We take the fact that life forms seek things for granted. We don’t ask why. Agency (“wanting” or “deciding” things) is as hard a problem in physics as consciousness:
Rocks don’t resist becoming sand but plants resist, by various strategies, becoming insect food.
We humans take “wanting” things to extremes. Some of us might spend a lot of time thinking about matters entirely unrelated to survival, like whether Captain Picard ages well in the new Star Trek knockoff.
Captain Picard is a composite invention, an abstraction for which ageing is a mere character concept discussed at meetings. Never mind, some of us might want that abstraction to be portrayed in a certain way. All life forms seem to need and want things; the most intelligent ones want more complex and less obviously necessary things.
All life forms seem to need and want things; the most intelligent ones want more complex and less obviously necessary things. At New Scientist, we are told that wanting things is a “superpower” that physics can’t explain.
But are we asking the wrong questions? “How did “wanting” things emerge?” at Mind Matters News
One commenter elsewhere wrote to say that animals want things because it is their “instinct” to do so. Fine but how do we account for it? Why don’t rocks have that instinct?
See also:
Why the mind cannot just emerge from the brain. The mind cannot emerge from the brain if the two have no qualities in common. (Michael Egnor)
and
Bernardo Kastrup: Consciousness cannot have evolved. How many joules of consciousness would make you a human instead of a chimpanzee? How many more joules of consciousness would make you a genius?