Dear Sir,
(On his essay) You are right that "our pursuit of goals depends on the contextual occasions of life". How do we fix a goal? We feel the deficiency of something which creates a need in our mind. If we have the knowledge of the mechanism to fulfill the need, we fix that as goal and direct the necessary agencies in our body to execute the task. For this reason, there is a brief time lag between the feeling of the need and its execution, which is called the Readiness Potential (RP). Thus, the goal is related to fulfilling the need - hence beyond survival. It extends to food, shelter, survival and procreation in all life forms, who only respond to the given situation based on past memory.
Though some animals and birds appear to plan for the future, it is related to these four areas based on memory of experience or observation and as a response to impending signals. Only human beings truly plan for the future. Dr. Jeremy England is correct in extending these instincts to inanimate objects, because if we precisely define life (separate from consciousness), it behaves mechanically. Once our first heart beat starts, it continues perpetually mechanically. When it stops, our body disintegrates. Our senses appear with the body and disappear with death. Thus, laws of increasing entropy drive matter to acquire life-like physical properties. But this is not consciousness, because it is mechanical.
You are right that "living organisms seek order, but as we age we lose order". The reason is related to the nature of time evolution, as separate from Darwinian evolution. Time evolution is applicable to everything that exists in the same manner. It has six stages: 1) from being as cause to 2) becoming as effect. 3) Growth due to accumulation of similars, 4) Transformation due to harmonious accumulation, 5) Transmutation due to non-harmonious accumulation and finally, 6) Change of form or destruction by disintegration. You are talking about the fourth and the fifth stages. This is the "basic natural order, according to England, that is dissipation-driven, aided by self-replication and restructuring".
When you are speaking of a "mindless process where matter, is a dissipation-driven organization, that naturally seeks self-replication to ramp up its ability to dissipate energy", the statement is incomplete. What is mind? We consider rest as mutual cancellation of all forces acting on a body. If one of the forces is removed or applied, the center of mass of the body moves in the same or opposite directions with attendant consequences. The point from which the motion starts is the mind. Thus, even inanimate objects can have mind. In humans, we have seen that unless mind is conjoined, our senses will not function. And mind operates only one channel at one time, though at a very high speed.
Since we have the ability to plan for the future, we enjoy certain degrees of freedom. This is our freewill. This gives us the power of discrimination. When mind is used with discrimination, it is called intelligence. Because of our discrimination in decision making, we get attached to it. That is called egotism. When we reflect on our memory and review our decision, it is called sentiency. But all of these are mechanical processes - hence not consciousness.
The above mechanism have certain pit-falls. Our attachment and memory affect our discretion. Thus, mostly, a proper decision making becomes biased and thus distorted. The same affects the so-called mathematical physics. For this reason, we have pleaded in our essay for replacing with physical mathematics.
What is a dimension? If you define it precisely and apply to time, you will know the difference. Duration is nothing but a measure of time or time itself, because duration is the interval between events and that is the definition of time. How do you say that the "10th dimension of observable space, the tenth being infinite possibilities? Symbolic of infinity"? Before that you have to prove that there is a tenth dimension different from what we have defined.
Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed your essay.
Regards,
basudeba