Science can address meaning and purpose

Bo Winegard writes about science and philosophy at the Aporia Substack, where, in a recent article, he discussed the relationship between science and notions of “meaning” and “purpose”. He concluded that “science cannot discover meaning” and that it must set any such notions aside; indeed he sees doing so as a major strength of science. I think that this is misguided and that it impoverishes science.

I do agree with much in Winegard’s essay, for example when he says:

“Before humans engage in science, or even philosophical reflection, they encounter a world that is full of significance, full of threats and opportunities, of purposes and failures, of tragedies and triumphs. Long before the scientist measures, the human being cares. Science does not create our meaningful engagement with reality. It presupposes it.”

But I suggest that he goes wrong when he continues:

“Science is extraordinarily effective precisely because it sets aside questions of meaning, value and purpose in order to focus on causal processes. It asks how things work, not what they mean; how events follow one another, not why they matter.”

I actually agree with much of the spirit of Winegard’s essay but want to dispute his implementation. I agree with him when he (correctly) rejects the idea that because “love, hope, meaning, morality are all products of brain cells and chemicals” they are therefore “not actually real”. Indeed those things are real precisely because they are products of brain cells and chemicals. Things that are made out of physical material, things that amount to being patterns of material stuff – such as cars, trees, rocks, babies, and indeed human feelings – are the things that are real. Anything else (such as a Platonic essential tree, or a human soul) is not real and does not exist precisely because it is not instantiated in physical stuff.

But I disagree with Winegard’s conclusion that “science cannot discover meaning” and that notions of love, hope, meaning, morality are not within the purview of science. Instead, the crucial distinction – echoing Hume’s famous is/ought distinction – is between describing values (which science can do and does) and generating or prescribing values (which science cannot do). The mistake is to suppose that, because science cannot prescribe values, it also cannot describe them, and thus that they are entirely outside the scientific domain.

Science is all about describing and understanding the world and how things relate to each other. That’s all it attempts to do. It cannot generate values, it cannot adjudicate them, and it is not a prescriptive oracle that tells us what we “ought” to do. Prescriptions, instead, must come from sentient beings that have feelings, values, goals and desires. But there’s no reason why science cannot properly concern itself with describing those things.

Indeed, a proper understanding of the origin of feelings, values and meaning must come from science, namely the science of evolutionary psychology. Baby mammals need a lot of nurturing and care. So evolution has programmed female monkeys to love their offspring. I don’t see anything “unscientific” in stating that. One could perhaps (in a mistaken bid to be more “scientific”) try to avoid a word like “love”, and one could perhaps insist that science should only concern itself with behaviour, but I don’t see any way of denying that a mother monkey has intense emotional feelings about her baby, and I don’t see any way of understanding monkey behaviour without recognising that.

Chimpanzees are social animals, and their interactions with each other are a major part of their lives. They have friendships, they have desires, they get angry, they show empathy, they have notions of fairness and loyalty, and they get upset at violations of fairness. A primatologist recognises all of this and cannot understand chimpanzee behaviour except in such terms. The idea of a p-zombie might be a useful philosophical thought experiment, but no primatologist thinks of their subjects that way. I reject the idea that science must treat mammals as p-zombies (if that is indeed what Winegard is suggesting).

Social mammals communicate, and that means that they must know what each other’s vocalisations mean. Vervet monkeys have one alarm call for “snake” and a different alarm call for “eagle”. The other monkeys understand those meanings, as demonstrated by the fact that they respond by scanning the ground or the air respectively. Have I just said something unscientific? I don’t think so. Yet Winegard declares that “science cannot discover meaning”.

Chimpanzees enjoy eating termites, and strip the leaves off a long twig to create a “fishing rod” that they poke into a termite mound to fish-out termites. The action of stripping the twig has a clear “purpose” in terms of the chimp’s “goal”. Have I strayed outside science in invoking those concepts? I don’t think so. Is the chimp consciously aware of that purpose (and thus is not a p-zombie)? I’ll bet that it is.

In order to facilitate their survival and reproduction, evolution has programmed social animals with feelings, values and goals. Their lives and their interactions with each other are meaningful and significant to them, precisely because social animals are programmed with values and desires as part of their fundamental nature. And that’s because an animal that literally did not care about anything (didn’t care whether it ate, didn’t care whether it got eaten by a predator) would not survive.

There is nothing to stop science from describing these aspects of human nature, though, again, science cannot declare normative prescriptions for the simple reason that those derive from values and goals. And while humans have values and goals, science does not and cannot generate them.

Bo Winegard’s essay was a response to a quote from Yuval Noah Harari:

“From a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion.”

Harari’s last sentence is wrong. Human lives are full of meaning. That meaning is part of our human nature and is generated by ourselves and our interactions with each other and the wider world. Nothing about that is a delusion.

But what about us not being part “of some divine cosmic plan” such that “if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual”. Well yes, this is true. Science tells us what types of entities have feelings and plans and goals that generate meaning and purpose, and the only such entities that we know of are the neural-network brains that are the evolved products of Darwinian evolution.

Entities that are not evolved animals (such as rocks, planets, stars, galaxies) do not have feelings. Harari is thus right that, in the “cosmic significance” sense (as distinct from the “significant to humans” sense), human life has no “meaning”. And, yes, science is not only capable of arriving at that answer, it is the best way of arriving at it! It is only by understanding ourselves as evolved social animals that we can understand human psychology, and only in that context can we understand the origin of feelings, values and goals.

If the Earth had been deliberately created for some purpose (as envisaged in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams’s satire on the human need to feel cosmically significant) then there would be nothing to stop science discerning that, just as it can discern the purpose of a chimp stripping a twig of leaves. The fact that science does not report a “cosmic purpose” for Earth is not because science is necessarily blind to such concepts, it is because there is no such purpose for the straightforward reason that Earth was not deliberately created. Nor, as far as we can tell, were we humans.

Einstein made this point well in response to a letter enquiring about the purpose of life, where he replied that questions about “meaning” and “purpose” must relate to the goals and desires that people have:

“I was impressed by the earnestness of your struggle to find a purpose for the life of the individual and of mankind as a whole. In my opinion there can be no reasonable answer if the question is put this way. If we speak of the purpose and goal of an action we mean simply the question: which kind of desire should we fulfill by the action or its consequences or which undesired consequences should be prevented? We can, of course, also speak in a clear way of the goal of an action from the standpoint of a community to which the individual belongs. In such cases the goal of the action has also to do at least indirectly with fulfillment of desires of the individuals which constitute a society. If you ask for the purpose or goal of society as a whole or of an individual taken as a whole the question loses its meaning. This is, of course, even more so if you ask the purpose or meaning of nature in general. For in those cases it seems quite arbitrary if not unreasonable to assume somebody whose desires are connected with the happenings.”

Winegard suggests that:

“Dawkins seems to expect science to provide an objective, non-superstitious answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?””

And science can indeed answer! The question is not outside the realm of science, but, as asked, the question is poorly posed. Dawkins would give the same answer that Einstein did. “Meaning” and “purpose” are indeed fully real and of the utmost importance to us humans. They are generated by sentient animals with goals and desires, and questions about meaning and purpose can only be asked in that context. To ask “What is the meaning of life?” in the abstract, stripped of that context (Whose purpose? Meaningful to whom?), is a category error. But to ask about the meanings and purposes within our lives is not.