we call opening of the context is another name for what is still to come.
Justice - or justice as it promises to be, beyond what it actually is - always has an eschatological dimension. I link up this value of eschatology with a certain value of messianism, in an attempt to free both dimensions from the religious and philosophical contents and manifestations usually attached to them: philosophical, for eschatology, the thought of the extreme, the eschaton; or religious, the messianism in the religions 'of the book'. Why do I claim that justice is eschatological and messianic, and that this is so a priori, even for the non-believer, even for someone who does not live according to a faith determined by Judeo-Christian-Islamic revelation? Perhaps because the appeal of the future that we spoke of a moment ago - which overflows any sort of ontological determination, which overflows everything that is and that is present, the entire field of being and beings, and the entire field of history - is committed to a promise or an appeal that goes beyond being and history. This is an extremity that is beyond any determinable end of being or of history, and this eschatology - as extreme beyond the extreme, as last beyond the last - has necessarily to be the only absolute opening towards the non-determinability of the future.
It is perhaps necessary to free the value of the future from the value of the 'horizon' that traditionally has been attached to it - a horizon being, as the Greek word indicates, a limit from which I pre-comprehend the future. I wait for it, I predetermine it, and thus I annul it. Teleology is, at bottom, the negation of the future, a way of knowing beforehand the form that will have to be taken by what is still to come.

Answer 3

Positivist evolutionary biologists claim that living beings are nothing but byproduct of purposeless random evolution. Yet they also claim that, say, a flower is nothing but a DNA propagating machine.

Living beings came into existence as a result of evolution by natural selection. Variants of genes came about as a result of random mutation. Some of those variants managed to copy themselves and others didn't. The variants that managed to copy themselves instantiate information about how to make copies of information in the environment in which they evolved.

I am especially interested in assigning meaning to the existence of, say, the flower. Unless there is designer and unless the designer reveals his intentions (for example I make a video game, and I know the purpose of a particular object within the game), or, unless one possesses the totality of knowledge (impossible), such claims are nothing but I-know-it attitude. For example, "DNA propagating machine" is nothing but an opinion. Nobody can ever be certain of that, or any other similar claim.

You have bad ideas about epistemology - the theory of knowledge. If Jack claims he designed a video game, how do you know he did it? He might tell you details about how the video game works, show you the source code and explain how he came up with the ideas in it, show you a copyright notice in the code that gives him the copyright and so on. You could guess that the explanation for all those facts is that Jack wrote the game, but you could be wrong. Jack might have somehow persuaded the author of the game to put his name in the copyright notice, and he might understand the game well by reading the source code. So your knowledge that Jack wrote the game consists of a guess that might be refuted.

Our knowledge of natural selection, and all other knowledge, has the same character, it consists of unrefuted guesses. The idea that all life evolved by natural selection is an unrefuted guess. The idea that life was created by a designer is a refuted guess. The reason for making such a guess is that biological structures are complex and embody information about how to manipulate the environment to solve a particular problem, e.g. - bird's wings are det up in such a way that they solve the problem of helping the bird to fly. If there was a designer he would have to understand the laws of physics to design the bird's wings and that knowledge would be information that needs an explanation just as the bird's wings require such an explanation. So the existence of the designer wouldn't do much to explain the existence of bird wings, it would be the start of looking for a real explanation. To understand this issue better see Chapter 4 of "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch.

One other issue to note is that biological evolution is not necessarily the only relevant explanation for why flowers look the way they do. Flowers are attractive both to insects and to human beings, which is unusual and difficult to explain. David Deutsch has suggested that flowers may have evolved to be objectively beautiful because they couldn't take advantage of having a lot of shared genes with the species they use for pollination, see Chapter 14 of "The Beginning of Infinity" by Deutsch.