The Most Important Differences

I sent this to a couple people today just to test my ability to make sense.  No answer is required or expected.  It's like a piece of something that you throw at the wall, and if it sticks, it's art!

"8-25-2014 riff, later edited a bit:  

As to trust and distrust and their important differences, I should have stressed that we trust safety and we distrust danger, but only when the degree of safety is known and the degree of danger is not known.  And in a world of living things that operate with intelligent strategies, the dangerous that need our distrust will invariably act with deceptive purpose, and the ones that we can safely trust will not.   So that those that are deceptive without dangerous purposes can’t be trusted not to be dangerous.  

What does that mean?  It means that when deception is a sign of danger we need to be looking for it, because when it isn’t dangerous after all, the looking won’t have harmed us.  It’s the not looking on the premise that deception isn’t always dangerous that will get us killed.

Does that explanation seem too complex for a primitive living system to grasp?  Yes, because it’s the failure to grasp these clues that gets some of them regularly eaten -  those invariably caused to trust by deceptive means.  So in the animal world, the prey have learned to distrust a predator in part because it’s dangerous, but in larger part because its tactics are invariably deceptive.

And these tactics have been used in the world of living creatures since living creatures have been born to use a tactical system to begin with.  Or put another way, their tactical systems are what living systems are defined by.  And tactics will always evolve competitively, or not evolve at all.  This is so, even though the competitive will use cooperation as a further tactic.  

The cooperative that don’t at some point see the need to compete will not have found the need to evolve as well.  And if the environment changes to deplete their resources, they may feel the need to change, but if they fail to see the need to compete for resources, they will invariably tend to die instead.  For those, however that can learn and develop competitive strategies, that competitive need will eventually become instinctive. (Must say why here.)

And I may need to argue that the need to compete for maintaining their existence as intelligently formed functional systems of nature has given birth to nature’s strategies to begin with.  (Must say why.)  And strategies by their very nature must continually be prepared to evolve.  The unsolvable mystery involved here is the question as to how and why strategies had presumably evolved from non strategies - a parallel question as to how somethings have existed as opposed to nothings.

Strategic Hows and Whys

A strategic system’s purposes are not necessarily connected directly to strategic goals, since their trial and error processes are more directed to choosing goals that meet their purposes rather than choosing purposes to meet their goals. The purposes in general involve the best way to choose the best reactions to survival challenges, so while the overall goal of strategies must be to survive, the intermediate goals would involve the hows, whens, whats and even, or especially, the whys.  Which reminded me to write the following:

The whys of something have at least two aspects: The goal that a thing might have acquired, and its particular purpose for attaining it, both of which in turn can have several other descriptive aspects.  Someone for example will tell us of the “what” of a single rock, such as its size, position, characteristic elements, etc.; the “where” as both its general and precise location; the “how” it’s sitting, loose, stable, crooked, etc., and how it looks from near or far, how it shines, smells, causes whistles in the wind, etc., etc.

But as to the “why” involved, that aspect seems to be an afterthought of most descriptions, and if necessary to know at all, it’s our concern for why we’ve found it sitting where it is - in other words for its immediate purpose to exist - and then, if we’re the more curious sort, we will ask how it came to serve that purpose as a secondary aspect of knowing why.

And then we may continue on that same abstract level of curiosity, concerned perhaps with who or what brought the rock there and why they did, perhaps suspicious of the purposes it was put there, but still not suspicious of any purposes attached to the rock itself.  After all, the thing is not alive, and even if it were, are we concerned for example why a something such as an ant has become an ant as long as we’re able to find out what that ant does and why it does it?  

Do we ask ourselves whether knowing why an ant exists at all will change our perspective as to what it’s doing and why?  Yes, some of us will ask that question, but will be easily satisfied with an “explanation" that as living forms, we’ve all evolved from accidental origins.  

To be told for example that the ant’s instinctive qualities emerged, and that its actions have become spontaneous over time, will be seemingly enough for science.  Leave the whys to some old speculative philosopher, such as the ones who’ve told us of the accidental determinations of nature to begin with. 

And so getting back to the proverbial rock, we certainly don’t feel the need to know more about its dead “purposes” than the reasons that any living thing might have to use the rock or move it somewhere else.  Not needing in the process to concern ourselves with any purposes that nature could have had to either produce a rock, or to make any crucial use of its production.

Rocks, we say, were non-living things among all other material on this formerly lifeless planet, and living things could have done nothing other than emerge from that ancient environment spontaneously - if that.  

But then I ask, why use “emerge” as the possible “how” if we really don’t know the possible “why” that any such materialization process would work?   And you might ask in return what has made me have concerns about the “why” if I can’t determine the true nature of the “how” of rocks to begin with.

But wait, isn’t the “how of the why” the most important question here?  Whether we can ever really know the hows if we’re satisfied that we don’t really need to know their whys as well?  Such as why we should have rocks anyway, if they’re really absolutely and uselessly dead things? Because, of course, if they are, why are rocks here, there, or anywhere at all?

Unless in the asking, we might discover why they have needed to be here, and how they’ve helped strategically to make the living come alive.

And how and why those ants acquired instincts.

Predator? No, Just a Psychopath.

        Predators, as I see it, are not the same as psychopaths.  Psychopaths have a defective and more or less untrainable empathetic function.  Predators on the other hand can read their victims empathetically to their own advantage. They see no moral problem in dealing with their instinctive needs as predators - just as other humans generally see no problem with the necessity of killing animals to eat.

Psychopaths however just don’t see moral rules as understandable.  They learn to mimic the expected behaviors, but don’t feel, either fully or at all, the emotionally learned responses that otherwise would govern that morality.

And so we have some psychopaths that are born without the emotional capacity to read the signals that humans (among other animals) in a cooperative setting have evolved to send each other instructively.  

And even if there are some psychopaths that can learn to read the signs, they will lack the capacity to be concerned with the implied instructions.  Essentially, these psychopaths prefer to use deceptive strategies, not understanding the “mechanics” of attaining trust.  Predators however do understand the importance of trust, and very often will form such trusting bonds with potential prey in an environment where the need for predatory strategies has been suspended; where their instinctive strategies, however, will still be there to depend on if circumstances change.

Further, predators in predatory groups will trust each other to obey the rules of predatory society that they’ve been born to learn and understand.  And while there can also be such a thing as a psychopathically oriented group (nomadic gypsies may be a good example), no such group comprised solely of psychopathic individuals has been successfully evolved or developed to my knowledge.

As to fear of immediate consequences, psychopaths, who could not win the trust of this type of predatory enemy, would not know how to negotiate their way out of an immediate threat from this type of adversary.  The expectation of some immediate damage would likely trigger an instinctive fight or flight response.  

But their predators will tend to make more practical use of the effects of fear.  If a fight with a psychopath resulted, both sides of the conflict would attempt to fearlessly deceive the other; but the predators, who can generally read their prey much better than the prey can read them, would have the advantage - especially where the prey were psychopathic and unable to use their limited emotional strategies properly.  That psychopath, fearing the finality of becoming a figurative meal, would likely run.

So yes, you can be a predatory psychopath or a psychopathic predator, but again, the essential differences remain the same.  Predators have functional purposes while psychopaths must serve dysfunctional ones.

(And as a PI, I was always a predator as far as my working strategies were concerned.)

Contending Forces

So how do you disobey a law of nature?  By obeying a conflicting law?  Where does the choice lie, or was it made in some way by the law that has forced the entity to obey, and forced it to choose to disobey the counter law.  

(But how can you force a choice and have it remain as a choice?  Contrary to the usual jargon, to defeat it, you do have to eat it.)

In nature, rather than by laws, are not the choices made by competing strategies for control of both themselves and their competing entities?  And were not those forces within those entities to begin with?  Do they not constitute the strategic forces that construct the entities that then use them for their evolving purposes?  Their "life" being in the strategies that are in themselves the essence of what causes force to have a strategic direction?

To be in other words, strategically directed forces?

Forces that in effect make what we call their laws?

Yes, strategies exist to accomplish strategic purposes.  Which are, in other words, contending purposes. Either cooperating to contend or competing, but otherwise we don’t strategize for a non-contending need.

What did these strategic systems “know” or have to know at the minimum beforehand and how was the skill acquired to use that knowledge actively? To act on it with the curiosity to add to it?  To become a budding strategy that knew somehow that it had the need to learn?  
And yet how could it and how did it know that it was contending for survival to begin with?   The incremental changes and their causes over time that led to these purposive activities seem almost impossible for our human minds to deal with.

Take magnetic forces for example.  Can they exist without the entities that they are exerting force either for or against?

Take light as well - does it exist to ferry protons for their own purposes, and/or are proteins themselves being ferried for various other entities’ forceful purposes?  And what were light’s existing uses and purposes to begin with?

And why are forces in contention, or were ever in contention to begin with?  Or did there ever need to be a first contention?  And what’s the best educated guess for answers to any of that?  

Perhaps the answer's this:  Contention must have to be a natural state of affairs.  Perhaps anything that has to move will have to contend with anything else that moves.  Doing so intelligently, or otherwise chaotically at the very least.  

So what’s wrong with chaos?  Well, it’s not predictable and it’s not evolvable.  It’s not amenable to any natural strategic purposes.

Then how does a strategy direct force, unless the strategy is the essence of the force which exists as a self responsive energetic entity?  But then strategies exist both to thoughtfully construct their entities and as the controlling aspects of the forces that operate their systems.  And they’re set up in addition to evolve all types of their intelligent operative characteristics; in which case they try and they err and try again continuously.

Except that the strategies and purposes of light, for example. don't seem to have evolved for eons as far as we can observe.  So do all strategies at some point have an end game, or just some,.  Or are there simply different types for different purposes?

So stay tuned.

Can we have been unconsciously intended? Or consciously unintended? Did we pave an unpaved road? Or unpave the paved?

intention |inˈtenCHən|
noun
1 a thing intended; an aim or plan:

For us at least, unconscious intention, as a process, is still intentioned (i.e., intended).  We've planned it and we've aimed it.  We chose to react OR we operated from a pre chosen process.  Intended is also something done that would otherwise have been called unintended, or in other words either a mistaken intention or an unintended mistake.  Yet at some point, if there was a behavior, there had to have been an intent to act - to behave or decide to not behave.
And in the end, all our living activities have at some point been made possible by a plan where intelligence was involved.  As it would seem was necessarily intended.  But by what, the unliving that preceded us?

But wait, this begins to seem a bit too silly.  I’m essentially arguing that nothing is unintended when I should at least concede that unintended has a practical meaning, which is to distinguish the planned from the unplanned, even though in theory, something happening is always a preplanned action.
But if an "aim" as well, if it was not the goal that the particular plan was aimed at, then we can have something intended that was also unintended.  Can't we?
Aha!  Context, context.  But what, intended context?  And are there intended or unintended purposes? Or is there any such thing.  Unintended must apply to results, no?  Otherwise we’re only talking of unintended intentions.
Which I suppose are theoretically possible, but meaning becomes lost when we’re simply playing with words for no other purpose than to play with meanings.

Well let's find a serious example, and one with a universal application!  Such as this one:
What do I mean exactly when referring to intentional construction as "intelligent" construction?  Well, that the construction was accomplished through some entity that had “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.”  And that this constructive something could have, in and of itself, been intelligently constructed to accomplish any intended or intentional purposes.
But nowhere down the line will we be able to find, logically, that this process had an absolutely accidental beginning.  Knowledge is not acquired by an entity that has no ability to use or process it.
And the having of skills is just another way of saying that a thing has the knowledge to be skillful.  Trial and error learning of a skill may occur through a series of obtaining accidental results.  But not by accidental trials with no ability to acquire a purpose in the process.
So what then is the ability to acquire purpose?  It may come down to the fact that there’s nothing in existence that doesn’t have some measure of that quality.   The quality of using at the least, the simplest of strategies.  The quality that allows the application of a known skill.  If only to follow the simplest of instructions or commands.  If only to consistently react.

AND If only to know to obey a natural law.  Or to have the ability to disobey it.  To have, in other words, the ability to choose the extent of our otherwise necessary reactions to a force!!
SO now we get to the very essence of the deterministic arguments, which make a difference between intelligent determination or the non-intelligence of a predetermined world and universe.  A universe where all things indeterminate will need to have retained an element of reactive choice!

Intended in the absence of the unintended.  What a crooked road to hell did I intend to pave with that one?

An Energetic Stream from my Consciousness

Riffing on 3-9-14:

Energy is the life of our universe.  It consists of necessarily self evolving strategies as well as their ever evolving fields of forces that, with the ongoing diversity of its strategic changes, have been variously constructed and regulated to use, direct, and accomplish a growing diversity of purposes.
Ah, you ask, but isn’t it simply a speculative assertion that strategic systems at the proverbial start will have needed to act at cross purposes to evolve?
No, because there must have been cross purposes available to act on if strategies were able to develop at all, since all strategies are ipso facto competitively and thus deceptively constructed, creating entities that, as strategic systems have been discovered to do, inevitably conflict.  And in ways that have allowed them to survive via the inevitable circumstances where strategies have had to develop competitive interests.  Interests that, in the sequential change of time, have developed a randomly chaotic system which, despite its trials and necessary errors, has eventually worked to the overall evolutionary advantage of strategic systems.
Why then was there anything like these systems in the universe to begin with since of course we can clearly see that such strategies are with us now.  That question however assumes there was a beginning, just as some assume there was a starting point for anything at all to exist.  I on the other hand am forced to assume there wasn’t one, a something being unable logically to arise from a nothing. Or, by an even lesser logicality, for there ever to have been a nothing.

Regarding what Charles Sanders Peirce had to say about everything having purposes.

May I mention as well

that we serve our own as well as others' purposes?
Everything in existence serves a purpose, whether it’s for our own or someone or something else’s prior purpose.  Which may in its turn be one of a series of purposes being served for the initial constructor of the first in that series of purpose servers; a series  which will tend, with intelligent assistance from other purpose servers, to predictively multiply itself exponentially (but not necessarily in a perfectly mathematical sequence).
And since a purpose requires an intelligence to form itself, all purposive somethings have been constructed by and for their purposes intelligently.  Some of these functional constructions having also been supplied enough of that existing intelligence to reconstruct and evolve themselves, and others more simply to consist of dullish servers in a train of future services.
And then if the initial purpose of all creative and constructive work in the universe was an intelligent one, who or what was the ultimate constructor?  We can logically, and then again with better logic, presume to have an answer, but we’ll never know to any certainty at all, or will we?.
Oh and yes, what was that initial purpose anyway, or what must it have been?
Or is it something that was always there?

And I haven't even tried to talk about how or why purposes can and will evolve in sequence to serve newer purposes countering those originally intended to be served. 

Our self structured capacities

Taken from the notes for a new book:

The human brain has restructured itself continuously since our species’ strategic needs and purposes diverged from those of our nearest ancestors - since we left the trees as they say to resourcefully walk about the earth.  The time taken for that measurably huge difference in the brain’s physical and functional complexity is evidence enough, for me at least, that these differences could not possibly have been brought about by mutational accident, and not even by a series of intelligent responses to any such a series of evolutionary events.
What must have had to happen were constructive responses to the “intelligence” of anticipation, based on our functional abilities to analyze our conceptions of strategic needs and responses to those from the very similar to the very different needs of others in the predictively foreseeable future.
And it bears repeating that the structural work required WAS done by our physical resources, and even if somehow magically directed from afar, needed the brain itself as an onsite observer and problem discerner as well as immediate construction trier and corrector of the inevitable series of construction errors.

Accidentally Acquired Intelligence?

Accidental Intelligence?

An accident can’t make something choose that has no ability to make a choice.  It can’t confer intelligence on something that can’t choose to use it.  So if an entity that’s supposed to be living can react to an accident by choosing a different path, then that entity has made a choice that the accident has caused it to make. Intelligence was at work within that entity as well as, in my view, “outside” of it.
Does that mean the accident itself was intelligently directed?  Not necessarily, as more likely intelligently created for what had likely been a different purpose.  It also means the living entity was intelligently devised, because being alive requires the ability to intelligently react.
Then how or why could intelligence be at work outside of that entity as well?  Because it took an outside event to produce the initial something that intelligence has evolved to advantageously react to.

So if we have an intelligent system that needs to evolve for the purposes of better taking advantage of accidents, then we’ve either had accidents that have always existed along with the intelligence that accidents then served to evolve, or had intelligence that created accidents as potentially beneficial, or accidents that, illogically, created intelligence (or had a form of logical accident that we can only conceive of as magical).
So then do we have what appears to be an evolving series of more effective accidents, which would seem to mean then that accidents were self created for a purpose?
Because the apparent paradox here is, first, that we’ve had accidents that have created intelligence. (Which would seem to be a logical impossibility).
Or second, intelligence that then created accidents for its own evolutionary purposes. (Except that, as another logical impossibility, intelligence had somehow not needed accidents to reach the stage where it began to need them.)
Or third, that accidents and intelligence somehow have existed for all of time as separate phenomena, each being necessary for the other to exist at all.
(Possible if only because of the impossibility of having nothing.)

And take mathematics for example, which many of our educated brethren see as evidence for a non-intelligent universe that follows its fixed rules in an automatically mechanical fashion, and yet if its systems haven’t learned to do these things intelligently, won't that mean they've never needed to be taught them?  The universe then being accidentally mathematical?
So again we come back to the only alternative set, a magical creator of these phenomena with conflicting purposes, or as some will say, no purposes, while they also say any appearance of purpose at all is accidental - since purpose requires an intelligence that these accidental forces did not have - because of course they could not - unless by magic.

What’s left then?  Can an intelligent universe have created what only appear to be accidents, or did an accidentally directed one create what only appears to be intelligence, yet at the same time do so in the presence of an unexplainably intelligent observer from which our more intelligent creatures have somehow now evolved?
Some observing physicist will now raise the possibility that multiple worlds exist which are also (or apparently) intermingled - one for example that’s unintelligently accidental (and neither frozen nor chaotic) and one that’s intelligent, yet not with any accidents available for that intelligence to have ever found the need to use.  (Neediness being logically unable, in my book anyway, to exist without a purpose.)
The question remains that since we, as humans, must use a trial and error method for the exercise of intelligence, how compatible is that to existing with an intelligentless system of accidents, unless it may have happened that accidents are not entirely a non-intelligent procedure?
In other words, if all’s said and done, there must be an element of intelligence to every accident, no?
And if intelligence cannot be accidentally caused, I must ask again, have all accidents been intelligently caused? 

Time Reversal and the like. Can we know the logically impossible to be possible?

John A. Wheeler, re A Life in Physics, page 347, commented in effect as follows:  You will say that the time reversal view of a torn piece of paper being ‘untorn' could never happen.  But in fact it could happen albeit with an incredibly small probability.  You and the universe won’t live or exist long enough to see it happen, yet in principle two torn sheets could weld themselves into a single mammoth sheet.  And the molecules of perfume that have spread to fill a room could migrate back and regather on the starlet who entered the room.

Wheeler’s argument appears to be then that no matter how unlikely the possible, the improbable is not the same as the impossible.
There are clearly several things wrong with this argument, logically as well as scientifically.  First, how did the reversal of a change somehow become a reversal of the “time” it took to make the change and then reverse it?  That would appear to be the problem whether time is seen as a separate dimension or a measure of the ongoing changes of all other dimensions in the here and now.
And if time is in fact a measure of the rate of change, then the sequence of those changes will continue to move in the direction that allows each bit of sequence to replace the other but never to effectively undo each others “doing.”  A happened sequence in other words cannot have never happened.
Further, a scientific theory that fails to recognize the role of purpose in all of the events it studies is not a proper demonstration of scientific logic.  A situation where nature will inevitably find some purpose for reversing the strategic processes that led over countless eons to the evolution of its regulated laws is simply not going to occur, as an intelligently devised strategy allowing it to start all of its systems over and reinvent those laws will not be found. If any thing is impossible, changing the beginnings of a system that has theoretically had no beginning seems to be that thing.

But, to take another tack, can’t something be illogically possible?  And if so, then anything is logically possible, right?  No.  Why not?  By our definition of sense and nonsense, okay?
But then, on the one hand, am I not playing with the necessary ambiguity of our words in order to offer evidence of the clearly impossible?  Yes, but on the other hand, I’d be violating all the rules of the game to claim to know, logically or illogically, that the logically impossible is possible.

Everything in the Universe is Intelligently Constructed for the Purpose of being Intelligently Operated

It remains a mystery as to how intelligence must have always existed if it's true that nothing could exist without it's help.     It's not explained by Gods or magic either by the way.  Those of us who don't believe everything in the universe but life is dead are likely to be accused of creationism, but all of them as well are required to believe that Gods and magic came from nothing, as otherwise they'd be neither godlike nor magical.  Just being mysterious doesn't seem to fill their teapot.

New book in development stage

I've changed the title of this blog to reflect the ultimate direction I've taken in my writing journey.  I'm preparing a sequel to the book below, re trust and deception, to demonstrate that these central aspects of biological intelligence did not arise, all by themselves and magically, from non-intelligent elements that are supposedly predominate in the universe.

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.

Proposal?

Here's a new comment from Baron P (at Acquired Purposes) that some may find interesting, as he's put the provenance of deception in a place I wouldn't have ordinarily expected to find it:

"The 'survival' strategy of the universe's energetic system is to learn of and anticipate the 'known' and concurrently expect the 'unknown.' Thus organisms with conscious connections to their surroundings learn to anticipate events and consequentially come to trust the anticipated.

And to distrust those signals that have not been to the same extent expected. And the signalers learn in turn to make signals conform to their competitive and predatory needs, and thus these 'deceptive' actions (as the more abstract thinkers have come to call it), have arisen and continue to fuel the evolutionary advancement of all purposive strategies."

Interesting?

Evolution By Everyone

Interesting exchange with Dr. David Sloan Wilson at his blog, Evolution for Everyone

http://scienceblogs.com/evolution/2011/05/whats_evolution_got_to_do_with_1.php

The following is slightly redacted, but hopefully not too far out of context:

On the subject of the function of traits, Dr. Wilson had commented that, "Not all traits are adaptive; they can be a product of drift, a byproduct of other traits, or adaptive in the past but not the present."

I commented: But that's the point, at some time in the evolutionary past, all traits were strategically successful behaviors somewhere. The question being, did these organisms then generate their strategies from experience, or if you are to continue arguing that they didn't, what was it that so magically produced them? Or did these first forms somehow cause their functions (as you seem to suggest) and functions somehow caused their strategies in turn?

Dr. Wilson was kind enough to answer: "I have difficulty understanding what you are driving at. If we restrict ourselves to adaptations that evolve by natural selection, it's true that they are strategically successful by definition, but this begs the question of how they evolved in the total population (e.g., by within-group vs. between-group selection, natural vs. sexual selection). If we consider the non-adaptive side of the evolutionary coin, then your statement "all traits in the end evolve from strategically successful behaviors" appears to be just plain wrong. Can you clarify what you are driving at, including what you think I am trying to hide from?"

["Hiding from" was an echo of something he'd said earlier, but I noted it was with reference to the new work being done under the headings of adaptive mutation, or self-engineering, or facilitated variation, or anticipatory systems, etc.]

I then left this answer for the record:

"OK, I'll summarize some of what is being discovered as succinctly as I can without making it an argument:
The cells that retain the memory of an experience then pass on that memory to those they have been divided into. Inheritance of acquired memories of experience, no? And many generations appear to be affected - and the effects of this experience can't be completely erased from the genome if the experience itself is replicated or repeated in a particular environment. And this seems one of the ways that cells evolve to anticipate and deal strategically with a multitude of problems.
Because it seems to be the present case with most social species that their form of culture is a preserver of learned strategies, some of which by reason of their effectiveness will become instinctive, and our earliest life forms may have started that instinctive process by passing the memories of learning directly through cell division. While later on when sexual selection and the like evolved, the mechanism for passing on what would be needed as socially instructive was a "culture" that required its lessons taught at least by example - and thus evolved our methods of communication for sharing memories that was more efficient then cell memory copying, especially as that original method of procreation did not apply all that well to multi cellular organisms.
Which leads one, or at least me, to opine that all evolution from the getgo was and had to have been a social/cultural phenomenon. Learning creates strategies which create forms to fit, which gain experience that strategies adapt to, and through cultural sharing by example or advances in communication, spread the impetus for readaptation throughout the groups accordingly.
Cultures assist in the heritability of acquired characteristics: Cultures provide the platform for their strategic development and purpose, and in addition help "spread the word" that accelerates the acquisition of these strategies "instinctively."
Strategy is the function of intelligence. The form alone has no intelligence. It can't choose, even though it's a cause of choice. The function chooses form and/or chooses how it will be caused to adapt.
There's more of course, but cutting to the chase, I don't think there is a non-adaptive side of the evolutionary coin and that indeed it's more than possible that "all traits in the end evolve from strategically successful behaviors. Posted by: Roy Niles | June 1, 2011 4:43 PM "

If I get an interesting response I'll post it here. Unless I get blown out of the water, in which case I'll deep six this whole posting.

**

Ok, I got a response from Dr. Wilson that, "This is cool stuff." However, "I think it is too extreme to say that all aspects of evolution are anticipatory. Good old fashioned Mendelian genetics still accounts for a lot."

And I said, "But having an anticipatory function doesn't negate the utility or purpose of these other processes. We, in short, anticipate the accidents of nature - without the one we wouldn't need or have the other."