Decades ago I had the vignette you see above this paragraph prominently displayed at the entrance of my office. At the time I was a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut and knew that the vignette was wrong from an evolutionary perspective, because evolution is not a linear sequence of changes from “lower” to “higher” forms. Still, that wasn’t the point. The point was that human beings are the only animals—so far as we know—to ask themselves the question of meaning. Or, perhaps, the implication of the image is that we are the only animals foolish enough to ask that question.

Ever since I was a teenager I thought that the issue of meaning had been settled: (i) there is no such thing as “cosmic” or universal meaning; but (ii) meaning at the personal, local level is a real and consequential human construct shaped by our biology and culture. I still believe both propositions, for the simple reason that they are the best explanation of all the facts we have come to know so far about the life, the universe, and everything. [1]

Recently, however, some of my colleagues in philosophy have been making increasingly noisy protestations to the contrary. A few years ago, for instance, the esteemed NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel published his “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” In the book, Nagel explored what he saw as the limitations of scientific reductionism in explaining consciousness and the mind’s role in understanding the universe. He argued for a teleological (i.e., purpose-based) perspective, suggesting that mind is a fundamental aspect of nature that current scientific methodologies fail to adequately address.

My colleague Allen Orr, an evolutionary biologist, published a typical critique of Nagel’s book in The New York Review of Books which reads in part:

“There’s not much of an argument here. Instead Nagel’s conclusion rests largely on the strength of his intuition. His intuition recoils from the claimed plausibility of neo-Darwinism and that, it seems, is that. (Richard Dawkins has called this sort of move the argument from personal incredulity.)”

And:

“Nagel’s teleological biology is run through with talk about the ‘higher forms of organization toward which nature tends’ and progress toward ‘more complex systems.’ Real biology looks little like this. The history of evolutionary lineages is replete with reversals, which often move from greater complexity to less.”

And so and so forth. The current champion for the (still very few, thankfully) philosophers who reject the scientific view of the world in favor of a more or less mystical one is Philip Goff, author of the recent “Why? The Purpose of the Universe,” in which he makes the case for both cosmic purpose and what he sees as the related notion of panpsychism, the idea that consciousness or a mind-like quality is a fundamental aspect of all things in the universe. And he’s getting plenty of promotion on the Substack of the American Philosophical Association, courtesy of Charlie Taben.

There are lots of reasons not to take seriously either Nagel’s teleology or Goff’s panpsychism, and therefore to reject the whole notion of a cosmic purpose. Let’s take a brief look.

The problem(s) with teleology

The notion of teleology was arguably first articulated by Aristotle and done away with during the scientific revolution that began in the 17th century, especially with the arguments proposed by David Hume and Charles Darwin. Here are the highlights:

First of all, the scientific worldview holds that physical processes alone, operating through natural selection and other mechanisms, are sufficient to explain the emergence of all phenomena including consciousness and reason, without requiring any overarching purpose. Of course both Nagel and Goff object to this, but the reality is that the scientific worldview has been incredibly successful in practice, while the sort of metaphysics these authors keep pushing has done absolutely nothing to advance our understanding of the world and represents, in fact, a sliding back to the Middle Ages, if not earlier.

Second, and this is an elaboration of the point I have just made, teleological explanations simply fail to provide concrete mechanisms for how cosmic purpose would actually operate in physical reality. There is truly nothing there to be seen.

Third, non-teleological explanations are simpler and do not require additional metaphysical assumptions beyond established scientific principles, which means that teleological accounts violate Occam’s Razor. While the Razor is a heuristic, not a universal law of logic, it has, again, worked incredibly well so far, which means that we need to have very good reasons to start ignoring it. We have, at the moment, no such reason at all.

Fourth, what appears purposeful to Nagel or Goff might simply reflect selection bias: we observe a universe compatible with our existence because we could only exist in such a universe. But this is an incredibly parochial view, since the vast majority of space is brutally inhospitable to life as we understand it. As sci-fi satirist Douglas Adams put it,

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

And most of that space is empty and lifeless.

Fifth, as Darwin himself first pointed out, we observe numerous flaws, inefficiencies, and apparent randomness in evolutionary development. This suggests lack of direction rather than purpose. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a whole book about this.

Lastly, cosmic teleology is problematic to the point of being conceptually incoherent: purpose typically requires an agent with intentions, making a “purposeful universe” potentially meaningless without specifying a cosmic agent. And both Nagel and Goff are very careful in distancing themselves from the whole notion of an intelligent designer, because they (rightly) don’t want to be associated with creationists.

The problem with panpsychism

What about panpsychism? You can read a good philosophical takedown of the notion here, but these are the major objections:

To begin with, there is the combination problem: panpsychism fails to explain how simple forms of consciousness in fundamental particles could combine to form the unified, complex consciousness we experience. This is sometimes also called the “binding” problem. Here is one consequence of the problem: if all matter is endowed with some elementary ability to “think” (or whatever Goff says it’s going on here), how is it that the three-pound brain in our head appears to be far more conscious than, say, Mount Everest? No, you can’t conveniently help yourself to neurobiological explanations, obviously.

Moreover, there are—again—parsimony concerns: many philosophers and scientists consider panpsychism to violate Occam’s Razor by multiplying entities unnecessarily, since panpsychism attributes consciousness to every fundamental particle, thus adding enormous complexity without clear explanatory benefits.

Third, there is absolutely no empirical evidence for consciousness in fundamental particles or simple systems, making panpsychism unfalsifiable and scientifically problematic. This is an issue that has been raised directly by physicists like Sabine Hossenfelder. Goff has responded that this is a misunderstanding of his position, since he endorses some form of dualism which is, by definition, empirically untestable. He doesn’t seem to appreciate that that sort of response simply helps him dig his grave much faster and more deeply, as far as most scientists and philosophers are concerned.

The next class of objections to panpsychism comes from functionalist theories of mind, which argue that consciousness emerges from specific functional organizations rather than being intrinsic to matter itself. Both evolutionary biology and neuroscience are based on the assumption of functionalism (sometimes with caveats about the specific physical substrates that generate consciousness), and they have been incredibly successful at what they do. Indeed, everything we know about consciousness and mind comes from those and allied disciplines, which again raises the issue of why exactly people like Nagel and Goff want to turn the clock back a few centuries.