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Science can’t stop talking in terms of ‘purposes’, but if the universe cares about us, it has a funny way of showing it
Everywhere we ascribe purpose to the workings of the natural world. While there are often ways of rephrasing such descriptions to eliminate the implication of purpose, it is surprising how natural such teleological talk still seems to us in science, half a millennium after its spectre was supposedly banished for good. And its attraction seems unlikely to dwindle at least while the origin of life — the unsolved puzzle that drives Nagel’s thinking — is still mysterious. There is still no convincing answer to the question of how, as the physicist Vlatko Vedral put it in his essay ‘What life wants’ for this magazine, one might reconcile biology and quantum physics in order to explain the ‘purposefulness’ of living things.
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Nagel’s view seems even more vulnerable, on its own terms, over the bleaker long scale of time. Why should we assume that rational creatures like us (wherever they might be: Nagel notes the possibility of alien intelligences) are the telos of the universe, when there is plenty of universal history left to go yet? Some scientists forecast that the universe will eventually end in ‘heat death’, a state of maximum entropy when there is no energy left for anything to happen. Perhaps that, instead, is the ultimate telos of the universe. If so, it might seem a gratuitous and even cosmically cruel diversion to have caused minds to have evolved along the way at all.
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