The Value of Purpose and the Purpose of Value
Much of our awareness is not merely intentional, but purposeful, and purpose involves another unique feature of consciousness: value. Purposeful behavior, or teleological causation, begins with value, which is applied to awareness of circumstances, and is then directed toward changing those circumstances. So the three essential elements are value, awareness, and agency. The first two are both indisputably real and utterly outside the realm of physical science.
The last is vital if purpose is not an illusion, but is most intensely disputed because if it is real then physical science at present is profoundly incomplete or on the wrong track altogether. The physical scientists do not want to abandon their boxtop. They have devoted their lives to putting the pieces of the puzzle together so as to match the picture they see there.
But there is a huge piece that does not seem to fit and which they simply ignore. Not only does consciousness— something nowhere to be found in their picture—actually exist, but a huge portion of consciousness, perhaps the vast bulk of it, is directed toward changing the physical world—with what appears to be extraordinary success. We are cold and want to be warm, so we build fires; we are hungry and want to be fed, so we find food. We spend our lives largely in our efforts to satisfy our desires, yet “science” tells us that we are deluded, that we are really just the helpless tools of blind mechanical forces.
Actually they usually argue not that our volitional behavior is illusory, but that it is “explained” ultimately by the laws of physics. One way of doing that is to argue that all of our willed behavior can be reduced to seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, which they see as mechanistic principles.
They are wrong. Pain and pleasure may or may not be the foundation of all value, but they are not mechanistic, they are teleological. If we can behave in such a way as to seek pleasure or avoid pain then purpose—something totally outside the realm of scientific understanding—has entered the world. Pain and pleasure are not physical principles, and physical principles cannot produce them. There is nothing like them in the concepts of physical law and there is no way that they can be derived from the laws of physics. There is no value—no good or bad in any form—in the world of physics; there are just particles and forces acting on them.
Scientists tell us that our brains are nothing but biological computers, but computers are essentially composed of switches. An impulse from one switch either turns on or turns off another switch. This basic operation is then performed many billions of times. “Memory” is just a bank of switches set by a series of impulses which then direct the impulses received to operate other switches. There is nothing there but a complex web of interlocking causal chains, not unlike strings of falling dominoes.
There is no place for value of any kind to enter the picture. Moreover, there is no need for value or purpose. The computer works fine without them. But if value in the form of pain or pleasure, or any other perception of good or bad, enters and changes the causal chain, we have unalterably left the world of physical law as it is presently understood.