Cultivating Purpose and Discernment in a Computational World
Summary: This essay explores what it means to cultivate ethical and moral orientation in a world shaped by human computational power. It argues that purpose must be understood not as a fixed end but as an ongoing movement through complex systems we do not fully command, and that ethical life today requires sustained attention to how intentions unfold over time. It requires, in other words, cultivating discernment.
Definition of Purpose in a Computational Age
What is purpose in a deeply computational age? It is our human capacity for envisioning many possible futures and selecting the actions to move toward the preferred one.
Purpose is not an abstract ideal but intention enacted through time and systems that exceed our individual control.
Time horizons can be very short or very long. Purpose can orient through instinct or it can be the result of collaborative deliberation spread across space and time.
The Computational World and Fate
As the computational and infrastructural ambitions of the Enlightenment have accelerated, we have drawn more and more of what we once called fate into human control. ‘We are steering things that we didn’t used to steer,’ as Michel Serres put it.
We are crossing a historical threshold. The last three decades carried us toward it; the years since the pandemic have accelerated the passage. As I explore in the World as Computation essays, computation is now an infrastructure shaping how fate and judgment are experienced.
The speed and spread of computational power now pull many of the concepts that once anchored Western experience through this threshold: consciousness, intelligence, rationality, knowledge, politics, culture, technology, progress. None remain intact. All are being reformatted and realigned as computation reaches new scales and velocities.
The question is no longer whether we can master nature, but whether we can master our mastery. Can we recognize the accursed shares that emerge from systems that promise so much? As Georges Bataille understood, every purpose throws off more than it intends. When these accursed shares are not consciously negotiated, they are discharged—unevenly, sometimes violently.
The Limits of Traditional Orientation
Western traditions have often sought moral renewal by locating a stable point outside convention—a magnetic north immune to historical drift. Sometimes this appears as a philosophical school, sometimes as categorical imperatives, sometimes as a privileged form of experience presumed to stand apart from history: pure reason, immediate intuition of the One, a monk’s withdrawal, eternal virtues.
Each promises an orientation untouched by time and contingency. Valuable in their own way, but they were cultivated in the Neolithic Age of seasonal rhythms and local consequences.
Can we really just airlift them into today as if they were adequate to a modern world defined by rapidly increasing speed and scale of our computational power?
These orientations typically begin with What is? questions: What is good? What is pleasure? What is the human being? What is a just society? The wager is that we can press a conceptual pause button—answer these questions first, suspend the noise of history, and then design our institutions to follow, as if moral clarity could be achieved by calling time out, assembling the experts, and answering the What is? questions.
The impulse is understandable, even perhaps necessary.
But pressing pause risks the myth of finality, and it is naïve. Whatever policies, prohibitions, or moral refusals follow will generate their own accursed shares: unintended harms, loopholes, and excesses released by well-intentioned design. Institutions, however, tend to behave as if their decisions are one and done—as if their work were completed when a bill becomes law rather than re-opened each time new problems surface.
When the time-out ends, the real test is whether we are prepared to see—and revise—what the pause set in motion.
At the individual level, our ancient moralities encourage withdrawal. One steps back—from participation, from experimentation, from responsibility itself—hoping to preserve moral coherence by refusing the game altogether. The gesture can feel principled, even necessary, especially when the speed of change outpaces our ability to judge its consequences.
Withdrawal functions like a personal pause button. By exiting the field, one hopes to stop the moral clock—to avoid complicity, to remain untainted, to wait until clarity arrives. But players who leave the game do not shape its outcome. The world continues to move, decisions are made by those who remain in play, and withdrawal guarantees not innocence but irrelevance.
There is nothing inherently wrong with withdrawal. I admire the Desert Fathers, like Anthony and Evagrius who pioneered anachoresis in the second and third century in Egypt. St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises remain vitally important practices for finding purpose and orientation in a fast-moving world.
Read my posts on Evagrius’ Practices of Time.
Here is the risk: this retreat easily begins to denigrate the world it has left behind. What lies outside is cast as corrupt, reckless, or morally compromised, while the self is elevated through its refusal.
Nietzsche named this sin ressentiment—not a passing emotion, but a moral strategy by which withdrawal converts its loss of agency into a claim of superiority.
Ressentiment thrives on standing apart, on slowing the world down long enough to condemn it from a position of imagined moral superiority. But in a world increasingly shaped by computational power—by systems that move quickly, scale globally, and generate consequences before we fully understand them—this posture risks becoming a perpetual, self-imposed victimhood.
Withdrawal will not slow these systems; it simply forfeits influence over them. Moral life cannot be conducted from the sidelines when computation at speed and scale itself reshapes the world and our experience in it.
Orientation and Responsibility
Earlier moral frameworks could limit responsibility because the world itself was taken as given. Much of what happened—plague, famine, drought, disaster—we ascribed to fate—the work of gods or natural forces beyond human control.
Moral responsibility stopped at intention, disposition, or local action. The rest was chalked up to fortune, providence, or an indifferent cosmos far too powerful and far to big to do anything about other than cope.
Stoicism refined this approach with great care and elevated it to a school. Responsibility extended only to what lay within one’s control; everything else was to be endured ‘neither raging against the shocks of fortune nor complaining of one’s own lot but accepting one’s fate with patience and acting as commanded’ as Seneca wrote to Lucilius (Letter 76).
Epicureanism drew up a physical boundary: retreat from the turbulence of Athens into the cultivated space of the Garden. In both cases, moral excellence was achieved by shrinking one’s world.
These moral technologies have left us with tremendously valuable ethical practices. I see the Stoic moral psychology of impression-assent-action as a genuine discovery of a universal. Seneca, in On Anger, teaches us that violence begins and ends with the individual’s response to a perceived insult. Violence is contagious, and so is its dissipation.
These ethics were intelligent responses to a world whose forces lay well beyond human control. Defusing violence, withdrawal, and endurance were often the only options, and they are still relevant today.
Our computational world has additional layers of complexity that call for more, however.
We now generate objects whose consequences exceed our ability to localize or contain them: nuclear technologies, atmospheric carbon, engineered pathogens, planetary information systems. None of these are the old kind of fate. They are byproducts of human calculation, coordination, and design—often undertaken with the aim of expanding health, energy, knowledge, and collective productivity.
This extends my inquiry from The Return of Fate, where I argue that increased control changes the shape of fate itself.
But their power to solve major problems is also the source of new ones—the accursed shares. The same nuclear science that promises abundant, low-carbon energy also concentrates destructive force in a tiny package. The same biological engineering that extends life and cures disease can yield viruses that span the globe much faster than we can create vaccines and treatments. The same planetary information systems that unlock extraordinary productivity also polarizes wealth and reorganizes attention, labor, and politics in ways no one fully intends or controls.
Fate is not an external condition divinely imposed on us. It is a byproduct of success—an accursed share released by the pursuit of genuine goods.
Responsibility in Motion
Let’s cast off with a different assumption: everything is—and always has been—in motion. At one level this is obvious. At another, it remains strangely difficult to think and to experience. We readily say that everything is relational, yet struggle to reason relationally. We acknowledge change, yet continue to build moral frameworks as if stable selves and ethical certainty are the goals.
Classical physics has been a template for truncating our ability to take motion seriously. For Newton, and later for Einstein, motion is governed by eternal laws that stand outside time. Change occurrs, but the order beneath it did not.
Moral thinking absorbed this bias. Ethics searched for fixed principles hidden within change rather than treating change itself as a fundamental problem.
That inheritance now strains. As physics reopens questions of causation, time, and natural laws—no longer assuming permanence beneath motion—we face a parallel challenge in our experience. Our inherited ethical frameworks still privilege slowing down, stepping back, and answering What is? questions first.
They assume that orientation needs a fixed direction based on eternal laws.
The first sections of Lee Smolin’s Time Reborn lay out this case with extraordinary clarity. Read my assessment here.
But in a world shaped by computation, decisions propagate; effects cascade at great speed and global scale. Consequences may be far downstream from original intentions. Responsibility can no longer be anchored to static rules or timeless virtues. It must track trajectories—and keep tracking them.
This isn’t consequentialism, which is spatial and retrospective even when issuing predictions. A consequentialist assumes that there will be a moment in time where all the results can be counted, summed up, and judged in their totality. Consequentialism wants a final reckoning.
I’m asking us to be more attentive to time—to remain attentive to what our actions become as time carries them forward—effects that unfold unevenly, escape any single moment of judgment, and often take us and others by surprise, and rarely if ever on an arrival schedule.
This is what it means to take time seriously. Moral judgment becomes less a matter of standing still and more an art of navigation—of noticing when forces begin to swerve, when good intentions gather dangerous momentum, when success starts to spill over into harm.
In contrast to ressentiment, Nietzsche offered ‘great health.’ Responsibility, in other words, is no longer a position one occupies. It is a practice one sustains.
For more on Nietzsche’s vision for ‘great health’ see my Reading Zarathustra series.
See also my post on Robert Harrison’s Juvenescence.
Purpose as Passage
If responsibility must remain in motion, then purpose cannot function as a fixed end. It cannot be an ideal we aim at once and for all, nor a justification that protects us from what follows. Purpose must be capable of passage—of moving through consequences without denying them or believing that they can all be seen and reckoned.
This is where modern moral thinking often falters. We are comfortable speaking of intentions, values, and commitments. We are far less comfortable staying with what those commitments become once they gather momentum. Like naïve Constitutional Originalists, purpose is treated as fixed rather than in motion, as if its moral meaning were finalized at the moment of original intent.
But purpose is not tethered to its origin. It releases energy. It mobilizes admiration, emulation, rivalry, imitation, and desire. It draws others into its gravitational pull. And in doing so, it inevitably generates excess.
This is not a moral failure. It is its condition of possibility.
René Girard understood that human motivation arises from emulation. We want what others want. We aspire by way of models. Without emulation, there is no creativity, no innovation, no transformation—and possibly no violence and no peace.
These desires are unstable. Emulation can sharpen into rivalry. Rivalry can tip into resentment. And resentment, when scaled, seeks an outlet.
Girard is an important figure for Time as Practice. Read my essays using his thought here.
The danger is not that these forces exist, but that we deny that they change as they unfold. We imagine that original intentions can purify what they set in motion. They cannot. Purpose always produces an accursed share: uneven effects, unintended victims, surplus energy that must be spent somewhere. Again, rarely on a schedule and never as a fully countable set of consequences.
To take responsibility seriously is therefore not to abandon purpose, but to refuse sanctification in its origins. Purpose must be followed through its passages and transformations, including the points where it begins to harden, exclude, or turn violent—often at the moment where it is most stridently asserting its original intent.
This is why morality cannot be reduced to rules, prohibitions, eternal virtues, or withdrawal. Nor can it be secured by collective decrees alone. Ethical life unfolds downstream, where intentions have already become actions and effects are no longer hypothetical.
Purpose, then, is not an origin or a destination. It is a passage—one that demands ongoing attention, revision, and care as we navigate.
Conclusion: Navigation and Moral Attention
If purpose is a passage rather than an original intent, then moral life cannot consist in choosing correctly once and for all. It consists in remaining attentive as our choices move through the world—through systems we do not fully command, tempos we do not set, and consequences we cannot entirely foresee. The question is not whether our intentions were good, but whether we are willing to stay with what they become.
In a computational world, purpose is not an origin or destination but an ongoing passage that demands sustained ethical attention and navigational skill.
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