glen wrote:
... Purposefully designed systems have bugs (i.e. epiphenomena, unintended, side-, additional, secondary, effects). Biological evolution does not. There is no bug-feature distinction there.
In trying to normalize your terms/conceptions to my own, am I right that you are implying that intentionality is required for epiphenomena (reduces to tautology if "unintended" is key to "epi")?
This leads us back to the teleological debate I suppose. The common (vulgar?) "evolution" talk is laced with teleological implications... but I think what Glen is saying here that outside the domain of human/sentient will/intentionality (which he might also call an illusion), everything simply *is what it is* so anything *we* might identify as epiphenomena is simply a natural consequence *we* failed to predict and/or which does not fit *our* intention/expectation.
We watch a rock balanced at the edge of a cliff begin to shift after a rain and before our very eyes, we see it tumble off the cliff edge and roll/slide/skid toward the bottom of the gradient but being humans, with intentions and preferences and ideas, *we* notice there is a human made structure (say a cabin) at the bottom of the cliff and we begin to take odds on how likely that rock is to slip/slide/roll into the cabin. *we* give that event meaning that it does not have outside of our mind/system-of-values. The rock doesn't care that it came to final rest (or not) because the cabin structure in it's (final) path was robust enough to absorb/reflect the remaining kinetic energy in the rock-system and the cabin doesn't care either! We (because we are in the cabin, because we built the cabin, because we are paying a mortgage to the bank on the cabin, because we intend to inhabit the cabin, because we can imagine inhabiting the cabin before/during/after the collisions) put a lot of meaning and import into that rock coming to rest against/on-top-of/beyond the cabin, but the rock and the cabin *don't care*. If instead of crushing the cabin, the rock grazes it on the side where there was a dilapidated porch you intended to demolish, carrying it away and crumbling it's bits to compostable splinters in the ravine *below* the cabin out of your site, you might want to refer to the epiphenomenal nature of rolling stones as clever demolition and removal crews?
I'm probably just muddying the water (at the bottom of the ravine, now filled with cabin-deck bits).
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