SPECULATIONS ON METAPHYSICAL PURPOSES EMBEDDED IN COSMOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
PROPOSITION A: The universe is not self-conscious although it is purposive, i.e. it is unconsciously purposive.
Our point, or assumption, is that the universe, which is ever-evolving and subject to physical laws allowing it to be made up of certain interior forms, approximately repeated in certain ways throughout this universe’s limits, has always been evolving towards something since its inception and that this very act of evolving is a purposive mechanic. Purposive because it is moving somewhere.
To understand what the primordial, unconscious universe could be evolving toward we have to ask ourselves what the universe would have been lacking when the evolution began, and we conclude that the great lack in the unconscious universe is consciousness and especially self-consciousness.
Seen in this way, cosmological evolution must be regarded as an element embedded in the physical structure of the universe. It is a driving, mechanical force that works in a moulding and sculpting, necessary way that has nothing to do with the idea of determinism or any negation of human free-will because it is not a conscious force. The purposiveness in the universe is unconscious.
The problem with this line of thought is that we cannot decisively answer the question ‘how?’. How can an unconscious entity be imbued with an evolutionary aim? And this answer eludes us even though the natural world is constantly involved in acts of unconscious evolution. Everything is change and everything is evolving.
Certainly, traditional metaphysics has proposed the idea of an eternal, infinite creator, or God, but that really does not satisfactorily answer the question at hand because to do so we would need to ask how can it be that God exists, which is an even greater problem answered with a simple ‘God is eternal and has always been’, which does not help us at all with our problem, because it forces us to turn to the great swindle of the so-called holy scriptures for any, usually cryptic, answers.
Yet, it is precisely the strong-hold that traditional, God-centred metaphysics has on humanity, for they are still the dominant attitudes behind the purposiveness of most human thought, that inhibits an idea of authentic human purposiveness. It is the intellectual cowardice embedded in religious notions that has created the general atmosphere of nihilism that we are experiencing today, because without authentic purposiveness humanity is most definitely a pointless, nihilistic concept.
So, in order to combat nihilism and create an authentically purposeful humanity, we need to wrestle with the metaphysical question of cosmological purposiveness in a new, non-scriptural, perhaps atheistic, certainly agnostic way, or, in a philosophical manner that is unhindered by religious preconceptions, drawing on the tenets of science and cosmology rather than the testaments of prophets and seers.
From the Big Bang to Bill Gates, evolution has been a primarily accidental process carrying everything from the simplest forms to the incredible complexity of the sapiens animal’s brain. Accidental because it has been carried out unconsciously, but this unconscious, accidental evolution of accumulating particles was also able to create needs, likewise unconscious, because as the cosmos evolved in time from energy into matter tendencies developed that favoured accidentally formed states of permanence that took on forms (hot stars or cold rocks) that persisted because of the fact that they were imbued with permanence. That stars and planets are all basically spherical objects that can now be attributed to physical laws determined by the compositional states of the particles that they are made up of. Because the particles making up the universe are the way that they are, interaction between them will create stars and planets, even though the particles themselves had and have no idea what they were (are) doing. The interaction between hot and cold matter and the energy embedded within them because of the molecular composition of everything, eventually created a substance that we call ‘water’ which allowed for another accidental process of the evolution of organisms that we call ‘life’.
With the appearance of ‘life’ everything changes in the essential nature of the universe. Simplicity becomes something that grows ever more complex, and it is through the development of this complexity that cosmological evolution becomes purposive. Over billions of years, the primordial nature of the universe has evolved into something that seems obsessed with the creation of more and more complexity. From our human-linguistic apprehension of the world, it ‘seems’ that there is an consciously selective process taking place at one tiny point, at least, of the universe: i.e. here on our own planet Earth. After billions of years of seemingly meaningless interaction, the molecular structures of matter in this certain tiny part of the cosmos produced a very complex molecule that we call DNA – a tiny instruction book embedded in the cells of organic matter that allow the organisms that possess it to replicate themselves. From this moment on the rather insipid cosmos of stars and rocks is suddenly imbued with something very interesting indeed and the future promises a brand-new type of evolution, driven towards the ever-increasing level of complexity that we call life.
With this natural, perhaps still accidental, development of DNA, the road forward to the sapiens brain had begun. This means that, in the chronology of the cosmological evolutionary process, we can henceforth consider the universe to be purposively geared, because it is driven in a creative way to the production of something increasingly complex. But, can we also say that natural evolution had also become a conscious process?
Of course, whether evolution is self-conscious or not, the outcome is the same. Once a system discovers how to differentiate between good and bad evolutionary choices, the choice takes on a deterministic character that seems to be rationally motivated. Likewise, the ‘programming’ constituted by the instruction book and the genetic information in the DNA molecule, makes the process seem intelligent, but much in the same way that a PC can seem to be savvy. Arguably, intelligence can exist without consciousness as such, one simply has to be capable of choosing the best way forward when faced with a conundrum, and this is how AI (Artificial Intelligence) gets its name. Nevertheless, if we can choose a better way, it has to be the better way for a reason, and consciousness implies consciously being aware in decision making of what that reason is. Likewise, the unconscious machine, operates only according to the rationality embedded in its operating structure or via its digital programming. Only when the self-learning, consciousness of AI is included in the programming do computers, robots and other machines actually seem to be conscious. Our DNA is not capable of self-learning, evolution in biological organisms occurs accidentally, via genetic mutations that prove to be beneficial to a species. However, another question arises here, for while the natural world is almost completely unconscious: Does lack of consciousness also mean a lack of knowing? We all exist in a binary state between consciousness and unconsciousness, however most of the decisions made in keeping us alive are carried out unconsciously. Our unconscious body knows exactly what to do to try and keep us alive, as do the bodies of any other living organism, and it is able to do so because of the information embedded in the instruction manuals of our DNA. When we have DNA we know how to survive and replicate our genes.
Consciousness is an anomaly in the universe, and yet unconsciousness has been able to create everything we know, by a process of trial and error combined with some accidental leaps that have been prejudiced by preferences for one result over another – and this, in the long run is a knowing process, that eventually becomes purposeful when the process has developed enough complexity to be fully conscious of what knowing is and entails.
It could be said, therefore, that whilst the universe was not born with any purpose, that purpose evolved. To create the conditions for intelligence to be possible, unconscious evolution had to move in a determinate direction. Without direction implied in trial and error, and a recognition of the advantages of replication that were unconsciously discovered in the development of DNA, the complexity necessary for the existence of intelligence would have been an impossible, evolutionary result of the Big Bang. It seems rational, to us, that the universe instinctively knows that it exists and that that same unconscious knowing has been able to gear evolution unto the creation of the sapiens organism that knows that it knows and can be aware of the incredible miracle that the universe’s evolution has been.
