• Punshhh
    2.6k
    Right, but this isn't OUR agency. It is the agency of something of which we have no control over and are not a part of (the unconscious brain). We are separate from it even though we share the same house.


    But my point is that one is at liberty to programme/condition ones unconscious mind to the extent that one is able to act as a strategic agent. Also your point about our unconscious mind having predetermined what we are going to do etc, is only an observation of how our momentary responses work. Agency over longer time periods works out regardless. For example in my own life, I contemplated for many years what my ideal career path was, I consciously chose what that path would be and have now acted on that choice. As such I am in entirely different circumstances, doing something different to what I would have been doing if I had remained in the demographic etc that I was born into.

    I would call that autonomy, not agency. Agency implies careful deliberation, decision making, conscious choices etc.
    It is rudimentary agency I know, but it is deliberated and decisions are made, although there isn't conscious choice. The organelles within the cells are complex computational devices which develop, test and refine responses to environmental conditions.
  • Punshhh
    2.6k
    So are you talking about my fathers desire to ejaculate inside my mother? As that would be the purpose of the agent (my father) who chose to bring me in to existence.


    Im not sure that there was a lot of purpose there, more like desire, attraction etc. This goes back to my point about cellular life though. The purpose in your fathers action was biologically determined and driven by his cellular life.
    Or do you refer to all life when you say "US" as in "god was the agent who brought us in to existence".
    Yes, I did, I but I did state that it might be a process and not God, or an intelligent alien.
    Oh no, now I see it was the latter. But I have seen many people reject this notion in favor that there is no agency that brought us in, it was just a fluke of nature. single celled organism evolved after lightning struck certain chemicals in the atmosphere and we are now just an absurd, random nothing with no rhyme or reason. How do incorporate purpose then? It would seem to go back to what willowofdarkness said: "To think in terms of living for a purpose is to consider life meaningless. As if life was nothing, with meaning only to be found in escaping it to some notion of purpose."

    Yes it might well be a purposeless process which brought us into existence. But logically we can have no idea if this could be the case. Empirically based scientific enquiry cannot even address the question about our origin. Nothing we can rationally come up with can help us out on this score, because in either case(with, or without agency), what we encounter on the ground would be identical(i.e. the world we find ourselves in) and the alternative might be absolutely imposssible. We are blind.
    If there is no purpose, then we can't obviously incorporate one. Unless we accept that we might be mistaken and incorporate one anyway, which many people, do anyway. Personally I leave the question open, while maintaining a heathy contemplation and intuition on what the purpose is if there is one.

    There is another angle though and that is that we decide to trust nature and that nature is not somehow deceiving us. If we trust nature in this way, we can consider that all the information about our origin is somehow expressed, coded in nature, naturally. So an intuitive reading of nature might give us the answer. I do this to the capacity that I can and I have determined that there is agency present and active in nature before our eyes, so there might be grander forms of agency beyond our current level of perception. So on balance if one is looking to nature for guidance, I do consider that there is a such a purpose.

    Also I already addressed the point made by Willow.
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