James Vornov, MD PhD
Neurologist, drug developer and philosopher exploring the neuroscience of decision-making and personal identity.
Purpose is real, absent the divine. But first, what counts as real?
Do things in the world really have purpose?
When we look around, it appears obvious to me that there’s a reason for things, whether it’s an inanimate manmade object like a saw or a dog chasing a squirrel. Now religious traditions ascribe purpose to a higher being. I’m going to show you that purpose is real in the world, absent the divine.
In this post, I’m just going to lay the groundwork and make the argument that these things are real. Then, in the next post we’ll talk about why we might agree that they have properties like purpose and agency. And without the need of any observer, me or you, to grant them purpose through our inductive efforts, I want to say that dogs had agency and purpose before there were people to realize it.
What Counts as Real?
Okay, what are we going to call real? It’s been a central question in philosophy since the ancients. Its important to me becuase I want separate whats real from what we’re aware of. If theres a real world, there’s a real truth of it we can approximate. We’re not forever stuck in our own heads with our individual views of whats real and what matters.
First let’s agree that there’s a world out there. It’s real. Sure we experience it through our senses and construct an internal model in neural networks that is made available through awareness. But the world out there is what we’ll call real. Also I want to talk about objects like rocks, tables and chairs being real. Otherwise we’re stuck with only the base layer, the raw stuff of matter, like quarks or the wave function of the universe being real.
Now you can go down the simulation route and say everything is a construction of the senses and presented to awareness through complex neural networks. This phenomenology is not unreasonable in psychology, but if you don’t think a table is real, we can end now. You’ll be living a purely phenomenological world, not my world of materialism. For now we want the world itself to be our subject, not how we perceive it. Which means there were rocks and birds and dogs before people showed up, before I showed up to see and name things. In Genesis, Adam names the animals, but they were here first.
Stability Over Time
So we’ll allow that more than quarks or the Schrödinger equation is real. There are real things in the world. You know, this shouldn’t be so hard to just talk common sense, but we have centuries of philosophy questioning these simple statements. Why have these discussions gone on so long contrary to simple pragmatism? Is it so hard to outline real things? For me, the simple answer is to name as real things stable over time. The arrow is a real thing, its path through space is not. A cloud is real, to the extent there’s the assemblage of condensed water vapor in the air. For sure, the edges can get fuzzy. And there are fuzzy outlines for constituent parts, like the gears and springs of a clock, the dirt and rocks that constitute a mountain. I can live with the ambiguity so we don’t have to go back to just the Schrödinger equation. In between base reality and our awareness, we need to establish what counts as real. It matters because I want to treat purpose and agency as real properties of real things, not just descriptions we project onto them. Observer independent.
Now these things we’re talking about, rocks and tables, are things because they just sit there. Basically we can say they’re in equilibrium, not coming or going.
Dynamical Systems
Next, what about things that persist but aren’t totally stable over time. Like a hurricane? We call these dynamical systems, they are stable entities but actively maintaining themselves. We simply appeal to common sense that the person that starts as a fertilized egg and transforms over time, gaining matter and losing matter is the same, real thing. The person from start to finish. Again, if you won’t agree I’m the same person as I was at 17 even though my atoms are all different, we can’t really have this conversation and you can live in your world of flux. See how far it gets you dealing with the world.
These dynamical systems change and move around, all the time maintaining a stable, continuous existence. Why dynamic? Because it’s taking in and pushing out energy and matter but there’s a boundary, an outline to the system. A hurricane is an organization of a bit of the atmosphere that’s stably organized into a stable dynamic system much like a human body. As I said before, we don’t care so much about the fuzzy boundaries, since after all the entire atmosphere is a bigger dynamical system and that in turn is part of the whole earth system, Gaia.
Real Things, Not Descriptions
As I live and breathe, hurricanes, dogs are also real things in the world. Their stability and boundaries define them as features of collections of matter, not products of description by some observer. If real, then we can agree now that a dog would exist even without someone to recognize it as a temporary canine assemblage of matter. So too the red spot in the atmosphere of Jupiter, lasting hundreds of years now, was there even before there were people with telescopes to point at it.
I think one of the confusions here comes from us calling these dynamical stable systems as “emergent” and then arguing about how to model emergence mentally. That’s what the philosophers call epistemology, the question of how we know things. We’re talking ontology here, the question of what exists. In my view epistemology is just about models embodied in brain neural networks that we’re born ready to create with a priori knowledge granted to us by millions of years of evolution. You can keep your theories and definitions of emergence in the epistemology bin. I’m just after a simple idea that, independent of observers, dogs and hurricanes are real things. The world is real, the things in the world are real whether close to equilibrium or temporary dynamical systems.
That’s all I wanted to do in this post. Things that are things are real things as long as they persist in the real world. Once we grant that anything stable are real entities, it’s not a stretch to ask whether their properties like agency or purpose are real too. Are apples red? Do dogs have agency? Does a hurricane have a purpose? Next time.
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© 2026 James Vornov MD, PhD. This content is freely shareable with attribution. Please link to this page if quoting.
