Philosophy

While rereading Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return, I am approaching the exposition of the false philosophy imposed by Aycharaych on the mind of Jaan but, before engaging with a falsehood, it might be helpful to present some, hopefully honest, philosophical reflections based on what has already been said.

Ivar Frederiksen had reflected that:

"It's bleak, believin' in nothin' except accident." (Captain Flandry, Riverdale, NY, 2010, p. 148).

Why bleak? What are the alternatives? "Accident" here does not mean mere randomness which, as a Danellian remarks near the end of The Shield Of Time, would be incapable of generating or sustaining a stable environment. "Accident" means the absence of conscious design. Before the first conscious being capable of designing anything existed, there must have been some unconscious development that generated such beings. Natural selection is an unconscious process although its outcomes can be misunderstood as instances of design. (I have just read some Jehovah's Witness propaganda.)

Organisms were naturally selected for sensitivity to environmental alterations. Again, mere sensitivity, e. g., a plant responding to water and sunlight, is unconscious. However, beyond a certain level of organismic complexity, sensitivity becomes conscious. Thus, organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation. Being became conscious. It follows from this that consciousness is indeed an accidental (unintended, unplanned) side-effect or byproduct of the unconscious process of natural selection but it does not follow from that that consciousness is meaningless in the sense of valueless. We are conscious beings and we value our existence. Indeed, only conscious beings are capable of valuing anything. No value judgement preceded or informed our genesis but none was needed.

Being can be analyzed as an interaction between change and resistance to change, or energy and inertia. The most inert level of interaction is inanimate matter. Life is more dynamic. It resists change (preserves self and propagates species) by change (transformation of inanimate into animate etc). The most dynamic level is human (or superhuman?) consciousness in which qualitatively new aspects of being are continually perceived or created. (I mean that this is what happens when human life is freest and at its most creative.) But, even at that most dynamic of levels, it remains necessary to maintain a material and cultural environment. Thus, resistance to change remains present but is most fully subordinated to novelty and creativity.

Thus, I suggest that the most basic, pre-conscious, cosmic forces are energy and inertia and that fully liberated consciousness is the peak of their spiral development.