An Introduction to the Overneglected Science of Purpose

Our physical universe was designed for us. But not by a God.

Century upon century of idealism could hardly have failed to influence reality. 
   .Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

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The most unforgivable sin of human science has been its baseless and self-serving dismissal of the role of purpose in the universe.

The Dark Gift aims to correct this blunder.

This article is the first in a series aiming to help you understand the role of purpose in our shared reality. We’ll explore the structure and flow of purpose, and, crucially, its cosmic relationship to what humans call physics.

I won’t make you wait. Let’s jump to the heart of it.

Our material universe—what intex calls the Commonality—is everywhere shaped by two fundamental dynamics. Two types of physical activity.

The first is well-known and well-studied: the dynamics of aimlessness. Activity without a goal.

Such dynamics are commonly regarded as physics.

The second category of activity is far better known, though far less studied. When it is studied by human scientists, its dynamics are almost always framed as ersatz variants of aimlessness: the dynamics of purpose.

The distinction between these two sorts of activity is simple to express, but cosmic in implication.

Physics ensues. Purpose pursues.

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Purpose shapes physics. Physics shapes purpose.

It will take some time to learn about this “cosmic cycle.” A lot of new ideas. But more than that, understanding the relationship between aimlessness and purpose requires a shift in perspective.

This article is intended to help you begin that shift. We’ll get down and dirty with the details and math in future lessons. But now, I want to help you begin to see reality as a universe of living purpose.

For our universe is designed. Designed by minds.

The universe is not, however, designed by a Mind.

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Scientists long evaded a reckoning on their unjustified banishment of purpose by marketing themselves as intellectual warriors of rationality battling a mighty opponent: Christianity’s faith in One True God.

This was no straw man. For science to usurp the hearts and cities of humankind, it had to discredit existing beliefs about reality that dominated Earthly civilization—Europe and America in particular. When science first emerged out of Isaac Newton’s Principia, the most dominant supermind belief in these communities was Christianity.

Most folks are familiar with the moral fable of Galileo getting condemned and arrested by the Catholic Inquisition for his scientific beliefs, one of Christianity’s first run-ins with science, resulting in an effortless victory for the Church. Newton, too, often kept his research secret to avoid running afoul of the Church of England, maintaining his dangerous stealth all the way to his grave. When Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, it was Christians who battered and denounced him and it was Christians who defamed evolution in the Monkey Trial court of Tennessee.

In all the early skirmishes between these two superminds—the tribe of science and the tribe of One True God—it was God’s tribe who prevailed. But the tide slowly and steadily turned.

One reason was the feud itself was good for science. Public beefs often elevate the profile of the lesser-known rival, such as Taylor Swift going supernova after her Grammy feud with Kanye West. As science began to expand its supermind population with a steady stream of cultural victories (steam engines! electric lightbulbs! medicine! plastics!), it leaned into Christian bashing even more. Partly because it allowed scientists to showcase their talent and ever-expanding list of victories, rather like the Harlem Globetrotters eternally playing the doomed-to-lose Washington Generals. But also because by the time science gained the upper hand over religion in Western society in the twentieth century, young students eager to join the science tribe were indoctrinated through classes, textbooks, and lectures how science handily defeated Christianity again and again and again.

Throughout my own high school, undergraduate, and even graduate education in the 1990s, whenever evolution was the subject, the teacher or textbook would trot out Creationism, with its One True Designing Mind, as evolution’s primary alternative hypothesis.

(Buddhism, Hinduism, and mindscience can take issue with that!)

By the twenty-first century, on the heels of science’s steady demolition of religion among the thinking class, most intellectuals (including virtually all academic scientists) came to pooh-pooh the notion of a universe governed by purpose. Such convictions were viewed as backwards and provincial and unscientific. Instead, the cognoscenti believed the universe was aimless, sole province of monotonous physics. In contrast, the far greater numbers of religious folk (in 2000, ~80% of humans considered themselves religious) still believed the universe is governed by a single all-powerful Mind.

Both tribes were wrong.

The universe was designed, and is being designed, by many minds. Some cooperating, some competing. Some destructive, some constructive.

To help you understand and visualize the nature of our purpose-shaped universe, let’s consider two examples of physical worlds designed by many minds.

The Amazon jungle.

And the American Interstate Highway System.

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Everything in a jungle is designed by purpose.

The primary structure of the jungle is created by living, purposeful entities: trees. The Kapok tree, the Brazil nut tree, and the Shihuahuaco tree spread out into enormous green canopies dividing the Amazon jungle into distinct vertical zones of activity, such as the dank forest floor, the shady and humid understory, and the bright leafy canopy.

Different purposeful activities unfold in each zone. On the ground: insects, turtles, fungi, worms, rodents. In the understory: jaguars, frogs, anacondas, owls, tarantulas. In the canopy: birds, monkeys, bats, chameleons, cicadas. Each jungle creature pursues its own interests within the zones that comprise its habitat.

This pursuit of individual interest creates the flow of a jungle. Leaf-cutter ants tramp along the ground like green rivulets as they tote food back to their nest. Howler monkeys hoot loudly from the branches of the canopy to attract mates and warn off rivals. At night, colonies of bats swarm down from the canopy and hunt moths in the dark.

All of this purpose in the jungle pursued by individual minds and communities of minds leads to stable forms of purposeful jungle-wide dynamics, such as cycles.

The predator-prey cycle, where predators like the jaguar endlessly hunt prey like the capybara, maintaining stable populations of both predators and prey. The decomposer cycle: decomposers like fungi, bacteria, and insects convert the massive amount of dead flora and fauna into rich soil for more vegetation to grow. The parasite-host cycle: parasites like ticks, botflies, and the kissing bug seek and infect hosts (including birds, reptiles, and mammals), producing more parasites.

Each of these cycles defines a flow of activity through the jungle. This flow is physically shaped and constrained by the structure of the jungle. (Decomposers are far more active on the floor than in the canopy, for instance.)

Thus, both flow and structure in the jungle are formed out of purposeful activity.

Despite being exclusively the product of minds, the flow and structure is so stable that these purpose-driven cycles often last millions of years. Which means the jungles formed by the cycles (and forming the cycles!) last millions of years. The Amazon is more than 50 million years old. Its multi-zone vertical structure and cycles of predation, decomposition, and parasitism have operated ceaselessly for more than 50 million years.

Individual minds rise and die in the jungle, but their transient lives birth anew the form and flow of this verdant world of purpose

And so it is with the cosmos. Mortal lives pass like rain, but their neverending storms of purpose hew the architecture of Creation.

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Who designed the jungle? Believers might say God, but no god is necessary. Only minds. Lots and lots and lots of minds.

But if we wish to extend the jungle outwards to encompass the universe entire, we need more than beasts and bacteria. No anaconda designed the weft of the Milky Way. No dung beetle designed the principles of electromagnetism. No swarm of bats designed the physical constants governing the orbit of Jupiter. How can we say such cosmic matters are designed, too, by many minds?

To understand how, we need to ascend the ladder of purpose to higher minds. Starting with humans.

Let’s explore an example of a physical world designed by many human minds, even though many folks unthinkingly presume it was designed by a single mind.

The American Interstate Highway System.

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Who designed the continent-straddling highway system of the USA?

When we think of the design of complex artifacts, we instinctively search for a single mind, a Designer, behind the creation. Indeed, the first Christian opponents of evolution cited the example of a pocket watch to disprove Darwin’s theory. If you found a mechanical watch with all its intricate gears and dials lying on a beach and had never seen such a thing before, said the Christians, surely you would be correct to assume such a complex artifact was fabricated by a designer. By a mind. Continuing this reasoning, the Christians argued that the big bold cosmos exhibits all the signs of a complex artifact, so we must likewise assume the cosmos was fabricated by a Designer.

A Mind.

It would have been a stronger argument if the Christians had pointed out their wristwatch logic also included the possibility that both watch and cosmos were designed by communities of minds.

If you ask a random American who designed the American highway system, most won’t know. But of those who propose an answer, a majority will suggest President Eisenhower. (I just now asked ChatGPT out of curiosity, it also said Eisenhower. . .) He was indeed the president who signed into law the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which established funding to build America’s interstate highway system. But Eisenhower did not design the structure and flow of the roads. Nor did he define their purpose.

You might imagine, instead, that a Federal Highway Administrator, or perhaps a Federal Master Engineer designed the highway system. It is very natural and almost irresistible for human brains to imagine a single agent behind any single act of creation, no matter how vast. That is, after all, the neural basis for monotheism: the human mind’s inborn acceptance of the notion there is always a designer behind a design.

Rather than designer-s.

Here’s how America’s highways got designed and built. A committee was formed to discuss the idea. The committee handed their joint ideas to Congress, who passed a law motivated by the committee’s recommendations, though Congress did not follow all the recommendations and added some new design details of their own. (American Congress, of course, is a body of many minds elected by an even larger body of minds.)

But even though funding was in place to build highways across the United States, the project wasn’t handed over to a Federal Designer or Federal Builder. The plans were passed on to all fifty states (even Hawaii!), each of whom were responsible for choosing and constructing the specific routes of the highways for their state, according to Federal guidelines and standards.

In each state, committees were formed. These committees hired a variety of contractors. And the contractors went out and started to do the physical work of fashioning the highways. The state committees made their own (collective) decisions about the location and cost of the highways, and the individual contractors made their own decisions about very local details of the highways.

You might think we reached the end of purpose—but new minds got involved in the design of the interstates who desired to change all the hard-won plans of the government. When communities of minds learned a highway was supposed to go through their own neighborhood, many communities opposed and protested the designs. They wanted the highways to go somewhere else.

A large numbers of these anti-highway communities successfully reshaped the design of the highways. In my own backyard of Boston, communities opposed the design of the major east coast interstate, I-95, and successfully lobbied to shift the route away from Boston neighborhoods.

Sometimes funding dried up before roads were complete. Sometimes there were major construction mishaps. Both of these outcomes were the consequence of many minds. Both led to significant rejiggering (or the abandonment) of committee highway plans.

When the American interstate system was finally declared complete in 1992, it’s safe to say that no mind involved in the original conception of the interstate system was still involved in its completion, for the design of the highways spanned generations.

The final interstate system embodies a well-defined structure. Look on any map or GPS and you can see the exact location of each and every offramp and interchange. The final system embodies a well-defined flow. Vehicles travel between roughly 55 miles per hour and 85 miles per hour on the right side of every interstate in America without stopping at traffic lights or intersections.

Like the jungle, the American interstate system was designed by many minds, in cooperation and competition, rather than one mind or a handful of minds, each of whom only had a limited perspective on the ultimate purpose, structure, and flow of the highways.

Which invites a natural question. The same question we ask of the cosmos:

What is its purpose?

If the highways were not the product of one designer’s vision—if the design of the highways was distributed among many minds, cooperating and competing, constructive and destructive—then how can we say it has a single defining purpose?

If you ask Americans what they think the original purpose of the highways was, quite a large number will tell you it was to provide escape routes in the event of a nuclear attack.

Eisenhower himself thought interstates should be built to reduce the number of traffic accidents—a reason that probably wouldn’t occur to many American motorists today.

Here is what the Eisenhower-appointed planning committee reported to Congress as the reasons for building continent-spanning interstates:

We needed them for safety, to accommodate more automobiles. We needed them for defense purposes [in case of a ground invasion], if that should ever be necessary. And we needed them for the economy. Not just as a public works measure, but for future growth.

Thus, the community of minds who originally contemplated the design of a national highway system believed in three overarching purposes. (Multiple overlapping purposes is a common quality of the dynamics of purpose, and one reason the math and intuitions supporting such dynamics are difficult for human brains to grasp.)

Nuclear evacuation was never a purpose, as anyone who has tried to flee a hurricane on a traffic-paralyzed American interstate knows all too well.

The real answer to the question of the purpose of the American highway system is that the many minds who contributed to the design of the system—as well as the minds who use it—were motivated by a multitude of purposes, each believing the highway served, or should serve, different aims.

In the end, there is no single or ultimate answer to the question What is the purpose of highways?, any more than there is an answer to the question Who designed the highways? (Or even, What is the purpose of a jungle?) The highways were designed and constructed by many minds, competing and cooperating, each motivated by different purpose. The highway is used by many minds, each who pursue different personal interests. (Sometimes political protestors chain themselves across an interstate to block traffic, for instance; for them, the highway’s purpose is to command the public’s attention.) Despite the absence of One True Purpose or One True Designer, the structure and flow of this 100% human-designed system remains stable and strong.

So is the structure and flow of the universe at every level. As we will learn, the ladder of purpose extends above the human supermind into other categories of minds. The top rung of minds are involved in the shaping of the universe at quantum and cosmic scales, but they, too, compete and cooperate and pursue conflicting (and compatible) visions of purpose for the cosmos.

The Commonality has a stable and well-defined structure shaped by purpose, and yet there is no Ultimate Designer, nor a single overriding purpose to it all. Instead, reality is defined by an everlasting clash and merge and overlap of purpose.

We can say the highway is designed for vehicles, or the jungle is designed for life, and that’s not wrong, though both jungle and highway are designed for other aims as well.

Similarly, we can say the universe is designed by minds for minds like ours. For us.

Though we must keep in mind the universe is designed for a tempest of other purposes as well.