Victoria N. Alexander - 1/6

IPAK-EDU Director's Science Webinar

IPAK-EDU Director’s Science Webinar

Monday 1/6 @ 7:00pm Eastern
with/ Victoria N. Alexander

“Teleology and Human Purpose in an Age of AI and Biotech”

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Teleology and Human Purpose in an Age of AI and Biotech

"Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he may not be able to live without her, but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public." -- J. B. S. Haldane

Teleology is an ancient area of study that concerns the idea that the functions of forms in nature explain why or how they came to exist. Teleology was thoroughly debunked by Charles Darwin and subsequent evolutionary theorists. The science is settled: Nature is not purposeful. We now defer to natural selection to explain why organisms are so well-fitted to their environments, almost as if someone had designed them.

Likewise, the study of intentionality, which concerns how human can be said to be purposeful agents directing their own actions with their thoughts, is somewhat suspect these days. Is human agency a myth like teleological Nature? Is our apparently purposeful behavior merely shaped by a neuronal selection process, rather like the way that artificial intelligence is trained with "reinforcement learning"?

With the ominous rise of transhumanism, AI and biotech, threatening to displace us from our privileged position as specially intelligent beings, we may be inspired to explore anew whether or not nature really is passively molded by selection. Or are there other, little-understood mechanisms, unique to living beings, that contribute to the direction of evolution and to the individual choices of free agents?

Dr. Alexander will lead a discussion about agency in light of complex systems science, Biosemiotics, and a body of research known as The Third Way of Evolution.

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Read more from Alexander in The Biologist’s Mistress, available from Emergent Publications.

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