In the journey to explore the mysteries of the world, teleology, a philosophical theory that reveals the relationship between things and phenomena, appears to be quite mysterious.

This doctrine has both supporters and detractors, and is worth exploring because of its uniqueness and controversy.

Teleology believes that the purpose of ideas predetermines the development of things.

For example, when looking at natural processes, it does not start from conventional causal relationships.

Teleology introduces purpose, a unique element of human behavior, into the interpretation of the world. This element originally belonged only to human activities, but is now widely used to explain the relationships between various things.

In the process of evolution and growth of all things in the world, teleology advocates that the goal precedes the process and leads the direction of development.

Teleology exhibits different characteristics at various levels, just like the structure of an organism. It can provide unique insights, not just based on the inevitable reactions of physics or chemistry, but to explore whether there is an innate purpose playing a leading role in the formation and development of life structures.

A typical representative of external teleology is to use God's purpose to explain nature.

Socrates once proposed this view. He believed that the reason why nature appears as it does today is because of the intentional actions of the gods.

In the Middle Ages, this view became a common explanatory device in religious theology.

At that time, natural science was not yet developed, and external teleology dominated the ideological world. People believed that things were the products of reason under the will of gods and were intended to serve some practical purpose.

At that time, people believed that heaven and earth had their own deep meaning in creating humans, and human-centered values ​​were widely popular, taking everything in nature to obey humans as a matter of course.

At the time, external teleology was quite popular. This theory denies the inherent laws of nature and attributes all phenomena in nature to supernatural divine will.

Scholars did not focus on the nature of things and their development laws at that time. They took the gods' established goals as their starting point, which led to deviations in the scientific understanding of nature.

Immanent teleology was established by Aristotle.

This theory holds that purpose is the intrinsic determinant of things.

Even if things exist inevitably, purpose is the fundamental basis and driver.

Aristotle observed many phenomena in the biological world. He believed that these phenomena were not caused by necessity alone, but were driven by some purpose.

He believes that the color and structure of flowers are determined by their internal purposes and are not just accidental coincidences in nature.

In nature, the lifestyles and body structures of certain animals are regarded as the product of their inner purpose drives.

It is not natural necessity that rules, but a deeper purpose.

Materialism before Marxism used the principle of determinism to confront teleology.

The teleological view goes against the respect for objective laws advocated by materialism.

Because teleology is mostly based on conceptual assumptions separated from the material basis.

When analyzing social and historical phenomena, teleology often easily falls into conjectures about pure concepts, while materialism focuses on starting from actual production and life and the objective laws of things.

This struggle manifests itself in many aspects. At the level of philosophical theory, materialism advocates that the world is essentially material, and that matter follows its inherent laws to move and progress. It abandons teleological views that transcend nature and logic, and promotes philosophical concepts. Return to a rational and pragmatic track.

There are new changes in the concept of teleology in modern cybernetics.

It regards "teleology" as synonymous with the purpose of control through self-feedback.

In the field of robotics or some high-precision industrial control systems, many systems equipped with negative feedback adjustment mechanisms are usually considered to have intrinsic goals.

This helps everyone understand the principle of automatic operation of the control system, and at the same time integrate the two concepts of feedback and goal to think deeply about the operation of the system.

The purpose here does not refer to traditional life or human subjective goals, but a concept of functional purpose based on data response.

This is actually different from traditional teleology. It is a unique interpretation of the concept of purpose in the field of modern science.

Skopos theory has continued to develop in the long history, and its connotation and expression methods have experienced many changes. But we must be clear that the real purpose is generated by human consciousness, which contains subjective value judgments. As for the natural material world, we should uphold a materialist perspective and respect its objective laws.

When engaging in scientific research and exploring the truth of the world, we cannot speculate on the correlation between things based solely on subjective assumptions.

When we find that the stone becomes hot, if we follow teleology, we may guess that the stone heats up to reach a certain high temperature state. However, according to scientific research, this is more likely to be caused by strong sunlight or other physical and chemical factors.

When we analyze life phenomena, we should be more cautious about teleological thinking.

What new changes do you think teleology will bring to the future development of philosophy?