Design and Artifacts

What about Artifacts?

What about artifacts - things humans or animals make to use? How do they fit into determinism? Just like anything else. 

If the deterministic process can produce human bodies and brains, it can produce jumbo jets and computers. The human is determined, the thoughts and movements are determined, the inventions are determined. The human brains cooperating and discovering and producing, are all determined precesses.

It is quite easy to see evolution and human intelligence as a continuum  on the way to jets and computers. You could say that jets and computers evolved through the processes of human minds and social and physical skills. 

You can say they were produced, not by humans, but by what produced humans. They were produced by particles obeying the laws of physics.

Not  on purpose, and not by accident, but because that’s what the physical interactions of particles led to.

The entire development of our world to its present state has  been without purpose or agency. All done by the determined interaction of matter. Any appearance of purpose or agency is a determined illusion by evolution to do with survival and reproduction. This illusion occurs in human consciousness.

The only thing that ever existed was particles, and the only thing that ever influenced them was physical laws. That is still the case today, even given the vast complexity that has evolved.

How does it Happen?

The universe, including  my little local world, is a mass of zillions of determined particles all obeying the physical laws. If you looked out your window and saw those particles bouncing around on their determined paths, all obeying the laws, determinism would make sense.But you are more likely to see a dog on the lawn, or a car passing by, or a child on a skate board.

How do those things come about? It doesn’t make sense that determined particles come together to produce those things by obeying physical laws. Why would particles want to get together and form a bicycle? Particles don’t have any aims or goals. How could they make something? Either a virus or a human or a radio?

Well, we do know that particles get together to form molecules and DNA and then life forms including mammals. And then came consciousness which developed thought, language and knowledge. The laws of physics do cover chemistry, biology, and natural selection shaping evolution. The evolution of the dog and the child and the skate board.

This is how particles, by themselves, can morph into motorbikes without any guidance or help other than the laws of physics which were in place at the beginning of time. And you would think that conscious minds with plans and purposes would be needed to create artifacts, but those minds also arise according to the laws of physics. 

If you’re looking at a motorbike, it is the end product of a long chain of determined events. One of the events being the evolution of homo sapiens.

Any Artifact

Any and all artifacts are produced by natural selection and particle behaviour (i.e.  determined processes). A watch can be traced all the way back to the factory, the designer, the parts production machine, the machine builder, the earliest use of watches, the passing on of watch  knowledge between generations and cultures, and then all the way back to brains that remember and function to make things, then further back to pre human ancestors and back to the first life forms and the formation of the universe. A particular watch can be traced all the way back to the big bang (in principle that is). It’s far too complicated in actuality. But you could fill a book on it for starters. Each of the atoms and subatomic particles within the watch have a particular path, a particular journey from the beginning of the universe. They were within stars and planets and rocks  to get to being a watch.

The influencing factors on those particles were many, including human DNA, human consciousness and society (i.e. other particles). None of those factors were guided by anything other than the physical laws of the universe. Human agency itself does not exist, except as a determined process, also caused by the laws of physics. It’s all clockwork.

The Sweeping View

In the sweeping view of particles to people, consciousness and jumbo jets, the knowledge required, and the planning and the design can be all left out of the equation. No guidance, plan or agency is required to evolve the original particles of the big bang into any form of object in existence today. The only source of change was always particle interaction according to physical laws.

That did everything, and still does, including any evolutionary or human designing, which are also pure processes of particle interaction. Our whole universe and everything in it is a lego universe. There are only the building blocks, but no builder of anything, only physical laws which do all the work.

Trains, boats and planes

Trains, boats and planes are all products of the universal laws, and come about by evolution which evolves things that make things. Evolution has produced brains and bodies which use information and skill to learn and manufacture.

You could trace the historical path of a particular car or a particular or a particular body, it’s the same thing. Both involve the tracing of how the physical particles arrived in their current formations due to the physical laws of nature. No designer or autonomous thinker is necessary. Everything that exists has arrived there naturally.

Jumbo Jets

It’s fair enough to imagine particles being determined in the fashion of billiard balls. All obeying the rules of physics to form gas clouds, stars, planets and life.

But what is difficult to understand is how meaningful knowledge, thought, research, communication and collaboration can be the result of determined events and determinism itself.

Those complicated and nuanced processes seem to need a freedom to be created and developed on the spot, and to be linked to people and teams of people and thinking minds. How can that all be determined?

What is, and where is the hidden link between the two apparent types of determined precesses? One simply physical and understandable (billiard balls), and the other involving human interaction and mind stuff. Or is it that the long, long period of evolution enabled the process to continually occur until our present situation seems so very far beyond the billiard ball model?

How, for instance could we trace a Jumbo Jet from the airport hangar all the way back to Neanderthal man or to the emergence of life? It must be possible because determinism is all there is. Determinism has done it, but how? How could you begin that exploration or conversation?

The answer could be similar to understanding the process of evolution by natural selection, where life forms today are so immensely complicated and purpose like, but were evolved by the purposeless, blind, determined process of natural selection.

What about TV

How could a TV set arise by natural selection? How could it have evolved? A TV is really a complicated stone axe. Both evolved from simpler forms of the same thing. A cathode ray tube and a stone flint for example.

What really evolved was the human brain. Memory, language, writing and scientific method all were the result of and co-evolved with the brain.

Ancient hands butchered and carved with stone tools. Modern hands, fingers, minds, written records and cultural cooperation have produced television sets.

The human mind has been designed by the blind unintelligent process of natural selection, and the TV set has come about by the intelligent design process of the human mind. The intelligence of the human mind has evolved unintelligently and this has led to designed artifacts being determined.

Human Achievements

Human achievements are also determined. They are carried out by humans and humans are made by natural selection. And natural selection is the natural behaviour of physical matter. The human brain as well as the human ability to store, teach and apply knowledge, are due to natural selection and natural processes.

The products designed and built by humans are the products of these natural processes and as such are natural processes themselves. It’s normal but not necessary to think of say space ships being built by humans. But you could also say that space ships are being built by natural selection.

The interaction between brains, people, knowledge and technology is irrelevant. All of that is determined by interaction between physical particles obeying physical laws. From the big bang to space ships, particles do it all on their own.

Evolution or Particle Behaviour

Looking to explain the design in the universe, a human tool for instance is the product of evolution. Natural selection built the human and the human mind, which evolved to operate at a thinking level, which used logic and ideas to design things that the original DNA and natural selection could not.

Blind evolution by natural selection produced the human which produced the culture which produced the human tool (a radio telescope for instance). Radio telescopes evolved by processes of natural selection, a completely blind process with no meaning or goals. There is nothing else around to do it. This  understanding is helpful and necessary to get a grasp on what we are and what we are doing in the universe and how it came about.

But there is one law, one overriding principle that reduces every other approach to truth to insignificance. Even evolution by natural selection becomes just another process determined by the laws of physics. This is the law of determinism or of cause and effect.

It is the fact that the current state of every atom in the universe at this present moment determines the state of the universe in the next moment. Events are caused by one sweeping movement of cause and effect. Everything is included in that process. Including actions, thoughts and your opinion of whether determinism is true or not.

Either at the level of fundamental particles, or neuronal electro chemical reactions or at the level of an idea expressed in an opinion. All are the same thing and equally determined by the physical laws themselves. That one principle is all that was necessary to evolve the universe from the beginning, 13.8 billion years ago to this very second.