Jeremy Sherman on the Origins of Purpose (BI 76)

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Several years ago I interviewed Terrence Deacon about his fascinating book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. His goal was to propose a theory of how purpose evolved in a universe without purpose. His argument was persuasive, but highly technical. In this month’s episode of Books and Ideas I interview his longtime colleague Jeremy Sherman. His book Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves makes Deacon’s ideas highly accessible to a wider audience.

What is the mystery of purpose? Sherman writes that the mystery of purpose is also “how aims emerge from aimlessness.” Then he argues that since only selves can have aims “the mystery of purpose becomes how selves and aims emerge from self-less aimless physics and chemistry.” We are ultimately exploring the mystery of how life emerged from a lifeless universe, but the answer is NOT evolution because we are looking for something that emerged before natural selection. It is a fascinating question and the possible solution proposed by Deacon and Sherman is fascinating because it doesn’t sidestep or evade the ultimate question of how meaning arose naturally in a universe without meaning.


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