Nature doesn’t have a consciousness, it just is. I think to anthropomorphize it as having one, to conceptualize it as being some kind of actor with goals or morals, is kind of to not understand it fundamentally, or to accept what it is. It’s just another extension of the naturalist fallacy.
There’s a flipside to this, and that’s the “blind nature” fallacy. Like Neodarwinists trying hard to ignore physiology and with that the fact that the way selection works is not a random process, but a process employing randomness strategically: The natural error in DNA transcription is quite high, correction mechanisms then bring that down to virtually zero, then, after that, mutations are introduced again. And it makes a hell a lot of sense: If you have a finch which has trouble getting food it’s much more fruitful to mess around with the beak shape than to mess with mitochondrial DNA. Our genome and physiology has ways of detecting environmental pressure and reacting to it on that kind of level. Any genomic line containing that kind of capability is way more fit in the ways of adapting than one that doesn’t, thus, it out-competes the others. Long since has. In case you have an hour for a physiology lecture.
Is it “a mind”? Well, it depends on your definition of mind. But it’s definitely not “mindless”: It’s deliberate. It’s not blindly throwing shit at the wall, it’s strategically throwing shit at the wall and coming down to it our minds don’t have a better strategy, either.
There’s a flipside to this, and that’s the “blind nature” fallacy. Like Neodarwinists trying hard to ignore physiology and with that the fact that the way selection works is not a random process, but a process employing randomness strategically: The natural error in DNA transcription is quite high, correction mechanisms then bring that down to virtually zero, then, after that, mutations are introduced again. And it makes a hell a lot of sense: If you have a finch which has trouble getting food it’s much more fruitful to mess around with the beak shape than to mess with mitochondrial DNA. Our genome and physiology has ways of detecting environmental pressure and reacting to it on that kind of level. Any genomic line containing that kind of capability is way more fit in the ways of adapting than one that doesn’t, thus, it out-competes the others. Long since has. In case you have an hour for a physiology lecture.
Is it “a mind”? Well, it depends on your definition of mind. But it’s definitely not “mindless”: It’s deliberate. It’s not blindly throwing shit at the wall, it’s strategically throwing shit at the wall and coming down to it our minds don’t have a better strategy, either.