Owning my Path

And if I

Asked you

To name

All of the

Things that you love,

How long

Would it

Take to

Name

Yourself?

                         ~ via TS

Sometimes you make a long journey for a specific reason only to find that your curiosity was leading you towards a mirage.

The wonderful thing is that you can always take the return flight home; you can always turn the steering wheel back, to your own road.

*

One of the most striking properties of survival-machine behaviour is its apparent purposiveness. By this I do not just mean that it seems to be well calculated to help the animal's genes to survive, although of course it is. I am talking about a closer analogy to human purposeful behaviour. These may include 'desire' for some object, a 'mental picture' of the desired object, an 'aim' or 'end in view'. Each one of us knows, from the evidence of our own introspection that, at least in one modern survival machine this purposiveness has evolved the property we call 'consciousness'.

 

The fundamental principle involved is called negative feedback, of which there are various different forms. In general what happens is this. The 'purpose machine', the machine or thing that behaves as if it had a conscious purpose, is equipped with some kind of measuring device which measures the discrepancy between the current state of things, and the 'desired' state. It is built in such a way that the larger this discrepancy is, the harder the machine works. In this way the machine will automatically tend to reduce the discrepancy - this is why it is called negative feedback - and it may actually come to rest if the 'desired' state is reached.

~ Richard Dawkins THE SELFISH GENE