The primacy of desire

I'm thinking about a post I made earlier, where I said, "There is something important about the primacy of desire. Important even for human ethics. Desire is forward-looking. Explaining motivation by pointing to past utility can leave out desire."

A lot of evolutionary talk about the origin of ethics focuses on the useful: but it all starts with desire. And ends there too. Somewhere Nietzsche talked about the desire of things in nature to discharge themselves... Now Nietzsche's no metaphysician, but remembering what he said further reminds me of the neo-Platonic expression, "The good is self-diffusive."

Another thought about another quote from that earlier post:

"It may be that evolutionary utilitarianism inasmuch as it treats the useful as prior to the intrinsically desirable, is likewise an unwitting anthropomorphism inasmuch as it treats nature as a whole as if it were a either person engaged in instrumental reasoning..."

Now evolutionary psychology doesn't HAVE to talk that way, but if it ignores the primacy of desire, then it can't help but treat nature in purely instrumental terms.

On the other hand, is the desire to survive is the only desire it need affirm? What if animals don't desire that per se? How does the per se desire relate to survival? For example, to enjoy food...?

Isn't it true, that by treating the self-ish gene as a kind of primordial life form, Dawkins gives a primacy to a fictional desire, while rendering desire as experienced in animals as merely instrumental? Dawkins objects to the weirdness of religion: well, what should we say about this? It seems that weirdness is fine when HE comes up with it...

Finally, a third quote from the same old post: "... looking at the role of desire in motivating animals operation and comparing it to the past utility, etc. I am reminded of the light/aperture metaphor that I used earlier. That is, aspects of animal (and other) evolution that can be described in mechanistic terms complement the teleological aspects in a manner analogous to how an aperture lets in light."

Yes. One can never describe desire as such using purely quantative terms and obscure variables. But the truth is that without desire, there is no human agency. There is no push and pull as exercised by human agents. Without desire, "push" is a name for tactile pressure... nothing more. So if the physics of non-living things is saturated with hidden desire, what are we to say about evolution and survival? If there is something desire-like in nature, then that surely would be compared to the quantitative aspect of our mechanistic descriptions as light is to an aperture.

Let the Light in!

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity. He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem. But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones. In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again. They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is in fact different from the one that came before. Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...

naturalism (or rather, anti-supernaturalism) and preternaturalism

I will use the term "preternaturalism" to designate a willingness to posit causes that are less than divine but which stand above and beyond those observable ones we see operating within the laws of nature. A naturalist might oppose theistic arguments from miracles or design by arguing for the possibility of preternatural causes. Such an argument, however, would bring us back to Zeus and Hera, tree nymphs and the like: a supernatural explanation would, by contrast, be more conducive toward a scientific approach to nature (i.e., positing only laws that are falsifiable when doing science).

The Human Question

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