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0 pointsdanbruc3y ago0 comments

That is the way I wanted my sentence to be understood, »evolve« in »[...] would the elephants evolve to be tusk-less?« is intended to mean nothing more than become dominant due to evolution and I do not see how that word in that context could be understood as anything else.

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bigDinosaur3y ago

Fair enough. I don't actually think you're wrong, to be clear, I think it's just easy to mix together related but distinct concepts here and the teleological angle makes that surprisingly easy to do (but it's almost impossible to actually avoid).

danbrucOP3y ago

Isn't teleology a red herring here? We may use language that sound teleologically - nature wants this or that - but that does not imply that we actually have any teleologically world view behind that. If someone says that the universe wants to minimize the action, then I don't think they ascribe any desires to the universe [1], they just want to say that physical systems behave in a way that minimizes the action which we figured out by inspection and experiment.

[1] At least by default, they can of course clarify that they actually think the universe has desires.

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0 pointsdanbruc3y ago0 comments

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bigDinosaur3y ago

danbrucOP3y ago

[1] At least by default, they can of course clarify that they actually think the universe has desires.

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