Purposive Philosophy via Science
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For human purpose to be positive in a non-transcendental sense, it has to be aimed at progress, which needs to imply eternal continuation in the material sense. Without eternity, all progress and achievements, and purposes are essentially nihilistic and vain.
For philosophy to describe materialistic purpose from the perspective of humanity, it needs a materialistic teleology, which needs to be rooted in science.
In teleological terms, however, science is profoundly pessimistic. The Universe is not eternal. Material reality has a use by date. Everything will one day collapse. Everything – all is vanity!
Nevertheless, philosophy should not give up and dive into nihilistic pessimism as well – and for the humanist, transcendental philosophy should be regarded as equally pessimistic as material nihilism. To be a positivist, the humanist needs to see beyond the pessimistic picture framed by science and look for optimistic paths, opening positivistic doors toward an eternal progress in the science itself. After all, this is the basic function of all technologies. The law of gravity tells us that we cannot fly, but it also was a necessary element in developing flying machines. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the Universe is doomed to evolve into a massive frozen, inanimate state, but it could also be the key to showing us how that cosmic-truth can be altered. If we were destined to fly, and leave the Earth, then our ultimate destiny, and purposiveness, must be to remedy the fundamental flaw of the Universe, which is the death of everything.
PROPOSITION A: The fact that the evolution of the Universe is moving in an ultimately pessimistic direction gives us a positivist goal to undo that negative outcome.
Once we look for positive gaps in the pessimistic quilt of the scientific view of eternity, a purposeful materialism becomes a dynamic, motivating force. Contemporary cosmology tells us that the Universe is structured toward the creation of life, and this itself leads to a wealth of positivistic, purposive conclusions. Even the pessimistic idea that the life-generating mechanism in the cosmos is not a very efficient one, can be interpreted in a purposive way by humanity for, as far as we know, we ourselves, as sapiens entities, are the highest evolution of life in the Universe, and that imbues our very existence with tremendous responsibility and purposiveness.
We are here, and by being here we give purpose to the Universe. We make it meaningful. With our technology we have shown that we can overcome the hardships of our environment here on Earth. Nevertheless, we have lost our way: our technological development has evolved in unsustainable proportions; our taming of the environment has developed into an abuse of that environment that threatens its destruction and our own annihilation.
The perpetuation of life in the Universe is a profoundly precarious subject that begins with the precarious problem of prolonging sapiens life on Earth.
What this tells us is that the highest good (what we should all be striving for) is our survival, and that that can only be grasped in an ultimate sense by developing our knowledge of nature. If the fine-tuned Universe exists, it has a moral implication. Even those who imbue a religious significance to Cosmological Fine Tuning could do themselves a big favour by asking themselves what this news tells us about the nature of God’s work … The morality is buried in the purposiveness embedded in the ambition.
What we see when we look at the Universe is a physics of becoming, and what we interpret in the miracle of life and its evolution into sapiens life-forms is a will for Being, which must run through this whole process of becoming. And Being, we reason, must also desire permanence. Through our sapiens minds, the Universe comes into Existence in a formal way, and our logical conclusion is that it would be normal for it to want to stay in existence.
This is our positivism: we are agents through which the Universe exists in a meaningful way. And we are the agents gifted with potential power of determining the success of the Universe’s attempts at Being through becoming and perpetuation.
What we are claiming here may sound esoteric to some, but they are philosophical statements based on scientific facts: a material philosophy nurtured by science.
