Appendix

Evolution, Purpose, and Consciousness

In 1986, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published a book called The Blind Watchmaker. This was two decades before he would become known as an advocate of the assertive brand of atheism known as “the new atheism.” But in retrospect, the book was a harbinger of this phase of Dawkins’s career. Its subtitle was: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design.

In one sense the subtitle was accurate. The book successfully debunked a particular argument that life on Earth was imbued with purpose by a God. But in the course of debunking that argument for higher purpose, Dawkins unwittingly laid the foundation for a second kind of argument for higher purpose. And the “evidence of evolution”—or at least some evidence from evolution—actually supports this second argument.

At least, that’s my view. And I hold it as someone who shares Dawkins’s commitment to the theory of natural selection. My 1994 book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, was grounded in the very ideas Dawkins had popularized in his landmark 1976 book The Selfish Gene. I remain, like Dawkins, unstintingly Darwinian in my view of how evolution works: Natural selection is the engine of evolution, period.

But you can believe that natural selection created life on Earth and still suspect that there is a larger purpose at work—that the purpose is being realized through natural selection. At this point I have to urge you not to jump to any conclusions. As I explained in chapter 14, to say that natural selection was set in motion for some purpose doesn’t necessarily mean it was set in motion by a being that merits the term “God.” In fact, as I explain below, there are scenarios in which the purpose was imbued by something that isn’t really a “being” at all, but rather a process.

Anyway, my main contention for now is that, leaving aside the question of what exactly might have imparted a purpose to evolution, there are ways of assessing the hypothesis that something did: You can look at the history of life on this planet and find evidence for or against the hypothesis. What’s more: The legitimacy of this enterprise is affirmed in Dawkins’s book, even if not in so many words.

The “blind watchmaker” in the book’s title comes from an argument made by theologian William Paley in a treatise called Natural Theology, published in 1802. Natural theology could be defined, in a very generic sense, as the enterprise of examining nature for signs of some larger purpose. Paley’s version of natural theology was, as Dawkins showed, flawed. My version, I hope, isn’t.

Here’s the basic argument Paley made:

If you’re walking across a field and you see a stone lying on the ground, there’s no reason to think it has a purpose, no evidence of design. But if you see a pocket watch lying on the ground, there’s good reason to think it was designed for a purpose. There is just too much intricate interconnection, too much seeming functionality, for it not to be a product of design.

Now, Paley asks, what if instead of coming across a rock or a pocket watch, you come across some animal, like a squirrel. Well, a squirrel is at least as intricate as a pocket watch, right? And its intricacy seems to be functional: It looks as if it was designed to do things like find nourishment, defend itself, and so on. So, says, Paley, in the case of the squirrel, as in the case of the pocket watch, it is valid to infer that there was a designer. And that designer is God.

On that last point, needless to say, Richard Dawkins begs to differ. He rightly points out that the organism was designed by natural selection, not by God. But, significantly, Dawkins agrees with Paley up to the point where Paley asserts that the designer was God. Here is what Dawkins says about Paley: “He had a proper reverence for the complexity of the living world, and he saw that it demands a very special kind of explanation. The only thing he got wrong—admittedly quite a big thing—is the explanation itself.”

It’s important to appreciate two big ideas Dawkins is affirming here.

First, Dawkins is saying that you can divide physical systems into two categories: the kind that demand a “special kind of explanation” and the kind that don’t. In the former category are pocket watches and squirrels—things that have the hallmarks of design, even though the “designer” may turn out to be either a conscious designer, like a watchmaker, or an unconscious process, like natural selection. In the second category are things like rocks, which don’t demand a special explanation because they don’t have the hallmarks of design.

Second, Dawkins is, by implication, saying that it’s legitimate to examine a physical system and ask, “Does that physical system demand a special kind of explanation?” Does it have signs of “design”—leaving aside for now whether those signs are the product of a conscious designer or an unconscious process?

The physical system I want to examine is the entire system of life on Earth, defined broadly to include technologies created by living things. You could call this system the biosphere or the ecosystem so long as you define those terms with unusual breadth. But I’d like to include explicit reference to what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (see chapter 3) called the noosphere—the technologically mediated part of the system that involves information processing and transmission and in some ways resembles an inchoate global brain and thus makes the system suggestive of a global organism. So I’ll call the physical system I’m examining the “bio-noosphere.”

Before I elaborate, a note on two other critical terms: “design” and “purpose.” The late Daniel Dennett—the philosopher most prominently associated with modern Darwinism and also with the new atheists—considered it acceptable to speak of organisms as having been “designed” by natural selection and of their having “purposes” that were imbued by natural selection (the overriding purpose being to spread genes, a purpose which entails such subordinate goals as staying alive via nourishment). Some philosophers prefer not to use those terms in this context, since an organism, unlike a watch, doesn’t have a conscious designer; natural selection, unlike a watchmaker, doesn’t design things with a purpose “in mind.”

In what follows, I’ll be using these two terms, “design” and “purpose,” broadly, as Dennett did, because I share his belief that it’s legitimate to talk about design and purpose whether or not the designer, the purpose instiller, was a conscious being or an unconscious process (and whether or not we know which of those it was). But, in deference to people who don’t share that belief, I’ll put quotation marks around these two words—just to underscore that in principle they could imply a creator that is either a being or a process.

Okay, so what kinds of things constitute valid evidence that a system is “designed” and has a “purpose”? There are basically two categories of evidence. The first has to do with the complexity—and, specifically, with the apparently functional complexity—of the physical system. So, for example, a squirrel is very intricate, and the intricacy seems well organized to perform certain functions (such as locating food), and these functions in turn seem subordinate to certain overarching functions (such as keeping the organism alive). This is the kind of evidence of “design” that Dawkins emphasizes.

The second category of evidence has to do with the process by which the physical system takes shape. In the case of the squirrel, this is the process biologists call “ontogeny”—the process that starts with a fertilized egg and involves the unfolding of increasing complexity and functional integration. In the case of what I’m calling the bio-noosphere, the process is a combination of biological and cultural evolution—the biological evolution that led to, among other things, the human species, and the cultural evolution that the human species launched, with particular emphasis on technological evolution and its influence on social structure. (See my book Nonzero for extensive discussion of the dynamics and tendencies of both biological and cultural evolution.)

Dawkins doesn’t emphasize the second category of evidence. He focuses on the functional integration of an organism, not on the process by which the integration took shape in the course of a life cycle. But I discussed this second category of evidence—and its application to the argument that the bio-noosphere has a purpose—more than twenty years ago with Dennett. And he agreed that this category of evidence is a valid one—that, whether we’re talking about what we call ontogeny, in the case of an animal, or what we could call biocultural evolution, in the case of the bio-noosphere, this process by which the physical system in question came to exist is a valid place to look for evidence in examining the hypothesis that the system is a product of “design” and has a “purpose.”

That conversation between me and Dennett is available on YouTube, and people interested in the question of evolution and purpose may find it worth viewing—both because it’s broadly relevant to that question and for more specific reasons that I’ll come to. (Searching for my name and Dennett’s name on YouTube will yield more than one video; this one lasts an hour and nine minutes, and the part relevant to evolution and purpose starts about five minutes in.)

Just to make sure you get the basic logic of my argument, look at these two sequences of development:

1. DNA in fertilized squirrel egg → ontogeny (aka maturation) → a squirrel.

2. First self-replicating material on Planet Earth several billion years ago → biocultural evolution → bio-noosphere.

I’m saying that there are two valid ways to argue that the evolution of the bio-noosphere has a “purpose” and reflects “design”: (1) argue that properties of squirrel ontogeny that seem to be hallmarks of “design” and “purpose” can also be found in biocultural evolution; and/or (2) argue that properties of a squirrel that seem to be hallmarks of “design” and “purpose” can be found in the bio-noosphere. In short: You can look for parallels between either the second parts of the two sequences of development or the third parts.

In chapter 3 I talked about what the entire several-billion-year process of biocultural evolution would look like if viewed from outer space with the aid of a special kind of time-lapse camera. I won’t here repeat that description, but I’d like to add some observations you might make if you did that kind of viewing.

The process has some of the properties that ontogeny evinces in the case of the squirrel, such as seemingly directional movement toward greater complexity. And I’m not talking only, or even mainly, about the growing complexity of the organisms produced by evolution, but also about the growing complexity of the whole biosphere and then the bio-noosphere. This complexity features what could be characterized as a division of labor among distinct parts that perform functions that help sustain the whole system. For example, plants capture energy from the sun and, by expelling oxygen, make it available to animals, which expel carbon dioxide that sustains the plants. Meanwhile, and importantly for purposes of my argument, evolution eventually produces a very smart species that launches a technological evolution that enmeshes that species in information technology—and here, too, we see what could be interpreted as a functionality at the global level. Indeed this interconnected species comes to resemble a global brain, a brain that in principle could assume stewardship of the whole biosphere somewhat as a squirrel’s brain governs the squirrel’s body.

Now, in the case of the squirrel, we would all agree (at least, Dennett, Dawkins, and I would agree) that this basic dynamic—the unfolding of greater complexity, including the development and integration of functionally distinct parts—is a manifestation of “design” performed by natural selection. In other words, this dynamic is part of what, in Dawkins’s terminology, demands a “special kind of explanation.” So, I’m asking, isn’t there at least some reason to think that what appears to be roughly (even if very roughly) the same dynamic suggests the need for a “special explanation” in the case of the whole system of life on Earth—a biosphere that, as it turns into a bio-noosphere, increasingly seems governed by a kind of global brain (even if badly governed—something that’s also characteristic of organisms in the early stages of maturation, when they aren’t yet well coordinated)?

At this point in the argument some people ask, “Wait, how could you possibly say we need a ‘special explanation’? We already have an explanation of how the ecosystem got created: It got created by evolution—by biological evolution and by technological evolution!” Yes, we do have that explanation—a nuts-and-bolts, material explanation for how the whole thing unfolded. But you could say the same thing about the squirrel’s ontogeny: We understand the physical process by which an egg unfolds into a squirrel. Yet Dennett and Dawkins agree that, in the case of a squirrel, we still need an additional “special kind of explanation”—namely, an explanation for how there came to be squirrel’s eggs that do this sort of remarkable unfolding. Well, I’m making a comparable claim about the first seeds of life on Earth—the original self-replicating material that unfolded into the whole bio-noosphere. I’m saying this unfolding, and the product of this unfolding, have properties that should lead us to suspect there is a “special kind of explanation” for how these seeds came to be here in the first place; I’m suggesting that these seeds, like squirrel’s eggs, may be a product of “design” and have some “purpose.” In other words, I’m suggesting that the word “seed” may be apt in a pretty strict sense.

I left the aforementioned conversation with Daniel Dennett thinking that he had, in the course of the conversation, agreed with me that indeed biocultural evolution evinces properties suggestive of “purpose” and “design” (as opposed to just agreeing with me, as I said above, that looking for such properties in the way I was looking for them is an intellectually valid exercise). He had seemed to acknowledge (after some cajoling) two things from which this conclusion would follow: (1) that if the evolutionary process on this planet evinced “directional movement toward functionality,” this would indeed constitute at least some evidence (even if meager evidence) of “design” and “purpose”; and (2) that, when we observe the biocultural evolution that produced what I’m now calling the bio-noosphere, we see that “there is a functionality about it” and there “has been a directionality about it.” But he later said I’d misunderstood him, and he wasn’t acknowledging as much as I thought. I’ll yield to him on that question, but I still recommend the video, because the pushback he had given me as I tried to move him toward these acknowledgments produced a conversation that illuminated key challenges to my argument.

Anyway, to summarize the argument I’m making: I think the ontogeny that gave us the squirrel and the biocultural evolution that gave us the bio-noosphere have key properties in common. Both seem to be directional processes that were very likely, given a benign environment, to carry organization to higher levels, ultimately producing a system characterized by seemingly functional parts, and indeed functionally integrated parts. I’m not saying the evidence for “purpose” and “design” is nearly as strong in the case of the bio-noosphere as it is in the case of squirrels. Indeed, in the first case there is, by virtue of the nature of the question, bound to be less available evidence, both for and against the hypothesis. I’m just saying there is more evidence for the hypothesis than is commonly appreciated.

In chapter 14 I noted that various things other than a God could have imparted “purpose” to biocultural evolution, and I vaguely alluded to scenarios in which the imparter—the “designer”—could have been not a being but a process, somewhat as natural selection is the “designer” of organisms.

The most plausible such scenarios I’m aware of are variations on the physicist Lee Smolin’s hypothesis of “cosmological natural selection.” Smolin suggests that maybe universes replicate themselves and the properties of our universe have thus been shaped by a kind of natural selection. If, for example, the portals by which they reproduce are black holes, cosmological natural selection would favor universes that have many black holes over universes that have few or none. This by itself wouldn’t explain how you wind up with a universe inclined to give birth to a process of natural selection that in turn is likely to produce intelligent, technology-creating life. However, if it turned out that this kind of intelligent life increases the chances of the universe replicating itself (maybe by intentionally generating black holes via super-advanced technology) then universes with this propensity for spawning natural selection would be favored by cosmological natural selection.

If you want to see this scenario explored, you can check out my conversation (also on YouTube) with the mathematician Louis Crane, who formulated the “Meduso-anthropic principle.” He’s one of two academics who independently posited variations on Smolin’s idea that involve intelligent life helping universes replicate themselves and thus illustrate how in theory a process, rather than a being, could “design” a biocultural evolution that has a “purpose.”

A Function for Consciousness

There is one other line of argument you could use to make the case for a purposive global superorganism. Before reading any further, you should be warned that this line involves the slipperiest of subjects: consciousness—by which I mean sentience, subjective experience. To say that something is conscious, in this sense, means that (as the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously put it) it is “like something” to be that thing.

Over the centuries, philosophers have come up with a number of ways of thinking about consciousness. Descartes, for example, believed consciousness was a kind of immaterial “stuff” that had a two-way relationship with the physical stuff that constitutes our body: the body can influence consciousness, and consciousness can influence the body.

This is called “interactive dualism,” and it is frowned on by many scientifically minded philosophers for obvious reasons: To attribute causal power to something immaterial is to suggest that the behavior of human beings, and perhaps other animals, lies beyond a full scientific accounting.

If you want a view of consciousness that is easier to reconcile with science, you can just cut Descartes’ view in half: lose the part about consciousness influencing the body, and stick with the part about the body influencing consciousness. In this view, consciousness bears the relationship to your body that the shadows in a shadow play bear to the puppets: Changes in the puppets change the shadows, but things don’t work the other way around; the shadows don’t influence the puppets. Shadows are real, but they don’t do anything.

This view—that consciousness is merely an “epiphenomenon”—has come to be known, naturally enough, as “epiphenomenalism.” I’d say epiphenomenalism is the prevailing view of consciousness in the behavioral sciences—not because many behavioral scientists have explicitly endorsed it, or have even thought about it in a precise way, but because an epiphenomenal view of consciousness is implicit in the way many of them talk about their work.

If, for example, you listen to a scientist describing, say, the reflexes that lead a person to withdraw their hand if it happens to touch a flame, the explanation will be entirely physical: The person’s contact with the rapidly moving molecules that constitute the heat causes physical information to be sent along the nervous system, and this physical information induces muscles to physically retract in ways that pull the hand out of the fire. There is, along with this objectively observable physical process, a subjective sensation of pain, but this sensation has no effect on the physical process.

So, too, when a neurologist gives an account of someone reacting to a loud noise, or responding to human speech: Sound waves enter the brain and trigger a sequence of physical events that culminate in behavior. Though neurologists may have mapped out this causal chain less completely than in the case of the hand reacting to the fire, there is a faith (a not unreasonable faith, given the track record of the behavioral sciences) that eventually we will be able to map out such a chain—a chain that leads inexorably, for example, from a sentence that enters my ear to a sentence I utter in reply.

Epiphenomenalism makes sense to me. At least, it makes as much sense as any other story about this elusive thing we call consciousness. But here’s the problem: Though epiphenomenalism may at first seem like the view of consciousness most compatible with science—a view that conveniently confines consciousness to a wholly inert role and thus doesn’t raise any troubling questions about the immaterial influencing the material—it does wind up raising a question that is, at first glance, at least, hard for the scientifically minded person to answer.

Here’s the question: If consciousness doesn’t do anything, then what is it for? Why does it exist?

Of course, things don’t have to exist for anything; they don’t have to have a function. Rocks, Dawkins and Dennett and I would say, seem not to be for anything. But since organisms, unlike rocks, were built by a process that imbues things with functionality, we plausibly assume that major features of organisms will have a function. And consciousness is a pretty major feature, even if it is qualitatively different from such plainly functional, undeniably physical features as feet, eyes, and the circulatory system.

In my 1988 book Three Scientists and Their Gods I wrote that, if consciousness is epiphenomenal, if it indeed bears the relationship to biological processes that shadows bear to puppets in a shadow play, then consciousness would seem to be “evolutionarily superfluous.” Some philosophers have since come to call this feature of epiphenomenal consciousness “extra-ness”—a term introduced by the philosopher David Chalmers (who had read my book as a graduate student) in his important and influential 1996 book The Conscious Mind.

Chalmers has put the matter this way: “It seems God could have created the world physically exactly like this one, atom for atom, but with no consciousness at all. And it would have worked just as well. But our universe isn’t like that. Our universe has consciousness.” For some reason, God chose “to do more work” in order “to put consciousness in.”

Chalmers isn’t a religious person—he’s using God in a kind of metaphorical way. Still, one could mount an argument that consciousness is evidence of divine purpose on the grounds that consciousness—subjective experience—is what gives meaning to life; so maybe a God “put consciousness in” to give life meaning.

However, that is not the argument I’m making here. In fact, I’m not now making an argument for divine purpose at all. There’s a second, quite different, way that an epiphenomenal view of consciousness could be enlisted in an argument for higher purpose.

The key to understanding this sense is to first understand something that may initially sound impossible—or, at least, sound contrary to what I’ve said so far. Here is that something: It’s conceivable, I think, that an epiphenomenal consciousness could have a function—and I don’t mean a vague, ethereal function like “giving life meaning,” but rather a more concrete function, a function that helps give shape to the bio-noosphere.

I hope it’s clear why this claim should seem at odds with what I’ve said about epiphenomenal consciousness so far. If epiphenomenal consciousness doesn’t really do anything, doesn’t exert any influence on the material world, then how could it have a concrete function?

My answer begins with an irony that some philosophers have noted. Namely: Even if consciousness is generally epiphenomenal—even if our subjective states as a rule have no effect on our behavior—there is one exception to that rule: When we talk about our subjective states, they are influencing our behavior—and also the behavior of whoever is listening to us. So even “epiphenomenal” consciousness has an effect on the world in the sense that it leads people to talk about it. It leads people to say things about it. And I don’t just mean it leads people to discuss the mind-body problem. It also leads people to say things like “I feel hot” or “What you said made me sad.” Animals as smart and social as us—reflective, selfaware animals that communicate via complex language—report on their subjective experiences, something they presumably wouldn’t do if there weren’t any subjective experiences to report on.

You might say, then, that “epiphenomenal” consciousness is a misnomer. Or, at least, it became a misnomer at some point in evolutionary time. For millions and millions of years, animals felt hunger and pain and other things, but none of those things actually influenced any behavior; subjective experience didn’t make any difference because it was merely epiphenomenal. And then we humans came along and started talking about our feelings, and consciousness was no longer epiphenomenal. For the first time, consciousness was having an effect on the physical world.

To be sure, it was still the case that the feeling of heat played no role in getting us to pull our hands away from a flame; in that sense subjective experience was still epiphenomenal. But once we uttered the sentence “My hand feels hot,” subjective experience was influencing human speech and hence human behavior. An initially epiphenomenal consciousness had, through evolution, passed a threshold beyond which it was no longer epiphenomenal.

So this is the reason epiphenomenal consciousness could, in principle, have a function. Or, at least, it’s the reason a consciousness that had been epiphenomenal throughout the history of organic life could come to have a function once organic life developed self-awareness and complex language, thus rendering consciousness no longer epiphenomenal. But what might the function of this suddenly not-epiphenomenal consciousness be?

Well, I’ve already suggested that, if there is indeed a larger purpose unfolding on this planet, it has involved the expansion of human social organization. After all, in order to get to a point where we could build a giant global brain, we had to approach a global level of social organization—which meant first moving from isolated hunter-gatherer villages to ancient city-states to regional states to groups of regional states interacting fairly harmoniously, and so on. Is there a way that people discussing their subjective states—talking about their feelings—could have abetted this expansion of social organization?

Maybe. After all, the expansion of social organization has been intertwined with, and apparently assisted by, a kind of progress in moral discourse. There was a time when members of one Greek city-state considered members of other Greek city-states undeserving of decent treatment—fair game for enslavement, for example. Then, thanks to such thinkers as Plato, and to certain social and political developments, a consensus developed that all Greeks should be treated decently; it was just non-Greeks, such as the Persians, who could be treated as though they were subhuman. And today, of course, the “moral circle” that Plato helped expand has expanded further; most of the world’s philosophers and other “thought leaders” would now say that members of all nationalities and racial groups deserve decent treatment. This moral progress (even if it is sometimes honored in word more than deed) facilitates global social organization.

And, more to the point, this progress has involved the discussion of subjective states. Moral discourse involves saying things like, “But wait, if we do this, those people over there will suffer undeservedly, and we’ve agreed that undeserved suffering is bad.” It’s very hard to imagine what moral discourse would look like if there were no subjective experiences to refer to, so it’s far from clear that the moral progress that has abetted the expansion of social organization could have taken place if subjective experience didn’t exist. So it’s at least conceivable that an initially epiphenomenal consciousness has turned out to have a function—not a function at the level of the individual organism, but rather a function at the level of an unfolding global organism. Specifically: It has helped the global organism become global and begin to congeal. It has led people in one part of the world to take into account the interests of people in other parts of the world more than they otherwise would have, and this has smoothed the path to international social and political organization.

One interesting feature of this scenario is that subjective experience existed for a long time before it started fulfilling its function—in other words, before a species evolved that talked about its subjective experiences. I consider this feature to work in support of the hypothesis that the developing bio-noosphere has a larger “purpose”—that it deserves to be thought of as a maturing global organism. After all, this sort of latent functionality is common in the unfolding of “designed” systems. Indeed, you see it in individual organisms that were “designed” by natural selection. Human reproductive equipment, for example, exists in some form for a dozen or so years before it gets to a point where it actually functions as reproductive equipment.

In any event, one thing is clear about any scenario in which subjective experience is a widespread feature of organic life long before there is a species via which it manifests physical influence: Any functionality there may be couldn’t possibly reside at the level of the individual organism. After all, natural selection, which is responsible for all functionality at the level of the individual organism, can’t make a trait widespread unless the trait has some influence on the reproductive prospects of members of the species in which the trait arises, and the trait can’t have any such influence if it has no influence on the material world at all.

The possibility I’m suggesting—that an initially epiphenomenal consciousness has come to manifest a function at the social and ultimately global level over evolutionary time—is obviously quite conjectural. And there are formidable objections to it. Chalmers (in a conversation with me that is also available on YouTube) made an objection that I suspect a number of philosophers would bring up. Namely: How exactly does a consciousness that was previously epiphenomenal, incapable of exerting influence on the organism harboring it, suddenly acquire causal force, provoking discussions about itself? When you start trying to imagine the fine-grained mechanics of such a transition, don’t you draw a blank?

I don’t purport to have a clear answer. At the same time, given what fundamental thresholds the advent of self-awareness and the advent of complex language were, it doesn’t seem to me inconceivable that crossing these thresholds could qualitatively change the capacity of consciousness to in some sense interact with the world.

Here is an analogy, based on my earlier analogy between an epiphenomenal consciousness and a shadow in a shadow play, that suggests what such a change might be like:

Suppose there was an organism that had no eyesight, no perceptual sensitivity to light whatsoever. Then suppose it developed eyesight and every once in a while looked at its shadow and reacted to its shadow. Well, at this point its shadow would have gone from being epiphenomenal—having no effect on the organism’s behavior—to having an effect on the organism’s behavior. Strictly speaking, nothing about the nature of the shadow would have changed—the changes all came in the physical constitution of the organism—and yet the shadow would now have a new capacity for interaction with the organism. (I wish I had thought of this analogy during my conversation with Chalmers!) So maybe, much as the advent of vision might turn a shadow into a causal force, the advent of human language turns subjective experience into a causal force.

Obviously, none of the arguments I’ve presented in the course of this essay are overwhelmingly persuasive. Then again, I think it is in the nature of the question of higher purpose for arguments in the affirmative to fall short of that mark. One reason for this is that, whereas the theory of natural selection is built on lots of data points—lots of observed organisms, and indeed species, that are all products of the same creative process—in the case of higher purpose we have only one data point to work with: life on Earth.

In any event, my main point is just that it is legitimate to mount such arguments, that there can be at least some evidence for or against the hypothesis of “higher purpose”—and, indeed, that some of this evidence is, qualitatively, the same kind of evidence that Dawkins used to make his argument in The Blind Watchmaker.

In closing I should again emphasize—as I did in chapter 14—that a “higher purpose” wouldn’t necessarily originate with anything like a God, as God has traditionally been conceived. That said, note that some of the properties evinced by the system I’ve been discussing are the kinds of properties associated with “higher purpose” in the traditional sense of a “divine” purpose. For example, there’s the aforementioned moral progress that has accompanied the expansion of social organization. And there’s the fact that sustaining history’s erratic but discernible drift toward a cohesive global community will almost certainly require more moral progress. Indeed, given the signs of backsliding on this project—given the distinct prospect that humankind, having reached the brink of a global community, will dissolve into chaos—you could say that our species is facing an epic moral test, the kind of test that has often been associated with divine purpose. That test is what a good part of this book has been about.

One final speculation:

If it turns out that artificial intelligence has consciousness, and this influences the way it treats us (perhaps by making it more sensitive to its effect on our subjective well-being) or influences the way we treat it (perhaps by making us, similarly, more considerate of its subjective well-being), this dynamic could contribute to the development of a stable and mutually beneficial symbiosis between silicon-based and carbon-based intelligence. This contribution might then be cited in future discussions about whether there is a “higher purpose” and whether such a purpose could explain the existence of consciousness—even, and maybe especially, a consciousness that is “epiphenomenal.”

Excerpted from The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning by Robert Wright. Copyright © 2026 by Robert Wright. Published by Simon & Schuster.