Well, it's driven by the laws of this universe, ultimately. At the level of inanimate matter, that's thermodynamics and such. At our level, it's meta stuff like

Well, it's driven by the laws of this universe, ultimately. At the level of inanimate matter, that's thermodynamics and such. At our level, it's meta stuff like evolutionary processes. There's power in there, for sure. There's instinct and emotion, too. There's thinking and reason also. It's an all of the above type of thing. But we tend to stick to the things that are most obvious to us individually. The universe is a giant computer on a path to compute some kind of humongous outcome. We're just execution units carrying out subroutines. We may or may not have some freedom locally (that's another debate).