Today, I offer a "reaction" video to an AI generated podcast of my 2002 doctoral dissertation on teleology, Narrative Telos: The Ordering Tendencies of Chance. Peter Duke, of The Duke Report™️, has been making such podcasts of various books for his website, and he uploaded my dissertation to show me how the new AI program works.

In the video below, I listen to the first 15 minutes of the 30 minute summary and I note where the AI gets it right and where is botches the paraphrase. In some cases, the AI takes my radical departures from philosophical traditions and turns them back into the conventional ideas. Mostly, however, it does get things correct, but the synthetic discussion was so boring, I got a little sleepy.

Listening to an AI-generated summary is the 21st century equivalent of reading the Cliff Notes for a novel you were assigned in school. Yes, you get the basic gist of the plot, but you don't get the experience that the author so carefully created for you.

Meanwhile, Jessica Duke , Peter's wife, has been doing meta-synthetic podcasts of synthetic podcasts to make your head spin. I borrow the imagery from her Stack article.

I do not think that authors’ and podcasters’ jobs are in jeopardy of being taken by AI. Cliff Notes are handy sometimes but have limited usefulness.

My dissertation was later published in 2010 as The Biologist Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature, and Nature. Below is the real author-generated intro. Which makes you want to read my book more, my intro or the AI podcast?

Chapter One: What is Teleology?

Teleology is the study of the purposes of action, development and existence. Its practitioners believe nature is purposeful. An ancient and enduring form of inquiry that has been out-of-fashion among educated people for centuries, teleology's slow, steady decline as a scientific discipline began in the 17th century with the birth of modern empiricism and continued to plummet apace the rise of the Enlightenment, Darwinism, and quantum mechanics. Nature is not purposeful, it was said, and those who continued to think it was were primarily spiritualists, artists, or madmen, who credited the guidance of gods, muses, or fate.

Biologists—whose subject compels them to deal with questions about, for example, what organs are for—must constantly remind themselves that officially functionality is just a side effect of predictable material causal processes.

As J. B. S. Haldane is said to have claimed, 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.

The serious and sensible scientists resolutely resist teleology and her meretricious allure. And so despite biology's occasional flirtation, in general science measures its progress in terms of the distance it has put between itself and teleology.

I call myself a teleologist, and in doing so risk a certain amount of professional shame and disrepute. When I was deciding on a career as a literary theorist and philosopher of science and entering graduate school, if any of my peers talked of teleology at all, it was only to say how passé or stilted "teleological" narratives were, on par with calendar art or sermons. People assumed I was religious or a Conservative or simply had bad taste.

Many of those who would receive me—some of whom also called themselves teleologists—were very unwelcome bedfellows. They talked of Truth, Beauty and Goodness and asked me to supply them with a Theory that would defend their particular ideas of T, B & G. Teleology concerns form and function, which is not the same thing, quite, as beauty and goodness, certainly not the same thing as Beauty and Goodness. So I was ultimately unwelcome in that group too.

What I do share with all teleologists, authentic or so-called, is a deeply felt folk-sense of purposefulness in nature. It is clear to me that many processes and patterns in nature can't be fully explained by Newton's laws or by Darwin's mechanism of natural selection. These are processes that are organized in ways that spontaneously create, sustain and further that organization. Although I believe that mechanistic reductionism is inadequate to describe these processes, I don't believe that purposeful events and actions require guidance from the outside—from divine plans or engineering deities. Nature's purposeful processes are self-organizing and inherently adaptive, which is the essence of what it is to be teleological.

A few examples: 1. Flocks of birds fly in formation and change direction simultaneously, even though there is no one leader in the flock nor any kind of instantaneous communication among the entire flock. 2. Many species appear to have been formed according to the same general ground plan: for example, many animals' major organs have relatively similar distribution schemes, even though they do not share a common ancestor. 3. When food resources are scarce, free-roaming slime-mold cells (if you do any amount of reading in science you know that slime mold and fruit flies have a kind of celebrity status) will emit a chemical signal that attracts other cells. They aggregate and finally pile up to form stalks that eventually release spores in order to continue the species-individual.

Each of these examples involves a process that appears to be guided by a plan or that anticipates the future. Yet, argue scientists, the individual birds, separate species, or free-roaming cells are not intentionally acting as an organized group, variations on a theme, or altruistic stalk builders. Such phenomena, it has been argued for four centuries of science, merely appear purposeful.

Instead, I wondered if these examples from nature can help us re-imagine what purposeful behavior actually is, in ourselves as well as in nature. I decided to pursue that thought. Against the good advice of many, I dedicated myself to teleology, an area of philosophy that had been so thoroughly discussed, debated and dismissed it seemed nothing more could possibly be said. But they were wrong, and I eventually found others like me who were beginning to reinvent one of the oldest ways of understanding the world and our roles in it.

Human purpose is a specific type of a more general purpose in nature. Both can be defined abstractly and generally as forms of self-organized adaptation. But this definition is not intended as an explanation. The structuring process that we call "self-organization" still needs to be understood. With this book, I hope that I can offer some general insights, showing how chance and constraints might work together to make us purposeful beings. What we learn about our own purposeful behavior will help us understand how nature, society, or culture can be said to act purposefully too.

When you set something up as an object to be gained, as Merriam-Webster defines human "purpose," you do so to maintain and/or improve your "self," whatever that is to you. And your self is, reciprocally, the epitome of all your past desires and accomplishments. If you are capable of acting purposefully that means that you (your purposes) are in some sense the cause of the action.

Acting purposefully cannot mean following someone else's ideas. Only your own purposes—which arise from your own self-organizing biological and semiotic processes—make you a purposeful being. Nothing is purposeful that is the puppet of some other force. To be purposeful is not to be a tool. Years ago, just starting to wonder seriously about these issues, I confronted the usual kinds of questions, What is life for? What is the purpose of life? Or, posed a bit differently, What is the meaning of life? as if it were a kind of allegory, and purposeful beings always served the purposes of someone or something else. I can't remember when exactly I stopped thinking about purpose in this way, but I have, completely. Over the dozen or so years that I've been studying the history of this problem, I have come to realize that purposes can only be defined in relation to the self in question. Your purposes, for instance, are always related to what sustains or furthers your values, what coheres with your personality, and, importantly, what helps you survive, evolve or adapt.

The question of your having a "higher purpose" would pertain to the role that you may have as a part of a larger society or ecosystem. We all play those roles too, as organs not tools. And as such, we preserve our own autonomy. "Organ" comes from the Greek organon, meaning "tool" or "instrument," a somewhat unfortunate etymology for an organ is different: it helps create and is created by the individual in which it exists. Tools don't do that. As a purposeful member of a society, for instance, you help create and are created by the society.

Theologians throughout history have made innumerable attempts, some valiant, to explain how people can have free will even if there is a God that determines everything in advance, a God who has a higher purpose under which we are bound, a God who has created us as (effectively" non-organic" in the sense of "not co-creating") instruments of his divine Plan. It cannot be done. Theologians throughout history have tried to co-opt teleology for their own religions. It cannot be done. Teleology is not theology. Teleology comes closer to a transcendental way of animating nature and recognizing some kind of proto-intelligence and creativity in events themselves rather than attributing their organization to a Being in control of nature. I say, comes closer to because it does not go that far or quite in that direction. Teleology seeks naturalistic explanation for real, natural phenomena. Nature is, as we are, self-organizing.