The living world is forcing scientists to rethink purpose

our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Purpose is not only a question of meaning. For philosopher Alan Love, it is also a question of life, agency, function, and scientific method. Alan Love is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Philosophy and Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, as well as the Director of the Minnesota[…] Alan Love is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Philosophy and Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, as well as the Director of the Minnesota[…] We’ve been asking whether we have a purpose.

Philosopher Alan Love says the better question is: what kind of purpose can we identify, document, and explain? Alan Love studies how scientists think about life, purpose, and agency. In this full interview, he offers a wide-ranging guide to purpose in living systems, moving across biology, medicine, artificial intelligence, and the structure of science itself.

He explores what it means for organisms to act with direction, why agency matters at multiple scales, and how ideas like function and goal-directed behavior can help us better understand life. For Love, these questions are not confined to one field. They require philosophers, biologists, doctors, AI researchers, and other thinkers to work across disciplinary lines — because the hardest questions about living systems rarely fit inside a single box.

An answer that is sometimes given to the question of whether we as humans have a purpose is no — we're just an organized bag of molecules shaped by historical processes. That picture doesn't take seriously just how significant the organizational structure we exhibit really is. So when somebody asks me, "Is purpose real?" I want them to sit down, get a cup of coffee, and settle in, because we need to have a longer conversation.

I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and I'm also the director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. I spend most of my time looking at how biologists think about their subject matter, and at how, when they work across disciplinary lines, interesting synergy and interesting friction can emerge between them. The word "teleology" is the study of purposes or goals — telos, from the Greek for goal.

Anytime somebody is talking about how organisms accomplish certain functions, they're broadly in the space of teleology. In everyday language, we commonly talk about teeth being for chewing, eyes for seeing. But in biology, that kind of language is tied up with a long history of worrying about whether something illicit is being invoked when you make that claim.