On Purpose (Reprise)

[tabemann]

Continuing the discussion from "Thomistic Idealism":

@Wayfarer

@tabemann

After all, I see a deistic conception of God, such as my example that I have mentioned on here of God as a greater intelligence (a ‘cosmic programmer’ perhaps) running our universe as a simulation (say, within a great cosmic computer) embedded in a greater universe that they designed, initialized, and set in motion but do not intervene in as perfectly plausible.

With respect, it’s not. That only seems plausible from the Newtonian perspective of the ‘Great Machine’ from which both mind and God are disembodied and perfectly detached. In reality, the appearance of living beings is itself the visible manifestation of intentionality (which is the great lesson of phenomenology, see On Purpose). The meaningless universe from which the Sacred has withdrawn is itself an abstraction, albeit a highly persuasive one.

@Wayfarer

@tabemann

I read your blog article and I must respectfully disagree with it. Intentionality in the biological realm is clearly an epiphenomenon upon evolution, which is very much an intention-less physical process that does not require any posited intentionality of the universe. The apparent ‘intention’ of organisms to survive is simply a matter of that the organisms that did not have an ‘intention’ of survival did not survive to pass on their genes while those that did did.

But on what basis do you claim that it is ‘epiphenomenal’? I understand that is the implicit assumption of mainstream biology, from which intentionality has already been excluded as a matter of definition, and which has to describe it as ‘apparent’. Which is why you’re begging the question! You’re assuming what needs to be shown.

I do not ascribe intentionality to the universe simply because a model of everything we know so far about the universe (with the only real gaps being w.r.t. the explanation of details of the Standard Model, the unification of quantum physics with relativity, and the nature of certain aspects of the interpretation of quantum physics such as ‘what is an observer’) does not need it. Adding intentionality to the basic model of the universe would require it coming from somewhere, which would need explanation. By excluding intentionality one arrives at a simpler concept of reality with nothing lost.

@Wayfarer

The fact is that organic life acts in a way that no inorganic compounds do: it acts to preserve itself against the pressure of entropy. That some organisms or early forms of organisms did not do this illustrates nothing other than the fact that they didn’t succeed. They died. It’s well known that a vast percentage of life-forms that evolved have become extinct. But that doesn’t negate the point: that organic life itself exhibits a form of intentionality, that crystals, rocks and hurricanes do not. The organism produces and maintains the boundary that defines it as an organism.

This is not some special metaphysical characteristic of organic life itself, though, but as mentioned just a simple consequence of the fact that life that persists and propagates itself also propagates the fact that it persists and propagates itself while life that fails to do so does not successfully propagate itself. Naturally, the vast majority of ‘successful’ life has come to exhibit this property for the very reason that its progenitors all managed to propagate themselves.

@Wayfarer

I think it presents an obvious challenge to Newtonian deism, because it points to the sense in which intentionality is made manifest in the organic domain from the outset and how it continues to manifest, rather than withdrawing to some ostensible but un-knowable ‘beginning’. The programmer is unknowable, uncontactable, outside the system. Whereas the hylomorphic/phenomenological picture makes intentionality the most immediately known thing there is — it’s what experience itself is.

The ‘cosmic programmer’ is just one potential beginning to our fundamentally rule-driven universe; there are other potential beginnings. Of course, it raises the question of how did the cosmic programmer’s universe begin ─ if our universe is a simulation, is the cosmic programmer’s universe also a simulation, and so on?

The key aspect, though, is regardless of how our universe came into being, it is clearly driven by deducible physical laws and has no need for the positing of ‘intentions’, so it is parsimonious to not posit any underlying ‘intentions’ to the universe.

@Wayfarer

Anyway - this is the wrong thread to debate that in detail, perhaps I might start one on this subject in particular.

Hence why I started a new thread.