Deriving Awe :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Deriving AweHaving become deeply compelled by the ability of evolutionary theory to reveal a account statement that consumes or subsumes all others, I have followed the story of change back beyond the origin of life, beyond the formation of the solar system, back to a dot where the first something came into existence. Though it may not do so for everyone, the story even allows me one more step along this rewinding trajectory, a step toward rejecting the assume for any intention or plan by upholding the power of random change to produce order. I have found it very useful to tell a story in which the absolute truth is randomness. This is not to ignore the phenomenally intricate, ordered and interdependent systems that organize matter in our universe, but kind of to understand creation in terms of an infinite dimension of possibility through which navigation occurs fueled by random change. My story, then, becomes one in which the offshoot is really just the beginning of one path t hrough the infinite dimensions of possibility, or what Daniel Dennett calls design space (Dennett 1995). Order or design does not blaspheme on the Word or intention but is produced as changes accumulate and become directed by one another, restricting and refining a crabbed branching journey among the possibilities.Thus, reaching backwards along the story of evolution I grasp randomness and a Wordless beginning. Reaching forward into cutting designs and increasing complexity I suddenly encounter human agency and imagination and I am catapulted into the possibility of transcending design space. If a brain were unfeignedly capable of non-algorithmic activity, and if we have such brains, and if our brains argon themselves the products of an algorithmic process...an algorithmic process (natural selection in its various levels and incarnations) creates a non-algorithmic subprocess of subroutine, turning the whole process (evolution up to and including...brains) into a non-algorithmic process after all. This would be a cascade of cranes creating, eventually, a real skyhook (Dennett 1995)This argument suggests that natural selection of random change (AKA cranes) has created a skyhook- something that exists one by one of and has the power to manipulate evolutionary processes. It defends the refusal to believe that human agency, free will, meaning, responsibility, etc. are all reducible and ultimately adaptive illusions. Yet, however desirous we are of such a defense, the very ability to know and interpret that we seek to uphold as a human transcendence of evolution must as well as cause us to recognize the flaws in this attempt to secure a degree of evolutionary removal.