Postulate of Objectivity

Monod was militant about what he called the postulate of objectivity: the rule that nature explains nothing in terms of purpose, that you are forbidden to account for a phenomenon by the end it seems to serve. This sounds like dry methodology. It is actually a discipline of mind that the AI conversation desperately lacks. We are surrounded by systems that invite purposive description—that seem to want and prefer and intend—and the strong human pull is to take that seeming at face value, to decide the model “wants” to be helpful, “tries” to deceive, “understands” the question. Monod built his entire science on declining exactly that reflex. The postulate is the rule that blocked him from explaining bacterial enzyme production by saying the bacterium “wanted” to digest the lactose—and forced him instead to find the actual mechanism, which turned out to be the operon: a repressor, an inducer, a stretch of DNA, conditional chemistry, and