I have written here on a “science of happiness” or a scientific ethics. I want to extend this slightly and tie it into the ideas presented in this thread.
You will notice that there is a pattern present in my view of the mind (what is going on behind the curtain of consciousness), my view of the world of cause-and-effect at its ultimate level of analysis (what is going on way beyond what we can observe at the quantum level), and my views presented in the thread on Action and the Soul.
The pattern is essentially the Darwinian algorithm and the Darwinian algorithm is essentially guided, blind search. Blind search is not an explanation of any phenomenon because it essentially boils down to saying “given a long enough time and a random process, everything will occur”. The purpose of an explanation is to reduce the phenomena to their essential principles, to squeeze out the noise and leave only the signal in its most compact form. So, blind search is a non-explanation… it leaves all the noise and does not reduce the signal to its elements.
The beauty of the Darwinian algorithm is that it provides a search process that is not blind but which is rudimentary enough that it can operate within a clockwork universe. Furthermore, the Darwinian algorithm is itself an a priori process! Determining what the particular results of the Darwian algorithm are (that is, what has happened to evolve) and how, in particular, they arose are empirical questions. But standing entirely apart from these empirical questions is the a priori, umbrella process by which the entire scheme operates.
Tying all of these ideas together, I will now present a Universal Praxeology.
The universal praxeology is essentially the idea that the Universe acts. It is the logical consequence of taking the idea of the Universe as an acting being seriously.
The Universe - insofar as we experience it - consists of the Urge, Physics and Awareness. The Urge and Awareness are metaphysical, that is, they lie outside the domain of physics proper (the world of cause-and-effect). In ourselves, the Urge is connected to our Awareness. Therefore, it is reasonable to leave them connected in the general case. This means that the Universe itself experiences a sense of satisfaction or rest unless it is disturbed. The Universe is disturbed as an unintended consequence of its unformed Urge which gives rise to the world of cause-and-effect. The world of cause-and-effect is a disturbance of the perfect repose of the Universe. So, we can think of this in analogy to an electrical circuit… there is a current source (Urge), resistance (world of cause-and-effect) and a current sink (Awareness).
Because the Urge is unformed, it is not action like human action. Human action is the state of affairs where the human being looks into the future and chooses ends and the means to attain those ends on the basis of future expectations. The Urge is an ultimate explanation and, therefore, cannot be explained in terms of anything simpler than itself. Hence, it must be unformed. It has no future expectations and it does not choose ends or means to attain those ends. Rather, it is pure, unformed urge to be satisfied. I believe these ideas are consistent with the Occult/Kabbala description of the Ein Soph.
We know about urge because we experience it. It is generally not feasible to know from inspection that an event is, in fact, uncaused. However, we directly experience the irreducible urge to act. Because this human urge (animals clearly exhibit the signs of experiencing it, too) exists within this Universe, we know that it is part of the real world. I’ve categorized Urge as a metaphysical phenomenon (Unmoved Mover) because of theoretical problems with attempting to provide mechanistic explanations for it that I haven’t gone into in this thread.
The Universe itself cannot act (the Urge is unformed). But since the Urge is unformed, the Universe also cannot not act, either, that is, it cannot be sure never to act. Hence, the Universe sometimes acts without meaning to, that is, structure inadvertently emerges from the Urge and gives rise to the world of cause-and-effect at its most rudimentary level. When we say “the Universe acts” it is in this sense that we mean it - the Universe acts inadvertenly.
Awareness is also a metaphysical phenomenon within my taxonomy. This is the second principle of Universal Praxeology: The Universe is aware. Misesean satisfaction (and want) is experienced as part of our awareness. On this view, awareness does not serve a function but, rather, is simply a fundamental property of the Universe in which we partake. That is, all matter in the cause-and-effect world is aware to one extent or another and, when properly configured (in the shape of an animal body/brain) gives rise to the elaborate level of awareness which we have and permits the elaborate or elevated sense of ecstasy (satisfaction) which we experience.
For those who will balk that this all sounds extremely religious, I will make the analogy of a radio receiver circuit. When matter is properly configured into a circuit of wires, insulators, inductors, capacitors, resistors, transistors, crystals and so on, you will have a radio receiver that transduces vibrations in the electromagnetic medium into mechanical, audio-frequency vibrations of air, permitting you to “hear” radio signals. The signals are there whether you have a radio that receives them or not and the materials from which the radio is constructed remain RF active whether or not they are configured into a radio. However, the sensitivity of the radio components to RF signals - when properly configured - is immensely greater than the sensitivity of the components laid separately.
This is the sense in which I mean that the Universe is “aware”… the Universe is an aware, feeling place, everywhere. However, it is immensely more aware and feeling within the human or other animal brain than elsewhere.
Awareness/consciousness, as I pointed out in an earlier post, is an effect that does not matter. Hence, we do not need to provide any kind of causal explanation for awareness, except to explain the antecedents of awareness in the world of cause-and-effect.
Awareness itself is unformed, like the Urge. If it were not, we would have to provide some kind of functional or cause-and-effect theory of it. But since we’ve placed it firmly in the metaphysical realm, we must admit that it is unformed. Unlike human beings, the Universe has no preference between positive or negative awareness. It is not averse to pain nor does it have an affinity for pleasure.
Nevertheless, everything that exists within the world of cause-and-effect is - as Blavatsky states in The Creative Will - “seeking what it likes” and “avoiding what it dislikes.” We state this in the case of human beings as a purely formal correlation. There is no reason that we cannot state this as a purely formal correlation with respect to every other entity in the Universe once we’ve already admitted that the Universe acts and the Universe is aware. That is, we can say that the electron is satisfied by being near a positive charge and is dissatisfied by being near another electron. The alignment of positive awareness in the human experience with that which is consistent with human nature (and vice-versa) suggests that this alignment may hold for all other entities, as well. Hence, an electron not only is satisfied but feels satisfied by being near a positive charge.
I’m still sketching out ideas in this direction but to give a clue of where it could be leading: there is a strong analogy between energy in physical systems and money in human society. Energy can take many forms and is frequently exchanged between these forms - it is a bit of a “universal medium of exchange”. It may be possible to derive a priori laws that explain why physical entities that are “seeking what they like” and “avoiding what they dislike” should be as we observe that they actually are in the world of cause-and-effect.
Also, I think it is possible to connect the idea of action (urge) with Darwinian selection at all levels of existence. We observe it in biology, in economics, in social hierarchies, in law and morality (see the linked article at the beginning of this post) and even - if I am right - in consciousness and the rudiments of the Universe itself.
Clayton -