8. Design, Intentionality, Life, Nature

8.1  Nature (evolution) is a blind watchmaker and does not "consciously" "design" anything.

8.2  We (specimens of the homo sapiens species) have eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to understand. We are percievers. And we do "consciously" "design" lots of things, from nice beds to go to sleep in to unspoken social contracts to supercomputers.

8.3  Nature's blind designs serve no purpose. No purpose that we can ever hope to discern, at any rate. (Compare 3.3: "... We suffer existence because of the biological imperative of replication ..." -- is replication its own "purpose"? We shall return to this ...)

8.4  Our intentional designs do serve a purpose: we wish them to do something to help us survive or to make our lives better. ("Survival" has at least two meanings: One, I survive as an individual organism, putting off death as long as I can; Two, the human race as a whole survives, putting off extinction of the species for as long as it can.)

8.5  Thus, something new has entered the universe: intentionality. Maybe that's a fancy way of saying that somebody or something now has a stake in it all: we do -- don't we? It "matters" to us whether we continue to exist or not -- both on an individual level and a larger group level.

8.6  We have our intentions; we have our understanding and design skills. Soon, we will be designing life forms from raw molecules and snippets of DNA both "found" in Nature and newly invented by us. Technically, we already are.

8.7  When did intentionality enter the universe?