I see a lot of thought in the speculative/futurist arena about how we will create machines that will make the next generation of humans obsolete (or the one after that, or somewhere down the line). There is much said in genetics and evolutionary biology about the percieved necessity (or lack thereof) of the “male species”, and of the essential selfish nature of the gene, to which we are all merely a method of reproducing. There is a lot of talk about the future where we are all useless, and machines run the world, as if running the world is the only use we have. There is fear of post-scarcity economics, as if capitolism is a warm maternal protection we cannot survive without.
All these ideas strike me as not only silly, but characteristic of a particular kind of social nhilism. We seem to have no sense of the meaning or purpose of ourselves as a species or society. We all have our individual causes, but we seem afraid to consider what it means to be human, and have a human purpose. I suppose these things seem the realm of religion - those atheists among us see no greater purpose, the religious see only God’s purpose.
Perhaps the atheists have a point. What are we but animals, allbeit successful and creative ones? (Creative… now there is a word that we rarely apply to an animal.) If we are just animals, then there is no greater purpose. We each have our own genetic roadmap, as evolution has shaped us exclusively to pass on our genes. As a whole there is no over-arching plan, we just follow our animal instincts, take part in the ecological web (if we’re animals, destroying that web is no crime, we’re just acting out the part nature made for us) and eventually die off or evolve into something else.
Those who believe in a god, I suppose, find solace in at least not being purposeless dumb animals. Still, their purpose, where any two religions agree, seems to be very much about our animal comforts. It is given to us by God to be kind and decent (necessary for non-destructive social groupings, these rules exist in the secular world and are known as ethics), and to make babies. Oh, and to keep believing in God. The purpose? To please God, with rewards later if you are good. As an over-arching sense of purpose, this is not very satisfying to me - it boils down to being a decent person, the reward for which is pleasure (heaven, paradise, etc, notice you only get that part after you die). Being a good person is nice, but where does it get us as a species?
Of course people find greater purposes in religion, but once you get past this baseline, no one can agree on what they are. Go forth and name all the things in the universe? Convert all the heathens? Preserve all the knowledge? What, really, does God want us to do, other than behave?
I don’t, for these and other reasons, believe that human purpose is a religious idea - though purposes may arise from religious thought.
Two words clarify this issue in my mind. Choice and creativity. Two words that distinguish between the vast majority of animals and ourselves.
Creativity. We can create, we can construct ideas that are not a subset of pre-existing ideas. Creativity is the essense of our world-spanning food-chain dominating culture. Evolution’s most powerful innovation to date. In fact, we have evolved something that, in principle, allows us to short-circuit evolution all together - we can choose how we wish to change our own genes… which brings me to the second word, Choice. Being creative is just a special kind of smart, and many animals are quite smart (some may be creative - lets face it, we are on a spectrum here, not the exclusive special case), but choice is something a bit different.
Choice. Most animals don’t have much. They are programmed as much as any robot or VCR. Instincts, very sophisticated and flexible programs, run an animal’s life. They dictate when to eat, when to run, when to breed, when to play (is play creative? Not necessarily, it often is exercise for the job of hunting or evasion). Humans can do something a squirrel will find it very difficult, or even impossible to do - a human can choose. A human can choose not to eat when hungry. A human can choose not to run. Against all evolutionary logic, a human can choose not to breed. (Can a chimp? Hard to say, but it seems likely that a chimp has more power to exercise choice than your average non-primate mammal - these things that have given humans such power are not unique to us, just more developed in us.)
Where does this leave us? Nature gives us creativity, God gives us ethics, you can ascribe Choice wherever you want, but where do we get any kind of purpose beyond just living well?
Here is my one religious belief. It comes not from logic, not from study, it is just an article of faith: Humans should be more than animals. We have the capacity to be more, and we should be. We should not be content merely to live well, fill the earth and die away in time. We have creativity, we should create. We have choice, we should choose something better for ourselves, or at the very least to explore the possibilities. Do we have an obvious purpose as a species? No, but we have the tools to make one from scratch, and we should.
There are practical reasons to consider Greater Purpose. Purpose drives innovation, pushes us to develope, become better. This refinement helps us survive as a speices (if thats really all that matters) and helps us better fulfill God’s plan (don’t you think he wants us to keep improving, get better at being good people?). Common purpose creates cohesion, and promotes empathy and solidarity (ask any soldier). And, if all you really care about is money, purpose drives competition and inspires investment.
Will we ever agree on a single Human Purpose? No, of course not. We don’t have to, because the actions of our society are emergent from the behaviors of individuals, not specified by any conscious plan. In other words, if we all think about a human purpose, and act towards that purpose, the character of society will change as a direct result. Maybe not in predictable ways, but it will change. The overall action of society will emerge from individuals acting with an awareness of the entire species rather than individuals pursuing selfish or animal/instinctive ends.
I believe this will result in a society that can in some sense be called self-aware, one that acts on common motives and ideas. Think about the million little ideas and thoughts in your own mind. Many purposes, desires, drives, and one you acting out the gestalt.
Think of society as an animal, or a small child acting on instinct. In an animal brain, many structures act individually to produce a group action - an instinct to eat selfishly demands feeding, a drive to mate selfishly demands copulation, another demands hiding from predators. Integrating them all produces a behavior that is influenced by each but which might not be the individual purpose of any one of them. Humans seem to have the ability to examine these drives explicitly (though few people really do this) and make conscious decisions about behavior. Perhaps some day human society as an entity will be able to do this, but meanwhile it acts just like an animal brain, behaving as dictated by the sum of all individual actions. If our actions took into account not just our individual needs, but some greater motive for all of society, what might that larger behavior look like?
I have no idea, but I consider it my god-given purpose to find out.
Beautiful