| For millions of years humans observed animals and saw an apparent purposefulness to their actions. Caring for young and the very act of staying alive supported this belief. Things that moved did so with a purpose. This apparent goal directed behavior was built into the fabric of language as it came into being. 'Free agents with a purpose' as an obvious fact was codified by religions and propagated by cultures. The ability to absorb a culture promoted fitness in humans, who are most comfortable with thinking of themselves as free agents with a purpose.
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| For hundreds of years humans have found the predictive powers of science to be valuable. But scientific explanations do not include purposeful behavior. The sun doesn't come up because it wants to warm people. Lightening doesn't strike a house because the residents have been bad. Science has steadily replaced religions in explaining physical phenomena to a degree that now we are in a time of backlash by traditional cultures. The reaction would be even more vitriolic if it were more widely understood that the universe cannot even feel disinterested.
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| An ant colony gives the appearance of purposeful behavior as swarms of ants forage for food and build nests. But there is no one in charge of the work that gets done. Each individual ant's input is only from the other ants directly next to it.
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| A brain gives the feeling of self-awareness as the neurons process a stream of sense data and memory sequences. But there is no homunculus directing activity and making decisions. Each individual neuron's input is only from the other neurons directly connected to it.
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| You can recognize any source of apparent purposeful behavior as a cabinet of curiosities whose contents are in proximity by chance.
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