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Grobstein's discussion of technology's evolving is very interesting to me, trained in the history and philosophy of science and technology. Certainly, technology is often simply the recombination of existing elements -- in fact, the same can be said for much of visual art, and musical composition, too, for that matter. As for progress being the result of humans "looking for a means to an end that they have already defined", that seems a bit too simple to me. Often the technology may be designed for a certain end but yields quite different ends -- no one suspected that the Victrola would re-shape our whole approach to music, for example. Rarely is an end well-defined: I doubt that Edison devised the light bulb as a direct solution to a problem -- people had lived with gas-lighting for quite a while, and probably could have done so for another hundred years. Even now, there are problems that have direct solutions, but technologies have not appeared to address them. Technological innovation is a much more chaotic process than most people realize, and its driven mostly by irrational factors: desire for profit, personal egos, the vagaries of the market, and so on. Why does the Windows system -- a dreadful bit of backwards technology -- continue to thrive? Primarily because of its hold on the market, NOT because it provides an optimal solution to the need for personal computing (a need which was fabricated out of thin air anyway!).

Now, onto a totally different subject -- problems in emergence. In mind, Grobstein and I are still locked in battle: I don't see how order and pattern and so on can emerge from nothing. I know that's simplifying Grobstein's positions, but still... The other day, I taught some of the ideas of Empedocles and Anaxagoras to my class. The former took the four Greek material causes (the four elements) and added two efficient causes. The latter put forward the idea of nous ("Mind") as the efficient cause. In both cases, these thinkers were not content with the idea that material itself could lead to order. That is, they didn't believe that systems could spontaneously arise and be self-organizing. They posited outside organizing forces that took matter and shaped it.

This seems to be a bit lame (to use philosophical jargon) to me, of course, and leads to the question of where those efficient causes are from -- an eternal regression. But one is interesting is that philosophically, we are all still stuck in this frame of thinking. We think that there is either some fundamental organizing principle "behind" all matter (the "God equation", Wolfram's algorithms, etc.), or that matter arises with all its properties ready to go, allowing it to combine, interact, etc., giving rise to complex systems. Neither solution works for me. I am tending to think now that either, as Grobstein knows from our conversations, we give rise to ourselves (more on that another time), or that (a topic for our group's discussion perhaps??) the whole concept of "something emerging" is flawed. Perhaps the idea of "process" is wrong!