It’s silly to talk about life without talking about teleology. Far from being correct in dismissing it from modern thought, purpose is the single defining characteristic of life. We can obfuscate it by talking about adaptation, but it’s senseless to talk about it with out realizing we’re fundamentally talking about purpose. An adaptation is a solution to a problem (perceived by whatever means, conscious or unconscious). If we had no purposes, we would have no challenges, and we would need no adaptations. We don’t speak of rocks adapting, because they have to goals or purposes to be either helped or thwarted. If I’m driving my car, and a rock falls in the road, I apapt. I go around it, because I have a purpose, a goal on its other side. The rock doesn’t adapt, neither does the car, except insofar as I build and direct it to further my ends. The rock has no goal in blocking me, it’s not adapting to my presence by falling where it does. Adaptation assumes purpose and goal. Without assuming it, you have an incoherent concept.
So then life is defined by purpose and goal. And for the small portion of it that is able to observe itself consciously, we call our awareness of our understanding or fulfillment of that purpose meaning. A purely reductive, materialistic view of the universe essentially defines life out of existence by exounging the concepts of goals, purpose, and meaning from the universe. Such an act is antithetical to the nature of life. It is life-destroying. We cannot survive and function in such a universe. And yet we are, we do live, we do function. And by our very existence defy the dead world of materialism.
However you conceive the connection between materials and the non material, it does exist, and the content of intelligence is observable by other intelligent, purposeful agents. My car is not a mere hunk of metal and plastic. It is designed, it has a specific use. It has things that can be done to it to improve or degrade its ability to serve that purpose. On a purely physical level it is just a hunk of metal and plastic. But it’s not merely that. It’s not reducible to that. It’s efficacy in fulfilling its function proves that. And the more intelligently something is designed, the more carefully the materials are ordered according to their purpose, the more wholly they inhabit the form of their teleology, the more powerful a tool toward that end they become. A rock makes a crude hammer. A carefully selected rock a better one. A shaped rock with a handle an even better one. A metal hammer even better. A metal hammer with a comfy leather grip even better than that. And then we get into more powerful expansions of the concept, such a hammer drills, jackhammers, and all that. The bigger the idea and purpose becomes, and the more the materials can be made to embody and follow it.
One of the curious facts of such purpose animating material in a life form is that they don’t exist in isolation. Our ability to imprint our purposes into other objects, essentially infusing them with a purpose from within ourselves is fairly well known. But other creatures do it all the time. We exist in a web of purpose and goals, some independent, some harmonic, some competitive. Even eating is an imposition of our goals onto something else. The prey becomes the food of the predator, and it’s own goals are overridden in favor of the predator’s stronger ability to enforce their purposes on their surroundings.
One of the most interesting things humans have done is to breed plants and animals for our own use and purposes. We’re not entirely unique in this way. There are farmer ants and shepherd ants and warrior ants and enslaving ants and ants that use the constructions of other creatures for their own use. There’s nothing terribly natural about corn or wheat. We’ve been infusing them with our purpose, changing them into technological objects, for thousands of years and generations. Our crops of objects of immense technological effort, immense design and refinement to make them what we wanted them to be. Domesticated animals are much the same. We created all kinds of different dogs for our various needs and purposes. We used the best raw material we could find, which happened to be wolves, but we made dogs. We created them. And we’re still creating them, making new things from the material. As I said, many animals and even insects can and do do this, but none so deliberately and consciously and effectively as us. We are aware of our purposes, and are able to evaluate the characteristics and purposes of other creatures (not just unliving matter), and we can capitalize on that understanding to accomplish in mere moments of time what might take another species eons. That understanding is what gives us our immense power and success above and beyond anything else on earth.
Mr Nobody's Patented Blog 