Do Heat Seeking Missiles Have Teleology?

[EricMH (Eric Michael Holloway)]

@nwrickert

I’m not convinced that “intrinsically teleological” actually means anything. For that matter, I’m not convinced that “determinism”, taken to be a property of the cosmos, is meaningful.

When we say “X is determined”, what do we really mean? If we say “X is determined by Y”, then it is far clearer what we mean. But if we only say “X is determined”, then something is missing. This gets us to philosophical questions about the relation between physical laws and reality. And that’s why I suggested we continue this part of the discussion in a more appropriate thread.

P(X) = 1 means determined. P(X) < 1 means not determined.

Indexing X by time, such that X[n] occurs before X[n+1], we can say an entity is intrinsically teleological if P(X[n]|X[n-1) < 1 and P(X[n]|X[n+1) = 1.