""being able to fly" is nowhere to be found in the parts of an airplane"
That's right. Especially in case of its wings. They have nothing to do with flying. Especially, for someone knowing the aerodynamics. "purpose" and "intentionality" are objective things.

the present-day subject of physics has nothing to say about the intentionality resulting in the existence of such objects. Thus it gives a causally incomplete account of the world. — Matias

This is not unique to human consciousness, but common to all complex systems. Physics cannot account for how it is now raining either. Weather systems are too complex to describe in terms of atoms and physical forces to a degree accurate enough to explain exact phenomena. Likewise with the motion of a double pendulum, clearly fully determined by physical forces, but too complex to actually describe thus. Its a fault of reductionism, but it says nothing special about human intentionality.

What do you think? Is this argument flawed? — Matias

It strikes me as oddly ignorant from someone who would be a well-respected mathematics professor. I would expect that argument from someone trying to piece all of this stuff together on their own via participating on message boards like this and then looking up stuff on Wikipedia etc. and not really understanding it.

For one, he seems to be appealing to that ridiculous literal misunderstanding of what a "theory of everything" refers to. The desire for a "theory of everything" is primarily a desire for a single theory that reconciles general relativity and quantum theory.

And then he appeals to the ignorant metaphorical usage of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, seeing as an upshot of that that physics would be trying to, but would not be able to, make predictions about psychology and sociology.

Physics doesn't focus on intentionality in the same way that physics doesn't focus on, say, chordate evolution or biome distribution or Etruscan pottery or how to make Mexican bean salad. Those are different fields.

How does he not know this?

What do you think? Is this argument flawed? — Matias

If we assume that free will exists, then it is a rather unpredictable ingredient in the universe.

The Theory of Everything equates to the Preserved Tablet in Islam:

Predestination in Islam. Muslims believe that the divine destiny is when God wrote down in the Preserved Tablet (al-lawh al-mahfooz) (several other spellings are used for this in English) all that has happened and will happen, which will come to pass as written. According to this belief, a person's action is not caused by what is written in the preserved tablet, but rather the action is written in the tablet because God already knows all occurrences without the restrictions of time.[5]

So, a theory based on a finitary number of principles would still be possible, not because it is this theory that would be responsible for what we do -- we still are ourselves responsible for what we do -- but because it is not constrained by the progression of time, and can therefore skip ahead to figure out what we will be doing, ahead of time.

What we are about to do, is not determined by machine calculation using the Preserved Tablet, but by look-up operations in the future state of the universe, which reveal what we have done in the past. This is then projected back to the present. Hence, the Preserved Tablet still knows what we are about to do.

Hence, in order to get a complete picture of the successive states of the universe, calculation is not enough. Gaps need to be filled by reading ahead. This device is therefore not operable from within the universe, since reading ahead from within the universe is not possible.

Seems a bit of begging the question. Intentionality is assumed.

The higher-level feature of human consciousness is clearly causally effective in the world around us: we live in an environment dominated by artifacts that embody the outcomes of intentional design. The issue is that the present-day subject of physics has nothing to say about the intentionality resulting in the existence of such objects. Thus it gives a causally incomplete account of the world. — Matias

Yes, consistent with a systems theoretic interpretation. Physics (and all physical science) operates by limiting the scope of experimentation in order to obtain accurate results. The world/universe, on the other hand, clearly is comprised of "open systems." This doesn't take anything away from physical science, it just suggests that it needs to be augmented. Successes in the applications of non-linear dynamic systems theory to a wide variety of fields and problems substantiate this.

Would you mind providing the source of this quote? It would help to put it into context.

My guess is that "intentionality" is an emergent capacity. — Matias

George F.R. Ellis is quite conversant with the idea of emergence and discusses it in a number of places. Such things as bottom-up and top-down causation are things he wrote about at length. It might help to get a fuller sense of what he had to say on the matter rather than working from this quote alone.

Also, emergence is a complex topic. There are different forms of emergence. And philosophers argue about whether, for example, strong emergence is possible, or if all emergence is merely weak emergence. And there is much discussion in the literature about the question of whether consciousness is the sort of thing that can emerge, if such a case is at all analogous to the classic example of wetness emerging from interactions of decidedly non-wet H2O molecules. It really is an interesting area to explore if you are so inclined.

Too many people take the idea of emergence and just run with it, using it to cover many sins, before really examining the subject.

And then he appeals to the ignorant metaphorical usage of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, seeing as an upshot of that that physics would be trying to, but would not be able to, make predictions about psychology and sociology. — Terrapin Station

Where does he refer to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem?

Physics doesn't focus on intentionality in the same way that physics doesn't focus on, say, chordate evolution or biome distribution or Etruscan pottery or how to make Mexican bean salad. Those are different fields.

How does he not know this? — Terrapin Station

I assure you he knows this territory. You are assuming a lot and drawing all sorts of unwarranted conclusions from this very limited and out-of-context quotation. I'd suggest familiarizing yourself with his thought before you write so dismissively of him and what you think he doesn't know.

Where does he refer to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? — petrichor

He doesn't explicitly, but it's what he's alluding to re "The self-referential incompleteness of physics."

I assure you he knows this territory. — petrichor

Right, as he should. So then why is he writing something so ignorant?

If you're saying that something else he said makes the quoted bit here not ignorant, then you can present it and I'll look at it. I'm not going to start reading everything he ever wrote in the hope of making his case for him or anyone else.

What do you think? Is this argument flawed? — Matias

It is the intention of physics not to inject intentionality in its endeavor as such effort could not be examined or tested. This is called defining the domain. But are physicists shooting themselves in the foot?
I don't find anything caustic with George Ellis quote -- either because I don't fully understand his narrative or because from what I gathered, I could say to it "Okay".

Except:

physics would still fail to comprehend human purpose and hence would provide a causally incomplete description of the real world around us. This situation is characterized by the self-referential incompleteness of physics: there is no theory or experiment that can determine what will be the next experiment to be undertaken by the experimenter or theory to be created by the theorist." — Matias

This contradicts the domain. Physics has building blocks upon which future experiments rely on.

You know what, this is actually hypocrisy -- there are tearing down of theories in physics and rebuilding anew.

Physicalism is inadequate. Thus, physical causality is incomplete. It's the same problem of the inherent inadequacy of the basis of the line of thought. The physical/mental dichotomy cannot take proper account of that which consists of both.

He doesn't explicitly, but it's what he's alluding to re "The self-referential incompleteness of physics." — Terrapin Station

No, he isn't. You seem to have just had a knee-jerk reaction when you saw the word incompleteness. Notice the colon following that. He is talking about how low-level physics doesn't account for everything, the choice of experiment being one such thing. This has nothing to do with Godel's theorem.

To really understand what he is talking about, the quote needs to be placed in context. It is probably part of a discussion of top-down causation, which Ellis, like many other strong emergentists, believes happens, which most proper reductionists don't believe happens. To understand what motivates his position and how he justifies this position, we would need to read more than this isolated quotation, which is why I asked @Matias for the source of the quote, which we still don't have. I did a Google search for parts of the quote and couldn't seem to find the exact source. There are other writings that can be easily found on related matters though, through which it would be easy for a person to become familiar with the thought of Ellis.

I have trouble with the idea of top-down causation myself. But Ellis is interesting to read on the matter. And there are some interesting philosophical problems that motivate his position.

I am not going to present his ideas here for you. I've got other things to do at the moment. I was just taking you to task a bit for your super-dismissive comments, when it is obvious to me, since I am slightly more familiar with Ellis, that you don't understand what you are criticizing. Frankly, you just made yourself look silly with those comments. But it's not entirely your fault. Some context for the quote is sorely needed here.

Imagine a time before any wide familiarity with Einstein's theories. Now imagine someone takes an isolated quote from his work where he says that space bends and presents it to some amateur physics fans who have never encountered such an idea. Taken out of context like that, and given the lack of familiarity with that body of theory and the justifications for the idea of bending space, that claim would just look silly to most people. I am not comparing Ellis to Einstein. I am just making a point about how you need to understand a whole body of thought before you can properly evaluate an isolated claim within it.

Your failure to comprehend the quote is a perfect illustration of the problem with quotations without context.

In order to have any kind of reasonable discussion of the quote, we need some context. Otherwise, this thread might as well be abandoned, as the comments in it don't really relate much to what Ellis was saying.

George F. Ellis makes the following argument — Matias

I thought I should mention that his name is George F.R. Ellis. A search for "George F. Ellis" will bring up a cattle guy.

You just typed almost 500 words in response to 10 words from me and a very short quote, where you started out your response by bickering with me.

Here's a video of a talk by Ellis related to the topic, for anyone interested:
On the Nature of Causality in Complex Systems, George F.R. Ellis