Revising evolution with a naturalistic teleology

Thomas Nagel writes: “The teleology I want to consider would be an explanation not only of the appearance of physical organisms but of the development of consciousness and ultimately of reason in those organisms. But its form can be described even if we stay at the physical level. Natural teleology would require two things. First, that the nonteleological and timeless laws of physics—those governing the ultimate elements of the physical universe, whatever they are—are not fully deterministic. Given the physical state of the universe at any moment, the laws of physics would have to leave open a range of alternative successor states, presumably with a probability distribution over them. 

“Second, among those possible futures there will be some that are more eligible than others as possible steps on the way to the formation of more complex systems, and ultimately of the kinds of replicating systems characteristic of life. The existence of teleology requires that successor states in this subset have a significantly higher probability than is entailed by the laws of physics alone—simply because they are on the path toward a certain outcome. Teleological laws would assign higher probability to steps on paths in state space that have a higher ‘velocity’ toward certain outcomes. They would be laws of the self-organization of matter, essentially—or of whatever is more basic than matter.

“This is a frankly teleological hypothesis because the preferred transitions do not have a higher probability in virtue of their intrinsic immediate characteristics, but only in virtue of temporally extended developments of which they form a potential part. In other words, some laws of nature would apply directly to the relation between the present and the future, rather than specifying instantaneous functions that hold at all times. A naturalistic teleology would mean that organizational and developmental principles of this kind are an irreducible part of the natural order, and not the result of intentional or purposive influence by anyone. I am not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without intention makes sense, but I do not at the moment see why it doesn’t.”[1]

“According to the hypothesis of natural teleology, the natural world would have a propensity to give rise to beings of the kind that have a good—beings for which things can be good or bad. These are all the actual and possible forms of life. They have appeared through the historical process of evolution, but part of the explanation for the existence of that process and of the possibilities on which natural selection operates would be that they bring value into the world, in a great variety of forms.

“Since the emergence of value is the emergence of both good and evil, it is not a candidate for a purely benign teleological explanation: a tendency toward the good. In fact, no teleological principle tending toward the production of a single outcome seems suitable. Rather, it would have to be a tendency toward the proliferation of complex forms and the generation of multiple variations in the range of possible complex systems.

“We recognize that evolution has given rise to multiple organisms that have a good, so that things can go well or badly for them, and that in some of those organisms there has appeared the additional capacity to aim consciously at their own good, and ultimately at what is good in itself. From a realist perspective this cannot be merely an accidental side effect of natural selection, and a teleological explanation satisfies this condition. On a teleological account, the existence of value is not an accident, because that is part of the explanation of why there is such a thing as life with all its possibilities of development and variation. In brief, value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.”[2]

“This is a revision of the Darwinian picture rather than an outright denial of it. A teleological hypothesis will acknowledge that the details of that historical development are explained largely through natural selection among the available possibilities on the basis of reproductive fitness in changing environments. But even though natural selection partly determines the details of the forms of life and consciousness that exist, and the relations among them, the existence of the genetic material and the possible forms it makes available for selection have to be explained in some other way. The teleological hypothesis is that these things may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them.”[3]

Robert Traer adds: What Nagel calls a “cosmic predisposition” is a evolutionary direction that provides a naturalistic explanation for the extraordinarily unlikely development of conscious life. Because our consciousness transcends our physical experience, as it is not limited to an awareness of sensory experience, a cosmic direction might also help to explain near-death experiences that seem to verify a continuing consciousness after physical death.

1 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012), 92-104.

2 See Derek Parfit, On What Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011).

3 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, italics added, 105-123.