The fundamental concept of the “Lifetoward” perspective is the recognition that:

• Nature expresses herself most dramatically through the processes of life. Life is a sorting algorithm, or a myriad of them collaborating to produce an effective whole effort in favor of victory in the infinite game. By sorting we mean selection, whether by conscious will or the persistent repetition of natural rhythms, as how the beach sand is sorted from the land. Trees sort nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the air, capture the energy of sunlight, and mix all these to produce their sustenance and reproduction. Animals travel about to seek, sort, and select, from their environments at large, an even more amazing degree of engagement. And the conscious in their magic, they choose actively as a function of their mental faculties, self concept, and perceived desires.
• The chooser holds a special awareness of the process in which she’s engaged. She knows her desire and observes herself expressing it. This is even more amazing in that this self-awareness permits intentional learning even in the symbolic realm of ideas and counterfactuals. Such an agent makes choices to moderate, plan, and sequence the fulfillment of instrumental desires to maximize outcomes that are more holistically desired. These desires, instrumental and grandly holistic, are native to the conscious soul. They emerge from deep within the organism. They derive from dispositions inherited from a biological lineage and are matched against an environment full of possibilities which that disposition then actively navigates, exploits, and manages.
• Service of Life’s purposes is the directional pursuit we’ve labeled “Lifetoward”. This service is by natural fundamental derivation, the “Good”. Thriving is the good. It is the purpose Life has encoded into our every gene, organ, and emotion. But it’s very complex, and it takes experience, discipline, and the help of others to clarify the alignment of any one’s emergent soul (perspective, mind, worldview, self-concept, personal narrative, fundamental mythology, truth, etc.) with those purposes in their full and complex detail.
• There are many levels of good to be pursued, from “Yum, I like sugar!” to “Behold, our civilization has brought all its citizens out of poverty and done it with a minimal expense of individual liberty!” Such grand desires as these are clearly NOT mere “personal” goals for any one individual organism to attempt to tackle on his own. Clearly it would take the collaboration of many smaller selves to align on goals and methods sufficiently to make progress in that direction.
• Life processes are fundamentally self-serving. They express such that they may persist in their expression. But such a reference to “self” is not to be taken too simply, for everywhere one looks in nature, living things serve purposes which far transcend the desires and goals of individual organisms. That is, life looks after individuals, families, societies, and ecosystems, all beloved selves each of their own levels. Planetary self-awareness as in the “Gamemaster” is a perspective available to the most learned (or merely tethered) conscious agents. Stewardship of one’s planet is a lofty calling indeed, but within the reach of humanity acting in concert.
• It is well to remember, the “self” is circumscribed by a line of arbitrary length, and so the self’s scope and scale are a matter of chosen perspective. Some people imagine their “self” as not even inclusive of their own bodies. They might say “I’m a spiritual being having an embodied experience.” Others tend to double down on the individual organism as the self that matters, as in “My right to swing my fist ends where it hits your face.” Others focus on the family, nuclear or beyond, and act out a willingness to die for their genetically related loved ones if necessary. Others choose to express their partisanship on the level of ideological groups, such as political parties, churches or religions, or various kinds of guilds; we experience these often as the “we’s and they’s” in our common discourse. Others are nationalists, where they can detect a strong sovereign perimeter undeniably enforced against other sovereign nations. Humanists aspire to see humanity as their highest self. It’s not difficult to recognize one’s self-hood as encompassing the whole biosphere of this planet. And at a conceptual level I can even imagine kinship and common cause with another alien life-form we might discover, if we’re able to establish effective communication in time to prevent war with them.

The key truth in all these sizes of the self is that they are all valid and inter-dependent from each level to the next. We depend utterly on our cultural system of “western liberal capitalism” to exploit vast swaths of the ecosystem to feed the individual inhabitants of cities, for example. And we depend on our coworkers to enable our own productivity in this highly abstract economic system we inhabit. And we depend on our armies to protect our property and our institutions. It’s not hard to demonstrate that life at all levels suffers if life at any of these layers is struggling. Societies that establish individual liberty unleash creativity and pursue progress more effectively to out-compete societies which stamp out dissent and personal choice. Weak institutions slow economies and are fragile when exposed to change. Mental health crises experienced by individuals at scale can destroy whole nations. To thrive is actually to thrive at all life’s levels, and to do so requires finding the right balance among so many complex and varied relationships.