Kriminel said to dmb:
So Dave, you think ideas and societies do not evolve? Or do they evolve on
the basis of some supernatural principle?
dmb says:
Neither. I'm following James and Pirsig in saying that mechanistic
explanations of evolution are empty and the idea that it is all driven by
the desire for mere survival is a ridiculous concept. But denying the fact
of evolution or attributing it to supernatural forces is even more
ridiculous, of course, and I'm certainly not suggesting any such thing.
Kernal said:
Volitional evolution? Is that like eugenics or Think and Grow Rich? You know
there was this guy Lamarck and he claimed...
dmb replies:
Huh? Isn't eugenics based on classic social darwinism, a.k.a. amoral
survival of the fittest? I think so. And think and grow rich? Isn't that
Susie Orman of PBS fame, which I'd never watch by the way? (I follow the
theory that wealth is for the mediocre; one has to be smart enough to know
how to get the money but stupid enough to believe that money is equal to the
good life.) In any case, neither of those things have anything to do with my
point about volition vs mechanism. As I understand it, evolution is driven
by the desire for betterness and survival is just one particular species of
better. Better is a relational concept of course. There is something we
desire beyond the preservation and perpetution of existence. In a million
billion tiny ways everything moves toward bettterness, single celled
organisms and philosophers are going to be dealing with entirely different
kinds of better, but this is what drives evolution in any context. I think
of it as an impulse to transcend any given situation that doesn't seem quite
good enough, whether that means moving away from physical danger or
inventing a new metaphysics. Betterness is a vague word, but there is a
clear and basic idea in it. It implies a will at work in all these tiny
particular cases, not a blind mechanism.
A positivist might see volition as some kind of miracle, but I don't. It
seems quite natural and completely ubiquitous. It makes a heck of a lot more
sense because evolutionary theory has to account for improvement, not just
change and variety. There is an apparent direction that can't be explained
in terms of mechanisms, functional fit or random mutations.
dmb
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