That said, because a goal is always a potential future which one strives to make objectively real (here placing goals found in fantasies and dreams aside), a goal as telos is always found in the future. — javra
That wouldn't matter anyways. The objective reality (of consequences) is nothing that would have anything to do with understanding anyways. You might understand proclaimed intents or not but you surely can't understand matter.So defining each, however, renders backward causation nonsensical. — javra
you surely can't understand matter — Heiko
1) An endstate (maybe the same as “teleute” but nicer sounding): an actualized result; an actualized completion, conclusion, or consummation of one or more processes, activities, events, or changes
2) A telos: A potential result toward whose actualization one or more givens strive, strain, stretch, bend, or move; respective to sentience, a goal, aim, or objective.
3) A telosis: A given’s activity or process of striving, straining, stretching, bending, or moving toward a telos; respective to sentience, the act of intending. — javra
Is telos in the kind of examples given facing the same direction as cause because it starts in your mind and crytallises or concretises later. — Fine Doubter
You may be intuiting the examples you said you wouldn't cite: the late S J Gould believed that at after a time of maximum mutations the form of many of which contained apparently useless features, after a contingent elimination episode had occurred some of the later surviving species found some of their features contingently matched the new environment they had to survive in. — Fine Doubter
That said, because a goal is always a potential future which one strives to make objectively real (here placing goals found in fantasies and dreams aside), a goal as telos is always found in the future. — javra
I kind of have to disagree with this. The intent of a deed is never found in the world. The deed in itself is a means to achieve the intent but never really "wanted", in the sense of being the primary intent or will of the subject. What is objectively found in the future are consequences of deeds, not intents. Consequences are concrete and detailed while intents are abstract and general. — Heiko
So:
Telos = goal
Telosis = plan for achieving that goal
Endstate = intended future condition. — T Clark
Response - All the factors we are considering - goal, intended final condition, and plan - exist in the present. They are not in the future. Therefore, we are talking about just normal old everyday causation. — T Clark
That said, because a goal is always a potential future which one strives to make objectively real (here placing goals found in fantasies and dreams aside), a goal as telos is always found in the future. It doesn’t matter if it occurs prior to the intending or is contemporaneous to the intending; in both aforementioned cases, the goal always holds place in the potential future (and, contingently, in the actual future as an endstate if one’s intending is fortuitous). — javra
And, since in telos-driven activities the telos always occurs in the potential future relative to that which it determines, then telos-determinacy can be further specified as backward determinacy. — javra
I don't think you can truthfully say that the goal is in the future. The goal always exists in the mind, at the present, and it is the intended fulfilment of the goal which is understood as in the future. The goal itself is in the present — Metaphysician Undercover
If the goal itself were in the future, then fulfilment of the goal would be necessitated, and telos-discordant endstates impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover
How is "the intended fulfillment of the goal" - which, as you say, is understood as in the future - not a redundant way of saying "the goal"? (e.g., Wiktionary defines "goal" as "a result one is attempting to achieve". To which I add that this result is not yet achieved, hence not of itself in the present.) — javra
Also, as I mentioned in a previous post, memories, perceptions, and goals all occur, ontologically speaking, in the mind and in the present. Everything that we are consciously aware of does. Yet our memories are our epistemological past, our perceptions are our epistemological present, and our goals are part of our less than certain epistemological future. To say that a goal takes place in the present holds the same weight as saying that a memory takes place in the present. Yet the memory is our awareness of the past (of past present moments we have already lived through) just as a goal forms part of our awareness of the future (of future present moments we have yet to live through). — javra
What I'm maintaining is that the future is not fully fixed ontologically. A goal is as much of the future as a memory is of the past. — javra
Yet the "result each is attempting to achieve" resides in the potential future and not in the present. — javra
As an aside, do we agree that a goal partly determines one's present choices of how to best achieve given goal? — javra
There is a difference between the goal, and the fulfillment of the goal. The former is what exists in one's mind, at the present, as a determinate thing, the latter is indeterminate. — Metaphysician Undercover
I agree with this, but I would not say that our memories are necessarily our epistemological past, nor that our goals and anticipations are necessarily our epistemological future. I wouldn't even say that our perceptions are necessarily our epistemological present. This is because I think we use other conceptions to form our temporal conceptions, which serve as the base for our epistemological "time", therefore, past, present, and future. This is why we can have an epistemological "time" like eternalism, which removes past present and future from the experiential definitions which you give them. — Metaphysician Undercover
I believe it is important to ground epistemology in solid ontology, so I think that going in the way which you do, referring to the ontology of time, for your epistemological definitions of past, present, and future, is the correct way. But I do not think that this is necessarily the way that epistemological definitions of past present and future, are formulated. — Metaphysician Undercover
You use "potential future", here, in a similar way to my "imaginary future". I think it's better that we use something like "imaginary", to maintain that this future is only in the mind, [...] — Metaphysician Undercover
Telos = the potential end toward which a given moves; e.g., a goal (that which one wants to accomplish)
Telosis = the movement of a given toward a potential end; e.g., a striving (what one does to so accomplish)
Endstate = the actual end; e.g., the outcome of the striving toward a goal — javra
If one's telos happens to be the taking to flight by the flapping of hands, one will start flapping ones hands as the telosis. — javra
Causation, as typically understood, does not occur strictly in the present. — javra
Or maybe I should ask, how do you define causation? — javra
I see where you're going with this. Still, connotations stand in the way for me. For instance, given the possibility of hallucinations, one could say that all our present perceptions constitute our "imaginary present", since our perceptions are only in the mind, and since there is a slim possibility that they could be wrong. In short, describing all our awareness of past, present, and future as imaginary on account of it taking place in the mind fails to distinguish between imagined truths and factual truths - for me at least. — javra
In assuming as much of an ontological ignorance as possible, can we experientially agree that our goals reference a future that has not yet been actualized but which we want to see objectified, i.e. to see actualized? Furthermore, that it is this referenced unactualized future of which we are aware that then determines our present choices (regarding how to best actualize this as of yet unactualized future)? — javra
There's something subtly difficult about goal-driven determinacy (whose occurrence I find is incontestable) and, as mentioned in a previous post, it as determinacy is a different category from that of causality as understood in modernity. — javra
Telos = the potential end toward which a given moves; e.g., a goal (that which one wants to accomplish)
Telosis = the movement of a given toward a potential end; e.g., a striving (what one does to so accomplish)
Endstate = the actual end; e.g., the outcome of the striving toward a goal — javra
I don't see how these are significantly different than my formulation. — T Clark
Telos = goal
Telosis = plan for achieving that goal
Endstate = intended future condition. — T Clark
Everything occurs strictly in the present. Our memories of the past and thoughts about the future take place in the present. Ok, ok, I'm being tediously pedantic. — T Clark
Even non-physical causation has to eventually lead to physical causation. — T Clark
I've been thinking for a while that causation is not a very useful concept. That is not a new thought. Bertrand Russell wrote about it extensively. Maybe I'll start a new thread. — T Clark
Have you looked at Husserl’s notion of intentionality? He begins from a notion of the present as ‘thick’ or ‘specious’. This time consciousness underlies all of our experiences. The present is not a punctual now but a triad consisting of the just elapsed past ( called retention) , the immediate present and a protentional aspect anticipating into the future. — Joshs
So every intention is teleologically oriented , every intention is both a prediction and a fulfillment , in the same act and same moment. And every intention produces novelty and the unexpected at least in some smalll measure. — Joshs
However, from this perspective we only come to believe in "the present" as a logical conclusion. The present is not experiential, we experience the past, and anticipate the future, and since we understand a substantial difference between these two, we come to the logical conclusion that there must be a present which separates them. — Metaphysician Undercover
I really don't know what you mean when you suggest a difference between imagined truths and factual truths. — Metaphysician Undercover
In assuming as much of an ontological ignorance as possible, can we experientially agree that our goals reference a future that has not yet been actualized but which we want to see objectified, i.e. to see actualized? Furthermore, that it is this referenced unactualized future of which we are aware that then determines our present choices (regarding how to best actualize this as of yet unactualized future)? — javra
Yes, I'm in agreement with this. — Metaphysician Undercover
By "determinacy" here, do you mean that we, in a sense, determine the future, through our goal-driven acts? This is obviously different from "determinacy" in the sense of determinism. — Metaphysician Undercover
Interested to see where you go with this. (And I'm curious if you have any ideas about when & why the emphasis on forward-determining causation came about.) — Arcturus
My hunch is that this is pointing towards any action being the relationship between what you meant to do, what you ended up doing, and how you see what you ended up doing from the point of view of what you meant to do, and how that feeds into what you want to do next. But I'm unsure how that relates to time, except that some of it seems... nonlinear in some way? I'm not sure. — Dawnstorm
But, personally, I'm right now just focusing on how to best understand goals in and of themselves. To keep things simple, from a consciousness pov. — javra
For there to be an endpoint, there has to be goal, but not only in the sense of determinism. The goal also determines what counts as an endpoint, either by supplying any given state with flags such as "success", or "give up", "hey, that's even better", or whatever. — Dawnstorm
one generally plays a competitive game with the intention of winning. One here intends to win, i.e. as psyche, stretches out from where one is in the game to a future state where one has won the game. This notion of a psyche's stretching out so far seems to me to be a different category than that of aboutness. — javra
Hm. We here hold different perspectives. I find that the separation of all experiences strictly into past and future is the product of a logical, rather than experiential, conclusion. I again find that the present is extended experientially, as in the experienced sound of a musical note. An interesting topic for debate, though I'm not sure it is pertinent to the issue of where goals are temporally located. — javra
This to me points to goals having an important relation to the yet to be actualized - hence potential - future. I'm trying to see where our disagreements dwell and how we might, maybe, remedy them. If a goal is not, in and of itself, a potential future (of which we are aware and yearn to actualize), then, given the aforementioned agreement, how would you say a goal differs from a memory or a perception? This with agreement that all three (memories, percepts, and goals) in at least some sense also always occur in the present. — javra
For there to be an endpoint, there has to be goal, but not only in the sense of determinism. The goal also determines what counts as an endpoint, either by supplying any given state with flags such as "success", or "give up", "hey, that's even better", or whatever. — Dawnstorm
...although we say "we are sensing at the present", we are really sensing things which are separated from the mind by a medium, and because of this separation, the things sensed are in the past by the time they are sensed — Metaphysician Undercover
...without the construction of these temporal notions of past and future, we would not see ourselves as being at the present. — Metaphysician Undercover
[...] I'm just playing around with what your model looks like to me in order to better understand it. [...] — Dawnstorm
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