RE: Natural Selection Seems Insufficient
Today at 1:51 am
(This post was last modified: Today at 2:26 am by Jal.)
@
OakTree500
@
Angrboda
@
Deesse23
@
Fake Messiah
@
Paleophyte
This post is another effort to explain why species would not survive deterministic metaphysics.
Modern science is tunnel-visioned, it wants to explain everything as mechanical causality. For example spark-plug-explosions in a car push down the pistons attached to a crankshaft, thereby cranking up rotational momentum. The wheels begin to spin, and the car moves. Domino effect.
When I attend a movie theater (see post 320), is it by such a fully deterministic domino effect?
You might respond: "Yes. Deterministic forces CAUSE you to desire to see a movie, and those desires, in turn, cause you to visit the theater."
Nope. That explanation utterly fails. A desire is just a subjective hunger (internal feeling). It is not a domino effect that pushes your body toward the theater. In a determinism, therefore, you cannot proactively react to your hunger, you cannot INITIATE an effort to satiate, your body is just a passive domino. No amount of movie-hunger will push your body to the theater. Just like, even if a car mentally hungered to translocate, it won't actually move until the pistons fire, pushing that body of matter. That's the problem here.
In terms of push-pull cause-effect (an effect COMPELLED by laws of nature), probably the MAXIMUM the universe could compel you to do is coerce a simple knee jerk reaction from you. When a doctor hits my knee with a rubber mallet, I am caught off guard, I am genuinely SURPRISED by the involuntary knee jerk suddenly COMPELLED of me. Which is completely different than voluntarily attending a movie. I am never SURPRISED that I found myself in a theater. I am not a passive domino who was knee-jerked into that auditorium. Rather, I proactively move myself (I voluntarily self-locomote) wherever my hunger is inclined to go. In word, I INITIATE. This is not mere push-pull determinism.
Furthermore a knee jerk is simple, crude motility. How about motions more complex? After using his rubber mallet to jerk your knee, could the same doctor compel your fingers to play piano? Or, even more to the point, can we use mallets to COMPEL mammals to hunt and gather food, and ingest water? Suppose the mammal is currently facing in a direction that points AWAY from the water, how will the universe manage, in a compelling way, to rotate its body to the correct angle, before pushing it forward ? Bear in mind that a deterministic mammal can't proactively "go wherever it wants."
In REALITY, mammals consistently do precisely that - they go wherever they want. When my cat hungers to go outside, it heads to the door, but pauses there and looks back at me until I open it. Even then it doesn’t head outside. It protrudes its head through the crack, looks around and, if it dislikes what it sees, it reverses direction back into the apartment. None of this is an involuntary knee-jerk compulsion that leaves the cat SURPRISED at the final outcome. On the contrary, the cat proactively DICTATES its outcome according to whatever it wants. Clearly a deterministic domino-universe is not in control - the cat itself is in control.
Although Merleau Ponty wasn’t a panpsychic (he never claimed that ALL matter is innately conscious) he DID insist, and famously defended his belief, that the entire human body is innately conscious. He pointed out, for example, that the brain, in human motility, doesn't have to command each muscle, limb, and digit to move to each spatial coordinate X, Y, Z. Hence Ponty described playing piano as "knowledge in the hands." My point is that even something as simple as ingesting food or water involves complex motility because X,Y,Z coordinates VARY. Since the brain cannot even CONSCIOUSLY manage to calculate and provide the X,Y,Z coordinates for motility, how will a domino-effect BLINDLY do it? Utter nonsense.
To summarize, since a deterministic universe isn't skilled at eliciting involuntary reactions - it can barely accomplish a simple knee jerk much less handle X,Y, Z coordinates - it cannot deterministically coerce us do complex things such as hunt and gather food, care for our offspring, follow a recipe, attend a movie, perform carpentry, conduct engineering, repair an automobile, or play a piano. In fact NONE of these activities are involuntary knee-jerk reactions that SURPRISE us. A blind domino-effect won't consistently induce these behaviors, much less CONCIDENTALLY induce them at the exact same moment we hunger for these activities. To believe in that kind of coincidence is idiocy.
Clearly, I am not a domino who must WAIT upon a deterministic universe in the vain HOPE that it might happen to coincidentally/ fortuitously push me in the desired direction. Rather I proactively self-locomote as to self-determine my trajectories. Period.
Finally, self-locomotion seems to be a necessary postulate. Otherwise the entire metaphysics lacks a First Mover.
![[Image: Screenshot-2026-09-08-at-15-09-42-what-w...-Googl.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/Y2DCmpfY/Screenshot-2026-09-08-at-15-09-42-what-was-einstein-s-experiment-concerning-photoelectricity-Googl.png)
