If you allow purpose to organize that which comes under your conscious inspection, what you will get is a bag of tricks-some of them very valuable tricks. It is an extraordinary achievement that these tricks have been discovered; all that I don't argue. But still we do not know two-penn'orth, really, about the total network system.
But what worries me is the addition of modern technology to the old system. Today the purposes of consciousness are implemented by more and more effective machinery, transportation systems, airplanes, weaponry, medicine, pesticides, and so forth. Conscious purpose is now empowered to upset, the balances of the body, of society
There was once a Garden. .... In that garden, there were two anthropoids who were more intelligent than the other animals.
On one of the trees there was a fruit, very high up, which the two apes were unable to reach: So they began to think. That was the mistake. They began to think purposively.
By and by, the he ape, whose name was Adam, went and got an empty box and put it under the tree and stepped on it, but he found he still couldn't reach the fruit. So he got another box and put it on top of the first. Then he climbed up on the two boxes and finally he got that apple.
Adam and Eve then became almost drunk with excitement. This was the way to do things. Make a plan, ABC and you get D.
They then began to specialize in doing things the planned way. In effect, they cast out from the Garden the concept of their own total systemic nature and of its total systemic nature.
Nor is it helpful to recast the “systems view of life” into Gregory Bateson’s theoretical framework. Here, materiality is dissolved into interrelationships and then subjectivized as “minds” This framework might be somewhat comprehensible to an Eastern sage, but it divests substance, indeed nature itself, of its very physicality. Abandoning the study of things — living or not — for a study of the relationships between them is as one-sided and reductionist as abandoning the study of relationships for the things they interrelate. If traditional materialist mechanism strongly emphasized the object, often with results that inhibited speculation beyond the given state of affairs, Bateson’s emphasis on relationships verges on a subjectivism that could almost be taken for solipsism if one did not know more about Bateson’s work as a whole. The claim that “all experience is subjective” and that “our brains make the images that we think we ‘perceive’” borders on an idealist counterpart of Jacob Moleschott’s equally crude materialist maxim, “No thought without phosphorus.”60(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-philosophy-of-social-ecology#fn60)
Unlike science’s limited objectivity, dialectical naturalism’s objectivity is ethical by its very nature, by virtue of the kind of society it identifies as rational, a society that is the actualization of humanity’s potentialities.99(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-philosophy-of-social-ecology#fn99) It sublates science’s narrow objectivity to advance, by rational inferences drawn from the objective nature of human potentialities, a society that increasingly actualizes those potentialities. And it does so on the basis of what should be as the fulfillment of the rational, that is to say, on rational knowledge of the good and a conceptual congruence between the good and the socially rational that can be embodied in free institutions.