Cultivating Purpose, Expanding Intelligence, and the Death of God
Hominization and Intelligence
The story of our hominization unfolds within a single question: how do we get the world to do more of what we want. In this ongoing endeavor, we have developed a capacity for asserting purpose well beyond what any other living thing on Earth is capable of.
To properly understand the human capacity for asserting purpose, we need to have a working definition of ‘intelligence’. I’ll borrow Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s: ‘the ability to model, predict, and influence one’s future’ (What Is Intelligence? , 10). Intelligence is, in other words, fundamentally an orientation to the future that seeks to modify its outcomes for the benefit of the organism.
The more sophisticated our models, the more of the future we can predict.
Intelligence Explosion
Our intelligence has grown with our expanding ability to assert purpose—to get the world to do more of what we want. This is not a static story. From throwing spears to splitting the atom, from two-million-year-old hand axes to data centers, the genus Homo has invested in tools to gain control over its environment by arranging causality to suit our aims.
As technology extends our capacity to assert purpose, it also extends intelligence—our ability to model, predict, choose, and revise. Technology, purpose, and intelligence co-evolve, and all three can be cultivated, personally and collectively.
We tend to tell this story within biology, paleontology, and anthropology as a story of evolving physiological capacities. But these capacities unfold within the question we’ve already posed as the context of our hominization: how do we get the world to do more of what we want?
This means seeing history within this wider context.
One episode in this history: when Babylonian astronomers looked to the sky, they saw omens from the gods. Over centuries, they cataloged thousands of omens on clay tablets—unearthed by archaeologists in the mid-nineteenth century.
They used these materials at hand—clay tablets and stamps—to teach future generations how to read the gods' signals. An eclipse might mean the imminent death of a king, or the dimming of Venus on the right or left could refer to the relative difficulty of childbirth. Over time, they developed mathematical methods to predict eclipse patterns years in advance, including the Saros cycle of 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours.
Starting from the heavens as signs, the Babylonians eventually saw patterns of long-term motion and developed computations to predict the recurrence of events within these patterns. If an eclipse can be predicted in advance, then preparations could be made well ahead of time.
Often this story will be told as an episode in the history of science or the history of astronomy. But it should be seen in the history of hominization—our expanding capacity to model, predict, and influence the future. It is, in other words, part of the history of the phenomenon of intelligence.
Consciousness and Divine Demotion
Over time, astronomers pushed the gods aside and began to see the heavens on their own terms: patterns moving with measurable regularity. Astronomy, as an independent undertaking, was born. Centuries later, Copernicus would place the Sun at the center of the cosmos not because he wanted to dethrone God—he didn’t—but because the calculations require fewer corrections if we assume the Earth is spinning around an axis and orbiting the Sun.
The invention of gods who roughly resemble us—as users of signs to communicate the future—inaugurates a pattern in human consciousness that externalizes our intelligence. To transfer our model of intelligence to imaginary beings requires us to have a model of our own intelligence that we can abstract and project onto non-human objects.
As observations continue, the omens captured in the tablets we call Enuma Anu Enlil (‘When Anu and Enlil’) become translated into detailed patterns cataloged in the Astronomical Diaries. The gods become demoted in this movement as our own intelligence expands its capacity to model, predict, and influence the future.
To see the movements of the heavens as the intentional actions of the gods is to externalize our intelligence as a model that we can begin to contemplate. If the gods are signaling the imminent death of a king or the scarcity of a harvest, we can only read these signs because we see the gods as versions of ourselves. We can, therefore, respond by computing these movements faster than the heavens can execute them. When we do so, our predictions have an effect on how the future unfolds.
Replication and Emulation
Thus, in the ongoing effort to get the world to do more of what we want, we have figured out how to project our intelligence onto other things—all of which are essentially ‘computers’ like us, moving predictably if not fully intentionally.
When that model is externalized, it is done so via written language—in this case cuneiform tablets. This allows for its persistence in time and its openness to further discussion and refinement. Many scholars have identified these tablets of omens and the Astronomical Diaries as ‘textbooks’ used as teaching devices. Written language, in other words, is becoming the bearer of our intelligence, and our intelligence was becoming replicable from generation to generation.
To learn these omens and the astronomical calculations, one had to learn how to read, and humanity had to learn how to teach and learn. We see in these tablets, then, the further evolution of emulation as our capacity to create and pass on models. To learn is, in part, to emulate another—to imitate how their mind works, which means forming a mental model and adopting that model as one’s own.
To repeat: in Babylonian astronomy, we are not just witnessing the birth of a science or the birth of history as written record keeping. We are witnessing an episode in the history of our hominization—the passage from animal to human, a passage that eventually creates the distinction ‘animal’ and ‘human’ as separate kinds of being.
This passage invents the gods and then demotes them. This passage is necessarily an evolution of consciousness—the evolved capacity of our intelligence to model, predict, and influence the future at increasing scale.
Time and Purpose
What do I mean by opening time to purpose? The bacterium moving through water is sensing the increasing or decreasing concentration of sugar. Depending on its internal need for nourishment, it will move accordingly. Is this consciousness? Is this intelligence? Is it just instinct? I’m inclined to agree with Agüera y Arcas that it is not consciousness but it is intelligence.
By making this distinction, Agüera y Arcas (and others) can envision an evolutionary continuum in which a self-reflective and self-modeling capacity emerges from intelligence. A bacterium navigating its liquid environment computes the presence of potential nourishment, but it can’t look to the heavens, see gods, and invent astronomy. Yet, it can understand patterns. These forms of life preceded us and dominated the Earth for millions of years before the Cambrian explosion some 540,000,000 years ago. They could not have dominated without getting really good at recognizing these patterns and passing them onto their offspring.
The distinction is fundamentally temporal in at least two ways. First, as we’ve been discussing, bacterium intelligence comes well before our more sophisticated version. The conditions of possibility for a more conscious form of intelligence—that can externalize its models—simply isn’t possible until many things happen. But that lineage must be traceable back to earlier forms, unless we want to assert an act of godlike creation—a miracle—intervening into the causal process.
Second, the bacterium has a very short context window compared to ours. It moves according to a register that we would call hunger. It has no capacity, or need, to plan, plant, and cultivate an orchard of apple trees that would provide it with abundant nourishment. Humans, on the other hand, have a wide capacity to envision multiple goals and objectives over increasingly long timeframes. We can use this capacity to look into the future to make plans and arrange events to bring about the preferred future.
In other words, we can arrange causes according to the effects we want.
Babylonians watched the skies, recorded events, watched them repeat, and learned how to predict those repetitions. When they modeled intelligent beings like themselves who were using these movements to send signals, humanity has learned to model other minds that resemble our own and project them onto other things. When that modeling expands to see the heavens as autonomous and regular movements, this capacity for abstracting intelligence away from anthropomorphic entities is another crucial moment in our hominization.
Good and Evil
We use those models not just to predict the future, but to judge it ahead of time. The birth of good and evil is inseparable from this capacity to predict the future and envision alternatives.
This capacity to envision the future and set a course for one or more preferred versions puts the problem of good and evil at the heart of purpose and therefore consciousness. Agüera y Arcas outlines three possibilities for evaluating a ‘good model’:
It accurately predicts the future.
It is effective in brining about, repeatedly, the envisioned future.
It is normatively good in that it ‘keeps the organism alive’.
More that this, however, our ability to sort good from bad depends on our collective ability to model and deliberate. We are collaborative creatures—not always for good purposes—and this collaboration allows us to compute these models and discuss them.
As we discuss good and evil, we evolve. Our ability to envision more possibilities widens as we contemplate them.
Contemplating this taxonomy of ‘good models’, we arrive at an important understanding of human consciousness and the assertion of purpose: we are inherently and unavoidably purposive creatures, which means that orienting to multiple futures with multiple time horizons is an evolving feature of our intelligence.
We can push this further. Our capacity to model good and bad outcomes—individually and collectively—is how we gain control over evolution. It is at the heart of our confrontation with fate: how we get the world to do more of what we want.
Agüera y Arcas captures this as ‘theory of mind’:
So, theory of mind lets us build a network of solid tracks along which our minds can venture far into the otherwise marshy future. Dynamical instability, like a lubricant, lets us glide anywhere along those tracks, free to go either way at any fork with the gentlest of nudges. Randomness provides those nudges, letting us wander prospectively into multiple futures. And selection prunes the network to allow efficient long-range planning. You may notice that this looks a lot like a fast version of evolution taking place in imaginary worlds! (277)
He has described accurately how I have been envisioning time as practice throughout this project: the power to envision multiple futures, evaluate them, and select for our preferences is how we intervene into evolution on our own behalf.
Our assertion of purpose is how our intelligence has evolved to do all of this.
This is how we make time into something composable across many dimensions. It is the essential feature of our hominescence.
Read more from the Wednesdays series.
This essay is part of my series on our Computable World.
For more on cultivating out power of purpose, see ‘Cultivating Purpose and Discernment in a Computational World’.