Stephen Downes

The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does (POSIWID). Or as Stafford Beer says, "This is a basic dictum. It stands for a bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances." There has been a lot of talk about systems here in recent days, but to my mind, the greates weakness of such talk is teleological. We talk about systems as designed (which they often are) with a purpose that expresses the intent of the designer. And sure, humans design systems. But nature doesn't. Gordon Brander writes, "It seems that these purposes have arisen from within the system, rather than being imposed from without. They are statistical attractors that dependently arise from the structure of feedback networks in the ecosystem. Biologists call this kind of emergent-from-within goal-seeking teleonomy, to distinguish it from imposed-from-without Aristotelian teleology."