Purpose

Friday, August 26, 2011

—Humanity is the only species that has domesticated itself

Wondering about the purpose of life is what makes us most human. The material universe has no purpose; by wondering about it, by seeking it, we are going past the boundaries of what the physical world has to offer us. We are refusing to be restricted by the limitations of the universe.

Why do we do this? Is this because our minds, somehow, have developed further than is strictly necessary? Are we more intelligent than we really need to be in order to thrive as a species? Has something gone wrong? Has evolution exceeded its mandate?

How much have our minds evolved since the beginning of civilization? Evolutionary theory suggests that human beings are pretty much the same as they were 6000 years ago; it takes much longer than that for a species to change. But once you get to the point where human beings are creating their own environments, is this really true anymore? Could it be that human-built environments, including social systems (controls on interpersonal relationships) have sped up evolution? That is, the environments we have created for ourselves amount to a sort of selective breeding program? No society has ever consistently told its members whether they could mate, and with whom. All societies have always allowed everyone to have children if they want (for the most part). But societies have always exerted pressure. Certain types of people get more of the resources, and are thus able to support more children who are more likely to survive. Social norms often dictate who can marry who without negative consequences. Certain types of marriages are frowned upon (old to young, rich to poor, black to white) at different times.

Humanity is the only species that has domesticated itself. Is this true? Have our social systems amounted to a process of selective breeding for certain traits? Unlike other animals, human beings are able to consciously choose their values. Our method of choosing mates is much more complex than that of other animals. We go by our instincts, but we also are influenced by what our culture tells us is desirable. In short, we develop a culture/society which tells us who to mate with; probably, the culture/society is biased towards pairings that will reify and reinforce the culture/society itself. Thus the culture we develop acts to influence the selection of mates, speeding species change along.

Is this why we wonder about purpose? Have we evolved farther via our culture than we ever would have in a natural environment? Are we, as human beings, now beyond the constraints of nature, and now a product of the constraints and constructions we have engineered ourselves in our own minds? Are we more intelligent and more complex than nature alone would ever have made us?

Or is wondering about purpose simply a side effect of the various mental structures that help us survive in day to day life? Are these things simply offshoots of the reasoning abilities that allowed us to make tools, fire, and clothing? Are they, in other words, epiphenomena of the type of rationality and ordering that is necessary to develop technology? Finding order in things, picking out patterns, and making inferences about these patterns helps in the struggle against nature, but also encourages us to see patterns where they don’t exist, and to be frustrated when we can’t see patterns where we think they should exist.

I see the search for the One True Interpretation in the same light. Our inability to accept that there is no Truth stems from our mandate to be certain of things. Our minds always want certainty, so they can stop worrying about it and go on to the next problem. If we know for certain what a phrase in Hawthorne means, we can file it away and go on to the next thing. If we don’t–if there are always “multiple meanings,” a never-stable “flow” of possibilities even for the individual himself, then nothing can ever be filed and everything is continually in disorder. We’ll never be done working on any particular line, so there’s no satisfaction in the work, little sense of progress, and no sense of closure. It’s very unsatisfying to the human mind, which is trained to look for patterns and order, and longs for closure so as to husband our limited processing power. We can’t just resign ourselves to uncertainty, because uncertainty means we don’t know what might happen next, and predicting the future is a huge part of why we think in the first place!