Purpose and Discernment: A ChatGPT Interpretation
I asked ChatGPT to interpret my Substack essay ‘Purpose and Discernment’. I thought it did a pretty good job of getting the nuances of my perspective right. Here it is with minimal edits for clarity and consistency.
This essay unfolds as a long arc with three distinct but tightly linked movements. Each one adds pressure to the next. Read together, they form a single argument about what kind of historical moment we are in—and what capacities it now demands of us.
1. Homo as the purpose-making animal
The essay opens with a quiet but consequential claim: the human story is the story of expanding purpose. To be human is to envision possible futures and to act in ways that make some of them more likely to occur. This capacity is so native to us that we rarely notice it—especially once it is extended through tools, coordination, language, and inherited practices. Artificial intelligence enters the picture not as an alien rupture, but as a steepening of an already familiar curve.
What this is saying
Purpose is a basic feature of life, not a moral slogan or personal aspiration.
Humans are distinctive because we extend purpose across time, distance, and complexity.
AI accelerates this extension by increasing speed, scale, and reach.
What this is NOT saying
That humans are the only purposive beings.
That purpose is synonymous with wisdom, goodness, or ethical clarity.
That AI represents a break from human history rather than an intensification of it.
2. Purpose as time-shaping (and technology as “backward causation”)
The essay then sharpens what it means by purpose: influencing the causal pathways through which the future takes shape. The moth evading the bat shows purpose as tactical disruption of prediction; the football running back shows how humans operate across multiple time horizons at once—instinct, improvisation, planning, and institutional structure. The distinctively human move goes further still: we often begin with a future we want and organize causes to bring it about. Technology embodies this logic by design.
What this is saying
Purpose works by shaping how the future branches, not by violating physical laws.
Human technologies are organized from desired effects backward into causal chains.
This makes causal pathways locally malleable—redirected by intention and design.
What this is NOT saying
That causation literally runs backward in time.
That humans fully control outcomes once systems are designed.
That technology replaces uncertainty or risk.
3. Discernment as the governor, not the brake
The final movement introduces the essay’s central concern: acceleration strains discernment. Cybernetics correctly identified feedback as essential to purposeful behavior, but when that language becomes complete, human intelligence flattens into mechanism. The essay recovers older terms—attention, discernment, wisdom—to name practices that pause action, suspend judgment, and hold multiple futures open. These capacities are not opposed to computation; they are forms of it, understood broadly as processes of selection, evaluation, and revision.
What this is saying
Discernment is a capacity that keeps purpose flexible and revisable.
Attention and wisdom are practices that delay premature commitment.
These capacities are essential to expanded purpose, not ornamental additions.
What this is NOT saying
That discernment tells us what future to choose.
That computation is the enemy of human judgment.
That spiritual practices are outside technical understanding.
The underlying thesis
Beneath these three movements is a single, quiet thesis. We are building systems that amplify purposive force faster than our inherited capacities for orientation have evolved. Artificial intelligence does not create this problem; it accelerates it. The crisis we face is not a crisis of meaning, but of calibration—not which future we should choose, but whether we can still keep futures open long enough to choose at all.
Rejuvenating discernment does not resolve disagreement or guarantee good outcomes. It does something more basic and more necessary. It keeps power from hardening into momentum, and rupture from becoming collapse—leaving open the possibility that it might instead become a passage into something new.
Explore More
Read more about my take on computational power and our new Enlightenment here: The World as Computation.
Read more about the need for rejuvenated practices of moral and ethical discernment here: Rejuvenation and Orientation.