The universe as a great thought

For an entity to have volition it follows that that entity must need to perceive the existence of something external to itself. When Descartes made his famous formulation he concluded that it was the act of thinking itself that proved he existed, but I think feeling comes first. This means the ability to feel pain and pleasure, in order to have something to think about. You can think of just about anything but it's through pain and pleasure that reality intrudes. The cosmos isn't always what we want it to be. The universe has rules and in order to preserve its integrity a living entity must learn these rules. Moreover, we have wants, the first of which is we want to live. This is where thinking comes in. Or maybe you might want to call it adaptation. But if adaptation is an act of will, as I contend it is, then you might as well call it thinking.
Thinking also requires memory, since one of the first things that needs to be learnt is that the conditions in this external world, the source of those sensations of pain and pleasure, vary from place to place and over time. Genes are coded memories. When we think of evolution we think of dinosaurs, cockatoos, starfish and the myriads of life forms that exist or have existed. But geneticists, like the presocratic philosophers have come down with the opinion that life is reducible, not to water, or air, or earth, but to the gene, and that all these forms are variations on a theme of the capacity of the carbon element to form compounds with other elements If that's the case, then what exactly is the point of these myriads of life forms?
We are told that the process known as evolution is a mindless and mechanical affair of random and deterministic events, just like the formation of stars as clouds of hydrogen coalesce through the influence of gravity. For Darwinian evolutionists natural selection and random mutation are equivalent forces to gravity and the other elemental forces postulated by physicists. In other words, life is something that is acted upon. This is the clockwork theory of the universe, a cliche but apt. Clockwork, not meaning clock like, but something that is wound up and set loose, like a toy car, until it fizzles out.
But living things are anything but passive. They act upon their surroundings and change them. When you think about it from this point of view the universe is more like a great thought than a wind-up toy.