The Evolution of Purpose.
Who benefits?
Long ago, when I was about 14, just after I'd been baptised into the Baptist Church (after a year of bible studies) I was sitting on my bed pondering what I'd learned. The central thing was that reality needed a Creator, and God was that. The thought emerged, "What created God?" I immediately saw that that presented an infinite regress that collapsed down to a reality that just exists and doesn't need a creator. Once I realized that God did not exist I was confronted with a huge conceptual change in how I saw reality. At the time I was into astronomy and was fascinated by things like stars and galaxies and orbits. Suddenly all that clicked into a new perspective. It all was just stuff happening according to the laws of nature. There was no entity orchestrating any of it. There was no purpose.
I was cool with that. The stars are far away after all. And the sense that I wanted to do things and acted to accomplish them I realized that I could have a purpose. And the people around me seemed to have purposes too. And I was learning to get along in that world and not having much problem. At the time I was not infected with ideas like 'purpose is a thing we possess' and so the thought wasn't large in my mind about where that thing came from. So I took a pragmatic approach that didn't bother with where purpose came from: could recognise that it was there but leave it for further research. I do know that a lot of people did not share my cool at the idea of a purposeless universe, and I don't speculate on their psychology, but for them the idea is terrifying. But that wasn't my problem.
Many years later I was exploring the philosophical implications of Natural Selection.
Natural Selection is a mindless process that over time selects entities that get better and better at exploiting their environment to leave child entities.
The process, in the abstract, is pretty simple to describe.
It's a process that happens as a loop.
first you have things that for whatever reason make copies of themselves
the copies make copies of themselves
and the copies of copies make copies of themselves
continue like that indefinitely
That's the loop
Now imagine that the copies are not all perfectly identical
Each has small variations from the parent.
And some of those variations turn out to produce more copies than other variants
As the loop continues, the copies that are better at copying become the new norm and the ones that are not as good fade away.
That's not anything's desire and there is no purpose to it, it's just an implication of the statistics of the situation.
That is termed replication with variation with a selection pressure.
Still we have no purpose. Whatever happens happens.
But if we inspect the copies closely we suddenly find purpose all over the place. Say our replicant (copying thing) is a simple thing like a bacterium. I don't know the details of the interior of a bacterium. I do know that it's intricate and complex and involves all sorts of dynamic structures.
Of those structures we can wonder; why is that there and come up with answers Like we can wonder; why is there a cell wall? What is its function in a cell? And get an answer like: so that the other reactions are contained and proceed more efficiently.
A question and answer like that is asking for and getting a reason why something like that is happening. One might call the reason something happens, it's purpose But something can have a purpose, like a cell wall, without anything asking anything about it at all. It's just there.
That's the start of the evolution of purpose.
Let me point out here that I talk of purpose in the same way I might talk about hands - implications of biology - not something that has to be.
And life evolved and so the environment involving purpose got larger and more complex.
Billions of years later we were up to creatures with purpose taken to a new level of abstraction.
Say you look at a winged dinosaur.
You can see the purpose of the wings and eyes and hunting behavior; to make it easier to find food
And you can see the purpose of finding food: to keep the dinosaur alive
And what is the purpose of keeping the dinosaur alive? Bingo. You're out of the loop where purpose makes any sense.
The loop just goes on without worrying about the purpose that just happens.
Just because evolution produces purpose doesn't mean that purpose is central to evolution. Imagine a pond with populations of many life forms that interact as an ecosystem. Say the pond gets an injection of nutrients that cause algae to bloom so much that it kills most of the fish. There is a correlation that happens between the nutrient injection and the effect on the ecosystem, but that effects are not necessarily the purpose of the injection. As in, ponds got killed by inflows of nutrients from phosphates in detergents or from fertilizer washing off of farmer's fields The purposes of the human actions were not to kill the ponds.
But we see there how much purpose has evolved by the time it gets to humans. We can imagine and create huge structures involving purpose that get to be almost as complex as the structures in a cell. We individually have our own purposes and we live in societies that are a balance of very many purposes on very many levels.
Returning to the thought that a purposeless universe is terrifying; it's easy to see why. Acting with purpose involves knowing what you are doing.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.