Metaphysical Humanism and the Laws of Being, part XXV—The Law of Intention, Part II

The abbey Church of St, Jouin de Marnes

detail of a capital

Photograph by the author

In emergent systems, directions arise as a result of collective interactions which then not only continue in the direction they're going, but also propagate themselves and double down on the methods by which they maintain that direction. 

Not only that, it'sn't enough for direction to be maintained; an emphasis on specific chosen directions increases as the systems, methods, and behaviors whereby direction is maintained and accelerated intensify their collective focus through emergence.

In this way intention and direction eventually acquire what we call life. This life that’s acquired is increasingly influenced by an intensifying level of conscious awareness, which emerges and manifests according to level. 

Conscious awareness exists at every level of the system; but it expresses itself quite differently according to level. It’s usually argued that life isn't present at lower levels: at the levels of atoms and disassociated molecules, no life as we understand it appears to exist. Their behavior looks, overall, quite different than life as we currently define it. 

To this point: of course its behavior looks different. Emergence dictates that behaviors at lower levels of organization always look simpler and less aware than what takes place on higher levels. 

There’s an obvious difficulty here, however. If individual atoms and molecules aren’t “alive,“ but their aggregates—which display emergent behavior— are ”alive,” how can we tell the difference? Where does it begin and end? The conclusion, of course, is that it’s the behavior of the molecules that imparts life, not their mere constituency. 

Yet constituency produces the behavior. 

Going back to the analogy of social insects, the behaviors of an individual ant appear to be mechanistically programmed and mindless; yet when we put enough ants together, their society clearly exhibits functions and abilities that can’t possibly, under any circumstances, be extrapolated from the behavior of an individual ant. The ant colony, in its own right, has acquired fundamental (basic) properties of conscious Being; the community acts in concert and has discernible intentions and purposes in mind. One still can't, however,  discern intention and purpose in the narrowly focused behavior of the individual ants; their actions are more or less comparable to a set of rather simple instructions in a computer program. 

Yet those instructions do something completely different once enough of them are put together in an emergent state of community.

Keep that phrase in mind. We’ll be coming back to it.

We thus see the law of intention surfacing within the emergent nature of the ant community. The individual ants don't, as far as we understand it, have intention per se; they have a set of ”programmed” (theoretically unconscious) behaviors that are presumed to be automatic, with no clear mindfulness behind them. 

Yet when nature puts enough ants together, intention emerges. 

That intention is a collected entity; the ants collaborate to achieve complicated and difficult tasks, such as building a bridge where their bodies can cross small bodies of water, or finding ways to carry large food sources much heavier than themselves back to the nest. Intention emerges from collective behavior where we can't see it individual behavior. 

The question of why matter has such an interest in direction is a curious one. There’s no need for matter to be interested in promoting or preserving directions of order; and although our physical laws impart direction of what appears to be a completely random type on the quantum, atomic, and (some) molecular levels, there is no conceivable explanation for why systems should organize themselves in an emergent manner that acquire the intention of not only maintaining the direction of order, but propagating it. 

This is one of the most striking features of emergent systems; they propagate themselves, often aggressively, and display behaviors whereby environmental substances (other molecules) are actively recruited and concentrated to assist in the propagation. 

Emergent systems with intention furthermore acquire self-preservation abilities; and once again, there’s no clear reason for why any of this should happen at all, given the supposedly inert nature of material as it stands. Yet it’s an incontrovertible fact that ”inert” matter doesn't require this dimension. Intention is an escalating factor, which — especially in the case of life — does things that are relatively inconceivable from the perspective of mechanistic rationalism. The intention that they’ve acquired is so strikingly different than the staid action of other atomic and molecular entities that it nearly defies belief, let alone an explanation.

We can see, then, that the question of intention lies at the root of a great deal of what we call life. While we understand that intention exists at the bottom, atomic, molecular level, why it organizes into what we call life remains baffling, unless we acknowledge that there are factors at work here that transcend material considerations.

Matter, then, has intention; it acquires a direction which it works to maintain. It not only works to maintain it, it actively works with agency to intensify the directed nature of its behavior.

This leads us to the question of why it's doing this. At that, in its own turn, leads us to the question of purpose.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.