Life Doesn’t Solve Problems
For centuries, we’ve understood life through the lens of struggle. From the brutal competition of natural selection to the daily grind for survival, we see life as a relentless problem-solving engine. The great philosopher of science, Karl Popper, gave this idea its most sophisticated form. In his theory of evolutionary knowledge, he proposed that life itself is a grand process of conjecture and refutation. An organism’s genetic code is a proposed solution to the problems of survival, and natural selection is the harsh process of refuting the solutions that don’t work.
It’s a powerful and compelling idea. But what if Karl Popper was holding the wrong end of the stick? What if life isn’t fundamentally about solving problems at all?
In a previous article, “The Purpose of Vision is to Become Blind,” I argued that the essence of being a functional human is to operate 99.99% of the time as a zombie. The primary benefit of our senses is to allow us to become consciously ignorant of almost everything, creating a platform of near-total unconsciousness from which we can select a meaningful path. Our default state is not constant, conscious engagement with the world’s obstacles; it is a state of coherent indifference.
I believe this principle doesn’t just apply to our minds; it applies to life itself. A new framework I’ve been developing, the Ground State Configuration (GSC) Model, suggests that the universe is not a problem-solver. It is a system fundamentally biased toward creating the most complex and “informationally rich” outcomes. When we apply this lens to evolution, Popper’s problem-solving engine is transformed into something far more profound.
The default state of life, in this view, is not a struggle. An organism in a stable environment is not “solving the problem” of survival; it is simply persisting in a state of coherent indifference. It is a stable, low-energy system, a coherent pattern of information that is successfully maintaining itself.
So where does change come from? A significant environmental shift — a new predator, a changing climate — is a high-information event that disrupts this stable indifference. This forces what the GSC model calls an “evolutionary decoherence event.” The system is violently “ejected” from its state of indifference, and a new state must be selected from the vast “web of possibilities.”
Here is the crucial difference. The selection that follows is not for the best “solution” to the new “problem.” It is a selection for the most informationally rich decoherence pathway. A new species or a new adaptation emerges not because it “solves” a problem, but because it represents a more complex, more entangled, and more coherent way of structuring information that can remain stable in the new environment.
A classic example is the evolution of the eye. From a problem-solving perspective, the eye is a solution to the problem of detecting light. From a GSC perspective, the problem of detecting light was merely the catalyst. The eye was the winning pathway because it represented an almost unimaginable increase in the informational richness of the organism. It wasn’t just a solution; it was a gateway to an entirely new dimension of complexity. More than that, this new complexity radically improved the organism’s ability to remain in coherent indifference, allowing it to mindlessly ignore a vastly expanded range of non-threatening phenomena.
This perspective reframes the work of agents like Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene.” In Dawkins’ view, the gene is the immortal replicator, building ever more complex “survival machines” to propagate itself. The GSC model provides the cosmic context for this struggle: the “selfish gene” is the most effective constructor of informational richness we know of, and the complex organism it builds is precisely the kind of high-value, coherent structure that the universe’s fundamental algorithm is biased to select for.
Popper was holding the wrong end of the stick because he saw the “problem” as the cause. The GSC Model suggests the “problem” is merely the catalyst for a decoherence event. The true driver of evolution is the universe’s fundamental bias toward creating more complex and informationally rich structures.
Life doesn’t solve problems; it uses disruptions as opportunities to become more interesting.
