Life, THE Evolutionary Force of Nature

I finally wrote a short book about my hypothetical views on evolution, and the basic functions from which all life has essentially evolved itself.

It's called: The Strategic Intelligence of Trust.
Subtitle: Life, an Evolutionary Force of Nature.

You can read the introductory preview here.  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008OMUDBW

It's main theme (trust versus the deception of distrust) has only been hinted at here earlier.  And life's methodology of deceptively evolving itself may also interest you.

Here's the blurb I wrote for the Amazon Kindle version:

This book will hopefully present a new understanding of life as an evolutionary force of nature.  It's the author's philosophical look at some of the latest science where our biological evolution is concerned.  But in particular, it focuses on a new hypothesis where trust, and its functional counterpart, deception, have been proposed as the primary intelligent and causative functions of all life on earth.  And not just as life's behavioral tactics, but as its most necessary strategic traits. Without which, life as we know it could not have evolved at all.
With over 40 years of experience as a professional investigator of human foibles, he provides support for a number of relatively new ideas that concern the way we, and other life forms, have used these strategies over the last few billion years to both acquire and serve an extremely odd diversity of purposes.
The reader should be aware, however, that these central themes won't sit well with either the Creationists or the staunch devotees of neo-Darwinian selection theories.  Particularly since the author hopes to further demonstrate that all evolution is the proximate result of the entity involved reacting strategically to its experience.  And that all of the above are acting in concurrence with this quote from Charles Sanders Peirce:
"In the pragmatic way of thinking in terms of conceivable practical implications, every thing has a purpose, and its purpose is the first thing that we should try to note about it."
If you can handle that, you should want to read this book.  If you can't, perhaps you shouldn't.

Determined to be Free?

We are free to choose because we have to choose.  To not choose is to choose not to, even if, as a result, it's to choose to die.  To be deprived of our ability to choose, completely, is our, the chooser's, death in any event.  

Our purpose, primarily, is to choose.

Everything, it seems, in the universe is both required and allowed to choose.
(Whatever is anticipatorily aware in any case.)

Sequence. Next to Purpose perhaps in Importance

These comments were first made at the Rationally Speaking Blog, 5-14, relative to the advocacy of precognition.  I thought I'd put some of them here lest I forget:

The physics of causation requires that all changes are sequential, and even when symmetrically reversible, must reverse in sequence. The prospective future, for example, if it could somehow, in some cockeyed causative directional theory, circle back to the present, it could only do so in what had by then become that future. The future only exists in our anticipation, not in physical reality.

All causes and effects are merely sequences of change. There is no actual present that's not both our past and future at virtually the same time. There is no absolute stillness in nature, quantum entanglement, etc., or not

No strategies without sequentiality either.

Without sequence, no experiments could be fashioned at all, nothing could be built to last a second, nothing would be predictable, and there would be no mathematics that these very somewhat delusional physicists need as their primary assessment and predictive tool.

Now if you want to argue that since our scientific logic is at best probabilistic, we can't say that anything is true to a certainty, then I'd have to agree. But to then ascribe a reliable degree of certainty to our most extreme examples of improbability requires a most unreliable stretch by any of our forms of logic.

Two concepts that seem unfalsifiable are the propositions that our somethings could not have come from nothing and that all these somethings must change in a sequential order.

Added 5-15:  Causation goes in all directions and (I'd argue) has to have been essentially indeterminate for the universe to evolve in any logical sense at all. But it's not my purpose to make that my argument. All of the things that move in all of those directions do so in an irreversible sequence of change.. They can change directions and change their very substance, but cannot change the sequence in which all of this occurs.
The argument for this seems similar to the one for determinism, but is radically different. Sequences don't determine choices, and determinism is all about the decreasing, if not entirely absent, effectiveness of choice.
And as to precognition, no, it does not count that somebody was able to accurately predict what they think was the result of having seen it in what we imagine is the future. And no precognition experiments have proven otherwise.

Added  1-15-14:   Both change and sequence are other than linear.
Causation comes in all directions, as must their resultant series of sequential dimensions.  But to the observer, sequence is as directionally observable as its observational capability will allow. And it’s always in the “now” direction.

Posted today as a Big Think comment (to: Brains Are Automatic, But People Are Free)

If our choices have not (or had not) been predetermined, we are then free to be affected by random circumstances, i.e., by the randomness of probability as opposed to the determinedness (and thus pre-determinedness) of certainty. Freed from the fixed to the flexible - from reactive to proactive determining, perhaps.

So then, at least according to my logic, the choice at hand is not so much between determined or undetermined as it is between determined and predetermined. And the future limits of the predetermined lie somewhere between the certainties and uncertainties of oncoming time and the lines to be drawn there by its sequential changes.

As it would seem that, by well informed choices, we can willfully act to both determine and predetermine their effects for an uncertain period, but that the perfectly informed and active predetermination of anything, by anything, for all of time, should be seen as logically impossible.

The corollary to this is, of course, that what we choose to do today would seem to be for us (rather than for our past) to most willfully, successfully, and responsibly determine.

From this site: http://www.atheistexile.com/2012/01/16/explaining-purpose/

"Roy Niles

Posted February 2, 2012 at 4:37 PM

* it seems you’re coming awfully close to attributing the state of the universe to an “intelligent regulator”*
Not really. More likely (and over-simply) over endless time the strategies by which its elements have evolved to anticipate the necessity to react to each other (defensively, cooperatively, etc.) have become the equivalent of intelligent and purposeful responses.
And it’s clear that nature’s consistent behavioral probabilities – that we observe as lawful – are so because there’s likely a logical self-regulatory process involved.
Even if these concepts (and Hoffman’s version is only one example of such anticipatory theories) hold value for deists, theists, etc., that’s their problem. It’s like saying that biological self-engineering is wrong because it gives value to a creationist’s version of self design.
The universe is responsible for its own evolution, and if seen as godlike, its in its consistently self regulated re-creation. Big question is where these energetic particles and their strategies came from and what sort of universal culture retains, disseminates and evolves them. (But in spite of some theories to the contrary, I’m fairly sure that these somethings did not come from nothing.)
And again, there’s much more to be said about the topic, but I’m still evolving my own version of its understanding."

Awkward but hopefully informative.

This Baron P person just won't let me leave his stuff alone! Example just posted at Acquired Purposes:

"1-4-12: Sequential Dimension

I have decided (or discovered) that there's such a thing as a sequential dimension. Some have referred to a similar concept as the dimension of time, but have seemed unaware that time is actually our measure of change, and change has no choice except to be sequential. Otherwise there'd be no such thing as measurable "time." And we then are led to see that time shows us nothing if not measurable sequence.

I'll leave it at that while I study this a bit to see what else has been written or discussed in this area, since as far as I've learned to date, it seems very little.

But wait: If the above is so, causation, as measured by the sequential dimensions of change is by that measure endlessly multidimensional. And universal strategies, for example, must be effectively sequentially dimensional!! And they causatively go in all directions, so how does that fit into a dimensional paradigm? (Considering of course that in theory, energetic nature never stops. And that sequence is not necessarily reversible.)

Lots of thought to ensue here!!"

Lots of luck with this one, pal. Considering that everything that occurs in the universe is to some extent an intelligently generated accident.