I notice there’s generous preview on Google Books, I’ll have a look. But even though I’m more persuaded by Buddhism that Christianity, his take on it seems rather too nihilistic for my liking. And that passage which references Bataille is the only thing I’ve read about him (it used to be an online post of Fischer’s, now part of an anthology).
But also I wonder how much of enactivism and phenomenology is positing a transcendent purpose? I suppose Husserl comes close with his transcendental phenomenology. In any case, the OP here is arguing that life is imbued with intentionality because it pervades the organic realm, not some supposed realm beyond it.
Nevertheless, the difficulty revolves around the idea that purpose or intentionality can only be conscious in the sense humans understand it. The activities of lower organisms can be designated ‘mechanistic’: they are, to all intents, merely objects that execute genetic programs.
I’m reminded of a Richard Dawkins lecture from 2009 on The Purpose of Purpose. He differentiates archeo-purpose which typifies the ‘teleonomic’ aspects of evolutionary development from the ‘neo-purpose’ which can be said to be displayed only by humans. But then, this seems to present a stark dualism between man and nature - really, only humans are capable of intentional action (along with some of the higher animals, although they’re not going to create technology and language). There’s something which seems Protagorean about that - it’s an anthropocentric view of life.
We are almost certainly descended at some point deep in prehistory from organisms that did not feel hunger in the way we do. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that our distant ancestors were filter feeders — they just went about eating whatever ran in their path. Then, however, one of our ancestors was born with a mutation to actively seek out food, i.e. feel hunger. As this gave it a competitive advantage, it survived and its descendants who inherited this mutation were more likely to survive than their counterparts without it. Consequently the mutation spread through the population until the lack of the mutation had died out. Hence, the gene came before the behavior, which needed no special teleology in order to come into being.
Where do you stand on the issue of panpsychism? Are there bridges between matter, life and mind on the issue of purpose or is the gap between matter and life fundamentally irreconcilable? Jonas makes a hard ontological distinction between matter and life, but Simondon, Merleau-Ponty and Thompson do not.
Jonas accepts analytical and ontological reductionism for physical phe-nomena. What he then argues is that this kind of reductionism fails in the case of the organism, which is ontologically emergent. Life, as he puts it, is thus an “ontological surprise.” Now, if we follow this line of thought, then I think we do face a serious life-matter problem, analogous to the mind-body problem. How does life emerge from nonlife? The panpsychist argues that we cannot make good on this invocation of emergence, that it is ultimately mysterious.
Hence the options would seem to be either some kind of dualism or some kind of panpsychism. But this line of thought is not at all the one we find in Merleau-Ponty and Simondon. In Simondon and Merleau-Ponty what we find is a reconceptualization of matter, life, and mind, one that does not bring mind down into the domain of microphysical processes nor equate mind with information transfer and self-organization, but rather tries to show how the notion of form as dynamic pattern or individuation process can both integrate or bridge the orders of matter, life, and mind, while also accounting for the originality of each order.
This is the path I try to follow in Mind in Life and not panpsychism. Nevertheless, I have to admit that my characterization in Mind in Life of life as “autopoiesis plus cognition” could be read as simply equating mind and life, and hence opening a door for the panpsychist line of thought. What I would now rather say is that living is sense-making and that cognition is a kind of sense-making. A wave or a soap bubble is an individuating process but not a sense-making one, because it does not modulate its coupling with the environment in relation to virtual conditions and norms.
A unicellular organism is a self-individuating and sense-making being but not a cognitive one, if by “cognitive” we mean being intentionally directed toward objects as unities-in-manifolds having internal and external horizons. What is important to me is not to fix the meanings of the words or concepts “matter,” “life,” “mind,” “cognition,” and so on— this effort would be misguided, since the richness of these words comes from their irreducible polysemy. Rather, my aim is to see whether we can chart multiple passages back and forth between those orders that we conceptualize, in different ways and at different times, as matter, life, and mind. (Thompson, Living Ways of Sense-making)
Are you more inclined toward Jonas’ perspective or Thompson’s?
This is helpful, thanks. It parallels the direction I was going in – that “designer/designed” or “creator/created” may not be the right pairings to discuss living things.
I also wonder if you would agree that we need to draw out some distinctions between “purpose” and “goal”? There’s a tendency to use them synonymously in this discussion. Intuitively, I find myself comfortable with the idea that life processes are goal-directed, and much more dubious about saying they have a purpose. But this may only reflect my own nuances of vocabulary.
If you find a non-human organism that can be demonstrated to be capable of engaging in philosophy, even at a most basic level, then I would say that it is capable of contemplating ‘purpose’.
Even if you extend the concept of consciousness to non-human animals, what about, say, plants or bacteria? A plant certainly cannot contemplate its ‘apparent purpose’ of growing towards light, and a bacterium certainly cannot contemplate its ‘apparent purpose’ of multiplying until it fills a dish of agar.
Your argument is that we tried to empty the universe of meaning, but we failed, because the universe has living things in it and we cannot squeeze goal-directedness out of living things.
You see ‘blind mechanism’ as a problem because it has no meaning, and you’re reaching for biology because that’s the domain of meaning and purpose—it matters to me whether that’s nutrient or toxin because I want to live.
But goals are the domain of instrumental rationality. We have to be a little careful about what we impute to organisms, but we can see how their actions advance goals, how features of their anatomy have particular functions, how they have roles within their groups, and so on. This is how we make sense of the world.
But what if what nature lacks is only this narrow, instrumental sort of meaning? From our always calculating point of view, it will seem at times that nature just is, without any purpose or meaning we can understand. Considered instrumentally, it’s just blind mechanism. But maybe that’s just a way of saying that whatever kind of meaning the universe might have, it’s not a human sort of meaning.
Agreed. ‘Goals’ are part of the human mind and what humans attribute to the world. Humans give the world ‘goals’. If this seems anthropocentric this is because humans are the only creatures we know of so far capable of philosophy. If we find that dolphins in the sea or crows sitting on branches happen to philosophize, I would extend this to them.
When we say that water seeks the lowest point in a landscape, we feel we are being metaphorical. When we say that a squirrel is looking for something to eat, we feel we are not. We can justify the distinction by pointing to the difference in organization between a body of water and a squirrel: one is ‘merely’ an aggregate, and the other an organism. It is tempting to explain that observation by saying that water ‘need not’ seek the lowest point to preserve itself while the squirrel must find food—but what kind of water would not behave this way in this environment?
I’m not saying we can’t come come up with a workable distinction between organisms and aggregates, of course we can. The point is only that the alignment of that distinction with the distinction between purposeful and purposeless behavior is not quite automatic. There is room to question how tightly or loosely coupled they are.
If you take the coupling to be very tight, it might seem to you that of course the behavior squirrels is purposeful, but that ecosystems and galaxies, not being organisms, only metaphorically behave purposefully.
If you take the coupling to be very loose, it might seem to you either that everything has a purpose or that nothing does, that there is a cosmic order or that we only project it.
I’m not of the understanding that life is an attribute of all matter, such as Galen Strawson proposes:
Naturalism states that everything that concretely exists is entirely natural; nothing supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists. Given that we know that conscious experience exists, we must as naturalists suppose that it’s wholly natural. And given that we’re specifically materialist or physicalist naturalists (as almost all naturalists are), we must take it that conscious experience is wholly material or physical.
I’m more inclined to ‘biopsychism’ which recognises life as a distinct ontological category with its own irreducible properties, and if I look up advocates of that term, both Jonas and Thompson are returned.
The traditionalist ontological distinctions of matter>vegetative>animal>rational still appeal to me, although I acknowledge it’s generally regarded as superseded. (E F Schumacher elaborates on the idea in his book Guide for the Perplexed.)
I consider myself a student of the philosophia perennis which holds to an hierarchical ontology, where there are levels of reality with corresponding levels of understanding. Science/scientia is adequate to the horizontal plane of objective existents but sapience/sapientia is concerned with the vertical dimension of qualitative insight. Science plainly dominates modern philosophy resulting in a ‘flat ontology’ (hence the questions about the realilty or relevance of quality, ‘qualia’.) But I believe, with Schopenhauer, that materialism is ‘the philosophy of the subject who has forgotten himself.’
I’m still reading both Jonas and Thompson. And Husserl.
Sure! I acknowledge from the outset that simple organisms don’t have purposes or goals as such, but that surviving and proliferating is in a sense goal directed. I also want to acknowledge the fundamental nature of ipseity or the state of being a subject. As we see in this conversation there is a strong tendency in the objective sciences to regard organisms as ‘mechanisms executing programs’ and human consciousness as an epiphenomenon or intrusion into the supposedly real domain of material forces. That is at the root of the problem. I’ve also been inspired by Steve Talbott’s essay series on The New Atlantis.
Purposes are not always conscious. Bacteria can learn Of course such behaviours are rudimentary compared to those of higher animals, but they can also be identified as the primeval origins of intentionality. In some basic sense they are beings that differentiate themselves from their environment. They have a boundary, a membrane, through which they exchange nutrients and which are maintained through homeostasis. My claim is that even at this early stage, they can no longer be regarded as objects or described in purely physical terms. Of course modern biology has vastly expanded the idea of physicality. Have you encountered Terrence Deacon, particularly his books The Symbolic Species and Incomplete Nature? They’re also relevant to this discussion. He attempts a non-reductive account of ‘how matter becomes mind’, but it’s very different to mainstream materialism.
The historical context is important. This describes the overall arc of thought from the ‘scientific revolution’ up until the twentieth century. But I say it still has considerable influence on the way we think about mind and body. It supplies an important part of the ‘grammar of culture’. We have concepts of mind or spirit and of matter, which permeate the discussion.
Oddly enough, this bring H P Lovecraft to mind! His universe was populated by these malign intelligences which were utterly alien and indifferent to humanity. Me, I’m more optimistic. My intuitions are more Eastern or Hermetic, ‘as above, so below’, humans as a manifestation of intelligence, although the model is more one of emanation than of creation.
My point is we can easily imagine a past in which the gene came before the behavior. Can we easily imagine the opposite without appealing to a designer or creator?
I gave what I believe to be a very sound logical argument as to why “the opposite” is the case. If you truly belief what you are saying, you can go back and address my argument, find the problems with it, and attempt to refute it. But I am not interested in how easy it is for you to imagine how what I concluded is false, nor am I interested in fictitious stories as evidence for your claims. If you must resort to fiction to support what you believe, then there’s obviously a problem with your belief.
Whether or not we want to say there is purpose in animal life, or plant life, or even non-life is one issue. The actual issue that I believe motivates the OP, but which is not being acknowledged as such, is the question as to whether there is an overarching cosmic purpose, which would imply a God or cosmic intelligence or at least will at work in nature.
No, we can’t coherently explain something which looks like it has been designed without imagining an immanent or transcendent intelligenece or an evolutionary process which unintentionally produces what looks to be designed.
Agreed completely. It seems some people here want to ascribe ‘purpose’ to life or to rocks without ‘purpose’ being ascribed by an intelligent being, whether human or divine, or ‘purpose’ being some kind of ‘vital force’ (with even rocks having such a ‘vital force’ of sorts). If purpose is not ascribed by humans or by God and is not a ‘vital force’, what is it?
I don’t want to pose it as ‘the Blind Watchmaker vs Intelligent Design’, even if that is the only perspective available to you. I say that framing is itself due to historical factors — the interaction of institutional religion and science in the Enlightenment. The perspective I’m trying to bring to bear is heavily influenced by phenomenology which is intended to re-frame the issue by bringing the pivotal role of the experiencing subject back into the picture.
I go along with Alfred North Whitehead, when he said in Science and the Modern World that science assumes an order. The difficulty being, though, that articulating what that order is, is not one of the things science is equipped to do, so there is no stricly scientific way of adjuticating that question. But to me, order seems as obvious as tides and seasons.
As the OP points out, the huge breakthrough of modern physics was in large part due to the exclusion of context. Its method was to concentrate exclusively on those bodies the attributes and behaviours of which could be defined solely in terms of physics. The successes that yielded are why physicalism has become such a widespread paradigm in modern philosophy, but at the cost of forgetting that initial step of abstraction and exclusion.
I really think that this misses the point of the op. The op is about things which demonstrate through the nature of their actions, that they act with purpose. And, we notice that these things are living, so we distinguish them from the non-living whose actions do not demonstrate purpose. This is the division between biology and physics. So the op is not asking about “cosmic purpose”, nor “God or cosmic intelligence”, it is asking a down-to-earth question about the way that living things, on earth, act with purpose.
I don’t see why you would impose only these two options. Let’s say that we reject the latter as unacceptable. I mean, we see all sorts of living beings building themselves homes, collecting food, breeding, and displaying all sorts of purposeful actions. To say that inanimate, dead things like rocks, which simply obey the laws of physics, could evolve into things which display purposeful acts makes no sense at all.
So, after rejecting that option, why do you say that “an immanent or transcendent intelligence” is the only other option? Why can’t we conceive of something in between, something which acts with purpose, but is not necessarily an intelligence? I don’t think that “intelligence” is a requirement for purpose. You might think, or like @tabemann, easily imagine that all purposeful acts must be derived from intelligence, but really, it’s quite often that purposeful acts display an amazing lack of intelligence. So we might find that intelligence has emerged from purposeful acts, without ever having existed prior to the purposeful acts which created it. Notice that saying intelligence emerged from purposeful acts is quite a bit different from saying that purposeful acts emerged from non-purposeful acts.
The question of historical factors in the framing is irrelevant if we are examining the logic, and deciding on account of that. Historico-psychological explanations for belief formation only work for those who don’t, or are yet to, critique their beliefs.
Also it is too simplistic, even anachronistic, and is basically a caricature of the issue to reduce the possibilities to ‘the Blind Watchmaker vs Intelligent Design’.
The experiencing subject is irrelevant to the issue of overarching purpose. You have evaded the question as to whether you are concerned with that question. If you are not, then the issue is reduced to whether we should impute purpose to animals (since they are sentient) or to plants and fungi (which are not generally considered to be sentient).
So which question is it that you are interested in?
Whitehead also posits God as essential to his system. It doesn’t do to cherrypick ideas, and leave out other ideas they depend on. Also science does not need to posit a universal order…it can restrict itself to dealing with observed invariances.
What is it that they lack if not sentience? I haven’t said that we cannot impute purpose to unintelligent animals, or plants, but really that is just a terminological issue. Some semioticians claim that semiosis goes “all the way down”.
Whitehead suggests that fundamental particles have a level of subjective experience, that experience happens at all levels, but his system depends on there being a God, albeit a very different one from the God of Christian theology.