The Orphaned Prediction: Spinoza and the Illusion of Cosmic Purpose
How many of us were taken to church as children and sent to religious education classes, only to learn there (also during Sunday dinners at Grandma's) that God is in heaven and loves you. The question is, what's going on behind this assumption, because this obviously can't be confirmed by any data from anywhere. Children are not necessarily immersed in the the explicit belief "God exists," but a deeper expectation which is that reality is ultimately organized for my benefit. That expectation remained even after the conscious belief disappeared.
This is a example of what we would call a generative model. The brain does not simply store propositions. It builds expectations about how the world works because it is a predictive machine. Most of these are acquired in childhood long before we can critically evaluate them.
Spinoza says something completely different. What did Spinoza say in Chapter 16? The crucial idea is that nature has no purposes directed toward human beings. Human beings imagine that nature exists for them because they naturally interpret everything through the lens of their own desires. In the appendix to Part I of the Ethics, Spinoza develops this even more clearly. He argues that people believe final causes, purposes, exist everywhere because they know what they want but do not know the causes that produce things.
For humans, the universe does everything for specific reasons because we always want something The logic goes something like this. I build a house because I want shelter. Therefore, houses have purposes. Then I unconsciously extend this reasoning to everything. Eyes must have been designed for seeing. Rain must fall for (human) crops. The sun must exist to give us warmth. The universe must exist for humanity (ridiculous). My suffering must have a hidden purpose (not so funny). Spinoza says this is a projection of human psychology onto nature.
Nature simply unfolds according to necessity. There is no cosmic intention behind it. That is a liberating idea.
We do not suffer because the cosmos has designed a hidden lesson for us, but because our prediction engines mistake the blind necessity of an indifferent universe for a story written for our benefit.
