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timtyler comments on In Praise of Boredom - Less Wrong
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Wow, just wow. I'm extremely disappointed with Schneider and Sagan. Not because of their actual research, which looks like some interesting and useful stuff on thermodynamics. No, what's disappointing and embarrassing is the deceitful way they pretend that they've discovered life's "purpose." Like many words, the word "purpose" has multiple referents, sometimes it refers to profound concepts, others times to trivial ones. Schneider and Sagan have discovered some insights into one of the more trivial concepts the word "purpose" can refer to, but are using verbal sleight of hand to pretend they've found the answer to one of the word's more profound referents.
When someone says they are looking for "life's purpose" what they mean is that they are looking for values and ideals to live their life around. A very profound concept. When Schneider and Sagan say they have found life's purpose what they are saying is, "We pretended that the laws of physics were a person with a utility function and then deduced what that make-believe utility function was based on how the laws of physics caused life to develop."
Now, doing that has it's place, it's easier for human brains to model other people than it is for them to model physics, so sometimes it is useful to personify physics. But the "purpose" you discover from that is ultimately trivial. It doesn't give you values and ideals to live your life around. It just describes forces of nature in an inaccurate, but memorable way.
I'm not saying it's absurd that to say that entropy tends to increase, that's basic physics. But it's absurd to pretend that entropy is the deep, meaningful purpose of human life. Purpose is something humans give themselves, not something that mindless physical laws bestow upon them. Schneider and Sagan may be onto something when they suggest that life has a tendency to destroy gradients. But if they claim that is the "purpose" of human life in any meaningful sense they are dead wrong.
When biologists say "the purpose of a nose is smelling things" you don't have to personify mother naure to make sense of what they mean. Personifying the organism is often enough. Since the organism may not be so very different from a person, this is often an easier step.
That doesn't change the fact that personification is a way to help people think about reality more easily at the expense of accurately describing it. Noses don't literally have a purpose. It's just that organisms that are good at smelling things tend to reproduce more.
The problem with Schneider and Sagan is that they confound this metaphorical meaning of the word purpose (the utility function of a personified entity) with a different meaning (ideals to live your life around). Hence their second book makes the absurd statement* that, when you strip the word "purpose" from it basically says "knowing that decreasing entropy gradients is a major reason life arose will give you ideals to live your life around." That's ridiculous.
*To be fair that statement was a cover blurb, so it's possible that it was written by the publisher, not Schneider and Sagan.