The Mainspring of Intention

Where does intention come from? Why do we know that some things have intentions while others do not?

In an earlier post, I noted that the earliest forms of life were unintentional by-products of chemical interactions under certain environmental conditions. When some elements (such as oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, etc.) come into contact with other elements, they will bind and form complex molecules and chemical compounds. No matter the urgency with which these elements are drawn to one another, they bind as a strictly unintentional by-product of their inherent properties.

I also noted the obvious, that those things that do not persist through time cease to exist. Turn this around, and we can say that those things that exist have the capacity to persist through time.

A living creature is the result of a series of reactions and interactions between groups of chemical compounds and the environment in which they find themselves. Through processes that are under active investigation and research and about which scientific understanding is growing daily, certain types of chemical compounds – amino acids, proteins, RNA, DNA, and other genetic materials developed the capacity to record the sequence of organic chemical reactions that result in a given life form.

We can therefore think of DNA and other genetic materials as a kind of technology for recording a pattern of reactions between chemical elements that result in a life form. This is why DNA is often referred to as the “blueprint of life”.

DNA allows life forms to reproduce – in effect, to make copies of themselves. But because copies are not always perfect, the development of DNA unleashed the grand experiment we call evolution. Over millions of years, an inestimable number of imperfect copies, mutations, and variations of RNA and DNA were produced, and for the most part vanished just as quickly as they arose.

But some of these genetic variations gave the creatures that carried them a greater ability to persist through time. Some of this genetic material recorded patterns that even in simple life forms we can begin to describe as “behaviours”. Some behaviours helped the creatures that displayed them to survive and reproduce. Other behaviours led to extinction.

Over a myriad of generations, our genetic material and our DNA “learned” what organic composition and what behaviours will allow a species of living creature to survive and to persist through time.

Genetic learning results in intention. Understand that this intentionality is hard-wired into the instincts of every living creature. Behaviours that help an individual and its species to flourish become the instinctual intentions of that species. Every creature from the simplest virus on up unconsciously or consciously intends to behave in such a way as to enable its species to survive, to persist through time, and to flourish.

We consider a behaviour to be intelligent insofar as it accomplishes its intentions and enables the creature exhibiting this behaviour to flourish.

Which brings us to a consideration of the concept of “Intelligent Design”. According to this theory, the universe and the creatures within it show signs of having been designed by an intelligent force, which is usually interpreted as an omniscient God. Various authors, among them Wayne Dyer, author of “The Power of Intention”, argue that God’s intention is immanent in every living creature.

If we understand the origin of intentionality as the intention to survive, to persist through time, and to flourish as an individual and as a species, then yes, we can say that there is intelligence and intention immanent in every living creature. But from this there is no logical necessity to impute the existence of a superior being, still less a personal God. The intelligence and intention inherent in the universe is a logically necessary result of the march of time.

This is the “logos” of which Heraclitus wrote as the fundamental organizing principle, the logic of the universe. This is that same Logos we read of in the bible: “In the beginning was the logos [usually translated from the Greek λóγος as “the word”], and the logos was with God and the logos was God.”

One of my goals for this blog is to map basic religious concepts to natural phenomena, to show that religious symbology is more than just fanciful mythology, but that is a pointer to and a metaphor for characteristics of the real world.

In the language of religion, the logos is the Holy Spirit. It is the immanence of God in nature. And Christ is “the logos made flesh”.

Knowledge and Experience

I’ve argued in an earlier post that knowledge is information that has a use-value. The importance of truth to knowledge is whether that knowledge is reasonably reliable – in which case it can be described as true.

What is the source of knowledge?

Traditionally, there are several sources:

• Authority
• Revelation
• Intuition
• Personal experience
• Inductive reasoning
• Deductive reasoning
• Instinct
• Science

Knowledge by Authority

Authority is knowledge passed down from an individual or institution. This sort of knowledge is best used as a sort of rule of thumb for decision-making in areas in which the decision-maker has no direct experience or other heuristics to draw upon.

The problem with authority as a source of knowledge is that it may be unreliable. Authorities have their own agendas to promote, and may not always have based their own authority upon solid ground.

The most reliable authorities have based their knowledge on their own experience or the experience of the institutions they represent. There is nothing wrong with respecting authority if that authority is deserved, especially if that authority has provided valuable and reliable knowledge in the past.

We could not possibly be expected to know the law, medicine, physics, plumbing, or any other area of expertise without extensive training and personal experience. Therefore it is reasonable to respect an opinion in these areas from an accredited practitioner as a guide to correct action.

It goes without saying, however, that some forms of authority cloak vested interests, and may therefore be valid only insofar as they support those interests. Religious authority, corporate authority, or political authority are especially suspect, since they may offer only partial truths while ignoring most of what might undermine their agenda.

My point here is only that knowledge by authority is based on experience – not personal experience, but the experience of the authority themselves.

Knowledge by Revelation

One common meaning of revelation is truth “revealed” by the divine. Typically this truth is revealed to an individual.

There is no doubt that an individual can achieve a truth through a sudden epiphany or blinding insight. Whether this insight is valid remains to be proven in practice, and whether or not it is of divine origin may never be provable.

Revelation is an intensely subjective experience and almost by definition is neither repeatable nor verifiable. This makes it a rather unreliable guide to action and a weak base of knowledge.

Knowledge by Intuition

Intuition is often regarded as “gut sense”, an insight gained on a non-intellectual level for which there appears to be no rational justification. But as Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink made clear, intuition is in fact a very rapid calculation made on an unconscious level, but based on genuine observation and often very sound mental and emotional reasoning.

One may feel as if one knows something by intuition alone, based on nothing more than a vague “feeling”, but dig a little deeper and intuition proves itself to be a device for rapid pattern recognition at a pace faster than can the mind can follow.

All pattern recognition is based on past experience of that pattern. If we take Jeff Hawkins’ work On Intelligence, all intelligence is not more than the ability to predict based on pattern recognition. In other words, all intelligence is based on experience.

Knowledge by Personal Experience

Knowledge by personal experience is obviously valid if it works for you. But it goes without saying that just because something works for you doesn’t mean it will work for others, and just because it works for you doesn’t mean that it is the best way to do things. Knowledge by personal experience is most valuable if confirmed by the experience of others.

Knowledge by Inductive or Deductive Reasoning

Inductive reasoning is the process of generalizing based on specifics. For example, every duck I have ever seen can swim; I can therefore induce that all ducks can swim. Deductive reasoning moves from the general to the specific. For example, I know that all beetles are insects and therefore by definition they have six legs. Therefore I can assume that all beetles in Uruguay have six legs, even though I have never been to Uruguay.

Both types of knowledge are obviously based on experience.

Knowledge by Instinct

Instinct is not typically seen as a form of knowledge, but as I have argued in an earlier post, what we call instinct is the summary of the experience of the previous generations of our species, as recorded in our genetic materials.

Knowledge by Science

Science is knowledge obtained through the scientific method. The scientific method is nothing more than the systematic and thorough testing of a hypothesis through experience.

The word “experiment” shares the same root as the word “experience” – the Latin “ex”, meaning “out of”, and “peritus”, meaning “testing”. Experience is knowledge gained through repeated trial.

An experiment is an attempt to create or recreate a certain type of experience through systematic observation and analysis. The purpose of the scientific method is to discover or confirm a repeatable and verifiable outcome of a set of identifiable conditions.

The scientific method, therefore can be regarded as nothing more than the systematic confirmation of experience.

Intentionality

Just finished an excellent book called The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan.

The book discusses the history of man’s relationship with four plant species: the potato, the tulip, the apple, and marijuana. But it uses this history to make some important points about evolution and co-evolution, natural and artificial selection, and even to bring in a few interesting points about a philosophical buzzword, intentionality.

Intentionality is the quality of thought sometimes referred to as its “aboutness”. Thought is always “about” something. What it is about is referred to as the intentional object.

Perhaps the most famous thought experiment in psychology and philosophy is John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, intended to show that computers cannot show true artificial intelligence, because whatever they do, they don’t truly understand what it is they’re doing. Even if we were capable of creating a computer that could read Chinese and translate it perfectly to English, we could never argue that the computer had any real intelligence, because it never actually understands Chinese.

The thrust of the argument is that the mind is not a computer, and that intelligence is more than just the ability to follow coded instructions.

I think Searle is both right and wrong, and this is why the argument over the Chinese Room experiment has such life. I think the human brain and indeed the entire natural world operates much as a computer does, although a computer is at this stage of its development reflecting that reality only in a very primitive way.

But where Searle gets it right is in reminding us that no matter how sophisticated the computer, it never really *gets* it, because it’s missing one ingredient; intentionality.

So what is intentionality? I think Searle would agree that when human beings cultivated the apple and other agricultural products to their current form, they demonstrated intentionality. Certainly they proceeded with intention, and armed themselves with belief and desire.

But Pollan’s book makes the interesting point, not new, that the apple, the potato, the tulip, and narcotics and medicinal plants such as marijuana, have themselves contributed to the making of the human species as it walks the earth today. Can we say that they proceeded with intentionality? Obviously the individual apple or grape on the vine does not contain enough brain power to make decisions or hold beliefs, but as a species-being, does the capital-A Apple species proceed with anything we might describe as intentionality?

Now let’s throw another perspective into the mix – Wayne Dyer, and his book and audio series, "The Power of Intention".

Dyer is a well-known speaker on public broadcasting networks in the U.S. He seems to be a self-help speaker of a liberal bent (liberal in the American sense of politically centrist but socially aware) and is tolerable to listen to, even though he will drift into semi-religious mysticism from time to time – “The Power of Intention” being a prime example.

Dyer argues that everything in the world is filled with “intention” – a word he leaves sufficiently ambiguous to be interpreted as either God’s will, or perhaps just the feeling many folks have that “everything happens for a reason.”

But one does get the feeling listening to Dyer that he is onto something, if he only had the words to express it properly. And what I think he is on to is this poorly understood force that causes the apple to do what it does, and the human being to do what *it* does with the apple.

Whether one calls it “intention” or “intentionality”, there is a motive force behind life that just is missing from an inorganic piece of machinery like a computer. A human being is alive with intention, and intention, whether conscious or unconscious, is what defines it as being alive. This is perhaps why Sartre considered intentionality to be just another word for consciousness.

Which brings me back to the wellspring of life, as touched upon in an earlier post – all life is motivated by the intention to persist through time, and all activity is ultimately traceable to this eternal spring.

By this definition, we can agree with Dyer that all organisms, all matter, all things known and knowable, are imbued with intention and intentionality.

One of the things that distinguishes humanity as a species is that it is not only intentional, it is aware of and in a process of ongoing discovery of its own intentionality – and indeed that of the universe we live in.

Do animals have souls?

I’m reading a book by Douglas Hofstadter called “I am a Strange Loop.” The book shows a lot of promise and I can use some of the concepts in the book as a jumping-off point for discussion.

Hofstadter has a chatty, informal style which I can forgive him for because his points are clearer for the use of it. But sometimes the reader feels as if personal information is getting in the way of the ideas…

In Chapter 1, Hofstadter explains some of his rationale for vegetarianism, and it’s worth exploring some of the points he makes. An important concept for Hofstadter is the “soul”, although he is unable (or at least unwilling) in the first chapter to provide a definition of what the soul is.

Citing the likeness between mammals and human beings, he considers it immoral to kill and eat higher forms of life. He contends that all mammals have souls, and then touches on the question of where to draw the line between higher forms of life and lower forms. Why is it OK to slap a mosquito, but not OK to kill a fellow human being?

The answer for Hofstadter is that there are higher and lower levels of “soul”, just as there are higher and lower levels of consciousness.

Let me return to a point I believe I made earlier in this blog series – in my view, humans beings can be seen as a sort of recording device. What we are recording is experience. What experience is is a record of the interaction between the being and reality, between the internal and the external world.

One way we can view “soul” therefore is as a record of experience. Some beings keep only a very short record of their experience – these would fall into Hofstadter’s category of creatures with small souls. Others keep a vast and extensive record, such as human beings.

Hofstadter specifically brings up the issue of the fetus as a creature with only a small soul, suggesting to me that whether he has consciously made the connection or not, Hofstadter is implying that the degree of soul a being possesses is a factor of the degree of experience it has recorded or is capable of recording.

I’ve made the point in earlier entries that our experience is recorded in our memories, but DNA and other genetic material is a form of very long-term memory, storing the experience of our millions of generations of ancestors. The only sense in which the soul is immortal is that the experience it records is capable of being transmitted to subsequent generations.

The animals, plants, and primitive life-forms that Hofstadter characterizes as being “small of soul” are those animals whose experience is recorded primarily in their DNA and genetic material. Animals such as human beings, dogs, and so on that he characterizes as being larger of soul are creatures whose individual life experiences form as large a part of their souls as the species-experience recorded in their DNA.

When we speak of the soul of a mosquito, we are referring to the semi-automatic behaviour patterns the species has learned over countless millions of generations. Animals such as mosquitoes show little individual deviation in behaviour and there is little evidence that they are capable of individual learning, or even that such learning would help them reproduce more efficiently.

When we speak of the soul of a human being, we are surely referring to the special life experiences that have shaped the consciousness of that person. When we speak of the soul of a city or the soul of a nation, we are speaking of the collective experience as recorded in the brains of the citizens of that city or nation. When we speak of the Soul of Humanity, we are referring more to the inherited learning and behaviour patterns of our species.

One of the goals of this blog is to discover plausible, rational definitions of religious metaphors, not in order to dismiss them but to decode them.

Prayer

As I discussed in my previous post, prayer is not for the benefit of the person being prayed for. Science has proven that prayer has no effect on the person being prayed for. Prayer is really for the benefit of the person doing the praying, and that’s why it persists. Prayer is a comfort, based on the illusion that in the face of this cold and pitiless universe, this vale of tears, one has some sort of recourse. One can plead for forgiveness, for redemption, for justice, would somebody give me a break here!

Interesting that the religious, who tend to argue that God is all-powerful and His motives are unknowable, should cultivate the belief that God can be swayed by fervent prayer, ideally by many people praying for the same outcome at the same time. Even more absurd, that God can be swayed by his Son tugging at his cape…

But to reiterate, one of my goals in this blog is to examine the human motivations for religious behaviours. I think we will find, as with prayer, that there’s a fairly sensible basis for every religious belief – although it’s rarely the one given by the religious themselves… And while religious beliefs appear to many to be quite irrational because they are driven by the emotions rather than the intellect, I think we’ll also find that emotion and instinct has its own rationale and its own intelligence.

I think we’ll also find that the power of religious myth is that it points to realities that science appears as yet to be only dimly aware of…

Truth

Stanley Fish, a columnist I recommend, wrote in the New York Times last week about “Atheism and Evidence”. His argument was an old one that one hears from the very religious – that truth is constructed, and both science and religion are based on faith, so one is just as valid as the other.

I will concede that science is also based on faith. We don’t have direct experience of all that science tells us, yet we choose to accept it, really on faith.

The question of which is the more valid hinges on how great a leap of faith is required.

In my entry from last week, I noted how while most Americans say they have faith in science, in practice they hold to very unscientific beliefs. People hold those beliefs simply because they seem to work OK for them. As a guide to a good life, religion works pretty well for many people.

One chooses the truth that one finds most fruitful as a guide to living one’s life. Religion for many is a kind of rule of thumb for righteous living.

This is only understandable if one recognizes that what we call “truth” is really just a proposition about reality. The religious tend to believe that Truth has a capital “T”, that there are fixed, eternal, immutable truths, just as the fundamentalists believe that species are fixed and immutable. Science tells us that everything is in motion, everything experiences constant change, nothing stands still but everything evolves.

Science starts from the hypothesis, which is a kind of proposition. Let’s assume that something will work, and then test it out in practice. If it works, it’s a valid guide to action. Science assumes that truth is not fixed, that what works under most circumstances will not work under all circumstances. But if “by and large, for the most part” (to borrow a phrase from Aristotle) it holds true, if experiments produce verifiable and repeatable results, we can trust the hypothesis.

Religion is pre-scientific – it offers truths that it does not feel obliged to prove through evidence. For example, many religions recommend faith in the power of prayer. Science says, rather than just accept that prayer is powerful, let’s test it in practice. Thus a large study funded by the John Templeton Foundation tested the power of prayer in practice – and found no evidence that it had any positive effect on the health of heart patients.

Many atheists will conclude that religious folks are acting irrationally when they pray. But I think we have to understand that the object of the healing power of prayer is not the person prayed for, but the person doing the praying.

Human beings desperately want to believe that they can have some power over the tempestuous world we live in. Believing in prayer gives them hope that they can somehow bring about a positive outcome, even in circumstances where they are quite powerless. Believing that one has power to bring about positive outcomes, that there is always something one can do, is a very healthy mindset. Prayer therefore has a very concrete benefit – otherwise people would not be praying.

One has faith in the truths that seem to yield the best results.

Science

I listened to a podcast lecture yesterday by Harvard history of science professor Steven Shapin. Shapin argues that science is becoming so loose a term used by so many – think creation science, scientology, etc. – and so few people live by science, that perhaps the term has lost all meaning, and certainly that the modern consciousness is not scientific.

He cites a number of sad statistics about Americans – that more than 90% believe in God, 82% believe in a physical Heaven, 84% believe in the survival of the soul after death, more than 50% reject evolution, that more than 25% believe the sun revolves around the Earth, and so on – as evidence that while people talk as if they respect science, they don’t actually know what it is.

Furthermore he states he has never heard a convincing definition of the scientific method. Which prompts this entry.

Let me start with an interesting point Shapin makes. He points out that at some point in our culture, scientists conceded some important ground to religion. They began to argue that science had nothing to say about morality, in fact that science and morality were mutually exclusive. Science was not about morality, and morality was not about science. They were all too willing to surrender the hard questions to the mystics and the divines, the priests and the pastors, because they had no scientific answers to offer.

One of my goals for this blog is to find a way to bridge science and morality, to show that morality can be explained through a range of scientific discoveries, not least of which was the work of Darwin and his intellectual descendents.

In part this is an epistemological question. Scientists, if they were worth their salt, learned early in their careers that absolute certainty had no place in science. Science is not the search for absolute truths – in fact physics has proven that all is in a state of flux and impermanence, and there are no absolutes.

Aware of this, and no doubt influenced by the religious cultures in which they were born and bred, scientists in the Enlightenment began to argue that their endeavors were much humbler and more practical than those of the spiritual leaders. They operated on a different plane.

Today in America one frequently comes across a curious belief that religious convictions are sacrosanct, above question, and that anyone has the perfect right to believe any sort of nonsense if it seems to have a “spiritual” basis. The rules don’t apply. It’s the split between faith and reason.

This split often shows up in the individual themselves. Something over 50% of American scientists, people who make their daily living from rationality, believe in a God, and seem quite comfortable with this split brain. Orwell called it double-think – the ability to firmly believe in two contradictory ideas at the same time.

Prof. James T. Hall cites a lecture he attended given by an evangelical. The speaker distinctly contradicted himself in his talk. When Prof. Hall questioned him on this, his reply was too the effect that, yes it was true that he had contradicted himself, but that didn’t matter, because “this is not science, this is religion.” Oh. OK then.