The living world is forcing scientists to rethink purpose

Alan Love studies how scientists think about life, purpose, and agency. In this full interview, he offers a wide-ranging guide to purpose in living systems, moving across biology, medicine, artificial intelligence, and the structure of science itself. He explores what it means for organisms to act with direction, why agency matters at multiple scales, and how ideas like function and goal-directed behavior can help us better understand life.

For Love, these questions are not confined to one field. They require philosophers, biologists, doctors, AI researchers, and other thinkers to work across disciplinary lines — because the hardest questions about living systems rarely fit inside a single box.

This video is featured on Big Think.