From: rodhemsell@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: E,ID&IY: Question for Rod
Date: August 5, 2005 8:11:18 PM EDT
To: rjon@vzavenue.net
Reply-To: postaum2005@sriaurobindocenter-la.com

You know, that whole chapter from the Life Divine, Ascent and Integration,
is the answer and also thoroughly explains his philosophy of evolution.
Another similar answer can be found in Heidegger's Philosophy of Reason
and Whitehead's Process and Reality. Design or pattern is what is
traditionally known as Form and process is traditionally known as
becoming-energy-possibility-potential-substance-matter, etc. In
philosophy, which was the same as science up til about 1700, it was
generally understood that things become what they essentially already
are. Sri Aurobindo recaps this when he says (2) that consciousness
cannot emerge from Inconscience, therefore the principle must already
be contained in matter. The philosophy of reason, similarly, says that
everything that exists has a cause or sufficient reason for being what
it is. For SA in LD it is Consciousness-Force or Supermind which is the
fundamental cause(reason) of existence, from which emerges each
principle in evolutionary succession and in all its manifold
expressions. This is more than design and more than intelligence. It is
the Self-Will of the Infinite which is, in harmony with Plato and
Aristotle, at once the Eternal Idea and the Phusis unfolding in time
its Logos, the Purusha sanctioning its force of Prakriti who works out
through process things that exist according to their essence, through
whatever temporal conditions, resistances, circumstances, etc. That's
"time."

Intelligence is a behavior. It is usually understood as
a rational behavior, one that calculates, deduces, etc. In
developmental psychology it can also be artistic behavior, political
and social leadership behavior, creative dance behavior, etc, and not
just linear symbolic behavior. As SA says in that chapter and as
psychology has amply demonstrated, it is any form of purposive
behavior, including that of paramecia and bees. Intelligent behavior
seems to be a characteristic of all life. In the human it becomes
overtly, characteristically mental-synthetic. Since mathematics became
the paradigm for demonstrable truth, it has become possible to measure
intelligence in the human and on down to the behavior of bees and
paramecia. So the early evolutionists like Haekel and Wallace, equals
of Darwin, went to great lengths to describe and quantify
patterns/designs in nature to prove that evolution was a coherent,
meaningful, intelligent process-explanation of natural phenomena. They
considered themselves "monists" and many mathematicians in the 19th and
20th century have concurred that natural design is something more than
chance occurances and cannot be explained by the latter. It seems to be
only the atheists that want to insist that only what is quantifiable is
valid and everything invisible has to be attributed to "chance." They
can't demonstrate chance mutation any more than we can demonstrate
inherent self-will. The mind is trying to explain a level or
magnitude/complexity of reality that is beyond its grasp. So science
has its convenient reductions as does religion. The reality itself is
however beyond mind, and not just present temporal mind, but mind
period. The new paradigm in physics and biology is therefore becoming
more holistic, chaotic, mystical. "Intelligent design" is a kind of
metaphorical mental phrase that describes more than it can explain
about a mental perception of the nature of physical existence as human
consciousness conceives it. It is no more or less "abstract conceptual"
than "random mutation" or "natural selection." As SA said, these
phrases don't really explain anything. So, along with SA we should seek
an "adequate" explanation of the processes of nature. It is more than
intelligent design and more than chance, it is the "logic of the
infinite."