some thoughts on intention
To get to the very root of humanity, one descends to the level of intention. I do not believe there is anything underneath this that can be observed about humanity (except simple Being, but this is not unique to humanity). Now, there are most certainly foundations that allow for intention, but my intuition is that they would be too abstract to identify or discuss. We can drill down only to intention.
From the Intender, everything else arises. Intention lies at the base of the mind; it is the very seat of consciousness. It is the presence of the Intender that allows for awareness, choice, and action. Remove the Intender, and you are left with a mere organism. Insert the Intender, and you arrive at humanity.
Intention arises, seemingly, from nothing. There is no naturalistic explanation for the appearance of an intention (in the sense that I am using the term). Biological life exhibits reaction, all of which is predicated on chemistry; chemicals react to each other in certain ways, chemicals make up biological machines, and these machines execute function as they react to internal and external stimuli. All of biological life based on reaction and all reaction is based on chemistry.
There is no accounting for the spontaneous birth of an intention. To be sure, humans are biological and so much of human life is nothing more that reaction. All of this human reaction is, however, easily explained and predictable, not unlike the rest of activity within the animal kingdom. Of course, even within a biological system there is randomness – will a startled zebra flee to the left or to the right? No one can know for certain. What we can know is that, whichever direction it chooses, the zebra will indeed flee. What appears to us to have the shape of an intention is nothing more than a reaction; it is causality within a chemical system.
Given enough time, these reactions become largely predictable, and this is true of humanity as far as biology is concerned. However, there is no possible prediction that can be made for intention. The desire to call to mind a specific memory for no reason. The desire to ask a question out of the blue. The desire to desire. Such examples find no answer in biology; they do not evidence the patterning, causality, and predictability found universally within biological systems.
One might argue that what appears to be spontaneous intention somehow hangs on a quantum phenomenon, and would therefore be random and essentially meaningless. I believe that we can be fairly certain that such instances of intention are not purely random, but rather are initiated with purpose and control. Intentions are not meaningless; the Intender is the one entity in Creation that searches for meaning.
Does it make any sense whatsoever that one searches for meaning driven by a fundamentally meaningless impetus – that one searches for meaning, meaninglessly?
tags: intender, intention, meaning, predictability, quantum, reaction
July 31st, 2008 at 10:21 pm
I think you’re getting into the edges of the discussion of what consciousness is and why we have it. It’s one of those things that’s still baffling to those looking at the problem. It may not remain so.
July 31st, 2008 at 10:43 pm
[...] the Gaps Ben posted a little about the conscious mind here and what makes it what it is. I’m not going to treat that subject here (there are libraries [...]
August 1st, 2008 at 9:00 am
Hey thanks for reading.
You might very well be right – we can’t ultimately know. But what I’m getting at, essentially, is the soul.
The Intender and the foundation of consciousness, I believe, lies in the realm of soul.
But who knows, maybe the soul is physical in a way we can’t understand – we tend to think it’s rather Ghost like, but perhaps it’s not. Still, my intuition is that this part of us is supernatural (as the Father is, as the Spirit is, and though incarnate, as the Son is). That we share in an Otherness that does not cooperate too kindly with microscopes and spectrometers.
August 1st, 2008 at 9:07 am
A paraphrase of something that I wrote in my posts about Kenneth Miller’s views:
* * * * *
If sin and free will are matters for the body, then being a Christian is a waste of time, as the soul is nothing but myth, and there’s nothing Christ needed to save us from.
If sin and free will are matters for the soul, but the soul develops naturalistically, then the burden of proof is on the Naturalist to prove that the soul even exists, and how it comes to be. He will then have the difficult task of explaining how it is this naturalistic soul can even be saved unto a supernatural paradise, or why this naturalistic soul even needs saving at all (as death would simply be the end, with no eternity to worry about).
Christians must believe in the supernatural (Christ being God, rising from the dead, ascending into heaven), and I would argue that not believing in the supernatural would pose an immovable barrier. How could the skeptic accept the very basics of the faith?
One cannot interface the supernatural in us with the natural in us – one cannot make sense of what the Scriptures say about us – unless we concede that some of what makes us human is inscrutable by science; I firmly agree with Gould’s Nonoverlapping Magisteria.