Only on the Earth are there Purposes and Minds

Purposes and minds only arose with life on earth. An essay putting these concepts in their place.

Only on the Earth are there Purposes and Minds

The surface of the earth is a special place. It is only here that we can speak of purposes, minds, knowledge and values. The rest of the universe is vast, but as far as we know, everywhere else is purposeless space and matter.

Science tells the story of why the earth is special. The background is the physics of a universe unfolding mechanically through the law-like behaviour of elementary particles and fields.

Then, on earth, some molecules developed the trick of replication, and by processes of evolution by natural selection the replicators became the great range of life on earth. Replication put information into the world in the form of blueprints transmitted by genes, and this growing information created increasingly complex life. The arrival of biology also introduced purpose, as living things can be understood in terms of purposes of survival and reproduction.

Later, some animals developed the further trick of consciousness, which introduced awareness and minds. This also brought value into the world as creatures value positively valenced conscious experience.

Then, in the last 300,000 years, homo sapiens refined skills of social cooperation, thought and language and through cumulative processes of evolving knowledge and technology developed new ways of living. This human cultural change accelerated in the last 20,000 years with the agricultural revolution, and then exploded in just the last 500 years with the scientific revolution.

The picture is of a mechanical universe on which is overlain first life, then consciousness and then human society. Each introduces new concepts. Life gives purpose and information. Consciousness gives minds and value. Human society gives knowledge and ethics.

Because people evolved on the surface of the earth our instincts are to regard purposes and minds as universal, just as we assumed earth’s gravity is everywhere. But science has shown that there is a vast, indifferent universe out there, and our familiar world of warmth, gravity, atmosphere and life is only a tiny island.

It can be difficult to accept what science tells us when it contradicts our instincts. Perhaps we can conceptualise that gravitational strength varies away from the surface of earth, but it is hard to get our heads around the scale of the universe, and to accept relativity and quantum physics. Similarly, it is not easy to accept that concepts such as purpose, values, mind, knowledge and ethics only arise within life and do not apply away from the earth.

Pre-modern people saw purpose and minds everywhere. A rock falls because it wants to be near the earth, a mountain is a spirit, a harvest is poor because a god is angry. Aristotle reflected such thinking in his physics which described nature in teleological (purposeful) terms.

Over time, science has progressively succeeded in describing the world mechanistically, and has shown the limited role of purposes and minds. Naturalism is the view that this progress will continue so as to explain the universe in purely mechanistic terms with no place for anything supernatural.

From a naturalist perspective, supernatural thinking is illegitimate. My point is that such illegitimate thinking includes believing that there are purposes and minds outside of living things. Animals have aims and minds, mountains and stars don’t. And, because as far as we can see only the earth has life, it is a mistake to apply concepts such as purposes and minds across the universe away from the earth.

My point is relevant to the question ‘What is the purpose of the universe?’ The answer is that the universe away from the earth does not have purposes as it is only with living things that purposes become germane. Our purposes should instead relate to lives lived and particularly to enjoyment and suffering within conscious lives.

It is also relevant to explaining how the universe came to be. We should expect the explanation to be mechanistic. We should not expect the explanation to be a god with a purposeful mind as concepts of purposes and minds are only applicable to life on earth. It is an odd picture to see purposes on earth, then an enormous universe with no purposes and then purposes reappearing to explain why the overwhelmingly purposeless universe exists.

We have a number of instinctive concepts that evolved from our situation as conscious and social creatures on a planet surrounded by other living things. These include concepts of purposes, minds, knowledge, values, choices, fairness and ethics. Science has shown that such ideas only arise within life and are not applicable across the enormous indifferent universe away from the earth. We should be clear that these concepts apply within life, consciousness and society, but not more widely. We should keep these concepts in their place.

Only on the Earth are there Purposes and Minds

Only on the Earth are there Purposes and Minds

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