Is there a will behind evolution?

Is there a will behind evolution?

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what. no.

Unknowable.

My will and the physical laws in effect my body are simultaneous, why can't we ascribe a very rudimentary will to atoms and molecules? Just as the human seeks fulfillment so is there a movement or "desire" in the atom to fill its orbitals.

the physical systems that comprise your body are responsible for what you call your will. due to the complexity of these operations having a "will" and seeking fulfillment are mistakenly attributed to consciousness and autonomy when they are byproducts of these systems . an atom doesn't "desire" to fulfill something that aligns with its physical properties. extrapolate that all the way up to a human.

>My will and the physical laws in effect my body are simultaneous
What effects your will fool?

>Just as the human seeks fulfillment so is there a movement or "desire" in the atom to fill its orbitals.
Why it moves is because it is under the effect of other movements.

My stomach or gallbladder doesn't seemk fulfillment, the consciousness that I am does - which of course emerges out of the sum activity of all the physical systems that comprise my body, but is still not reducible to any one system. If the total functioning of all my sub-properties results in (or rather, IS) desire x, why can't we say the same for atoms?

These movements being nothing other than the mutual action of innate properties on each other, just like all actions in the human sphere, but obviously on a much higher order

they do seek "fulfillment". that is, fulfilling their designated function as prescribed by it's components and sum of the physical forces effecting those components. if you ate something rotten, it may be in your stomach but it's a component of a body and subsequently other parts of the body will react. it's lines and lines of dominoes that meet up to progressively more complex arrangements of dominoes. The thing that pushes those first dominoes isn't an act of will but the sheer fact of coming into existence in the first place which establishes its initial properties.
that being said, the cause of existence is currently impossible to know. though even if there was a "will" behind creation, they would like be subject to the same processes that i've described. it's turtles all the way down. the nature of existence is infinitely recursive.

Of course they seek fulfillment, but all these sub-fulfillments, as it were, snowball into the prime fulfillment of myself as a conscious being that wants to experience x, y, and z for itself and not for any single organ (besides the brain).

My point is, if the will of my body is the sum of physical laws acting in my body - if subjectivity is a causally-determined system's perspective of itself - then why not trace that back to atoms?

I'm just saying those initial properties are a will, or the germ of a will.

it's back to the dominoes thing. all the dominoes are doing the same thing, falling over. step back and the arrangement of the dominoes is far more complex than the initial simple single file lines of dominoes but are still performing the same actions.
it's a matter of parsing scale. do you think a gall bladder is conscious? humans might not but but imagine the gall bladder thinks it does. that is what you're postulating, that it's possible for gall bladders to be conscious. the gall bladder on its own level of scale believes that it has a will but the human that it is a part of doesn't perceive as such. If on every level of scale that which interacts on that level of scale believes it is conscious, does consciousness truly exist? conscious becomes meaningless if that's the case.
i guess i'm conceding the possibility that we are conscious but at the same time it would be pointless if everything were conscious. essentially if everything were conscious, for all intents and purposes, conscious would not exist. the concept of consciousness can only be viable if some things have it and others don't

No, probably just a grad student taking a lunch break.

Well it still wouldn't be meaningless to refer to the human "flavor" of consciousness.

And consciousness as such would not become meaningless because if everything in the universe is a unit of consciousness in a larger body, than the final totality would be equivalent to God - ESPECIALLY when human consciousness is not as strictly deterministic as a rock falling from a great height, since a human being can overcome his built-in programming to an extent through higher-order, self-reflexive determinations

This famalam.

To expand, the dichotomy in this thread between "but I have a will" and "but your cells don't have their own will" is confused.

Your motivation for ascribing a will to yourself but not your cells is based entirely on your extrapolation about what things have minds that is based on what things look and act like you. But that distinction is 100% arbitrary as far as our modern science is concerned.

Imagine the progression of the formation of our solar system through modern evolution to today. Is there some special moment when consciousness magically appears because of "complexity" or whatever other thing you think causes it? That's absurd. So as David Chalmers points out, consciousness has to be fundamental.

So asking if evolution has a will is like asking if physics has a will or if the universe itself has a will. We're not in a position to know that because we're just a part of the universe.

Well yeah that's what I'm saying. Consciousness is a continuum occurring in parallel with the continuum of physical complexity, and neither is prior to the other but are mutually determinative.

Not so much an ineradicable dualism as a bifurcation necessary for existence as such, since there can be no self without an other, and no other without a self

Random genetic mutations filtered by natural conditions or natural selection leading to accumulation of traits over a long period also known as evolution.

humans have been artificially selecting shit for millennia, and now that we're fully aware of the phenomenon you can say objectively that there is will behind evolution in some cases.

I know what you're going for, though. completely unfalsifiable. subterranean dinosaur people will conquer the planet, prove me wrong.

I think it's worth thinking about and the answer, once you really hash out the variables involved, seems to be "probably" but it's true we can't really know

You're making a bunch of what I consider unjustified claims there and I'm the guy you were responding to.

I'm not saying you're wrong. But you're extrapolating from what we can't know to claiming that that unknowability is evidence of ontological truth.

what the fuck are you talking about?

there's as much evidence for an omnipotent "will" over evolution as there is for subterranean dinosaur tyrants ready to conquer the planet. that means there is an equal evident base for thinking about the answers to these questions. how is considering the existence of a will over natural selection any more "worth" than considering we might be conquered by ancient earth lizards?

>hash out the variables involved
>"probably"
I would love to see your line of reasoning here lmao wtf

My will is equivalent to physical laws as they are operating in my body. An atom's "will" is equivalent to its properties. Ergo, there's no hard break between dumb matter -> autonomous life but a continuum of will being expressed in progressively complex systems.

so you're just redefining words to suit the idea that natural will exists? ooookaaaayyyyyyy...if you want I guess. I could semantically deduce that broccoli is a sentient life form that is as technologically capable as humans if I used as much wordplay as you are right now.

an object will move toward that which is in compliance with the parameters of its properties and it's current state. is that not the same thing as conscious will? if atoms were conscious, is that not the way they would behave? if so, consciousness would be made a null and the question of it existing would be a non-issue.
life is not a property of a rock so a rock would have not behave in a way that would prevent it from falling from a great height. the properties of a rock do not differentiate between falling or not. a human however is a living being and would avoid this event as falling from a great height would compromise that property. we would not exist as we are today if our ancestors didn't pass on having the property of tending toward not falling from great heights. neither of these cases contains evidence of will.
Chalmer's line of thought presumes that there is a consciousness. whether that is so is undetermined.
but there's no such thing as "artificial". it's the result of the behaviour of humans, which all the way down is the result of the sum behaviours of whatever base units we're made of. everything is "natural".

>but there's no such thing as "artificial".
artificial is an abstract concept invented by humans specifically to discern between things that humans created and things that humans did not create, and to extant, things intelligences created and did not create. your semantics render the word useless. you are literally playing with language to fit your arguments. it's really boring and nobody will ever take you seriously.

people agree to use common definitions of words so that they can understand each other and communicate. if you do things like refuse to recognize that humans can make a distinction between objects created by an intelligent entity and objects not created by an intelligent entity, you are not only playing make-believe, but you are refusing to speak the language everyone else is speaking by claiming words like "artificial" are meaningless. you are re-defining language to fit your perspective, instead of using language to explain your perspective. this is the definition of a semantical argument, and it is fallacious.

googling it says "made or produced by human beings" so i'm wrong. i guess it was the sentiment of the term that i expanded the meaning beyond humans.

>wordplay

Number one recourse of a pleb who doesn't understand what's being said. I made my argument perfectly clear, no it's not as nonsensical as sentient broccoli. Get with it

Coalescence of property and consciousness is the hallmark of atoms, molecules, and other simple physical systems. It is in the human that there occurs a higher order determination stemming not from a cascade of physical billiard balls smashing into each other but precisely from the human being's perspective of himself as a limited, determined system (which means those billiard balls are having a perspective on themselves as billiard balls).

I have no idea where you're getting the rest of your post from. Of course we wouldn't exist if we were passively being acted on by external laws. Sooner or later the human being can decide to determine himself, and this will to self-determination is just an extension of the survival instinct which we see in less intelligent animals, which is an extension of the simple behaviors of even less complex organisms and on and on down to atoms. What are you having trouble with?

even though google has the most widely accepted definitions 99.9% of the time(when words are not politically attached in any way i.e. the word "gender" was redefined), I still refuse to accept their definitions of the words "jealousy" and "literally". they've lost their meaning.

yawn. you're wrong because I decide that conciousness means purple chitonous spikes and atoms don't have purple chitonous spikes so conciousness cannot be a hallmark of atoms therefore you're wrong.

if you bring up a googled definition of "conciousness", to prove me wrong, I'll bring up a googled definition of "will" to prove you wrong, and illuminate to you exactly why wordplay is real and is retarded.

this is what wordplay is, this is how you sound. it's boring and juvenile. if you hear it a lot to the point that you aggressively respond to it, it's probably because you use it a lot.

lol panpsychism and Spinoza refuted by a Google definition. 20 posts in and this faggots still thinks I'm arguing atoms have thoughts and feelings. Goddamn you niggers are fucking stupid, like goddamn

Absolutely

The will to fuck white women

You should really read Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe -Simon Conway Morris.

One of the few serious treatments of the topic that doesn't boil down to I.D. nonsense.

survival is one of the base properties of a human. as a result of other gained properties, some can come to supersede the property of survival. a human can "choose" to fall from a great height.

i would say the conflict here is the threshold of the order of complexity necessary to be classified as consciousness.
naw, i agree with this post . "will" is equivalent to abiding by properties. there's no "hard break" but a continuum. if everything has the possibility of conscious, the ends of the continuum are infinite and out of reach of our understanding. you guys seem to believe there is a threshold but i see the infinite continuum and don't think that threshold exists.

Exactly, which is why human self-determination arises out of the survival instinct but is not beholden to it, such as martyrdom or the sacrifice of one's life.

> Is there some special moment when consciousness magically appears because of "complexity" or whatever other thing you think causes it? That's absurd.

Total failure to understand what emergent complexity is. Akin to arguing that there is no special moment where a house appears out of bricks, therefore, all bricks must contain house.

the conflict here is when those bricks become a house.
as i said in this post if the opposite states of brick and house extend infinitely, when exactly can a house be defined as a house. every brick can't be a house.

though the op is claiming every brick is a house and everything has will

Bad analogy. A house is just one of things bricks can make up, and while a brain is just one of many things atoms can make up, this is what connects them: let's define mind or subjectivity if you prefer as the self-determined center of any given system, as the "within" of an object as opposed to the objective and determined "without".

At the simple end of the spectrum, mind is functionally identical to a particle's properties, but these particles go on to compose larger and more complex networks of relations which acts in a unified way with that organism's will. In this area of the continuum, mind, that organism's felt, central sense of self is dim and diffuse and really not that distinguishable from simple movement.

Go up the scale though and this self, the center, becomes consolidated and specialized in a brain. So the analogy is dumb because a house is not just a thing atoms make but a higher-order expression of simple but fertile principles of attraction and repulsion

No, "house-ness" is latent in bricks, and I'm further arguing a telos: that bricks naturally become houses given the right conditions

this post is an argument from authority combined with an ad hominem, with nothing other than references to pseudoscience. I don't have any interest in even beginning to discuss anything with you on a serious level, as it would be impossible. go to school.

God.

Absolutely not, it is a cold heartless system like gravity and my sex life.

No, actually here you said consciousness itself, not the potential for consciousness, had to be fundamental.

Read Sokal, you'll like it

>doesn't even know what ad hominem is

You're not as smart as you think you are. You don't have a handle on what I'm saying and keep hiding behind logical fallacies and accusations of wordplay. It's not a blind appeal to authority if I've already explained my position like 5 times you gibbering mong

That's the same thing. As in, consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality because mental properties are latent in atoms and molecules. Do you guys really need your hand held for every word?