In a physical universe, movement is mechanical and particles are pushed by external forces. In a conscious field, motion can’t be an unconscious process because the field itself is self-luminous and aware. So if movement isn’t by external force, how does a conscious field move?
Notice your own consciousness. It’s always about something: the words on this page, the sounds in the background, the touch of the chair. You can’t find awareness that’s about nothing. Even if you try to look for awareness without content, that becomes the object your consciousness is about. This aboutness is called intentionality: your awareness always points toward an object.
But the objects of your consciousness aren’t passively registered like objects reflected in a mirror. In its bare act of awareness of something, consciousness is already pointing and reaching toward its chosen object. When you look at aboutness closely, you see it isn’t a static relation but inherently dynamic.
Your attention doesn’t merely scan the world randomly. It selects some objects rather than others. Your attention has preferences.
This inherent and natural movement of consciousness is will. You direct your awareness toward what you want. Rather than a mechanical oscillation in a field aimlessly following external forces, will is an internal movement choosing what it reaches toward.
Your will is always oriented in a particular direction. This orientation is so natural you rarely notice it. Your will is like a vector, it moves but it also has an inherent direction to that movement. You have many different desires but they all have one thing in common, they aim toward what you perceive as valuable and good.
What we perceive as good may not actually be good, sometimes we’re mistaken and think something is good but it turns out not to have the value we expect. But that isn’t because we aimed toward something we think is bad. We simply made a mistake about what’s good and discovered later we’re wrong.
We also desire things we know are bad for us, we eat that slice of chocolate cake instead of the apple. But that’s a case of weakness of will. We haven’t chosen something we think is bad, we think the chocolate cake is good. We recognise the cake is of lesser value when judged against our long-term goals of health, but in the moment, the instant pleasure of the chocolate cake appears higher value.
Your will always aims at what appears to be valuable to you at the time. Just as a compass always points north, your will always points toward the good. The movement of will can’t be value-neutral.
Waves of will
You reach toward what you find valuable and generate movement in the field in the form of waves extending outward. These waves are your will in action: your desires, intentions and choices made real in the field. These movements aren’t powerless wishes; they create real effects in the world. This is the causal power of consciousness.
As these waves of causal power propagate, they produce oscillations in the field like ripples spreading across water. But the field also contains innumerable other agents generating their own waves. As these waves interact, they form complex interference patterns.
The everyday version of this is familiar. In trying to fulfil your desires, you inevitably interfere with someone else’s. If your neighbour wants to blast heavy metal while you’re trying to sleep, the divergent wills collide and interfere with each other. Whenever agents have different goals that create incompatible effects in the world, there’s conflict.
If many agents with conflicting goals share the same field of action, some kind of coordination is needed. Without coordination, the interference patterns would create chaotic structure rather than stability. Most of our goals require sustained and coordinated action and that requires a stable background with predictable results.
But coordination isn’t the same as just letting things move without colliding. The collisions in the field are between wills, and the direction of will is never value neutral: it always aims toward the good. When the loud stereo overpowers your sleep, that isn’t coordinating the wills. It ignores the conflicting values and the loudest sound wins.
Coordination of wills means sorting outcomes into better and worse for the wills involved not by which will happens to be stronger.
This sorting isn’t something the laws of physics can achieve. Physics tells us that whatever will is causally strongest overpowers the weaker. The laws of physics make no judgement about what should happen; they only predict what will happen given the physical strength of the forces involved.
But we don’t sort outcomes this way. We don’t think the strongest is the best. If we did, no action could ever be wrong. A cruel act wouldn’t be wrong, it would simply be something that happened: the strong overpowering the weak with no value judgement attached.
That isn’t how we interact with the world. We all think certain outcomes are wrong and shouldn’t happen. This is an ethical judgement we all make, not a matter of opinion or personal preference. Whatever we may say in theory, none of us live as if it’s false.
This view can ground our judgements that some things are right or wrong in reality itself. Under naturalism it can only be justified in human nature: our rational or empathetic natures are the source of our ethical judgements. Naturalism has no place for good and bad in the world itself if all we have is a purely physical world. A physical description can provide a pattern, but it can’t give us a standard.
Patterns vs standards
Consider the difference between a pattern and a standard. A pattern can’t be right or wrong, but a standard is a rule by which we can judge something right or wrong. A pattern is just a regularity, a description of how things are. A standard is a measure that things can fail to meet; it tells us how things ought to be.
A hurricane has a stable centre. The water in a river flows along the path of least resistance. These are both patterns produced by an aimless process and neither can be right or wrong. There’s no standard to determine what patterns air currents should form or which path a river can take.
We may think a river taking a path that floods a town can be judged wrong, but that judgement can only be made against our standard that flooded towns are bad. We supply the standard, the river doesn’t know anything about towns. The river itself isn’t making an error.
What about patterns that have a function?
Some patterns do have a function and so give us goal-directed systems. A thermostat has a set-point. A heart has a function: it’s for pumping. A standard seems to come along with the function. If a thermostat doesn’t reach the set-point, it’s in error. If the heart doesn’t pump, it’s not performing the function and so we say it’s failing.
These functions give us working vs failing, success vs error. Here a standard seems to arrive with no mind behind it. Goal-directed systems generate standards without anything extra required. Maybe coordination is just a big feedback loop.
But we need to look more closely at where the standard comes from. The set-point of the thermostat is supplied by us, not the thermostat. The thermostat doesn’t judge that the room should be a bit warmer. The error is an error “for us,” relative to the standard we supplied, just like the river that floods the town. Even if the standard is built into the function of the machine, it’s still a standard borrowed from us.
Doesn’t evolution set the standard without a mind?
What makes pumping the heart’s function rather than making a thumping sound which it also does? We can judge a pumping heart is better than a failing one, but what makes the pumping its function is that it was selected by evolution and gets passed on. Nature selects what the heart is for, its goal. And if something has a goal, it has a way to be in error. That looks like a standard with no mind behind it.
Evolution gives us many such examples. When a baby sea turtle hatches out of its nest, it crawls toward the brightest part of the horizon. For as long as there have been turtles, the brightest horizon has been the open sea, because the sky and water retain the last light while the sand dunes are dark. So heading for the brightest light reliably took them to the water, they survived, and the trait was passed on through successive generations.
But in the modern world there are sometimes street lights behind the beach. The hatchlings follow the brightest light and they end up on the road and die. Everything in the hatchling is set for the ocean, but there’s no ocean. That’s an error in the strongest sense: it’s a state that can be right or wrong. Either the ocean is there or it isn’t, and no mind is involved.
But what makes the ocean the goal?
It’s true that the hatchling’s state is about tracking the ocean, because that’s what it was selected for. But the hatchling is never wrong about which light is brightest. It’s only in error if reaching the sea is its goal, rather than tracking brightness. What makes the ocean its goal? Only that turtles who followed the brightest horizon reached the ocean, survived and reproduced. But that assumes survival counts as success.
Survival isn’t success, it’s a pattern. What reproduced, reproduced. Calling it success requires a valuer who judges it so. A machine keeps to a target, and nature installs targets, but nature doesn’t decide which target is the right one.
The examples all show the same thing. Every borrowed standard points to a prior one. The thermostat’s set-point came from the engineer; the engineer’s sense of a comfortable room came from what he found good.
Every standard inside a mechanism is a real standard only because something that can judge value stands behind it. We can only have a genuine standard when there is something an outcome can be better or worse for. It needs a perspective the outcome can matter to, from which one thing can be found more significant than another. And only something mind-like does that. Something that set the point or the goal, because it judged it good.
The same point applies to the coordination of multiple wills with conflicting goals. That can’t be done by maintaining a borrowed set-point. It has to sort countless outcomes into better and worse for each of the wills involved. That is standard judging through and through. Whatever does that sorting isn’t an aimless process. It’s a valuer, not a mechanism.
The field as coordinator
We’ve seen that coordination requires a genuine standard and a genuine standard requires a valuer. So whatever sorts the conflicting wills of the individual subjects in the field must be mind-like, because to sort is to judge outcomes better or worse. We’ve already seen what it is to find something better and reach toward it: that’s will. A valuer isn’t a static judge; valuing is a movement toward the good.
So whatever does the sorting is a valuer with a will of its own. We understand the nature of our own will, but what kind of will is this?
It can’t be merely the aggregate of all the individual wills, because every subject is bound within the field and screened from all the others. If any of the individual wills were the standard for the rest, it wouldn’t be a universal standard. It would be a single will elevated above the rest by decree and that’s no less arbitrary than the strongest will determining the outcome.
Coordination of wills requires a vantage point none of the individual subjects have: one that can’t be screened or parochial and has access to every perspective at once. It must have an agency over and above the individual wills. The coordinating will is itself a mode of the field, distinct from the individuals within it.
The field can’t lack a will, because will can’t be a new property that appears only once the field has bounded individual subjects. A boundary can concentrate, differentiate, or constrain the field, but it can’t create a novel property the field doesn’t already have. A boundary can only reveal what is already there, the same way a prism reveals colours already latent in white light.
If bounded consciousness has will, then the field must also already possess will. And will, as we’ve seen, is never neutral: it always points toward the good. So the luminous field has a will of its own, directed toward the good, just like ours.
The intuitive image for this coordinating role is the conductor of an orchestra. An orchestra is made up of a collection of individuals with different instruments that produce different notes. A conductor is needed to harmonise all these divergent sounds. In one sense the conductor is part of the orchestra, yet at the same time must also be different from it. This is the same pattern of unity in difference: they are one thing (the orchestra) and also many things (individual musicians).
But the orchestra image is also misleading, because a conductor stands out in front of the orchestra, he’s not part of the music. That’s an image of a bound individual, not the medium in which those individuals are moving.
The sound waves of the individual musicians travel within a medium, and it’s the medium itself that’s conscious and mind-like. The coordinator doesn’t passively register the waves as an audience may hear the music. It hears each wave as better or worse for the will of the musician who sounds it. The coordinator is the witness to the entire depth and breadth of the field.
The laws of nature
In the luminous field the subject is the bounded light, reflected inward by its own boundary. The coordinator is that same light, but unbounded. It pervades the entire field, both inside each individual’s boundaries as well as in the connecting medium between them. This is one dynamic field of waves in motion, with two modes of activity.
The structure of the field itself coordinates the divergent wills, its responsive movement harmonising them into a coherent whole. We could think of the stable, measurable background of this coordination as the laws of nature. Just as our behaviour is the outward movement of our will, the laws of nature discovered by science describe the outward movement of the field’s will.
This ordering principle isn’t like an engineer who sets the parameters of allowed movement and then stands outside the system. It’s the internal dynamics of the system itself. The dynamic field has an independent movement of its own.
If the field’s will is directed toward the good, its first priority is the conditions each subject needs to sustain a stable resonance pattern, or in other words to survive. On the most basic level, our first desire is to survive and continue our existence. This orientation characterises not only individuals but the movement of the field itself. Survival is the precondition that must be in place before any other good can be pursued. Which means survival must be favoured by the structure of the field. Evolution by natural selection is one expression of this, it selects traits that sustain existence.
But survival alone can’t be the highest good. No one wants to survive at any cost. We need food to survive but we want enjoyable food. No one wants to eat gruel every day. We need air to breathe, but we want clean, fresh air, not foul, polluted air. We want an occupation that pays the bills, but we also want it to be an enjoyable and meaningful pursuit.
We’re attracted to beauty, justice and a whole life we would judge worthwhile. This orientation is as universal as hunger and as difficult to silence. Beyond survival we want fulfilment. Survival is an instrumental good, it’s a necessary condition that makes the pursuit of intrinsic goods possible. Everyone must obey the laws of nature, but within those laws, our free movement is allowed.
