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Science, technology and purpose

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Abstract

In a recent book, ‘Machines with a Purpose’, many of the unattractive features of our technology were traced to a view of the world which has predominated in science for nearly four hundred years. This is, that nature, and everything that it contains, operates causally and without purpose. To counter this view, an alternative, purposive view was developed. The paper gives a simple account of this development, of other related work, and of the underlying motivation.

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Notes and References

  1. Howard Rosenbrock,Machines with a purpose, 1990 (Oxford University Press).

  2. H.H. Rosenbrock, The use of computers for designing control systems,Measurement and Control, 1972, vol. 5, pp. 409–412; The future of control,Automatica, 1977, vol. 13, pp. 389–392; Engineering as an art.AI & Society, 1988, vol. 2, pp. 315–320. These may be compared with Norbert Wiener, The human use of human beings, 1954 (Houghton Mifflin); Charles R. Kelley, Manual and automatic control, 1968 (Wiley).

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  3. For a conspectus, see Richard I. Drake and Peter J. Smith,Behavioural science in industry, 1973 (McGraw-Hill).

  4. See, for example, Lisl Klein,New forms of work organisation, 1976 (Cambridge University Press); James C. Taylor, The socio-technical approach to work design, in Karen Legge and Enid Mumford (eds),Designing organisation for satisfaction and efficiency, 1978, pp. 95–107 (Gower Press).

  5. H.H. Rosenbrock (ed),Designing human-centred technology, 1989 (Springer-Verlag).

  6. Shaun Murphy, The ESPRIT project, in ref. 5, pp. 145–168; see also ref. 1, pp. 167–175.

  7. H.H. Rosenbrock,Computer-aided control system design, 1974 (Academic Press).

  8. Harry Braverman,Labor and monopoly capital, 1974 (Monthly Review Press); David Noble,America by design, 1977 (Alfred A. Knopf); Peter Brödner,The shape of future technology, German original 1985, translation 1990 (Springer-Verlag).

  9. For example, Georges Friedmann,Où va le travail humain?, 1950 (Gallimard).

  10. For example,Work and the future, 1979 (CIO Publishing).

  11. Daniel Nelson,Frederick W. Taylor and the rise of Scientific Management, 1980 (University of Wisconsin Press).

  12. Joseph Needham,Man a machine, 1927, p.93 (Kegan Paul). Needham is characterising science, rather than defining uniquely his own beliefs.

  13. Lewis Mumford,The myth of the machine, 1967 (Secker and Warburg). This may usefully be compared with the view of a historian and specialist in control: Otto Mayr,Authority, liberty and automatic machinery in modern Europe, 1986 (Johns Hopkins University Press).

  14. Bertrand Russell,History of western philosophy, 1946 (George Allen and Unwin), 1979, ch. 9, pp. 82–85 (Book Club Associates).

  15. F.A. Yates,Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition, 1964 (University of Chicago Press); Keith Thomas,Religion and the decline of magic, 1978 (Penguin Books).

  16. Stillman Drake (translator),Discoveries and opinions of Galileo, 1957 (Doubleday). On p. 163, quoting Bellarmine's letter to Foscarini, ‘For to say that assuming the earth moves and the sun stands still saves the appearances [i.e. reconciles theory with observation] better than eccentrics and epicycles is to speak well. This has no danger in it, and it suffices for mathematicians’. On p. 164, ‘To demonstrate that the appearances are saved by assuming the sun at the centre and the earth in the heavens is not the same thing as to demonstrate that in fact the sun is at the centre and the earth in the heavens. I believe that the first demonstration may exist, but I have very grave doubts about the second, and in case of doubt one may not abandon the Holy Scriptures’. See also Dudley Shapere,Galileo: a philosophical study, 1974 (University of Chicago Press); also MWAP, pp. 68–74, and the references thereto.

  17. See Edwin Arthur Burtt,The metaphysical foundations of modern physical science, 1932 (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner).

  18. Ref. 17, p. 113.

  19. Descartes,Discours de la méthode, 1637, reprint undated, p. 109 (Routledge).

  20. La Mettrie,L'Homme machine, 1748.

  21. See ref. 12.

  22. This fact can be given a direct mathematical expression for linear systems, as in Thomas Kailath,Linear systems, 1980 (Prentice-Hall): equation (21) on p. 601 expresses a future state in terms of the present state and intervening inputs. For finite automata, including computers, it is expressed by the Nerode equivalence class: see R.E. Kalman, P.L. Falb and M.A. Arbib,Topics in mathematical system theory, 1969 (McGraw-Hill). Mario Bunge, inCausality, 1959 (Harvard University Press) denies that the state can be a cause, but his concept of state is a narrower one which would exclude, for example, the Nerode definition.

  23. See MWAP, pp. 91–92.

  24. In the purposive treatment of quantum mechanics given in MWAP, pp. 203–219 (cf. pp. 87–93), the compoment (iii) of the state determines the ensemble over which averages are taken when defining the purpose: two distinct ensembles for electrons passing through B and C respectively if the answer is yes, one ensemble for all electrons if the answer is no. The orthodox theory of interference and related phenomena has led to a multitude of interpretations: an irreverent account is given by John L. Casti,Paradigms lost, 1989, pp. 414–419 (Scribners); see also Edward Nelson,Dynamical theories of Brownian motion, 1967 (Princeton University Press).

  25. MWAP, pp. 32–36.

  26. MWAP, pp. 36–41.

  27. See Wolfgang Yourgrau and Stanley Mandelstam,Variational principles in dynamics and quantum theory, third edition 1968 (Pitman); Cornelius Lanczos,The variational principles of mechanics, 1970 (University of Toronto Press).

  28. See MWAP, p. 66.

  29. See MWAP, p. 67.

  30. Bertrand Russell,A free man's worship, 1918, p. 46ff. (New York), quoted in ref. 17, pp. 9–10. Burtt notes that Russell ‘has now adopted a less extreme position on these points’.

  31. Attributed to Enrico Fermi by Robert Jungk,Brighter than a thousand suns, 1960, p 184 (Penguin Books). Rabelais mocked an outworn chivalry with the slaughter achieved by Friar John, ‘unto the number of thirteen thousand six hundred twenty and two, besides the women and little children, which is always to be understood’. Hiroshima and Nagasaki evade all mockery and lie beyond the reach of any ironic exaggeration. Jungk records (pp. 254–255) that Fermi argued strongly against the subsequent development of the fusion bomb.

  32. Adriano Tilgher,Work: what it has meant to men through the ages, 1931, p. 151 (Harrap). Since Tilgher wrote, computer-aided design has made a beginning to the elimination of creativity in the conception and design of machines themselves: see Mike Cooley,Architect or bee?, 1987 (Chatto and Windus).

  33. MWAP, pp 120–135; also pp. 136–154 for a detailed view of one example.

  34. Henri Poincaré,Science and hypothesis, 1952, p.117 (Dover); see also MWAP, pp. 68–73. A second quotation from Poincaré bears directly on MWAP, pp. 54–62: ‘let us suppose that all objects be deformed ... according to any law whatever, and that our measuring instruments be deformed according to the same law. We will not be able to notice this.’—John W. Bolduc (translator), Henri Poincaré,Mathematics and science: last essays, 1963, p. 16 (Dover). The inside-out world (IOW), which illustrates this, was familiar to me as an undergraduate, having been put forward in a form which was not equivalent to RW. The ways in which it different were evidently not sustainable, but the possibility of a fully equivalent form was clear. My first reaction was the one given in ii on pp. 60–61 of MWAP, and only later did I appreciate that this was ruled out by symmetry, and arrive at iv, p. 61, which is essentially Poincaré's view.

  35. For an elaboration of this bare account, see MWAP, pp. 49–75.

  36. MWAP, pp. 102–119.

  37. Jacques Monod,Chance and necessity, 1971, p. 160 (Collins, Fount).

  38. Swami Nikhilananda (translator),The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 1974, p. 42 (Sri Ramamkrishna Math, Madras).

  39. MWAP, pp. 76–101, 194–219.

  40. A non-military example would have been preferred, but all the most advanced control systems are military.

  41. The following account may be compared with ref.5.

  42. Henri Poincaré,Science and hypothesis, 1952, p. 128 (Dover).

  43. MWAP, passim, but especially pp. 22–30, 36–43.

  44. See ref. 39. The development in pp. 203–219 is not intended as a ‘contribution to science’, because its point of reference is not observed facts, but the consensus of the elementary textbooks, with which it is designed to agree. Any developments suggested as in ref. 50 below were not pursued, because they would have obscured the main line of argument.

  45. David Bohm, A suggested interpretation of the quantum theory in terms of “hidden” variables,Physical Review, 1952, vol.85, pp. 166–193;Wholeness and the implicate order, 1980 (Routledge and Kegan Paul).

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  46. Fritz Bopp, in S. Körner and M.H.L. Price (eds),Observation and interpretation, 1957, p. 51 (Butterworths). Bopp prefaces his comment thus: ‘The discussion so far as been unsatisfactory and this for the following reason: we say’ etc.

  47. Stanley Katz.

  48. Barry Barnes,Scientific knowledge and sociological theory, 1974 (Routledge and Kegan Paul); Mary Hesse,Revolutions and reconstructions, 1980 (Harvester Press); Willard van Orman Quine,From a logical point of view, 1961 (Harper and Row); William Newton-Smith, The underdetermination of theory by data, in Risto Hilpinen (ed),Rationality in science, 1980, pp. 91–110 (D. Reidel).

  49. Henri Poincaré,Science and hypothesis, 1952 (Dover).

  50. R.P. Feynman, The development of the space-time view of quantum electrodynamics,Physics Today, 1966, pp. 31–34.

  51. Some examples can be gleaned from Roger B. Angel,Relativity: the theory and its philosophy, 1980 (Pergamon); Max Born,Einstein's theory of relativity 1965 (Dover); Wolfgang Yourgrau and Alwyn van der Merwe (eds),Perspectives in quantum theory, 1971; Richard Dawkins,The extended phenotype, 1982 (W.H. Freeman).

  52. Hubert L. Dreyfus,What computers can't do, 1972 (Harper and Row); Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus,Mind over machine, 1986 (Free Press); Joseph Weizenbaum,Computer power and human reason, 1976 (W.H. Freeman); T. Winograd and C.F. Flores,Understanding computers and cognition, 1986 (Ablex).

  53. Refs 8,9,32.

  54. Ref. 10.

  55. See MWAP, p. 154, ref.58.

  56. Ref.15.

  57. Ref.17; see also A.C. Crombie,Augustine to Galileo, 1952 (Falcon Press); E.J. Dijksterhuis,The mechanisation of the world picture, 1986 (Princeton University Press); Pierre Duhem,Études sur Léonard de Vinci, 1906 (A. Herman); Pierre Duhem,Medieval cosmology 1985 (University of Chicago Press); Alexandre Koyré,From the closed world to the infinite universe, 1957 (Johns Hopkins University Press); Alexandre Koyré,Études de l'histoire de la pensée scientifique, 1966 (Presses Universitaires de France); Alexandre Koyré,Galileo studies, 1978 (Harvester Press).

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Rosenbrock, H. Science, technology and purpose. AI & Soc 6, 3–17 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02472765

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