CONCEPT
The Banishment of Final Causes
Francis Bacon's deliberate exclusion of purpose and meaning from natural philosophy—his ruling that the inquiry into why a thing exists "is barren, and like a virgin consecrated to
God, produces nothing"—the founding methodological move that makes modern science powerful and that an AI inherits as a constitutive silence about what any of its outputs are for.
Bacon made a choice in 1620 that founded modern science and that we rarely notice because we live so completely inside it. In the
Novum Organum, he deliberately excluded final causes—the Aristotelian question of what a thing is
for, its purpose, its telos—from natural philosophy, on the grounds that the search for them is barren: it produces no operational knowledge, no power, nothing you can do. Keep the efficient and material causes—the how and the what-of—and set aside the final cause, the why. This methodological choice cleared away centuries of fruitless teleological speculation and let knowledge become power. It also drew a wall around meaning and put meaning on the far side. An
AI is what stands on this side of that wall, perfected: pure efficient causation, predicting and producing at the highest pitch, constitutively