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I was prompted to write this article by Samantha Drobac’s “What is Evolution For?”
We humans seem predisposed to believe that things and events have, or should have, purposes. We make things intentionally to be useful in various ways, and many people believe that “Everything happens for a reason.” It seems that most people even extend that idea to the universe as a whole — there must be a purpose for its existence and our existence in it.
Things in our makeup as highly communicative social animals make the concept of purpose a useful one, which gives the concept of purpose itself a sense of purpose to us. Whether to find our daily food or our mates, it helps us to imagine specific goals for what we are seeking and direct our actions toward those goals. Our senses of vision and hearing direct our attention in space, and we can move our bodies, or parts of them, in those directions if we interpret those sensations as indications that of things that may help us to achieve our goals. As social animals using language, we extend basic goal seeking to a generalized concept of “purpose” — that many actions and events are not only pushed by causes but are also pulled by foreseen goals.
Many other forms of life than us seem to be driven by purpose as well, yet on closer reflection it seems unlikely that purpose is a conscious concept for them…
