# 2024-10-28 - Do Explain - Half Episode #57 - Truth and Abstractions, with David Deutsch and Jake Orthwein [Official](https://doexplain.buzzsprout.com/1260167/episodes/15993837-57-half-episode-truth-and-abstractions-with-david-deutsch-and-jake-orthwein) [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ws56TxdAx4) [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/half-episode-truth-and-abstractions-with-david/id1482313214?i=1000674705104) Duration: 00:41:34 ## Transcript ### Christofer Lövgren 00:00:00 - 00:00:32 In what way, if at all, it bears upon your stuff? And in some way, we've been carrying on that inquiry in the background for these many years. But the truth one seems to be the easiest way to concentrate that question, I guess. And we really enjoyed your latest appearance with the Increment boys, Vaden and Ben. ### David Deutsch 00:00:32 - 00:00:34 Oh, yeah, that was fun. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:00:34 - 00:02:42 Yes, and you touched on this particular topic there. And so, yeah, we thought we would give it a shot as well. I think we might disagree with you a little more than they do. I think we take a stronger stance there, but yeah, we'll see. Yeah, the truth is I feel like I don't totally know. But because in some way, they're coming from different... The inputs into this are coming from very different lineages that don't tend to talk to each other. And so we're trying to see if they interact or not. But okay, so maybe the best place to start is this truth talk, which I know is not... It was sort of just a, you're trying to figure out this question rather than your deepest commitment. So I'm not holding you to it as your deepest commitment. But it was interesting in the sense that it kind of... Yeah, it crystallized some of these questions for me. So what I understood you to be saying in that truth talk is that you're trying to figure out this question of how you can retain objectivity given the inevitable ambiguity of any statements we speak or think. Yes. And the ambiguity there is an ambiguity of natural language that can't be escaped by natural language. And so rather than having a direct reference relation between the statements and the world, you have a reference relation by way of propositions, which can be perfectly precise and perfectly unambiguous and so forth, such that they can correspond in this, I guess, like Tarski sense to the world, which is... You got into this a little bit with Vaden and Ben, but ambiguous is not quite the right word for the world, but something ontologically definite in the sense that it can be characterized with precision or something like that. Yeah. The world... ### David Deutsch 00:02:45 - 00:03:08 Ambiguous is kind of a category error when it comes to the world, because ambiguous refers to statements or propositions or something like that, something which asserts something. But the world doesn't assert something. It just is there, and we can get it more or less right. Right. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:03:10 - 00:03:29 But the world can't be... There's this term nebulous that, for example, this guy David Chapman uses, that's sort of like the world-level word for ambiguous, which is like not precisely characterizable, something like that. ### David Deutsch 00:03:31 - 00:04:00 Nebulous means cloud-like, and a cloud may not be precisely measurable or whatever, but the cloud is there, and the cloud is either one way or another way, whether or not we can know it or measure it. So I don't think that makes the world... Well, the world is cloud-like, but it's not nebulous in the sense of ambiguous-like. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:04:03 - 00:04:49 Right. Okay. So in some way, we're getting close to the heart of the matter sooner than I would have expected. But there's a distinction that gets made... I can pull up the slides in a minute. But the distinction that I think I make that I don't think Popper makes and that is not commonly made in the rationalist tradition in general between how the world is altogether and how it gets characterized in terms of objects, categories, properties, relationships, which I put under the bucket of ontology. So often ontology is just how the world is altogether, but I'm using that to refer to the world as parsed into objects. ### David Deutsch 00:04:49 - 00:05:06 Good distinction. Yes. So what you mean by ontology is maybe what someone else might mean by the theory of ontology or the true theory of ontology or something like that? ### Christofer Lövgren 00:05:08 - 00:05:51 Well, that's the ambiguities, right? So there are some kinds of ontologies, ways of parsing the world, that are clearly not wholly context and purpose independent and objective in that sense. Like, what counts as a cup when I'm just, you know, like a rough and ready cup that I need to swig something might not be some way of characterizing the world that's perfectly objective and suitable for a scientific theory. Right. So, you know, a tree stump counts as a chair in certain contexts and not in others or something like that. Yes. But also what you said earlier is even deeper that ... ### David Deutsch 00:05:53 - 00:06:43 The way in which we slice the world up conceptually is it doesn't match the way the world is objectively sliced up. So we may think of a thing like a correspondence between two things, like someone's made to measure suit may correspond to their shape, but that may not be the best way of looking at it. The best way of looking at it might be in terms of symbols of class, allegiance, whatever. You know, I'm just making it up as I go along. Right. I know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So in that sense, an ontology wouldn't be what ... ### Christofer Lövgren 00:06:43 - 00:07:30 You're saying what you're calling the true theory of ontology in this objective sense. That's true. Okay. There's an analogy between that distinction and this in my mind, and this distinction you're making between statements and propositions because the meaning of a natural language statement is relative to the interpretation of words within a particular linguistic community, which if you take the sort of full later Wittgenstein line on it is like meaning is often use and there's nothing intrinsic about DOG that makes it refer, but rather by convention, learning a language within a particular linguistic community, I learn that DOG means DOG. ### David Deutsch 00:07:30 - 00:07:35 Yes, by the way, the same is true of formal languages as used in mathematics. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:07:37 - 00:08:35 Well, but this is what I, if the only way that words get their meaning in natural language is by learning their use within a particular linguistic community, I don't know by what causal and that has, there's a causal story you can tell there, like almost like a physical causal story you can tell there about the manner in which the terms get their meaning because it ultimately cashes out in the interactions that I concretely have rather than something intrinsic to the symbols. Yeah. That you can, there's a story that you can tell there that you can't ever tell about perfectly abstract propositions. Like I don't know how they get their meaning apart from by their use. Wait, so propositions aren't ever known to anybody ### David Deutsch 00:08:36 - 00:10:46 And they don't get their meaning. They are abstractions of sort of infinitely precise statements, but nobody, so they don't have to get their meaning from any, they can't get their meaning from anything. Statements get their meaning, as you say, from culture, but I want to avoid, just in case we're going there, I want to avoid any trace of inductivism here. It's not like Wittgenstein thinks that we hear the word dog a lot and then we associate it with a dog. The connection between a statement and an object or a word in an object is always conjectured. So I may conjecture that a dog is a useful concept and I may conjecture something in the world that corresponds to dog, to the word dog, but that conjecture may be false and I may correct it. And there is such a thing as correcting it. I can say my previous meaning that I assigned to the word dog is wrong. And people use this, this happens when to everybody, alas, when they talk about fish and at some point they're told that the whale is not a fish. And I think that's an appeal to authority. A whale is a fish in the everyday sense of the word. And we should not acquiesce in giving over everyday meanings of words to scientists who have defined them according to the meaning that they have for scientists. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:10:48 - 00:11:51 Yeah, sorry, but that may be a sidetrack. No, no, all that's very helpful. I don't think I was going to go in an inductivist direction, but you tell me. But what you said I definitely agree with and it's interesting. But when I think about truth or falsity with respect to whether a whale counts as a fish, for example, the type of truth or falsity that gets used in rational objective scientific theories doesn't seem to be the relevant one. And the reason I mean that is because true or false seems like also like a category error a little bit there. And that it's not trying to parse the world as the world is already so parsed on its own side, independent of our context and purpose. And so in that sense, it's not objective in the sense of being wholly on that side. Do you see it? Yes, although it is objective in the sense that one ... ### David Deutsch 00:11:51 - 00:12:29 Can meaningfully say that one has made a mistake in within a particular context, like for particular. Yes, but just now I was I was not only doing that I was saying that a particular context is the right one to use. And people often use the wrong context. And it could be that our culture switches over to this scientific use of the word fish. And I would still object to it. I mean, whether I'm right or wrong is neither here nor there. But it's meaningful for me to object to that change in usage and say that the old usage was better. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:12:30 - 00:12:37 For particular purposes, I keep wanting to sort of do this re-relativizing move. Yeah, okay. For particular purposes. ### David Deutsch 00:12:37 - 00:12:45 Yeah, again, it's not necessarily a pre existing purpose. You know, this ... ### Christofer Lövgren 00:12:45 - 00:13:07 Sure. Yeah, the purpose is change. And yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I think I totally agree with everything you just said. But then, is there a way in which and the way in which is there a way in which and does all this fall under the bucket of what you would call parochialism generally, like when I talk about context and purposes, is that is that included ### David Deutsch 00:13:07 - 00:13:57 In what you tend to mean by parochial and no. Well, when I say parochial, I mean something which is a narrow view of a particular thing, which in my book, I use it mostly pejoratively, because the book is about the largest possible scale of things and the universal. But if the book was about something else, then parochial wouldn't necessarily be a pejorative term. So like, if I were reviewing a biology textbook or something, I wouldn't object to them saying ### Christofer Lövgren 00:13:57 - 00:14:03 That way, not all adaptations are parochial and not the worse for it or something ### David Deutsch 00:14:03 - 00:14:26 Like that. Yeah, I mean, it. Parochial isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if you're reaching for something universal. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:14:26 - 00:14:49 Okay. So are propositions necessarily not parochial in their meaning or reference? I guess because they're abstractions, but I'm sort of using this reality of abstractions thing in the back of my mind where there's nothing that's like, it's also not a diminutive to call something an abstraction in your world. ### David Deutsch 00:14:50 - 00:15:38 Yes, I suppose a proposition would come along with a context built in so that I could idealize the concept of fish in biology and I could idealize the concept of fish in everyday language. And each of those would correspond to some well, there would be propositions that use those concepts or to use those nouns. And they would be different. They would be applying to different things. And the difference in the precise specification of what the context is would be part of ... ### Christofer Lövgren 00:15:38 - 00:15:48 The proposition. Okay, okay. So in some sense, the context all gets loaded into that. ### David Deutsch 00:15:48 - 00:16:46 Yes. As a further idealization. Yes. So I suppose mathematicians do this all the time, because they say there are three, the number is three as a natural number. But, you know, there are three solutions or something. But if we were interested in integers, then there might be more solutions. And if we were interested in something else, then there might be no solutions at all. So when a mathematician says three, implicitly, he's referring to some context in which three is a member of a set that the mathematician happens to be interested in for these present purposes. Now, this is a very good example, but I could probably think of better examples. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:16:47 - 00:17:35 Well, no, but it's still interesting, because as you're saying, it's like, it's like, we have a image. I have an image of math as being conducted sort of essentially as these perfect abstractions. But you're saying even mathematicians are importing some notion of context, when they're Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Okay, so even mathematics imports this kind of context, but in math, you can make I could get this totally wrong. So just let me know. But I'm thinking of, you know, the sets, which is something like the ontology being referred to in our in this prior use of ontology can be made perfectly definite, perfectly precise. And it's sort of all on the world side in that language. You see what I'm saying? ### David Deutsch 00:17:38 - 00:18:21 Well, when you say it can be made, can't be made by humans. No, there is such a thing as a perfectly precise characterization. I've just thought of a better example than integers and sets. So a mathematician might say, so-and-so, this collection is not a set under ZF set theory, but under an expanded set theory, it is a set. But usually, one doesn't say which set theory one's sets belong to, if that's not part of the problem one is addressing. So that's an example of everyday ### Christofer Lövgren 00:18:21 - 00:19:37 Mathematics language being imprecise. There's something that I at least think characterizes mathematics though, that I don't think characterizes at least most of our interaction with the world, which is something like this idealized sense of correspondence where you have all the symbols on one side, and the world on another side, the world comes already so parsed, independent of any kind of purpose. And then like the point is to get the symbols on this side to mirror the world on this side. And that idea of correspondence, if you want, or like representation was imported into the rationalist tradition in philosophy, because you're trying to sort of do this formal logic to mirror how the world is on its own side. But the more you bring in this context and what I'm calling like a context and purpose relative conception of ontology, the more that seems like a little bit problematic in the sense that like, though, it doesn't really make sense to say the world already is divided into sets, in that sense, because what counts as a particular object will depend on things on ... ### David Deutsch 00:19:37 - 00:20:14 Your side, not just on the world side. Yeah, but for every, if we're talking about propositions, um, for every characterization of the world in terms of slicing up of the world in terms of concepts, there is a proposition which includes a specification of that slicing up, which specifies not only how that was sliced up, but about what it actually is like after it's been ... ### Christofer Lövgren 00:20:14 - 00:20:50 Sliced up. Okay, okay. But then what is, what does reference even mean in that case? Um, because like reference in the human case, in some way, it cashes out to like, how it causes me to comport myself in some way, cash out in action, like how it causes me to behave toward the world. And that that's sort of in this idea of meaning as use, like it's what I do with that that constitutes the thing's meaning, the way it gets me to behave toward the world. But I don't know what that would mean. I don't even know what meaning means in the case ### David Deutsch 00:20:50 - 00:22:40 Of a proposition in that sense. So the reason why I want it, the reason why I want that to be there, and the reason why I think it's unsatisfactory, just to use Tarski's theory of truth directly from utterances to physical objects, is that truth is an all or nothing thing. It's that there's the law of the excluded middle, you know, there in logic, but yeah, yeah. Yeah, but if we want to use that concept in real life in ordinary speech, there has to be a sense in which ordinary speech corresponds to something that does have the law of the excluded middle. Right, right, right. Statements don't. But if we can if we can make sense of saying, yeah, but statements are an approximation to a thing that does have the law of excluded middle. And therefore, if someone says to me, no, the, you know, the law of the excluded middle isn't true, because something can be both true and false at the same time, like, can be true in one universe and false in another, then I can say, yeah, but you're not using that. I can point to the way that they're not using it properly in the sense that they're not trying to make a statement that corresponds to a proposition. They're trying to redefine what it means to be true. And that's, you know, that's the relationship between propositions and the world that really has that and all we can have is approximations to that. I don't know if that's ... ### Christofer Lövgren 00:22:41 - 00:24:15 I think it makes sense. So if you can't appeal to the propositions, then you can't appeal to anything objective when you're saying to like, this is true. Like, really, it's true. Yeah, yeah. That isn't a problem. For most purposes, right? Like, like, from, you know, if you and I have a misunderstanding, the example that gets used that David Chapman takes is, have you ever heard of the book Understanding Computers and Cognition by Winograd and Flores? It's I think it's referenced in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Winograd is one of the characters. And it's one of the names that gets anagrammed in Gödel, Escher, Bach in one of the dialogues that's very much like your book. I've forgotten that. Yeah. Right. But so Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores wrote a book called Understanding Computers and Cognition. And there's an example that they use in it that's very influential, where it's like, if I say to you, is there any water in the refrigerator? And you say yes, and then I go and look and there's nothing in the refrigerator, there's just an eggplant in there and something else. And I say, you lied to me, and you go, No, I didn't, you know, there's water in the cells of the eggplant. Right. Okay, so that would be like a, in some sense, true, in some sense, false, but you and I had a misunderstanding about meanings there, where what I was referring to when I asked the question, is there water in the refrigerator is different than what you were referring to when you answered it. ### David Deutsch 00:24:15 - 00:24:17 Yes. And then we would work that ... ### Christofer Lövgren 00:24:17 - 00:24:24 Out if that misunderstanding arose in that context. Exactly. We would get closer and closer ### David Deutsch 00:24:25 - 00:24:33 Until we were close enough for misunderstanding not to dominate what we think each other are saying. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:24:33 - 00:24:42 Right. But is truth the thing- But we wouldn't be perfectly close ever. But is truth the thing that we'd be deferring to in negotiation there? ### David Deutsch 00:24:42 - 00:25:13 Well, we'd, usually, what we're really doing is we're approaching each other, we're correcting errors in our conception of each other. Right. But when people get closer to each other in that sense, then the reason that they have been able to do that is that they're also both getting closer to the truth. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:25:13 - 00:25:27 But isn't part of the claim here that you want to make, Jake, that the truth of that statement, is there water in the refrigerator, is by definition dependent on your purposes as the asker? ### Jake Orthwein 00:25:27 - 00:25:57 I think it's definitely dependent on your meaning as the asker, and then that's dependent on your purposes. And it doesn't sound like David actually disagrees with me. No. So did I get you right, David, that on your view, in a case like that, that whole context is embedded in the abstract proposition itself? Yes. Okay. And by the way, it's also embedded in real life in people's brains. Because ... ### David Deutsch 00:26:00 - 00:26:29 I have a theory about what context you're using, and vice versa, you have a theory about what context I'm using. And we start off with mistaken theories about each other's intention, each other's context, and we correct those. As I said, what's kind of literally happening physically is that we're correcting errors in our theories of each other. Right. And you could even ### Jake Orthwein 00:26:29 - 00:26:51 Say we're coming to share each other's context and purpose to a greater degree. Not necessarily. So long as I know what your context is, I don't have to share it. Yeah. I guess like I'm coming to represent your context. Not in a literal sense, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But note that, I mean, I don't know where you're going with this again, but note that ... ### David Deutsch 00:26:51 - 00:27:11 There are people who would deny all this. There are people who say things like, well, there's your truth and my truth. And there's no such thing as an objective fact of the matter that we can come to agree on. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're the wrong social class or the wrong color or whatever. ### Jake Orthwein 00:27:11 - 00:27:41 Yeah. I think if you're here and they're here, I'm like here, which is to say I'm much closer to you than to that. But there's a sense in which you're closer to that than a really naive rationalist view, right? Where it's just, there's no such thing as parochialism. It's just perfect truth all the way down. And there's a sense in which Popper was closer to that just by negating the certainty project that had character. Yeah. ### David Deutsch 00:27:42 - 00:27:50 Yes. And that's why some people think that Popper is a postmodernist or that Popper caused postmodernism. ### Jake Orthwein 00:27:50 - 00:29:23 Right. There's a way in which this line of inquiry, like the way that Descartes, I think, set up the epistemological project as being build your knowledge on a foundation of perfect certainty. The failure of that did cause postmodernism in a certain sense, you could argue. But you can't blame Popper for pointing out that that was misconceived. So I'm not trying to take you all the way into full postmodern relativism, but I'm trying to give the devil their fullest due in some way. And I think one thing that's at least, yeah, it seems right to me is that what I was talking about is ontology. So the furnishings of the world in terms of objects, categories, properties, relationships, is not pre-given in the world, but dependent on our context and purposes. And when we're able to successfully pick out the same ontologies in the world, as in the case of the water in the refrigerator example, it's because we're coordinating with one another, not coordinating with the God's eye view. And you can idealize the convergence there, but you can't idealize the convergence there for every possible situation, and nor would you want to. Well, there is some structure in the world, though. I would guess ### David Deutsch 00:29:23 - 00:30:25 That the number three is not in the same category as a dog. That is, the difference between them exists objectively. Sorry, not just the difference between them. The fact that they're of different kinds, one of them an abstract integer and the other one a physical mammal, I think that exists in the objective world. So it's not just that I've sliced up the world in such a way that three is in different category from dog. The fact that I have done that is partly due to the structure in the actual physical world and the abstract world. ### Jake Orthwein 00:30:25 - 00:32:25 Yeah. So the way I'd want to put it is something like, it's not arbitrary how we do the dividing for any given context and purpose. In some way, the world is always pushing back, except when you're doing mere invention. And the world can be the abstract world, the world can be the physical world, and so forth. But the way it matters that the world, there are purposes for which it makes sense to bunch the integer three and dog into the same category and so forth. If everything is routed by way of propositions and the paradigmatic case of what knowledge is, is taken to be this idealization of perfect convergence on the objective truth, I think that's not quite right because in some way it's always coming from the bottom up and you're never hitting that. So it's sort of weird to think that the world is always the paradigm case. Do you see what I'm saying? Not sure. I think just because something is unattainable, that doesn't mean it's not meaningful or useful to speak of it. So there's another distinction. A lot of what I would be talking about would get chalked up to epistemological uncertainty in the Popper framing and in your framing, which is that we don't know, we may be uncertain. But here we're talking about ontology, not epistemology. Right. And that seems different than saying we just don't know yet and that's why we can't attain it. What it would mean to attain it, it doesn't make sense to say what it would mean to attain it because it's always going to be for particular purposes. ### David Deutsch 00:32:31 - 00:33:00 We might be able to attain anything up to that, but not actually that. Like absolute zero, we can speak of absolute zero and it can appear in equations and so on, but absolute zero has never occurred in nature and never will. So, but it's a meaningful thing to speak about. ### Jake Orthwein 00:33:07 - 00:33:20 In some way, you said earlier that parochialism is not a denigration except when you're aiming at universality. Doesn't this imply that you always sort of should be aiming at universality? You know, if that's... ### David Deutsch 00:33:22 - 00:33:54 The trouble is that we're not in charge of where our creativity leads. We may want to have a universal theory of disease, but we might end up with the theory of canals instead because that's where it led. Right, right, right. People often don't find what they're looking for and people often do find what they're not looking for. ### Jake Orthwein 00:33:54 - 00:34:04 Do you think of the world as being amenable to universal description in any domain? ### David Deutsch 00:34:07 - 00:34:33 Yes, I think so because otherwise you'd be saying that there's a limit to how well we can understand things. Like if there's a limit to how well we can understand dogs, it must mean that the domain of dogs is finite and therefore it's a subset of something wider that we could understand, of which we could get a better understanding. ### Jake Orthwein 00:34:39 - 00:35:44 I think I don't understand. Part of the reason I ask is like, if I take it back into the realm of natural language and these parochial things, you're doing this coordination dance between whatever your symbols are on the one side and the world on the other side, but the world is unstable at certain levels of analysis. That coordination thing is always kind of a dance. It's not like a static thing that you could get right once and for all. That's part of why I think of the world as not being characterizable in, partly just because of change, but also because of this ontological nebulosity thing. I don't think of it as being characterizable. The laws of physics are the paradigm case of it's going to obtain for all of time, so to speak. But I don't think of everything as being like that. I don't think even the laws of physics are like that. ### David Deutsch 00:35:49 - 00:37:48 There is a certain, like I say when talking about constructor theory, there is a prevailing conception of what constitutes a law of physics. That conception has got the structure in it. It's a law of motion and it has entities which change with time and that kind of thing. constructor theory proposes a different conception. We don't know. I mean, we're trying to express each in terms of the other and so on, but the idea is that they won't be perfectly expressible in terms of each other. One of them will turn out to be not useful, not a good way to express the actual laws. The biologists that first thought of the idea that a whale is not a fish will have been doing something like that. When they wrote their grant proposal, they will have said, I shall be studying a certain type of large fish. That makes everything I'm going to say so absurd and that we have to change the terminology because the terminology is simply too misleading. It doesn't correspond to reality. So that has happened with physics several times in history. Kepler, his laws were about the shapes of orbits and about the times that it takes for objects to go around the orbits. And there was no concept of force at the time. Newton had to invent that. ### Christofer Lövgren 00:37:48 - 00:38:01 Yeah. And I think they didn't have some kind of occult sources or something like that. I've read accounts that it's like the idea of the force he was importing from some of his weird alchemical preoccupations or something like that. ### David Deutsch 00:38:01 - 00:38:34 He might have been, but I know he didn't like it. He didn't like it because you can't see a force and so on. So yeah, he might well have got it from somewhere. Again, where you get it from, whether you like it or not, whether you don't like it, your research is going to take you in a certain direction. You can either go in that direction and make progress or you can just insist and not make any progress. ### Jake Orthwein 00:38:34 - 00:39:55 Yeah. Okay, I have maybe two more questions. This has been super informative, so thank you. I have maybe two more lines of questioning. One is about this analogy to natural selection. That's one of the things that's so interesting about Popper is that you can really be like, oh look, contextualism and criticism is very much like variation selection. But one of the first things that I remember being taught when I was learning about natural selection is that you shouldn't do this purely hierarchical conception of fitness as being like everything was trying to just become a human, which is the peak of the fitness ladder. And you also shouldn't have the conception of final fitness because there's always this kind of Red Queen dynamic happening between you and the environment and it's not that kind of thing where you're going to be fit once and for all because you're changing the environment and so forth. It's a very dynamic thing. And I think of knowledge as being kind of similar in that sense, but that's part of why I have this intuition that these universalized idealizations are sort of like missing the point or something. You know what I mean? ### David Deutsch 00:39:55 - 00:40:35 Right. So, nice point. It's the first time I've thought of this, but I guess you're right, to put it in my terms, that there is no analog of truth in evolution. It's wrong, as you just said, it's wrong to think of the process of evolution as maximizing something globally. I mean, locally, it maximizes something, but there's no ideal thing that it's heading toward.