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You are here mixing causation and intention. (I state what we both understand for clarity).alt said:
I see no paradox nor contradiction here. Indeed for intention to manifest and have meaning one's actions need to be able to cause the effect which is the intended goal... at least in so far as it can significantly increase the likelihood of the desired outcome. Indeed for will to exist and have meaning there must be a mechanism of observation, modeling of cause and effect to predict, and power to act.
But there is a part of your examples which I think misses the mark. A spontaneous event may trigger the activity of an intention but the intention may previously exist. The rescue squad were trained and prepared and positions before the avalanche occurred. One may argue that the intention preceded the instigating trigger. Intent needn't invoke omnipotence and must if it is to be actualized account for and react to circumstance.
Yes intent requires some form of "intelligence" in so far as it must invoke expectations of effects of acts. It is an emergent property of living organisms. Now we can speak loosely of intent on a somewhat lower level and get into a very grey area. We often speak of the purpose of say the shape of a finch's beak or some other genetic characteristic of an organism. Here we are at a level of "quasi-intent" where there is no mind (one may assume for arguments sake) behind the design but there is information processing in the biology of genetic reproduction and evolution. The beak shape is in one sense accidental an in another sense purposeful. We need a distinction in the language to handle this level. Say "quasi-purpose" and "quasi-intent".
It is instructive to look at the thermodynamic environment in which we see life existing. We have Earth sitting with a high temperature sun nearby and a low temperature universe into which to radiate. We thus have a large flux of (Helmholtz) free energy through the system. This allows the emergence of spontaneous self organizing systems. It feeds heat engines which power refrigeration effects (formation of intricate crystalline structures, distillations of fresh water, chemical separation of elements, salt flats and ore deposits, ...)
Self organizing systems have an emergent causal structure. In the presence of free-energy flux they cause replication of their organized structure. No intent here but a different level of description for cause and effect. We see growth of crystals and quasi-crystals, propagation of defects in these, and similar condensed matter phenomena.
It is not so much as a specific organized outcome is caused as that over time and many random accidental effects, those which further the organization, are selected out as more resilient against reversal. (the clump of atoms which accidentally land in alignment with the crystalline structure are less likely to re-dissolve by better transmitting heat into the crystal and down to the cold point where it began to form.)
Within this sea of self organizing systems one presumes organisms emerged able to encode and replicate information about how it behaves physically. Now one has a new level of causation where the genetic structure causes the behavior and the behavior is selected for survival. One has "quasi-purpose" and "quasi-intent" in the form of selection from large numbers of variation for most favorable traits. It is the proverbial billions of monkeys tapping on typewriters except that those who fail to type something sensible get culled.
There are two more points of emergence, the first brings about intentional purposeful behavior. From flatworms to lions, tigers, and bears you have an organ dedicated to perception of the environment and triggering actions base on environmental cues. You have a rudimentary mind which encodes not just behavior but perception. In there somewhere must be a modeling function adapting a predictive mechanism, i.e. learning and changing behavior based on experience. These entities can be said to hold intent. The lion is indeed trying to eat me and the flatworm is in fact intending to move and find food.
At some level, possibly the lion, possibly only bigger brained animals such as primates and some others, possibly only the human mind, there is conscious intention. Instead of only learning cause and effect from our experience in a reactive way, we abstract and hypothesize constructing theories of how the world works and so extrapolating upon experience. I've certainly seen examples of parrots and chimps doing this but not universally, only specific trained examples. I suspect they are at the cusp where such emergent behavior is possible but exceptional among individuals.
(By the same token I've seen humans who seem incapable of anything other than reactive "animal" behavior.)
Hmmm... 'accidental' and also 'spontaneous' with some "accidental" confusion of the two meanings.
Identifying levels we may ask at what levels the meanings of words like "spontaneous" and "accidental" change their definition.
- Physics & Thermodynamics
- Chemistry & Condensed matter physics
- Self-organizing systems (specialized chemistry pre-biology, non-equilibrium thermo.?)
- Biology
- Behavioral (animal) Psychology
- Human Psychology/Philosophy of Thought (including epistemology, logic, etc and the philosophy of science including this list.)
I'd say questions of intent and purpose don't have any meaning below the level of Biology and should be "quasi-" qualified at the level of biology. And then we can distinguish forms of intent at the last two levels e.g. the distinction between first and second degree murder and manslaughter. (conscious intent, reactive intent, no intent but responsibility for causation).
One may ask how 'spontaneous' is defined at the base level vs. 2nd and 3rd levels. In classical physics there is no 'spontaneous' and we have a clockwork determinism between past and future states of reality. Quantum mechanics modifies the issue a bit and there are arguments about interpretation but we can qualify e.g. spontaneous vs. stimulated emission. There is room for invoking the term and giving it meaning. Note however that at the next level spontaneous is quite distinctly meaningful. We can speak, even in the classical domain, of spontaneous reactions, such as condensation or
spontaneous human combustion ;). We understand when speaking of this at the level of chemistry that we are speaking of random external causation and not the type of indeterminate causality invoked when considering quantum physics. It changes further at higher levels. Certain self organization phenomena are "inevitable" with spontaneous time of instigation. That's true even of critical phenomena in chemistry/condensed matter physics where phase changes are the rule and super-critical phases are exceptional.This is how I see the meanings of the words parsed at different levels. Well I'm talked out and I've got to get ready for school. I apologize for being long winded.
