Seeing the truth is not conductive to survival

[SanteriSatama]

Analytic Idealism maintains a strictly Darwinian view of evolution as far as I know.

Analytic idealism does so, but Bernardo the man has also more degrees of freedom to think and discuss than the theory.

[DandelionSoul]

I definitely see what you are saying. I guess my only remaining criticism is that the telos of "goal-directed" almost implicitly assumes a dualism of internal agency and external agency which the ancients simply did not have. It says the inner lawfulness of the process is "tautological" (in a negative sense of being non-informative) because what we really want to know about is whether an external agent designed the inner lawfulness. But the "externality" of the agency was not even a possibility in ancient Greek thought (any forces "external" were also felt as tied up with inner activity of the human being participating in the phenomenal world). So telos could only be referring to the inner lawfulness which we both acknowledge exists. Does that make sense? I think also these few passages from Steiner should help clarify what I am trying (poorly) to say:

Among the manifold streams in the spiritual life of mankind, there is one we can follow which may be described as the overcoming of the concept of purpose in realms where it does not belong. Purposefulness has its own particular nature within the sequence of phenomena. It is a truly real purposefulness only when, in contract to the relationship of cause and effect where a preceding event determines a later one, the reverse applies and a subsequent event affects and determines an earlier one. This happens, to begin with, only in the case of human actions. A person carries out an action, which he pictures to himself beforehand, and lets himself be moved to his action by this mental picture. What comes later, the action, works with the help of the mental picture upon what comes earlier, the person who acts. This detour through mental picturing is, however, altogether necessary in order for a connection to be purposeful.

In the process which breaks down into cause and effect, the perception is to be distinguished from the concept. The perception of the cause precedes the perception of the effect; cause and effect would simply remain side by side within our consciousness if we were not able to connect them with each other through their corresponding concepts. The perception of the effect can only follow upon the perception of its cause. If the effect is to have a real influence upon the cause, then this can only be through the conceptual factor. For the perceptual factor of the effect is simply not present at all before that of the cause. Whoever maintains that the blossom is the purpose of the root, which means the former has an influence upon the latter, can maintain this only about that factor of the blossom which he can establish through his thinking. The perceptual factor of the blossom has as yet no existence at the time when the root comes into being. For there to be a purposeful connection, however, not merely the ideal lawful connection of the later with the earlier is necessary, but also the concept (the law) of the effect must really, through a perceptible process, influence the cause. A perceptible influence of a concept upon something else, however, we can observe only in human actions. Here alone, therefore, is the concept of purpose applicable...

Monism rejects the concept of purpose in all areas with the sole exception of human action. It seeks laws of nature, but not purposes of nature. Purposes of nature are arbitrary assumptions just as unperceivable forces are (see page 109f). But also purposes of life which man does not give himself, are unjustified assumptions from the standpoint of monism. Only that is purposeful which man has first made to be so, for only through the realization of an idea does purposefulness rise. The idea however, becomes operative in the realistic sense only within man. Therefore human life has only the purpose and determination which man gives to it. To the question: What kind of task does man have in life?, monism can only answer: the one which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no predetermined one, but rather it is, at any given moment, the one I choose for myself. I do not enter upon my life's path with fixed marching orders.

I think we're very close in our thinking here, assuming Steiner's thinking reflects your own. My sense is that "purpose" only exists from within a first-person perspective, which is to say, one embedded in a world and limited by a world horizon, and is fundamentally both relational and spatiotemporal. With that said, I've seen enough of the more-than-human world to think that Steiner is being overly restrictive here: while I don't think it makes sense to talk about the purpose of a river in flowing toward the ocean, I think it does make sense to talk about the purpose of my cat yelling at me because she wants to be on my lap (I thwarted her purpose so I could write this post, and now she's very disgruntled).

I can possibly see a sense in which purpose might be sort of baked-into the macrocosm (you can tell I'm very committal by the way I managed to stick "possibly," "might be," and "sort of" into a single sentence). It would be a kind of existentialist turn in ontology, whereby the void is a lack, and lack is desire, and desire is desire to be, and desire to be is desire to be with, and so the void, as absolute freedom and absolute lack and absolute desire (which are just three ways of saying the same thing), is its own self-transcendence in be(com)ing all and with all. I'm not committed enough here to attempt a rigorous argument -- just batting at a bit of an intuition for funsies. That would offer something of a purpose immanent to the world that would ground both the fundamental categories of worldness (there is no being with without relationality, which entails time, space, and causation), but without the sort of "telos" I find most objectionable, where there's some kind of preordained plan for the Universe.

In any case, Steiner's quote seems to support my initial assertion, that when we're discussing natural selection, we ought to be doing so with an eye toward causes rather than purposes.

[DandelionSoul]

Darwinian theory of natural selection is a very limited and incomplete view of evolution, not only as an explanatory biological theory, but even more so in the wider sense of evolution which includes also spiritual evolution - as the term is commonly used and discussed on this forum.

The global entelecheia of evolution can be stated as goal-direction of uniquely experiencing. From this perspective each experience has inherent value by virtue of being unique. Experiencing experiences difference and variance, not immutable same. Thinking with this global perspective, interestingly 'potential' does not exist on this level even conceptually. The algorithm only actualizes, self-realizes. The no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics can be seen as an expression of the global generative algorithm, in which the purpose of experiencing is to experience.

The potential comes sensible in the local entelecheia, nested in the global. Potential arises from the qualitative and relational valuation of actual experiencing, as an instrumental device to guide and direct experiencing towards some desired quality of experiencing. By projection-creation of an superposition of possibilities, a local continuum of experiencing can create self-reflecting temporal loops for various degrees of qualitative choices.

So many of your posts offer so much to chew on! If you'd be okay with elaborating, I'd love to hear more about the limitations of the Darwinian model of evolution (I mean, I know there have been advances in evolutionary theory since Darwin, but I assume you mean here the sort of broader paradigm of mutation-and-natural-selection as the sole drivers of evolution). Also, I'm not familiar with "entelecheia." I looked it up and I think that maybe I have my mind around the concept? But I've never read Aristotle, to my shame. And the no-cloning theorem... I looked that up, too, but with the relatively meager grasp on quantum mechanics that I have, I couldn't get my head around it at all.

[AshvinP]

I definitely see what you are saying. I guess my only remaining criticism is that the telos of "goal-directed" almost implicitly assumes a dualism of internal agency and external agency which the ancients simply did not have. It says the inner lawfulness of the process is "tautological" (in a negative sense of being non-informative) because what we really want to know about is whether an external agent designed the inner lawfulness. But the "externality" of the agency was not even a possibility in ancient Greek thought (any forces "external" were also felt as tied up with inner activity of the human being participating in the phenomenal world). So telos could only be referring to the inner lawfulness which we both acknowledge exists. Does that make sense? I think also these few passages from Steiner should help clarify what I am trying (poorly) to say:

Among the manifold streams in the spiritual life of mankind, there is one we can follow which may be described as the overcoming of the concept of purpose in realms where it does not belong. Purposefulness has its own particular nature within the sequence of phenomena. It is a truly real purposefulness only when, in contract to the relationship of cause and effect where a preceding event determines a later one, the reverse applies and a subsequent event affects and determines an earlier one. This happens, to begin with, only in the case of human actions. A person carries out an action, which he pictures to himself beforehand, and lets himself be moved to his action by this mental picture. What comes later, the action, works with the help of the mental picture upon what comes earlier, the person who acts. This detour through mental picturing is, however, altogether necessary in order for a connection to be purposeful.

In the process which breaks down into cause and effect, the perception is to be distinguished from the concept. The perception of the cause precedes the perception of the effect; cause and effect would simply remain side by side within our consciousness if we were not able to connect them with each other through their corresponding concepts. The perception of the effect can only follow upon the perception of its cause. If the effect is to have a real influence upon the cause, then this can only be through the conceptual factor. For the perceptual factor of the effect is simply not present at all before that of the cause. Whoever maintains that the blossom is the purpose of the root, which means the former has an influence upon the latter, can maintain this only about that factor of the blossom which he can establish through his thinking. The perceptual factor of the blossom has as yet no existence at the time when the root comes into being. For there to be a purposeful connection, however, not merely the ideal lawful connection of the later with the earlier is necessary, but also the concept (the law) of the effect must really, through a perceptible process, influence the cause. A perceptible influence of a concept upon something else, however, we can observe only in human actions. Here alone, therefore, is the concept of purpose applicable...

Monism rejects the concept of purpose in all areas with the sole exception of human action. It seeks laws of nature, but not purposes of nature. Purposes of nature are arbitrary assumptions just as unperceivable forces are (see page 109f). But also purposes of life which man does not give himself, are unjustified assumptions from the standpoint of monism. Only that is purposeful which man has first made to be so, for only through the realization of an idea does purposefulness rise. The idea however, becomes operative in the realistic sense only within man. Therefore human life has only the purpose and determination which man gives to it. To the question: What kind of task does man have in life?, monism can only answer: the one which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no predetermined one, but rather it is, at any given moment, the one I choose for myself. I do not enter upon my life's path with fixed marching orders.

I think we're very close in our thinking here, assuming Steiner's thinking reflects your own. My sense is that "purpose" only exists from within a first-person perspective, which is to say, one embedded in a world and limited by a world horizon, and is fundamentally both relational and spatiotemporal. With that said, I've seen enough of the more-than-human world to think that Steiner is being overly restrictive here: while I don't think it makes sense to talk about the purpose of a river in flowing toward the ocean, I think it does make sense to talk about the purpose of my cat yelling at me because she wants to be on my lap (I thwarted her purpose so I could write this post, and now she's very disgruntled).

I can possibly see a sense in which purpose might be sort of baked-into the macrocosm (you can tell I'm very committal by the way I managed to stick "possibly," "might be," and "sort of" into a single sentence). It would be a kind of existentialist turn in ontology, whereby the void is a lack, and lack is desire, and desire is desire to be, and desire to be is desire to be with, and so the void, as absolute freedom and absolute lack and absolute desire (which are just three ways of saying the same thing), is its own self-transcendence in be(com)ing all and with all. I'm not committed enough here to attempt a rigorous argument -- just batting at a bit of an intuition for funsies. That would offer something of a purpose immanent to the world that would ground both the fundamental categories of worldness (there is no being with without relationality, which entails time, space, and causation), but without the sort of "telos" I find most objectionable, where there's some kind of preordained plan for the Universe.

In any case, Steiner's quote seems to support my initial assertion, that when we're discussing natural selection, we ought to be doing so with an eye toward causes rather than purposes.

Yes Steiner's thinking reflects my own. Can there ever be any reflected experience which is not first-person, embedded in a world, relational and "spatiotemporal"? Perhaps the last one could be left out depending on what we mean by it. I would say it makes sense to talk about the "purpose" of your cat yelling at you only if it is not divorced from the natural evolutionary reasons (inner lawfulness) for the cat yelling. Steiner sort of indicates it is better not to even use the word "purpose" for such things, as it is usually intended to mean something other than that inner lawfulness (an "external" effect determining its cause), and the more I think about it, I tend to agree because it creates so much confusion. But if we are to speak of "purpose", it cannot be divorced from those natural processes which determine actions from within themselves. So yeah I think we are pretty much on the same page!

I just noticed your equivocations rubbed off on me, or maybe mine on you

[SanteriSatama]

So many of your posts offer so much to chew on! If you'd be okay with elaborating, I'd love to hear more about the limitations of the Darwinian model of evolution (I mean, I know there have been advances in evolutionary theory since Darwin, but I assume you mean here the sort of broader paradigm of mutation-and-natural-selection as the sole drivers of evolution). Also, I'm not familiar with "entelecheia." I looked it up and I think that maybe I have my mind around the concept? But I've never read Aristotle, to my shame. And the no-cloning theorem... I looked that up, too, but with the relatively meager grasp on quantum mechanics that I have, I couldn't get my head around it at all.

Darwinian model has nothing to say about birth of life and experiencing. So it's not really relevant to deeper discussions of idealism and animism, cognition and Spirit.

The Greek term 'telos' was italiced etc. to this discussion. So I tried to continue form that in rather simple morphological level: "in-goal/end-having" is literal translation of the Greek word monster. But now, written and that form it lookes like a goal keeper making own goal in a soccer game most embarrassing way...

Also no need to read much more into no-cloning theorem. It was presented more as a rhetorical rhyme of the theory of Divinely Integrated Differentiation as generative algorithm of experiencing.

[DandelionSoul]

I think we're very close in our thinking here, assuming Steiner's thinking reflects your own. My sense is that "purpose" only exists from within a first-person perspective, which is to say, one embedded in a world and limited by a world horizon, and is fundamentally both relational and spatiotemporal. With that said, I've seen enough of the more-than-human world to think that Steiner is being overly restrictive here: while I don't think it makes sense to talk about the purpose of a river in flowing toward the ocean, I think it does make sense to talk about the purpose of my cat yelling at me because she wants to be on my lap (I thwarted her purpose so I could write this post, and now she's very disgruntled).

I can possibly see a sense in which purpose might be sort of baked-into the macrocosm (you can tell I'm very committal by the way I managed to stick "possibly," "might be," and "sort of" into a single sentence). It would be a kind of existentialist turn in ontology, whereby the void is a lack, and lack is desire, and desire is desire to be, and desire to be is desire to be with, and so the void, as absolute freedom and absolute lack and absolute desire (which are just three ways of saying the same thing), is its own self-transcendence in be(com)ing all and with all. I'm not committed enough here to attempt a rigorous argument -- just batting at a bit of an intuition for funsies. That would offer something of a purpose immanent to the world that would ground both the fundamental categories of worldness (there is no being with without relationality, which entails time, space, and causation), but without the sort of "telos" I find most objectionable, where there's some kind of preordained plan for the Universe.

In any case, Steiner's quote seems to support my initial assertion, that when we're discussing natural selection, we ought to be doing so with an eye toward causes rather than purposes.

Yes Steiner's thinking reflects my own. Can there ever be any reflected experience which is not first-person, embedded in a world, relational and "spatiotemporal"? Perhaps the last one could be left out depending on what we mean by it. I would say it makes sense to talk about the "purpose" of your cat yelling at you only if it is not divorced from the natural evolutionary reasons (inner lawfulness) for the cat yelling. Steiner sort of indicates it is better not to even use the word "purpose" for such things, as it is usually intended to mean something other than that inner lawfulness (an "external" effect determining its cause), and the more I think about it, I tend to agree because it creates so much confusion. But if we are to speak of "purpose", it cannot be divorced from those natural processes which determine actions from within themselves. So yeah I think we are pretty much on the same page!

I just noticed your equivocations rubbed off on me, or maybe mine on you

By "spatiotemporal" I just mean that relation implies a kind of distance between things related: I can't relate to you as "you" unless you are, in some sense, over there, separate from "me," and since relationship is always already in process, we can't so much as have a conversation outside of a temporal framework. Even when I dream of being someone encountering someone else, in order for that someone else to be someone else, I have to experience that spatiotemporally. Since I invoked de Beauvoir in my last post, I think she puts it beautifully:

By uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present to him. I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

And, no, I don't suppose there can be any reflected experience (which I take to mean "experience we're aware of experiencing") that doesn't have those qualities, but I invoked them specifically to distinguish the aperspectival ground from the perspectival arisings: from the non-perspective, purpose can't obtain by definition. Purpose obtains concomitantly with perspective. Here I agree and disagree with Kastrup, in that I think that all living things exhibit purpose in their actions precisely because they face outward toward a world: they do not experience themselves as the world but in it, and the very act of living is an act of dividing a world that thitherto (isn't that a fun word? just the aesthetic experience of saying "thitherto" is delightful) had remained undivided. To return to my dream analogy, if the dream were, say, of a "raw" dreamscape, without the experience of inhabiting a particular perspective within it, then no sense of lack, no desire, no purpose would emerge within me in the dream, and I'm not even sure such a dream could encode itself to memory as anything but void. If it did, I'm not sure I could put such a dream experience into words (having had similar psychedelic experiences, I can speak directly to the difficulty of putting such things into words even when I remember them).

I would even say that the qualities of first-person-ness, perspective, etc. obtain prior to metacognitive awareness: I can reflect on my cat's experiences in a way that she is incapable (at least I think, but you never know with cats) of reflecting on her own. The reason I think I can talk about her purpose is precisely that it's born out of lack, out of desire. She is not being cuddled and is aware of the lack of cuddles, even if she's unable to turn that awareness inward. Hence, the cuddles (the effect) emerge first in her mind, and then the yelling (the cause of, she hopes, cuddles) is an attempt to realize that cause. While that isn't independent of the immanent principles that move all things, it is a specific kind of realization of those principles that, in my mind, is tied up with living things: I don't see much justification for suggesting that the water of the river feels the lack of and desire for the ocean in the same way that my cat feels the lack of and desire for cuddles, because the river is internally undifferentiated between itself, the riverbed, the place where it starts, the ocean itself, the rain or springs that continuously feed the place where it starts, etc. etc. all the way out to the whole Earth. Purpose requires differentiation, and differentiation requires lack.

With aaaaaaall of that said, to turn back toward natural selection, I think when we talk about it, we're talking about it in a sort of aperspectival manner: obviously (well, in my view), all the living things involved in evolution feel lack, feel desire, and act with purpose to fulfill those desires. But when we say that a certain species died out because its faculties were insufficient to adapt to changes in its environment -- the dodos simply couldn't outwit the hunters and the dinosaurs couldn't adapt to the changed climate and so on -- we aren't trying to get into the phenomenology of a dying creature, but talking about it in the same terms we'd talk about hydrodynamics and gravity in a river. So talking about "purpose" there seems like a category error.

Am I making sense, and if so, are we still on the same page?

[AshvinP]

I think we're very close in our thinking here, assuming Steiner's thinking reflects your own. My sense is that "purpose" only exists from within a first-person perspective, which is to say, one embedded in a world and limited by a world horizon, and is fundamentally both relational and spatiotemporal. With that said, I've seen enough of the more-than-human world to think that Steiner is being overly restrictive here: while I don't think it makes sense to talk about the purpose of a river in flowing toward the ocean, I think it does make sense to talk about the purpose of my cat yelling at me because she wants to be on my lap (I thwarted her purpose so I could write this post, and now she's very disgruntled).

I can possibly see a sense in which purpose might be sort of baked-into the macrocosm (you can tell I'm very committal by the way I managed to stick "possibly," "might be," and "sort of" into a single sentence). It would be a kind of existentialist turn in ontology, whereby the void is a lack, and lack is desire, and desire is desire to be, and desire to be is desire to be with, and so the void, as absolute freedom and absolute lack and absolute desire (which are just three ways of saying the same thing), is its own self-transcendence in be(com)ing all and with all. I'm not committed enough here to attempt a rigorous argument -- just batting at a bit of an intuition for funsies. That would offer something of a purpose immanent to the world that would ground both the fundamental categories of worldness (there is no being with without relationality, which entails time, space, and causation), but without the sort of "telos" I find most objectionable, where there's some kind of preordained plan for the Universe.

In any case, Steiner's quote seems to support my initial assertion, that when we're discussing natural selection, we ought to be doing so with an eye toward causes rather than purposes.

Yes Steiner's thinking reflects my own. Can there ever be any reflected experience which is not first-person, embedded in a world, relational and "spatiotemporal"? Perhaps the last one could be left out depending on what we mean by it. I would say it makes sense to talk about the "purpose" of your cat yelling at you only if it is not divorced from the natural evolutionary reasons (inner lawfulness) for the cat yelling. Steiner sort of indicates it is better not to even use the word "purpose" for such things, as it is usually intended to mean something other than that inner lawfulness (an "external" effect determining its cause), and the more I think about it, I tend to agree because it creates so much confusion. But if we are to speak of "purpose", it cannot be divorced from those natural processes which determine actions from within themselves. So yeah I think we are pretty much on the same page!

I just noticed your equivocations rubbed off on me, or maybe mine on you

By "spatiotemporal" I just mean that relation implies a kind of distance between things related: I can't relate to you as "you" unless you are, in some sense, over there, separate from "me," and since relationship is always already in process, we can't so much as have a conversation outside of a temporal framework. Even when I dream of being someone encountering someone else, in order for that someone else to be someone else, I have to experience that spatiotemporally. Since I invoked de Beauvoir in my last post, I think she puts it beautifully:

By uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present to him. I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

And, no, I don't suppose there can be any reflected experience (which I take to mean "experience we're aware of experiencing") that doesn't have those qualities, but I invoked them specifically to distinguish the aperspectival ground from the perspectival arisings: from the non-perspective, purpose can't obtain by definition. Purpose obtains concomitantly with perspective. Here I agree and disagree with Kastrup, in that I think that all living things exhibit purpose in their actions precisely because they face outward toward a world: they do not experience themselves as the world but in it, and the very act of living is an act of dividing a world that thitherto (isn't that a fun word? just the aesthetic experience of saying "thitherto" is delightful) had remained undivided. To return to my dream analogy, if the dream were, say, of a "raw" dreamscape, without the experience of inhabiting a particular perspective within it, then no sense of lack, no desire, no purpose would emerge within me in the dream, and I'm not even sure such a dream could encode itself to memory as anything but void. If it did, I'm not sure I could put such a dream experience into words (having had similar psychedelic experiences, I can speak directly to the difficulty of putting such things into words even when I remember them).

I would even say that the qualities of first-person-ness, perspective, etc. obtain prior to metacognitive awareness: I can reflect on my cat's experiences in a way that she is incapable (at least I think, but you never know with cats) of reflecting on her own. The reason I think I can talk about her purpose is precisely that it's born out of lack, out of desire. She is not being cuddled and is aware of the lack of cuddles, even if she's unable to turn that awareness inward. Hence, the cuddles (the effect) emerge first in her mind, and then the yelling (the cause of, she hopes, cuddles) is an attempt to realize that cause. While that isn't independent of the immanent principles that move all things, it is a specific kind of realization of those principles that, in my mind, is tied up with living things: I don't see much justification for suggesting that the water of the river feels the lack of and desire for the ocean in the same way that my cat feels the lack of and desire for cuddles, because the river is internally undifferentiated between itself, the riverbed, the place where it starts, the ocean itself, the rain or springs that continuously feed the place where it starts, etc. etc. all the way out to the whole Earth. Purpose requires differentiation, and differentiation requires lack.

With aaaaaaall of that said, to turn back toward natural selection, I think when we talk about it, we're talking about it in a sort of aperspectival manner: obviously (well, in my view), all the living things involved in evolution feel lack, feel desire, and act with purpose to fulfill those desires. But when we say that a certain species died out because its faculties were insufficient to adapt to changes in its environment -- the dodos simply couldn't outwit the hunters and the dinosaurs couldn't adapt to the changed climate and so on -- we aren't trying to get into the phenomenology of a dying creature, but talking about it in the same terms we'd talk about hydrodynamics and gravity in a river. So talking about "purpose" there seems like a category error.

Am I making sense, and if so, are we still on the same page?

I will need to consider the above more, but most of it sounds good to me! In my view informed by Steiner, however, all of Reality is the activity of living spiritual beings, including what we usually call natural non-living processes. But it is not a 1:1 correspondence between underlying activity and appearance like "river" and "the activity of river being". So I do agree it is correct to only speak of purposes for agencies which are differentiated from the surrounding environment in some manner, and therefore experience the "lack" which influences their behavior. Although it also seems to me that, at the highest possible resolution, all perspectives within the One Mind experience some lack in that manner. So then the distinction between non-reflective and self-reflective consciousness, i.e. the latter as those who establish ideal connections between phenomenon in the relation of "cause-effect", becomes the most useful for distinguishing between those beings who have "purposes" and those who do not.

[DandelionSoul]

I will need to consider the above more, but most of it sounds good to me! In my view informed by Steiner, however, all of Reality is the activity of living spiritual beings, including what we usually call natural non-living processes. But it is not a 1:1 correspondence between underlying activity and appearance like "river" and "the activity of river being".

I would need to get deeper into the nuts and bolts of Steiner's metaphysics to be able to grasp what it is y'all mean by that. I read Cleric's Deep M@L essay where I think he discusses that idea, and I may need to revisit it before I can engage.

So I do agree it is correct to only speak of purposes for agencies which are differentiated from the surrounding environment in some manner, and therefore experience the "lack" which influences their behavior. Although it also seems to me that, at the highest possible resolution, all perspectives within the One Mind experience some lack in that manner.

Right, and to me this is the fundamental distinction: the living who lack and the nonliving which doesn't, all the way "down" to the individual cell and all the way "up" to... ?

So then the distinction between non-reflective and self-reflective consciousness, i.e. the latter as those who establish ideal connections between phenomenon in the relation of "cause-effect", becomes the most useful for distinguishing between those beings who have "purposes" and those who do not.

Here I don't think I'm sold: I tend to think purpose precedes self-reflection. If you watch the action of a plant in time lapse, it becomes clear that the plant is acting deliberately: striving toward the fulfillment of its lack. I don't think the plant is self-reflective (though I'm always hesitant to assume that sort of thing, especially with a creature whose physiology and way of being in the world is so drastically different from my own). Perspective, lack, desire, and purpose are all inseparably bound up together in my view. And to the extent that desire entails a knowledge of the lack, it entails thought in the broadest sense, prior to language and prior to metacognition. Self-reflective thought seems to be when thought can turn around and think itself, and that seems to me to emerge out of social identity: we learn to understand what we are through the social world we're born into and must learn to negotiate with. Thus, we begin to think of ourselves and our own thoughts can become objects of our thinking.

The sophistication and complexity of self-reflective thought seems to fall on a continuum: to some extent, my cat is aware of herself, but perhaps not to the same degree that I am. And that continuum may have something to do with the capacity for self-reflection to transcend the immediate social situation and see oneself as part of a broader community or even a living world, and our personal episodic memories as aspects of a broader history. And with that growing sophistication and complexity and breadth of self-conceptualization emerges a deeper and richer sense of purpose, until one day we find ourselves finding meaning in talking about metaphysics.

[AshvinP]

I will need to consider the above more, but most of it sounds good to me! In my view informed by Steiner, however, all of Reality is the activity of living spiritual beings, including what we usually call natural non-living processes. But it is not a 1:1 correspondence between underlying activity and appearance like "river" and "the activity of river being".

I would need to get deeper into the nuts and bolts of Steiner's metaphysics to be able to grasp what it is y'all mean by that. I read Cleric's Deep M@L essay where I think he discusses that idea, and I may need to revisit it before I can engage.

So I do agree it is correct to only speak of purposes for agencies which are differentiated from the surrounding environment in some manner, and therefore experience the "lack" which influences their behavior. Although it also seems to me that, at the highest possible resolution, all perspectives within the One Mind experience some lack in that manner.

Right, and to me this is the fundamental distinction: the living who lack and the nonliving which doesn't, all the way "down" to the individual cell and all the way "up" to... ?

So then the distinction between non-reflective and self-reflective consciousness, i.e. the latter as those who establish ideal connections between phenomenon in the relation of "cause-effect", becomes the most useful for distinguishing between those beings who have "purposes" and those who do not.

Here I don't think I'm sold: I tend to think purpose precedes self-reflection. If you watch the action of a plant in time lapse, it becomes clear that the plant is acting deliberately: striving toward the fulfillment of its lack. I don't think the plant is self-reflective (though I'm always hesitant to assume that sort of thing, especially with a creature whose physiology and way of being in the world is so drastically different from my own). Perspective, lack, desire, and purpose are all inseparably bound up together in my view. And to the extent that desire entails a knowledge of the lack, it entails thought in the broadest sense, prior to language and prior to metacognition. Self-reflective thought seems to be when thought can turn around and think itself, and that seems to me to emerge out of social identity: we learn to understand what we are through the social world we're born into and must learn to negotiate with. Thus, we begin to think of ourselves and our own thoughts can become objects of our thinking.

The sophistication and complexity of self-reflective thought seems to fall on a continuum: to some extent, my cat is aware of herself, but perhaps not to the same degree that I am. And that continuum may have something to do with the capacity for self-reflection to transcend the immediate social situation and see oneself as part of a broader community or even a living world, and our personal episodic memories as aspects of a broader history. And with that growing sophistication and complexity and breadth of self-conceptualization emerges a deeper and richer sense of purpose, until one day we find ourselves finding meaning in talking about metaphysics.

These are very interesting points. I will have to think about it some more to adequately respond (or maybe someone like Cleric will respond first alleviating me of that responsibility ). I am not sure we can ever ascribe "purpose" to a cat via her mere "instinctive" knowledge of her lack. Under idealism, a knowing element is inherent to every experience, so would that not imply all experience is "purposeful".

[DandelionSoul]

These are very interesting points. I will have to think about it some more to adequately respond (or maybe someone like Cleric will respond first alleviating me of that responsibility ). I am not sure we can ever ascribe "purpose" to a cat via her mere "instinctive" knowledge of her lack. Under idealism, a knowing element is inherent to every experience, so would that not imply all experience is "purposeful".

Yes and no. First, no, strictly speaking, not all experience is purposeful, since not all experience is a motivated action. If, on my way to the car, I trip on the stairs and faceplant on the driveway, the walking to my car was purposeful, but the faceplanting was... well, hilarious, but not purposeful. In fact, in that case, assuming I wasn't injured, it's the very purposelessness, the absurdity of it, that would make it funny to an onlooker.

But all motivated/deliberate/whathaveyou actions are purposeful, and the upshot is exactly what it sounds like: no human being was ever born into a world not already shot through with meaning and purpose.