Reductionist think of imperative programming when they say ”programming”. Also there is declarative programming:
”Declarative – code declares properties of the desired result, but not how to compute it, describes what computation should perform, without specifying detailed state changes” [101]
When reductionists compare brains to computer it is imperative programming that reductionists have in mind. The modern hardware nowadays is built for IP
”Imperative – code directly controls execution flow and state change, explicit statements that change a program state” [101]
I see here a powerful metaphor associated to your text. Prolog language is originally from linguistics and it is near philosophy! (swi-prolog is the particular tool in my mind)
I was struck while reading this by the deep resonance between your framing of teleology in biology and Alfred Adler’s use of teleology in psychology. Though working in different domains, both perspectives seem to recognize a similar motivational essence: that life unfolds not as a reaction to what has been, but in response to what calls us forward.
Adler spoke of the individual psyche as guided by unconscious goals or imagined ideals. Not as rigid plans, but as directional tendencies shaping behavior from within. Much like your description of organisms tending toward form or coherence, this vision of purpose is open-ended, relational, and emergent.
It’s powerful to see this convergence, a shared recognition that purpose is not imposed from outside, nor reducible to mechanism. Rather, it is something woven into the living process itself, shaping, drawing, and inviting all at once.
Thank you for this beautiful and thought-provoking exploration.
Henri Bergson wrote: “That life is a kind of mechanism I cordially agree. But is it the mechanism of parts artificially isolated within the whole of the universe, or is it the mechanism of the real whole? The real whole might well be, we conceive, an indivisible continuity. The systems we cut out within it would, properly speaking, not then be parts at all; they would be partial views of the whole. And, with these partial views put end to end, you will not make even a beginning of the reconstruction of the whole, any more than, by multiplying photographs of an object in a thousand different aspects, you will reproduce the object itself. So of life and of the physico-chemical phenomena to which you endeavor to reduce it.” (Bergson 1907/1944, 36)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote: “[If] man really becomes the manipulandum he takes himself to be, we enter into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening. (Merleau-Ponty 1961/2004, 292)
Mazvita Chirimuuta provides these, and many other striking quotes from the rich vein of process philosophy, in her exemplary paper “The Reflex Machine and the Cybernetic Brain: The Critique of Abstraction and its Application to Computationalism”
do you have a view on the theory of consciousness developed by Hameroff and Penrose?
Tasty! Love it.
Reductionist think of imperative programming when they say ”programming”. Also there is declarative programming:
”Declarative – code declares properties of the desired result, but not how to compute it, describes what computation should perform, without specifying detailed state changes” [101]
When reductionists compare brains to computer it is imperative programming that reductionists have in mind. The modern hardware nowadays is built for IP
”Imperative – code directly controls execution flow and state change, explicit statements that change a program state” [101]
I see here a powerful metaphor associated to your text. Prolog language is originally from linguistics and it is near philosophy! (swi-prolog is the particular tool in my mind)
101. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm
I was struck while reading this by the deep resonance between your framing of teleology in biology and Alfred Adler’s use of teleology in psychology. Though working in different domains, both perspectives seem to recognize a similar motivational essence: that life unfolds not as a reaction to what has been, but in response to what calls us forward.
Adler spoke of the individual psyche as guided by unconscious goals or imagined ideals. Not as rigid plans, but as directional tendencies shaping behavior from within. Much like your description of organisms tending toward form or coherence, this vision of purpose is open-ended, relational, and emergent.
It’s powerful to see this convergence, a shared recognition that purpose is not imposed from outside, nor reducible to mechanism. Rather, it is something woven into the living process itself, shaping, drawing, and inviting all at once.
Thank you for this beautiful and thought-provoking exploration.
Henri Bergson wrote: “That life is a kind of mechanism I cordially agree. But is it the mechanism of parts artificially isolated within the whole of the universe, or is it the mechanism of the real whole? The real whole might well be, we conceive, an indivisible continuity. The systems we cut out within it would, properly speaking, not then be parts at all; they would be partial views of the whole. And, with these partial views put end to end, you will not make even a beginning of the reconstruction of the whole, any more than, by multiplying photographs of an object in a thousand different aspects, you will reproduce the object itself. So of life and of the physico-chemical phenomena to which you endeavor to reduce it.” (Bergson 1907/1944, 36)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote: “[If] man really becomes the manipulandum he takes himself to be, we enter into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening. (Merleau-Ponty 1961/2004, 292)
Mazvita Chirimuuta provides these, and many other striking quotes from the rich vein of process philosophy, in her exemplary paper “The Reflex Machine and the Cybernetic Brain: The Critique of Abstraction and its Application to Computationalism”
https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/163478123/Chirimuuta_forthcoming_Reflex_machine_penultimate.pdf
Thank you for this link
Wonderful post! A great start to my day. Thank you.