In Darwin’s big picture, hummingbird evolves to live and produce viable offspring, and that's his purpose, the big evolutionary why for all his activities.  Hummingbird expresses his purpose in all his activities and bodily structures.  Hummingbirds aren’t machines that act as if they have purpose, nor is purpose our human projection of meaning onto a machine.  Hummingbird’s way of being, his consciousness and his purposes, are all inseparable. 

 

You say, OK, where does purpose come from?  I answered your question above.  Look at the subject of the active-voice sentences: hummingbird.  Hummingbirds produce their own purpose.  Schrodinger’s missing latch-key is right here: Living beings are causal agents, with awareness, who bring purpose into the world.  An organism is an emergent, whole thing, a conscious agent who acts for his own purposes.  An organism brings a new level of causation into the world.    

 

Hummingbird and me are I-and-Thou, both of us causal agents with our own purposes.  We're perpetrators of causation, not victims.  We engage with our environment.

 

Let’s use amoeba as another example.  The Life of Amoeba consists of adjusting, surviving, reproducing in an ever-changing environment.  Mr. Amoeba doesn’t have a brain or a rarified consciousness like ours, but the organism, as a whole, knows what he knows.  The environment bombards amoeba with light waves, jiggling molecules and other data, and amoeba separates signal from noise.  Mr. Amoeba gives meaning to the buzz of information, converting it into, “go here, don’t go there, eat this, don’t eat that.”  He gives meaning to the buzz in accordance with amoeba’s ends: go here because it’s safe, eat this because it’s good.  A purposeful mind is making sense of the buzz of information.  Mr. Amoeba has evolved to know these things; he is an agent who lives with purpose, said purpose, stated in cold evolutionary terms, being to survive and produce viable offspring.  No one else causes Mr. Amoeba to act the way he does; Mr. Amoeba does it himself.

 

“Being-at-work staying-itself” is a wonderful phrase that Stephen Talbott borrows from the Aristotelian world; see his article, Evolution and the Purposes of Life, in The New Atlantis (Winter 2017).  The complexity within little Mr. Amoeba is beyond our ability to understand or quantify.  How does Mr. Amoeba keep it all together?  In the words of Mr. Talbott, “The relevant processes -- generally involving trillions of diffusible molecules making their way in a watery medium -- remain ‘on track’ only because the organism, as a unified center of agency, is being-at-work-staying-itself.”

 

Hence my theme: a living being is a center of awareness who organizes his own activities to go about living, being-at-work-staying-himself, according to his own purposes, which purposes include survival and reproduction.  Mr. Amoeba has evolved over billions of years to be just this: a conscious, causal agent who organizes his activities by his own purposes. 

 

What I love is that every organism goes about being-at-work-staying-himself in his own way.  Nature is wondrously profligate with its ways of being.  A hummingbird hovers.  A wolf lives in a wolf-pack and fulfills his roles in the social unit.  I expect that wolf is fully alive and himself when fulfilling his roles.  A dog lives in a human-pack and has roles in our social unit, if such can be said of mooching.  But then, have you ever seen the joy of a working dog doing his job?  Maybe that’s authenticity, for your nature to express itself fully in what you do.  Sometimes I was lucky enough to feel that way with my children, even when they were teenage know-it-alls.  In contrast, when purpose goes wrong it produces nasty things like cancer, which is cell division operating for itself, not for the whole.

 

Where am I going with all this?  Our grab-bag of causal theories needs a theory for living beings, as causal agents who bring purpose, agency and meaning into the world, and who create new causal chains.   A living being requires a causal theory that’s relevant to him, not merely his constituent parts.  We must explain a whole being by looking at the whole of him and the purposes he seeks to fulfill and the agency he brings to the job.  To see a living being as It, a machine-like product of material causation, is to miss the essence of him.  The causal theory must recognize Thou.

 

My next essay, Origin of Life, is a case-study on purpose and agency.  I talk about homeostasis and the origin of life, which is how a sack of molecules becomes Mr. Amoeba.  For a living being, homeostasis is being-at-work-staying-itself.