Are we closer to answering some of the Big Questions in life?
Gunnar Babcock, lecturer in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, explores this through science.
Gunnar Babcock (he/him) received a PhD in philosophy from the University at Albany, SUNY and he has taught courses in applied ethics, philosophy of biology, evolutionary biology, bioethics, and environmental philosophy. Before coming to Cornell University, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Dept. of Biology at Duke University for four years where he taught and worked on developing a theory of how goal directed systems work in biology. His work appears in journals such as the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and Philosophy of Science. Before pursuing an academic career, Gunnar oversaw a domestication project in Alaska for six years.
The Fields That Direct Us
The question of whether there’s purpose in the universe, in life, or in our own lives is perhaps one of the most important and most enduring questions. Yet, it receives surprisingly little scientific attention. My collaborator, Dan McShea, professor of biology at Duke University, and I have a new theory about how purposive systems work. Our research suggests that purpose or goal directedness is the result of what we call fields.
Our theory begins by observing shifts in thinking that happened during important advances in science. For example, before Newton’s theory of gravity there wasn’t an obvious explanation for why things like rocks fall. Without the notion of a gravitational field, to explain why rocks fall meant having to attribute special kinds of fundamental, internal properties to them. But now, armed with knowledge of gravity, we can see such lines of explanation were always a lost cause.
However, today, we continue to look internally for causes when accounting for goal-directed behavior. This is especially true when it comes to life. Our theory does the opposite by looking outside and evidence suggests this is where goal-directed behavior originates. Just as gravity accounts for why rocks fall, the morphogenetic gradients outside cells are responsible for guiding the development of embryos. Without this crucial outside guidance genes, by themselves, have no way of determining where the cell is, or what it should do next. We speculate that even things like human affect, or wanting, works the same way in driving human behavior. Affective in the brain isn’t localized at particular neurons. Instead, cognition is bathed in large fields of interactions which create affect. These are further directed by even larger social fields, and so on. Starting to think about goal directed entities as being guided by fields not only provides a means through which purpose might be studied empirically, it suggests that there is purpose in the universe.
Read More:
[Aeon] – Elusive but everywhere
Purpose Agency and Field Theory
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