Quote of the Week
(December 16, 2024)

Cruise missiles — and, for that matter, kitchen blenders, electric hand drills, and textile looms — consist of materials we articulate together for use as tools in accomplishing our own tasks. The “top-down” ideas guiding assembly are ours; they do not come to expression through holistically active developmental processes in which all the growing parts participate. Our ideas are not native to the collection of parts. Our ideas are not active at the very root of material manifestation in the way that physical laws and biological principles are inseparable from the substance in which they work. We merely rearrange, in an external manner, materials already given to us. We cannot penetrate to the inherent lawfulness of physical materials with the force of our wills, except in moving our own bodies. (And even there, the doing is currently inaccessible to our understanding.)

When we want to explain the operation of a kitchen blender (or a missile), we require no reference to its intentions, or to any striving toward a future state. When we do make such reference, we are really talking about our own purposes in structuring the device for employment in service of our interests. There is no more an immanent end-directness in a cruise missile than in a blender. Both devices are simply put together in accordance with our purposes.

By contrast, a developing organism’s living “trajectory” results from its growing directionally into its mature functioning. We never see a designing power or force that assembles an organism from pre-existing parts in anything like the way we build tools and machines. Organisms are not designed and tinkered with from without, but rather are enlivened from within. The wisdom we find at play in them is intrinsic; it is their own in a sense wholly untrue of the external intelligence with which our mechanical inventions are structured.

(from Chapter 10, “What Is the Problem of Form”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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