What is Life’s Cosmic Role?

Daoists, Buddhists, pantheists, deep ecologists, and all those who have a mystical view of the naturalness and the interconnectedness of everything we perceive face the intriguing question of what our species amounts to from nature’s perspective, as it were.

From the humanistic vantage point, which is confused and impudent according to these nature mystics, we stand apart from nature in a crucial, existential sense. We progress by taming the wilderness, replacing natural processes with the artifices of civilization. Far from seeing ourselves as united with nature, we think we’re autonomous agents whose grim moral obligation isn’t to act out on our evolved impulses, but to envision improvements on nature’s wildness, and to bring them to fruition.

Again, this progressive independence must be illusory if, instead, in the grand, cosmic scheme, everything fulfills some natural function, or everything’s caught within a cosmic process or causal system.

What, then, is the natural function of personhood, or of humans, the cleverest, most ambitious of apes? From the human-centered standpoint, we can easily answer the comparable question. What we’re up to, as I said, is pursuing our cultural agendas in politics, business, and religion, and in our professional capacities, family lives, personal hobbies, and so on. We’re supporting politicians who share our social values, or we’re striving to build the best widget and sell it for a profit, or we’re aiming to fulfill God’s design.

But none of that can matter from a mystical perspective that takes naturalness to be the ultimate pattern. Where our species fits into that pattern should be expressible in purely empirical, objective terms that don’t presuppose a dichotomy between life and nonlife, mind and matter, or civilization and wilderness.

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It’s hard to guess at what that role might be without knowing where life generally fits into the nonliving universe. For all we know, the tree of life on our planet might be an outlier, and the more common trajectory of organic evolution that plays out in distant star systems or galaxies might differ from the terrestrial norms. Thus, even if we knew everything about life on Earth, from its origin to its endpoint — which we don’t, especially because life isn’t finished evolving here — we’d have only a small overall sample size to guide our speculations.

If we knew generally what life tends to do in the universal scheme, based on observations of many independent evolutions of life, we could generalize that life’s role in nature is to undergird some complex construction, or to serve in some solar transformation. But we don’t yet know whether there’s any such larger process at work since we don’t know that there’s any extraterrestrial life.

We know that life here is part of the carbon cycle, which figures in the planet’s equilibrium. Yet that observation supports the humanist’s dualism since our species threatens that equilibrium by generating excessive carbon from our industrial output. Thus, even if the carbon cycle were relevant to life’s overall role in nature, we still wouldn’t know that our species occupies that cosmic position. If anything, the evidence points in the other direction.

One possibility that crops up in science fiction is that organic forms transmute into the mechanical, so that machines, computers, and AI will replace animals and humans. Our role could be to serve as the go-betweens, as bridges between those eras.

Or perhaps we shouldn’t overcomplicate matters and should notice what’s hiding in plain sight. If our progress is deadly to terrestrial life, our job might be to correct for the advent of life. Perhaps life is anomalous in the universe, and even parasitic on it, so that nature re-establishes its lifeless balance not just by sending volcanoes and meteors to wipe out species, but by giving life enough rope with which to hang itself, as it were. With the transition of animals into people, life is lulled into hubris so that people act more recklessly, pursuing their progressive ventures that eventually terminate the delicate chemical balance that accidentally allowed for this organic anomaly.

This would be a dreadful nihilistic possibility that runs counter to secular humanism and calls the spiritual mystic’s bluff about a so-called higher, enlightened morality. If the universe is supposed to be lifeless, as it were, morality and spirituality are shams. Our natural, metaphysical role would be to act as life’s executioners, and to destroy ourselves ironically out of narrow self-interest.

Yet the deep ecologist or Eastern mystic means to reassure us with the talk of natural continuity. We’re supposed to welcome the fact that we figure in some underlying process that will persist long after we’re gone. Moreover, we’re supposed to gladly give up on our humanistic pretensions, willingly surrender our liberal right to pursue our personal happiness, and focus on the cosmic scheme.

What if that cosmic scheme is horrific, though? What if life is a pointless accident that negates itself like a clumsy clown who struts about on the stage before realizing he’s not cut out for show business and scurries off before the audience even knows he’s performed?

Of course, we can speculate as we like, but the point is that the mystic owes us some such explanation. This is especially so because science tells us not just about natural continuities but profound cosmic discontinuities.

For instance, there’s the split between the quantum and Einsteinian, spatiotemporal worlds, and between the interior and exterior of black holes. Perhaps those dichotomies are only illusory and future science will demonstrate the natural continuities that unite those seeming opposites, telling an all-encompassing narrative. In that case, life would occupy a chapter, or perhaps only a footnote in that theory of everything.

As it currently stands, though, the discontinuities are real and profound. It’s not just that personhood seems to negate the wilderness, but that nature generally negates itself out of sheer wildness. Nature creates and destroys its parts, and if the destruction has any larger function, it’s to make room for the emergence of novel constructs. People, too, are profoundly creative and destructive, so we may be avatars of nature’s wild indifference to its absurd work.