this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think that's kind of the central difference to me at least. It's the self maintenance of the tension between the internal and external by reproduction of its component parts that do kinda be what distinguishes life and organisms from mechanistic objects. as you say, whether it's chemical or mechanical or electrical doesn't really matter.

But that's a statement about the ultimate consequences of what happens, which doesn't tell us almost anything about the proximate nature of the actions. That's what I mean by "projecting a teleology." Consider a mutant amoeba that does something not conducive to self-maintenance, there is nothing inherently different about the nature of those actions as biological processes, it requires a zoomed-out view to explain normal amoebas as conforming to selection pressures and this mutated behavior as deviating from selection pressures. "But the amoeba dies!" Yes, but the event of the death later on is not useful for explaining the fundamental nature of the action itself, the death is a distant, emergent consequence of the action, an event distinct from the action (as is successful replication, and even more so with the "event" of surviving past that point in the future). You're using teleological reasoning to make some sort of metaphysical claim about events and organisms that fundamentally don't make sense from a materialist perspective.

There's a direct throughline between . . . the constant bringing forth of what it lacks for its own continuation, and things like the special process of reproduction, cognition, experience, self-awareness, and social processes.

This, as I have abridged it, is completely true. The issue is that the "want" is just a metaphysical, teleological complication that doesn't help us understand anything and just serves to mystify a mechanical/chemical/electrical process that is already entirely understandable.

It's just... dialectics

Right, it is dialectics. The problem is that it's Hegelian dialectics, which is highly teleological and idealist, and not material dialectics.