I Am a Strange Loop

We might anthropomorphically describe a flush toilet as a system that is “trying” to make the water reach and stay at a certain level. Of course, it’s easy to bypass such anthropomorphic language since we effortlessly see how the mechanism works, and it’s pretty clear that such a simple system has no desires; even so, when working on a toilet whose tank has sprung a leak, one might be tempted to say the toilet is “trying” get the water up to the mark but “can’t”. One doesn’t truly impute desires or frustrations to the device — it’s just a manner of speaking — but it is a convenient shorthand.

A Soccer Ball Named Desire

Why does this move to a goal-oriented — that is, teleological — shorthand seem appealing to us for a system endowed with feedback, but not so appealing for a less structured system? It all has to do with the way the system’s “perceptions” feed back (so to speak) into its behavior. When the system always moves towards a certain state, we see that state as the system’s “goal”. It is the self-monitoring, self-controlling nature of such a system that tempts us to use teleological language.

But what kinds of systems have feedback, have goals, have desires? Does a soccer ball rolling down a grassy hill “want” to get to the bottom? Most of us, reflexively recoiling at such a primitive Aristotelian conception of why things move, would answer no without hesitation. But let’s modify the situation just a tiny amount and ask the question again.

What about a soccer ball zipping down a long, narrow roadside gutter having a U-shaped cross-section — is it seeking any goal? Such a ball, as it speeds along, will first roll up one side of the gutter and then fall back to the center, cross it and then roll up the other side, then again back down, and so forth, gradually converging from a sinusoidal pathway wavering about the gutter’s central groove to a straight pathway at the bottom of the gutter. Is there “feedback” here or not? Is this soccer ball “seeking” the gutter’s mid-line? Does it “want” to be rolling along the gutter’s valley? Well, as this example and the previous one of the ball rolling down a hill show, the presence or absence of feedback, goals, or desires is not a black-and-white matter; such things are judgment calls.

The Slippery Slope of Teleology

As we move to systems where the feedback is more sophisticated and its mechanisms are more hidden, our tendency to shift to teleological terms — first the language of goals and then the language of “wishing”, “desiring”, “trying” — becomes ever more seductive, ever harder to resist. The feedback doesn’t even need to be very sophisticated, as long as it is hidden.

In San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum, there is an enclosure where people can stand and watch a spot of red light dancing about on the walls and floor. If anyone tries to touch the little spot, it darts away at the last moment. In fact, it dances about in a way that seems to be teasing the people chasing it — sometimes stopping completely, taunting them, daring them to approach, and then flitting away just barely in time. However, despite appearances, there is no hidden person guiding it — just some simple feedback mechanisms in some circuitry monitoring the objects in the enclosure and controlling the light beam. But the red spot seems for all the world to have a personality, an impish desire to tease people, even a sense of humor! The Exploratorium’s red dot seems more alive than, say, a mosquito or a fly, both of which attempt to avoid being swatted but certainly don’t have any detectable sense of humor.

In the video called “Virtual Creatures” by Karl Sims, there are virtual objects made out of a few (virtual) tubes hinged together, and these objects can “flap” their limbs and thus locomote across a (virtual) flat plane. When they are given a rudimentary sort of perception and a simple feedback loop is set up that causes them to pursue certain kinds of resources, then the driven manner in which they pursue what looks like food and frantically struggle with “rivals” to reach this resource gives viewers an eerie sensation of witnessing primitive living creatures engaged in life-and-death battles.

On a more familiar level, there are plants — consider a sunflower or a growing vine — which, when observed at normal speed, seem as immobile as rocks and thus patently devoid of goals, but when observed in time-lapse photography, seem all of a sudden to be highly aware of their surroundings and to possess clear goals as well as strategies to reach them. The question is whether such systems, despite their lack of brains, are nonetheless imbued with goals and desires. Do they have hopes and aspirations? Do they have dreads and dreams? Beliefs and griefs?