RE: Do Humans Have Compulsary Will? Which best describes your take on 'will'?
May 28, 2015 at 10:32 pm
(This post was last modified: May 28, 2015 at 10:33 pm by bennyboy.)
I'd like to add to this a point about the evolutionary narrative. For selection to work, a trait, or at least a trait precursor, must exist in an individual in order to be tested statistically against the environment.
So let's go to the beinning of mind, and ask a question-- is there a minimal "spark" which constitutes mind? Some will argue that there's a smooth transition between dumb matter and thinking systems, but I think tha's a semantic cop-out-- either there is a subjective perspective, no matter how simple, or there isn't one. That means that while the NATURE of mind may have evolved with the complexity of organic brains, the EXISTENCE of mind was necessarily spontaneous.
What does this mean for the idea that the mind is a product of matter? In evolutionary terms, that first existence of mind must have been exactly simultaneous with the first existence of the structure supporting it: for if the system preceded the effect, then you'd have to posit some kind of magic light switch whereby a system capable of mind didn't actually have a mind-- and then it did.
So it must be said not that the brain evolved, and that mind is a byproduct of the brain, but that mind and brain must have co-evolved. In other words, there has never been a living thing, with a functioning nervous system, in which some degree of mind wasn't one of the determiners of subsequent evolutionary events. So this preference of looking at physical structures as dominant, and mind as a byproduct, isn't really correct: mind is ubiquitous in the evolution of all living systems including that of the brain-- this is the opposite of "byproduct."
So let's go to the beinning of mind, and ask a question-- is there a minimal "spark" which constitutes mind? Some will argue that there's a smooth transition between dumb matter and thinking systems, but I think tha's a semantic cop-out-- either there is a subjective perspective, no matter how simple, or there isn't one. That means that while the NATURE of mind may have evolved with the complexity of organic brains, the EXISTENCE of mind was necessarily spontaneous.
What does this mean for the idea that the mind is a product of matter? In evolutionary terms, that first existence of mind must have been exactly simultaneous with the first existence of the structure supporting it: for if the system preceded the effect, then you'd have to posit some kind of magic light switch whereby a system capable of mind didn't actually have a mind-- and then it did.
So it must be said not that the brain evolved, and that mind is a byproduct of the brain, but that mind and brain must have co-evolved. In other words, there has never been a living thing, with a functioning nervous system, in which some degree of mind wasn't one of the determiners of subsequent evolutionary events. So this preference of looking at physical structures as dominant, and mind as a byproduct, isn't really correct: mind is ubiquitous in the evolution of all living systems including that of the brain-- this is the opposite of "byproduct."
