I did a search but didn't look closely enough, so I had taken the jar comment to mean "mere container". Thanks for explaining. I'm not sure I like the metaphor

I did a search but didn't look closely enough, so I had taken the jar comment to mean "mere container". Thanks for explaining. I'm not sure I like the metaphor because everything in the jar is doomed, there are no opportunities for the alternatives to arise that the jar must choose between and no circumstances where that choice then affects the survival of the jar. Because I recognize that many are uncomfortable with the idea that things without brains might make choices, I was trying to speak in a way that let "choice" be a stand in for a scenario where selective pressures on some group of species cause an adaptation in some other species which benefits the survival of the initial group. "Intent" being added by the storyteller (me) to help with the explanation, but without importing any claims about cognition. I was avoiding taking a stance about whether the ecosystem makes a choice in the more traditional sense, with cognition in the mix, because I don't have any evidence of that, and I probably never will. But you're taking a stronger position. You're saying that it absolutely does not have the capacity for intention. That strikes me as unknowable, how can you be sure? Presumably this: > because ecosystems tell no stories, we can only ascribe stories to them My dog tells no stores, but I think it's reasonable to talk about her intentions. When I'm playing a game against an adversarial AI and it attacks or defends, it's reasonable to talk about its intentions. We are the storytellers, we get to decide which part of our stories are the setting (emergent phenomena) and which parts are the characters (intentional action). They're mutually exclusive for any given story. But you can always tell a different story where the white blood cell is no longer an emergent phenomenon of the immune system but is instead a defender of the realm. As long as the stories are helping you make falsifiable predictions at the end of the day you're still going science. > Even if you didn’t mean it literally, it is a turn of phrase which encourages in others to see something in the natural world that simply isn’t there. As mentioned, I was avoiding taking a stance about it because panpsychism is out of scope here, but I did mean it literally. Science can't even establish an objective understanding of human intention. Some would say all phenomena are emergent phenomena and the notion that intention is a delusion. I'm not one of those people, but that's where stasis among cognitive neuroscientists is. We're nowhere near where we'd need to be to assert that a complex system does not have whatever it is that we do, we can't even be sure that we have it. That's why I want to defend my habit of treating things like ecosystems as if they have intentions, we can't know objectively either way, so it's fair game for creative explanation. It's also more fun.