Natural motion

-Our beliefs about qualia should be able to make sense of potty-training a two-year-old.

-“But we could isolate the neuro-biological mechanism of needing to pee, and have it trigger a bell going off. So the feeling is purely physical!” It is probably truer than we know to compare the necessity of a physical system to the necessity of a biological urge. But a closer look at the comparison requires that we be able to divide it from a violent motion. Having someone hold your feet to the fire and the need to satisfy an urge are both pains, but one is the desire to reverse a movement the other is a desire to complete it. A natural necessity should be teleological. “Blind urges” all have an eye to an end.

– Are we just supposed to not notice that falling is an operatio of body? It’s not as if a body is suffering some mechanical conveyance when it falls – it’s exercising a natural tendency with extrinsic help. The same description can be given of eating, reproducing, digesting, sensing. Newton’s apple in an insight into nature.

-The force of gravity = resting, it falls. In stable equilibrium, it falls.

-Aristotle made motion for the sake of rest because he saw the operatio of body as attaining its natural place. But the operatio of body is not this, but falling. Bodies fall like eyes see. True, if there were only one body in the universe, it would not fall, but if there were only an eye in the universe, it would not see.

-The basic reality of nature is the system. We understand this though metaphors of the machine or computer but this could never be a system of substances. The system is a proto- city, where all the substances composing it are drawn together by their mutual needs. A body has a need from within to fall but requires another to do so in the same way that an animal has a need from within to reproduce or eat a deer.

-Energy is a commodity and currency in natural systems. The substances exchange it and use it to achieve their ends. It is conserved in the same way that any exchanged currency is conserved.

-Natural urges are sometimes cooperative and sometimes zero-sum-games. Nature desires both private and common goods.

-We can’t express natural desire except though desire language: “wants to” or “is trying to”. Feel free to say this is all a matter of language, but ride the taxicab to the end of the line, please. Your own desire to pee has to be a matter of language too. Riiiiight.


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