Omar Claflin

Is everything pointless? Of course it is. There is no point. The more we probe, the more we confirm that.

There are grandiose debates going on about the ultimate sources of purpose. Science versus humanities versus religion, with each of them arguing that they can provide purpose. All of them jostling to tell us what the point of all of it is.

The whole ‘point’ of it is what we infuse into our own perception. The lines of the world are purposeless but we can color them in, in whatever way we’d like. Our starting point may be our general well-being, happiness, which has implications of survival until it butts heads with survival, like in terminal suffering. Or knowledge or mastery of the world. Until that butts heads with well-being. Or survival. Give us ‘purpose.’ There isn’t purpose. Give yourself purpose.

Purpose is an approximation. A rounding error. There are profound efficiencies to be realized when apparent function and form converge. There are many gradations of this; this is a highly relative assessment. Function and form do not always mesh together neatly. Situational changes can improve or worsen this fit. I should say apparent function because function is a relative definition depending on what purpose you think it should have. Function is an injected narrative of purpose.

Did they do that by mistake or on purpose? It’s an erroneous question. You don’t know. They don’t know. The actual question being asked is ‘how likely is it they could do that again?’ and/or ‘did they expect that to happen?’ If they guessed beforehand that they were going to do that, they call it purposeful. If not, a mistake. Or if they assess themselves as unlikely being able to ever replicate it again, it was an accident. Purpose is a shortcut narrative.

When agents are well suited to an environment, having relative benefits, it appears purposeful. Purpose is an accident if it happens. Also a matter of perspective. It’s okay though for us to infuse our own axioms and priorities and start from there. And of course actions that lead to those priorities indirectly will seem non-pointless. To us. Our information system is biased because without bias, we would be adrift. Relativism must start somewhere. However, other potential axioms have to be examined as well.

Goals come from the biological informational system that is your mind, with biasing the immediate environment around for your comfort, your survival, to the propagation of your genes, to an extent. Biased perceptions serve as useful summaries of the environment, filtering the only features that are salient to you, coloring them with emotional judgment whether or not they seem to contribute to your goals. This sense of control, based on your goals, the orienting, aligning, focusing force of all intelligent systems – colors the view of the world, but doesn’t actually color the world. Perception is important, but contrary to the saying, it isn’t everything.

Plenty of have written about consciousness, the illusion of it. I’m not sure illusion is the right word but it is a perceptual experience. An ability to compare memories with your current sensations. The point is you are a compilation of mental processes. Interesting mental processes, sure. But it’s akin to a council having a discussion without ‘you’ having any input or control. The whole ‘council’ is you. Not to discount your feelings of engagement or effort. Or to reduce your simplicity.

Imagine a cabinet of jabbering council-people. Imagine they are processing the news that a neighboring nation state has developed an enormous cache of wealth, say in the form of natural resources. The war councilor will interpret it as a means to increase its potential military. It will interpret any wealth-increasing action in this manner. The potential for that exists, but it’s a shortcut by a threat assessment process who sees everything in a war of vulnerabilities and advantages.

The problem with purpose is that the multiple narratives of purpose will also work on the same action. They are increasing their wealth for the purposes of building themselves schools or giving economic gifts to its neighboring states. Or for research and technological advancement. Or they just don’t want to work 40 hours a week anymore and plan on subsidizing a 30 hour work week.

Actions are actions. Events are events. They are devoid of purpose. There is no point. Point and purpose is the coloration your mind overlays on the world. They slice into the world in specific ways for concentrated, biased summaries. They attempt to summarize and predict what events and actions will come next.

In neuroscience, when analyzing brain activity, purpose-driven explanations serve as summaries or logical traps. For instance, the differences in brain activity between two groups of people can be explained away with opposing purpose narratives. For instance, more brain activity in the faster group is seen demonstrating ‘more processing.’ Oh wait, it turns out that I switched the labels. The activity is actually less in the faster group. Well, that’s okay because less brain activity can be explained as demonstrating ‘increased neural efficiency.’

Scientific progress is made not by looking at meaning or purpose or explanations centered on ‘why’ things happen. An explanation about the origin of animals through evolution is an explanation answering ‘how.’ ’Why’ explanations are irrelevant to the process of scientific discovery. Why is the sky blue, a favorite question of toddlers, is really a question of ‘how is the sky blue?’ which has something to do with light scattering. Or the range of you retinal detectors depending on how you look at it. The common colloquial use of the word ‘why’ also confuses things. It sometimes gets substituted for ‘how is that…’ or ‘what are the reasons for…’ To really ask ‘why’ asks about the intent of the whole universe or you being here, which is a favorite exercise of toddlers and philosophers.

How did life form on this planet or in the universe? Well there’s other authors who explain that better that but there exist robust explanations of various scopes to explain how that happened.

Why did life form on this planet or in this universe? You could say it was Nature’s way to observe itself by creating awareness as some have suggested. You could give a universal answer like the lazy older sibling to the toddler and just say “Because.” You can extend that by one word and say “Because God.” You could also say the universe really likes fudge cake and it was the only way the universe could create fudge cake. I have a personal bias toward the last explanation.

I’m not deriding shortcuts in your brain. They are critical. They are inextricable to you. I’m not saying you can entirely remove them. Just be aware of them.

You can be aware of when you’re doing this. This gives you clarity on your own thinking. You can try to be aware of the output of your thinking, such as the language you use. But everything before the output that generated isn’t accessible to you. It’s implied by the same psychology simulators of predictive behavior you apply to everyone else. What those thoughts actually are can only be guessed at. Those thoughts, those neural calculations, aren’t even words either.

The war councillary’s input is taken for what it is. Not mistaken for a holistic truth.

Purpose, intent, motives work as a feature of the brain. There is an ability to anthropromorphize action and simulate motivations in the brain. Motivations allow us to predict future behavior.

Watching the maneuvering of a black-tinted windowed car. Car has intent. We can quickly process the complex action, the layered motivations that are trying to maneuver aggressively to get past other drivers and suddenly slow when a cop is present. It acts human even though we only see a four-wheeled vehicle. It seems impatient, aggressive, or even angry. This is our psychology simulator at work.

The ability of the mind to simulate others and their psychology (their preferences, their motivations, their probable goals) is an advanced strategic ability to predict what other people will probably do in the future. Applied to less complex things, it seems cartoonish: A ball wanting to roll down the hill. Applied to other complex phenomena, like weather patterns, it leads to disaster (for example, the old days of ritual sacrifice to appease the weather). Applied to actual information processing systems with similar social intelligences, even if not human, it can work pretty well (such as interacting with your dog).

The point is, this is a cognitive ability at your disposal. It projects, like Jarvis the artificial intelligence on Iron Man’s heads-up display, additional summarized information in the form of predictions. It is poorly designed for things that do not have the same complexity structure that we do. I do not mean less complex necessarily. Like the weather. Or the universe. Or any super-dimensional intelligence. Consider how the gods of literature act with human psychologies ranging from a jealous psychopath to a haggling negotiator.

Willful intent is imposed by our minds. By three months old, infants can interpret the ‘intent’ of a ball and whether it’s on a path that will collide with them or not. It’s a prediction mechanism by using a summarizing motive. A motive is a generalized enough of a description that in a different context, its predictions can still be applied.

However, it’s easily misled. It’s limited. Adults can also project intent and motivation onto the random output of a computer as demonstrated by many psychology experiments where the randomness was kept from the participants.

The problem is summarizing motives, which may be roughly accurate or way off, and conflating that with feelings and intent. It’s a prediction tool. Instilling feelings in the wind or an earthquake.

You can summarize any necessarily transient goals in a purposeful narrative or predict action of the world around you. It’s a lazy shortcut. The ultimate lazy shortcut is to take one lethargic swipe at the whole thing with one extended grand purpose.

If everything is pointless, what is the point? The point is your mind’s tendency for biasing the world through a worldview. Defining goals, and blasting things that get in that way of it as ‘bad’, sanctifying things that help as ‘good’. The religious like to say that their institutions infuse the point (or purpose, but it’s an overused word). Partly, without a coherent authority staking what the point is, there is a fear that other people could pick different things as a point for life. Well people do do that all the time. Even within a very-culturally-similar group of people, they do that. People look at things differently, with their priority list slightly different than people right next to them. Shaped by the nuances of their megaseconds of life experiences. Their mood that second. There is no absolute point. There are common points that a lot of us just tend to have, some of the time. Points that aren’t completely nihilistic, that are well-being-seeking, that value solidarity. It’s a manifestation of a fear hoping that everyone else will converge, herd-like on the same point as them. Not converging puts you in a potential conflict, possibly against a powerful majority. At best, it’s a tactical attempt to define an absolute where there is none. These are just sociological tactics to impress absolutes in a world where there aren’t any.

Gratitude, blame, any association of responsibility. These are deep strategic logical manipulations on the environment. Attempts at social manipulation.

There is, in fact, an evolved understanding in dealing with the world that lays aside choice and blame and looks instead at causality and understanding. Good, evil and culpability become annoying concepts. Similarly, a laying to rest of could-of-should-of loop thinking about past events, of actions that will stand unbudgeably-locked in history forever should be a more psychologically centering (and a more mentally accurate) place to be. Ruminating about other actions from what actually occurred is pointless. Finally, despite the lack of culpability, free will and actual possibility in the present and immediate future, events will play out influenced by your presence, even though you have no control. Your presence may manifest in effects that are unintentional by you, maybe forever unaware by you, but the situation was influenced by your presence.

Inferring probable future actions of people and other agents through motive summaries is useful. But you should be made aware that the distinction between ‘how’ something occurs and ‘why’ something occurs is that you’re overlaying purpose on the action. These actions may be the weather, bureaucracies, or an absent-minded neighbor. Your mind will simulate a psychology for these things. But be aware of its usefulness insomuch only as an attempt to summarize a pattern in their behavior. The purpose of purpose, if you will.

To be able to explain ‘why’ gives us the sense we can encapsulate and summarize something fairly completely. Any future situations that are novel, we can at least venture a guess what the system might do given a summary of its motivations.

This applies to even your own observation of your own behavior. You may think you eat healthy and workout because you intend on living for a long time. But suddenly you are diagnosed with an incurable illness that will murder you (illness with purpose) in several months but find yourself still working out. 

Now why are you working out? Because you actually enjoy it. Because you can beat the illness. Sure. Maybe it’s because you carry a vanity about your autopsy. I don’t know. The point is you don’t really either. Any consistent explanation of your past actions is equally valid.

If you were asked before you got sick, you would have insisted, based on the narrative you had generated, that you would not have continued to work out. You would have based this on your narrative about longevity. This is an attempt at predicting what your brain, you, would do in a future situation. You’re often wrong on this.

You are capable of observing yourself quite often and have access to some of the internal sensors in your body; you can carry some internal discussions but this really doesn’t imbue that much self-knowledge as you might think. Self-awareness isn’t as robust as you may think.

Self-narratives have been especially dissected in the case of split brain patients. These are revealing examples of how the brain works because the superhighway of neurons connecting the two halves of the brain have been severed in these individuals. This is done as a surgical technique to prevent the electric storm of a seizure from spreading over the brain for the seizure cases that are intractable to medication.

Experimental psychologists will take advantage of this type of brain by providing conflicting or different information to both halves of the brain and ask the subject to report on it. The talented ability of how one half of the brain will spin a narrative, quickly and deftly mind you, is well documented when its fooled or fed information beyond its awareness. The takeaway from these experiments is precisely this point about the limits of self-narratives.

Narratives are summaries of purpose and motive as discussed. But these are overlaid onto (or extracted from) a sequence of events. The brain’s tendency to notice how things are ordered, in a sequence of time, is the more primal calculations happening. It notices correlations between event 1 and event 2, or action and agent. It then layers purpose and motive (calling one a cause, another an effect), which gives us that predictive power or shorthand goal-oriented focus.

This neural sequence extraction applies to many things we do. Temporal lobe activations can be seen when listening to a story, a sequence of notes as music, storing or recalling events or listening to a sequence of words in a sentence. It extracts the sequence of things. It listens to that musical note, word, or event, and guesses based on previous experience what will probably happen next.

Correlations that happen in some order are given an implication of causation. In other words, when one thing consistently happens before or after something else, we assume a relationship. And the one earlier in time becomes a cause. For our mind, constantly trying to predict as much as possible, it serves as a cue for the second event. Our psychological simulators layer intent, motive and purpose on top of these causations.

Educators are familiar with the concept that raw causality has to be converted into a story for processing by its students. History has to have motives, biochemical pathways have to have purpose. The scientific process is our surgical tool for dissecting the world, but it’s not analogous to our mind’s product of understanding. Our anthropomorphic stories of our environments are our communication vehicle; the bard’s song of our species.

This makes sense. But in order to add to or improve upon the dense information packing that comes in the form of stories, we have to unpack it, ignore its previous conclusions in order to add to it. But to transfer it, it often requires some sort of story-packing in the form of popular science books, lectures, articles and even analogies drawn in the discussion sections of review articles in the scientific literature.

These motivational narratives cannot hope to come to any conclusion. They are simply the anthropomorphic summaries of what we know, or think we know. They are a product of our understanding. In other words, characterizing something leads us to output these kinds of summaries.

Why are we here? You can answer this question with nearly any conceivable answer. I like to think I’m here so I could experience fudge cake. Answering how we got here has an explicit explanation, depending on the scope and context. Your demand for a purpose-driven narrative is a product of the summarizing feature of our minds. If you wish for a purpose, think of it this way: Your ragtag set of mental processes got you this far so that you could take yourself further.

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