13. Long time
In the movie Good time, Robert Pattinson and Bennie Safdie play the parts of brothers. Pattinson is a smart small-time criminal, but not so smart that he doesn’t get caught; Safdie is an adult with learning difficulties, recently ‘sprung’ from his care centre by his brother. On the surface, the film is an entertaining heist movie with a difference, but at the end the audience is asked to decide: what is a good time? Is it the ‘good time’ promised by the genuinely caring carer when re-introducing Safdie to his life of institutionalised incarceration or the scary and unpredictable experience he had with his bank-robbing brother? Living to plan or something more serendipitous?
The penultimate aspect of time I want to talk about is biological time, evolutionary time. Here we are less concerned with individuals and more with the viability of types of organisms or species but, clearly, there is a necessary a connection between individuals and species and there are some interesting analogies in the structures of choices or options at both levels. Biological time can refer to both the lifetime of organisms and to genetic changes in living things. And, again, these treatments of time have intimate links to the meanings we place on the world. We are born into a family and quickly gain some kind of understanding about birth, life, maturity in various stages, and death. We also become familiar with growth and with competence and incompetence: how, as children and as adults, we learn to do things; how, with age, we lose some of our abilities; and, finally, though perhaps less knowingly, how we lose them all. Some societies place great value on perspectives that include multiple generations; most have some concern at least as far into the future as their children and grandchildren. Some value their ecosystems, often with mythical and/or historical components. But most of us (with the exceptions of scientists dealing with the evolution of viruses and bacteria, for example), although aware of our ancestors and perhaps believing in the evolutionary tree of life and connectedness of all living thing past and present, have no direct experience of evolution.
At any moment in time, the evolutionary choices available are determined by the current genetic composition of organisms and their environments. However, the options for change are, given the starting point, innumerable, so the best we can do in most cases is to paint some negative space; that is, we can define some of the things that evolved creatures could NOT look like. That is the limit of its predictability. And, with a constantly changing and complex environment that includes other creatures, it is not going to get any more predictable.
There are two more structural features to mention before getting into the technical guts of the matter. Evolution acts like a ratchet: past decisions become built-in. The second feature is the co-dependency between the organism and its environment, which includes other organisms. We are always adapting to a moving target. These two features combined mean that our efforts to change, to use more cognitive terms than are justified here, are hopeful rather than confident. And if the changes are maladaptive, the changed variants, or ultimately organisms, die out. We are committing to a physical form, and, implicitly valuing a form, that we “hope” will provide us with a high level of fitness for the future.
In addition, evolutionary time is inherently complex. Not only is, for example, the lineage of hominids evolving against a changing background environment, it is also changing in the context of the evolution of vastly different kinds of living things, some of which have much shorter evolutionary timelines.
There are several timeframes that are important in the development of organisms. They fall into two groups: one is defined by the path of genetic changes, changes that are important at the species level; the other is defined by changes during the lifetime of the individuals, some of which are defined by the genetic elements of the organisms, others by the environment but most by interactions between these component parts.
Evolution is serendipitous. It has a directedness but no goal and no plan. Strictly speaking, it has a single “goal”; the continued viability of a life-form. The goal of evolution is to live to fight another day at the level of a life-form, not the individual. This “goal without a goal” or very loosely structured goal is teleonomic. It has tormented biological philosophers for decades. I’m interested in teleonomic structures because they are, in a sense, more natural than the more explicit, cognitive types of goal that we are more familiar with.
The development of individuals, especially individual humans, has become less serendipitous over time. This trend intensified dramatically when humans developed cognitive competences, language skills and, especially writing. They allowed us to use time as an instrument. They allowed us to set more or less explicit goals and to plan paths to their achievement. They allowed us to believe that we have control. In general, we have come to value tight and explicit goals more than the loose and implicit ones.
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Here are two definitions:
And what are the values in these different ways of looking at intentionality? Whether we have a fixed goal or a more general direction, we act as though each end point, whatever it might be, is valuable. But the means are a different matter. Teleological structures treat the means as valuable. Teleonomic ones see the means as poorly defined at best. Any value in them is emergent rather than fixed. This means that if teleonomic acts are valuable in themselves, it is in the possibility of the emergence of something valuable from them.
Evolutionary structures are teleonomic structures, although human cognition is augmenting natural forms of evolution with those based on reason. Think genetically-modified (GM) foods, for an example of the latter.
Developmental structures are also teleonomic. Once formed, they are triggered by environmental stimuli. An acorn becomes an oak tree, not an ash nor a sea bass. Or it doesn’t become a tree at all. It passes through its developmental stages to reach maturity (or not) but this mature end, although directed, is not willed in any way.
Reasoning is different. Reasoning is teleological. We decide to do something. We do something for a reason. We expect, if the means are well-defined and undertaken, that the ends will follow. We have, if not control, then influence over the future.
From centuries of experience, genetic commitments lead to more or less automatic behaviours, whether this is the regulation of salts in the bloodstream or the beating of the heart, and so on. Similarly, epigenetic switches are triggered on contact with environments of the right kind and developmental processes happen reliably. The structure of these processes transfers into everyday life; habits, once adopted are hard to break. There is a pattern here. Activities repeated successfully and sufficiently often become automatic. The time periods vary. And in this sense the values we attribute to them vary, but the nature of the valuation remains the same; if it works sufficiently reliably inductively, and we usually haven’t defined what the “it” is before the inductive process happens, we commit to it. But the first genetic or epigenetic or even, in many cases, habitual act is serendipitous. Organisms open themselves to valuation by their environments. But they don’t “bet the house” on a particular outcome. Instead, the bet takes the form of a What if? question. Extinctions generally do not come from hopeful but failed bets on future environments; rather, they come from massive environmental changes such as climate change (a likely cause in the case of dinosaurs) or from exposure to new and virulent predators (such as the human extinctions of creatures such as the dodo) that organisms cannot adapt to quickly enough.
Reason, in the best scientific tradition, decides on the ends to be tested, the tests, and then draws conclusions, though they may be heavily conditional upon the environment in which the tests were carried out. The differences with the previous, more serendipitous, means and ends are clear: the ends in rational systems are selected consciously and abstractly, they are tested consciously and abstractly, using tools and assessment criteria that have been chosen by individuals or groups consciously and abstractly.
The test in teleonomic contexts is defined by genes, environments and time. The test in teleological contexts is defined by abstract and, to some extent at least, arbitrary criteria. In the case of the former, the environment, broadly defined, decides; in the case of the latter, we decide. And in both forms of decision we experience value. Teleonomic value emerges, sustains and wanes; teleological value conforms or disappoints. In the latter case, we adopt an attitude of control over processes and, in doing so, we play fast and loose with time. It is as dangerous as it is powerful.