Deriving Awe :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Deriving AweHaving become deeply compelled by the ability of evolutionary theory to insure a story that consumes or subsumes all others, I have followed the story of deepen back beyond the origin of life, beyond the formation of the solar system, back to a point where the first something came into existence. though it may not do so for every iodineness, the story even allows me iodin more step along this rewinding trajectory, a step toward rejecting the need for whatsoever endeavor 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 sulphur. This is not to burn the phenomenally intricate, ordered and interdependent systems that organize matter in our universe, hardly rather to understand creation in terms of an infinite prop of possibility through which navigation occurs fueled by random change. My story, then, becomes one in which the Beginning is really just the beginning of one data track through the infinite dimensions of possibility, or what Daniel Dennett calls design space (Dennett 1995). Order or design does not rely on the Word or intention but is produced as changes accumulate and become directed by one another, restricting and refining a particular branching journey among the possibilities.Thus, orbit backwards along the story of evolution I grasp randomness and a Wordless beginning. Reaching forward into new 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 truly undefendable of non-algorithmic activity, and if we have such brains, and if our brains are themselves the products of an algorithmic process...an algorithmic process (natural plectron 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 proce ss 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 independently of and has the power to manipulate evolutionary processes. It defends the refusal to believe that human agency, drop by the wayside will, meaning, responsibility, etc. are all reducible and ultimately adaptive illusions. Yet, even desirous we are of such a defense, the very ability to accredit and interpret that we seek to uphold as a human superiority of evolution must also cause us to recognize the flaws in this attempt to secure a degree of evolutionary removal.