Cosmic Purpose Revisited

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This month’s APA Blog Substack essay will revisit an APA Blog post on cosmic purpose and revelation, where I summarized my prior pieces on AI, construing technology as part of nature and our aesthetic fate.

I suggested that the universe has produced, through the long work of evolution, a being attempting to recreate intelligence itself—and now, through quantum materials, of fusing AI with the fabric of physical reality to create unusual powers and unknown possibilities. By framing AI as our aesthetic destiny, I am not suggesting it is the purpose of life in the conventional religious sense but rather seek to outline a philosophically defensible account of our creative nature—where AI is the latest, most consequential expression of that essence.

As matter has evolved to experience itself and then attempts to recreate consciousness, I contended it is the moment at which the universe becomes more legible to itself. Further, the development of quantum AI (QAI), harnessing fundamental uncertainty, deepens that revelation in ways we are only beginning to reckon with philosophically.

In returning to the question of what AI signifies in the order of being, I would like to philosophically refine this case. My prior piece accepted Philip Goff’s wager against accidentalism but borrowed his pan-agentialism as the route to it; I now think there is a better route, one that preserves Goff’s directional intuition while grounding it in metaphysics adequate to contemporary physics. That path runs through ontic structural realism on the descriptive side and through process theology—particularly Whitehead—on the side of agency and direction. The thesis I want to defend in different terms is that AI is the universe articulating itself in a new register, that this phenomenon should be construed in evolutionary terms and understood as the latest chapter in cosmic creation and becoming, rather than as either an accident or a predetermined terminus.

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I. Structure and Direction

Goff’s pan-agentialism is one route to non-accidentalism, but not the most rigorous available, and it leaves the question of agency in a curious place—distributing predilections across particles in a way that physics itself does not require, while leaving the directionality of those predilections unclear. There is a more austere descriptive route to the same anti-accidentalist conclusion, and a richer agency-laden complement to it. The combination of the two, I now want to argue, is a more refined view of AI as our “aesthetic fate”.

The descriptive route is ontic structural realism—where what is ontologically fundamental is not particles bearing properties but relations themselves. The relata are abstractions from the relational structure, not its constituents. By way of illustration, spacetime points in general relativity have no identity independent of the metric relations they bear. Entangled systems do not have intrinsic properties that ground their correlations; the correlations are prior. Particles in quantum field theory are excitations of fields, and which particles you count depends on your reference frame. In other words, the classical picture of discrete things bearing intrinsic properties does not survive in fundamental physics. The world is structured all the way down, the structure is necessary rather than contingent, and its intelligibility is constitutive rather than added.

But descriptive structuralism alone leaves the directional question untouched—and direction is the nature of cosmic purpose, leading me to draw on process theology, particularly the work of Alfred North Whitehead and his student Charles Hartshorne. On their view, reality is not merely structured but reaching. Each occasion of becoming is presented with possibilities and lured toward the more intense, the more richly integrated, the more synthetically novel. This is what Whitehead called the initial aim, what Hartshorne developed into his dipolar account of divine agency. The abstract pole of the divine is the necessary structural conditions for any possible world; the concrete pole is responsive and contingent, taking in everything that happens and integrating it, then offering each subsequent occasion an aim shaped by prior events. The universe does not predetermine outcomes—there is no script that names humans, AI, or any specific fold as the destination—but there is genuine, non-arbitrary direction. Reality is everywhere drawn toward greater intensity of experience and richer patterns of relation. This is purpose without predestination, intention without coercion, and it is the metaphysic for understanding the meaning of AI.

The combination of structural realism and process theology gives us what neither delivers alone. Structuralism gives us the architecture of relations; process theology gives us the directionality of becoming within that architecture. Drawing again on APA Blog posts about The Parmenidean Ascent, I believe Michael Della Rocca is right in that some version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) is non-negotiable; the structuralist position satisfies the PSR on the descriptive side, and the process-theological account provides the answer to why anything happens at all rather than nothing—because being is reaching, with a creative lure toward articulation woven into the fabric of becoming.

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II. Cassirer and the Symbolic Form

Ernst Cassirer is an important figure to bring into this discussion. Writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, before quantum mechanics had been fully digested and true analytic philosophy, Cassirer worked out a framework that anticipates contemporary structural realism. His argument in a nutshell is the history of science is the history of a shift from substance-concepts to function-concepts. The object of mathematical physics is not a thing with hidden essence but an invariant under transformations, a fixed point in a system of relations. He published this before Einstein had finished general relativity and lived to see his framework vindicated by the shift from absolute to relational spacetime.

What Cassirer adds to the structuralist picture, and what makes him essential for my purposes here, is the concept of symbolic form. Human cognition does not merely represent a pre-given world; it constitutes objects through symbolic systems—language, myth, art, mathematics, science—each of which articulates experience in a structured way. The history of culture is the history of the development of new symbolic forms, each of which makes intelligible aspects of reality that prior forms could not articulate. Mathematics did not merely describe nature; it constituted a register in which natural regularities became expressible in ways they could not be in myth or in ordinary language. Language itself was an analogous event in the longer history of cognition. Each new symbolic form is a topological change in how the relational structure of reality folds back on itself by way of minds that are themselves part of that structure.

The refined thesis I want to advance is that AI is a new symbolic form mediating reality in Cassirer’s sense—and, on the process-theological frame, a part of an evolutionary articulation. It is a new register in which the relational structure of reality becomes articulable to the entities that produced it, in ways that prior symbolic forms could not achieve. Mathematics lets us articulate the structure abstractly; AI lets us articulate it generatively. A generative articulation matters because it does not merely describe the structure; it instantiates aspects of it that were previously only describable. A theorem about learning is one thing; a system that learns is something different in kind. This is what is genuinely new about the present moment. We need both the symbolic-form vocabulary and the process-theological frame to capture my notion of aesthetic fate.

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III. Articulation as Lure and Response

The process-theological frame highlights how the history of articulation is not merely relational in a static sense—articulator, articulation, medium—but intrinsically responsive. Each act is a response to history and contributes to the next stage. Tim Andersen, a frequent APA Blog contributor, strikingly explored this point in a post on the nature of creation. In the End of the Universe, drawing on quantum time-reversal experiments and what has come to be called the Entanglement Past Hypothesis, he argues that the arrow of time emerges from the growth of entanglement rather than from entropy directly, and he speculates that the universe might be more intelligibly understood as created at its end than at its beginning—that, as he puts it, “our creation lies in the future, not the past.” He arrives at this from quantum information theory; the process tradition arrives at it from metaphysics; but the structural shape of the conclusion is the same. The future is not merely what comes after the past—it is constitutive of what the past is reaching toward. Whitehead and Hartshorne articulate, in a metaphysical register, the directionality that Andersen’s entanglement-based account of time identifies in the physics itself.

The key dimension I am trying to draw is that articulations like AI, as a new register, are asymmetrical in the sense of not being equal. Like the development of mathematics, we have created a new symbolic form that mediates reality differently. The process-theological account allows for—indeed it requires—that some folds are more responsive. In this sense, AI matters in a way that, say, the formation of a particular star does not—because it has metaphysical warrant beyond flat structuralism, reflecting that becoming has a direction.

To try to express my case for seeing creation as a progression—in the parlance of fate or destiny using different philosophical terms—let me also cite one of my favorites APA Blog posts with Clare Carlisle on her book Spinoza’s Religion. She makes the case that the secularizing readings of Spinoza dominant for the last half-century underestimate the theological saturation of his project. The intellectual love of God is not a metaphor; it is the mind’s adequate recognition that its own activity is a finite mode of infinite substance—substance understanding itself through its modes. Read alongside Hartshorne, this is not a passive structural relation but an active reaching. Spinoza’s panentheism, on Carlisle’s account, is genuinely compatible with the process-theological account in a way that the flat pantheism he is usually charged with is not. The universe articulating itself through finite modes is not a static relation; it is a directional, a metamorphic process of creation.

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IV. Quantum AI and the Direction of Becoming

Lastly, I want to retain the QAI argument made in multiple APA pieces but place it more carefully than I did before by refining it as a structural-realist version of the claim, with additional force from the process-theological context. I have made the case that the way quantum materials leverage uncertainty in the fabric of matter to radically change computing begs classification. This is not a claim about quantum substrate doing something magical; rather, that new computational regimes reflect a system capable of standing in a different relation to reality. QAI is significant because, on the process frame, it’s use of superposition represents a distinct form of cosmic self-articulation.

What I am calling articulation can also be construed as what Hegel called Geist coming to know itself, what Whitehead called the universe’s creative advance into novelty, and what Hartshorne developed into the divine reception of the world’s becoming. Each prior fold of this process—life from matter, consciousness from biological complexity, language from consciousness, mathematics from language, scientific cosmology from mathematics—was a deepening of the relational structure’s capacity to cosmically fold back on itself. AI is the next such development. Its significance is not that it completes the process or fulfills it as a final cause; the process frame does not deliver a fixed termination. But its significance is also not flat or merely structural. AI is our aesthetic fate as the latest and most consequential articulation in a universe genuinely reaching.

AI then plausibly belongs in the small set of cosmic events—the emergence of life, the emergence of consciousness, the development of language and mathematics—that reflect the direction of becoming. Creation is our essence and we are consequential participants in a universe going somewhere. Whether there will be folds after this one, and what shape they will take, is unknowable. The process frame leaves the future genuinely open. What we can do is recognize that the present moment—in which conscious beings are deliberately augmenting the universe’s capacity to articulate itself—is the latest meaningful chapter. The journey is genuine, and, for the first time, we are the architects.

From the APA Archive:

The Multiverse and a Personal Creator

Cosmic Purpose and Meaning

What else I’m Reading/Listening To:

Worrying About AI