Although he has some good theories, my view is slightly different to Tolman. Being from a mainly design background, I think design is an iterative process. So an organism behaves randomly without purpose, it then interacts with an environment and responds to that environment. The fittest behaviours (for that environment)  tend to increase in number and those less fit reduce. Hence Darwin's survival of the fittest can be applied to animals, systems, or design concepts. One should differentiate the operation of the design process, from how that process is taught or communicated. BS7000 for example implies that design is a linear process starting with customer requirements and ending with a product definition. My belief is that this is a way to communicate to others in a logical fashion how the design came about.

Recent observations of how designers actually operate is different. They tend to flit from idea to product definition and back again. What appears to be happening is that they solve the most difficult problem at the start (knowing that the easy stuff can be done later) and flit from idea to idea until they find one that can be taken further. Many ideas are discarded along the way. In a competitive world, even when the concepts are sold, natural selection takes place. Think of the VHS versus the Betamax battle in the 1970's. The better performing technology was Betamax (in terms of clarity of picture and speed of start up) but because of the environment at that time, VHS won; mainly because more content was available due to business contacts.

In the 1980's Intel and Microsoft won out over IBM (mainframes) and Apple because their products could be made cheaper and volume sales were the predominant driving feature.

Contrast this with today, where Apple are dominant, because today, functionality wins over product cost; the environment has changed, so has the solution.

So survival (of idea, product or animal) is determined by the environment rather than having an inherent purpose. However, when explaining or teaching, one uses purpose to clarify the message.

Best Regards

Dr Paul

Dr. Rai, the architecture, functionality, operations, and behavior of engineered systems are traditionally determined by the designers during the design process (as much as it is possible) based on the available assumptions, information, and knowledge, under the influences of the embedding environment and the real life circumstances and uncertainties. Typically, no change is supposed to happen in the intended, specified, and implemented characteristics, apart from the natural deterioration of the systems. Therefore, we may say that definition and operationalization of purpose remain human dependent (as you wrote: a human construct), and humans assign the purpose to specific engineered systems. This places many of the traditional engineering systems around us into the tool category.

However, with the appearance of smart or intelligent complex systems the situation is changing. These kinds of systems are made able to change their functionality, operations, and behavior in run-time based on their built-in learning capabilities. This latter is in itself a new aspect of manifestation of human purpose. More important is that as the intelligence and autonomy of engineered systems are growing, they are becoming more and more independent from the initial design purpose.

What this means is that the interaction of the behavior planned in the design phase and the build in learning and adaptation potential may lead to some level of self-defining capabilities. As a result, complex systems can change not only their structure, operation or functionality, but may also perform some not completely planned or unplanned behavior. Autonomous systems may change their objectives as well. This is however rather constrained in the case of current real life systems, and cannot happen freely. Nevertheless, these altogether are leading to a paradoxical situation in which not only designers, but also systems may act as planners and decision makers. It should be mentioned that the current literature has not addressed this issue with due and sufficient breadth and depth yet. Kind regards, I. H.

Prof. Imre Horvath. Thanks for an enlightening response.The idea of intelligent and self adapting systems who could change their objectives and co-determine their purpose is quite scaring.

Dr. Rai, I tend to resonate with your conclusion. We are living in an age when science fiction of the past is becoming the reality of today. Unfortunately, we cannot know what the future is going to bring to us. No one was able to foresee what positive and negative social effects the appearance of smartphones could result in on society level. However, science, as well as technology, has the potential to correct itself and will hopefully have the chance to bring its consequences under control in good time. Towards this end, we strongly need human wisdom. Regards, I.H.

While „system” or ”purpose” should be further defined so that no linguistic or conceptual confusion would occur we might consider that every systems intrinsic purpose should be avoiding entropy, that is surviving as systemic organization, with specific relations between components, which permit the system to be recognized as such in relation with an ever-changing environment.

Dear Lupa,

Your contribution does not make sense, please clarify. One cannot avoid entropy. Do you mean an increase in entropy? In the universe entropy always increases, so one cannot avoid increasing it. Even in reversible heat engines, the second law of thermo-dynamics applies, so total entropy increases. There is an argument that living organisms decrease entropy, but that only applies to part of the system,  that contains the organism itself. Overall entropy still increases.

Dr. Lupu, I am afraid I cannot follow a part of your argument: "we might consider that every systems intrinsic purpose should be avoiding entropy"  How can you avoid entropy? With very simple words, an engineered system decreases entropy because it imposes an architectural and operational order on all its parts, on itself, and partially on its environment. This applies to living organisms as well, as very properly argued by Dr. Riley. Furthermore, my impression has been that the original (interesting) question of Dr. Rai was more concrete. Of course, sometimes we have to derive explanatory answers to philosophical and/or scientific questions in a deductive way (starting out from existing generic theories), but we also have to consider specific theories in order to be able to address the specificity hiding in the question. In this context, I cannot see a direct relation between (human) purpose and entropy. With kind regards, I.H.

Purpose seems to be dependent on the complexity of the system studied. Simple (non living) systems do not seem to show any meaningful purpose (except the reason for their construction) . For example, a clock has  the purpose of showing the hour, but I would say this is a purpose assigned by the designer.

If we consider complex systems (for instance, living subjects or human organizations), they do have intrinsic purposes (emergent properties).

I would suggest a classic article on this subject: "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by A Rosenblueth, N Wiener and J. Bigelow, Philosophy of Science, 10(1943), S. 18–24

Dear mister Riley,

You might be right about not being possible to avoid entropy, but this is not the problem here, because purpose is something towards a system reaches, without being compulsory to be achieved. If you consider entropy by the term chaos, then system is by definition organization. To give a simple example: a driver in a functioning car make a system which has as main purpose not only to reach the destination but also, and basically, to reach that destination as a driver-car system, not as a smashed car-dead driver entity. That would mean in my opinion avoiding entropy. Eventually, any car will reach a car graveyard as a final destination, while any man will be reduced to its elementary components six feet under the ground, but this is something we desperately try to avoid for as long as possible. If you consider that entropy means only thermodynamic equalization, then it should not count as possible purpose for any system, even if it definitely counts as its tendency. We should try not to mistake purpose for a „feature” of a system, as increasing entropy could be called. In that respect, purpose should be considered a human construct, because it pertains to will and intention, while systems are considered as such also in human understanding, also as a result of a human will.

Dear Dr. Lupu,

Entropy is defined as the integral of change in heat / temperature.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

If you are using the term in another way, you should either define what you mean, or provide a reference to a different definition.

saying that you can avoid entropy is saying you avoid heat or temperature, which of course is non-sense.

Dr. Riley

Dear all,

I do understand that my discourse has its conceptual faults, and I am aware that much of your interest was stired by my use of the word avoid, instead of decrease, in relation to entropy. As an answer to mr. Riley, if someone has the purpose to avoid heat (the heat of the sun), he stays in the shadow. While my choice in vocabulary might not be the happiest one, I was talking about entropy and the intention to „avoid” it as the main purpose of a system, in respect to Schrödinger discussion on negative entropy. That does not mean that Schrödinger himself used the term avoiding,he probably was talking about decrease also, and my main mistake is that I speculatively entered a domain I was not so familiar with. I apologise for that.

The way biological systems evolve mechanical sytems (man made systems) also evolve. Mechanical systems evolve in the minds of designers. For instance, the cars we used to see 20 years ago on the roads are not to be seen. Their place has been taken by cars which are safer, fuel efficient, more robust, better aesthetics and so on. All these attributes are manifestations of purpose. Hence purpose plays a role in the evolution of these systems. But, purpose is also not aloof from the environmental factors. When fuel becomes expensive and when we realize that carbon based fuels damge environment we design fuel efficient cars which save both- money as well as environment.