The Mattering Instinct

This is the second of two reviews of important new books, both of which have been added to my list of favorites. The first addressed Steven Pinker's When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows. Please see the first review for a more detailed explanation of common knowledge.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's The Mattering Instinct represents an astonishing intellectual achievement — the kind of book that arrives perhaps once in a generation. Like her husband Steven Pinker, Goldstein belongs to that vanishingly rare category of polymath who has achieved genuine expertise across multiple domains. Trained as a philosopher at Princeton, she has studied physics, written fiction, explored ethics, and investigated religion with equal seriousness. The Mattering Instinct synthesizes insights from all of these fields into a cohesive theory addressing the most profound questions of human existence: Why do we care so intensely about our own significance? Where does meaning come from? What separates a life worth living from mere biological persistence?

The ambition of the book recalls great synthetic works of the mid-twentieth century like Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, but Goldstein's execution is far more rigorous, grounded in contemporary neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and information theory. She has produced what might be called a naturalistic theology: an account of human meaning-making that takes seriously both the findings of science and the undeniable phenomenology of mattering.

The Mattering Instinct Defined

Goldstein begins with a deceptively simple definition. The mattering instinct, she proposes, is a desire to be deserving of attention. Not merely to receive attention — celebrities and criminals receive plenty — but to deserve it. We hunger for a cosmic justification of the enormous attention we must devote to our own lives. We spend every waking moment inside a single skull, experiencing one particular stream of consciousness, making decisions that will shape one particular biography. This massive investment of awareness demands some return: surely all this attention must be warranted by something.

The definition carries more weight than it first appears. Goldstein distinguishes the mattering instinct from related concepts: self-esteem (which concerns one's evaluation of oneself), status-seeking (which concerns one's position relative to others), and the will to live (which concerns mere survival). The mattering instinct subsumes these but cannot be reduced to any of them. A person might have high self-esteem, considerable status, and robust survival instincts while still experiencing the anguish of not mattering. Viktor Frankl's patients in Auschwitz demonstrated precisely this dissociation: stripped of status, with survival an open question, many still found that meaning-making — the conviction that their existence mattered — determined whether they persisted or gave up.

Common Knowledge Turned Inward

Goldstein's most striking theoretical contribution is her suggestion that the mattering instinct arose as an evolutionary spandrel — a byproduct of cognitive architecture that evolved for other purposes. Specifically, she proposes that the recursive capacity for "common knowledge" (as Pinker describes it in When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows) turned inward on itself to generate self-directed mattering.

The reasoning runs as follows. Humans evolved sophisticated mechanisms for tracking what others know, what others know that others know, and so on recursively. This capacity enabled the complex social coordination that distinguishes our species: markets, governments, religions, all depend on common knowledge structures. But this recursive machinery need not remain pointed outward. In our quietest moments of introspection, operating in an open loop without feedback from other humans, the same neural circuits can be directed toward ourselves.

The result produces the characteristic recursive structure of mattering: "I know that I matter because I know that I know that X matters, and I know that I know that I know that I matter because I know that X matters," and so on, without limit. The common knowledge machinery, designed for tracking recursive social states, generates recursive self-directed states when turned inward. Just as the architecture of the eye — evolved for detecting prey and predators — enables us to appreciate sunsets, the architecture of social cognition — evolved for coordination — enables us to contemplate our own significance.

This theory carries a testable prediction. If the mattering instinct emerged as a spandrel of common knowledge capacity, it should have appeared relatively late in human history — after the common knowledge machinery was firmly established but before written records. And indeed, Goldstein marshals evidence that explicit concern with mattering appears only during the Axial Age, roughly 800-200 BCE, when thinkers across disparate civilizations — Greece, Israel, India, China — simultaneously began grappling with questions of individual significance and cosmic meaning. Before this period, religious and cultural texts emphasize collective identity, ritual obligation, and proper behavior, but rarely address the question of whether a particular individual life matters in the sense Goldstein intends. The Axial Age hypothesis, developed by Karl Jaspers and more recently elaborated by scholars like Robert Bellah, suggests that something changed in human consciousness during this period. Goldstein proposes that this change was the mattering instinct coming fully online — the common knowledge recursion finally achieving the depth necessary to generate stable self-directed mattering states.^[1]

Thermodynamics and the Physics of Mattering

In her second chapter, Goldstein dives into physics. She motivates her definition of the mattering instinct through an extended discussion of thermodynamics — specifically, the concepts of entropy as defined by Ludwig Boltzmann and "negentropy" as coined by Erwin Schrödinger.

Boltzmann showed that entropy measures disorder: the number of microscopic arrangements consistent with a given macroscopic state. High-entropy states (like gas molecules evenly distributed through a room) vastly outnumber low-entropy states (like all the molecules clustered in one corner). The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy increases over time, which is often misunderstood to be a necessary consequence of how high-entropy states are statistically more probable than low-entropy ones. The high-entropy states are astronomically more probable: you can wait as long as you want and you won't see the gas molecules in your room condense into a lump in the corner. This statistical view of entropy, pioneered by Boltzmann, was crucial to developing our modern understanding.

Schrödinger, in his landmark 1944 book What is Life?, observed that living organisms appear to defy this tendency. Organisms maintain their structure, grow, reproduce, and evolve — all of which involve creating and preserving low-entropy order in the face of thermodynamic dissolution. Schrödinger proposed that life "feeds on negative entropy" — negentropy — sucking orderliness from the environment to maintain its own organization.

Schrödinger himself later acknowledged that the term "negentropy" was somewhat misleading. In a footnote to later editions, he explained that what he really meant was "free energy" — the thermodynamically available energy that can perform work. He avoided the technical term because he worried that lay readers would confuse it with energy itself.

The distinction matters because free energy represents not just orderliness but potential for action. A living organism doesn't merely resist disorder; it harnesses gradients of free energy to do things — to move, to grow, to think, to create. The mattering instinct, Goldstein argues, connects precisely here: we experience mattering when we successfully convert free energy into meaningful action, when our existence contributes to the ongoing work of creating and maintaining order against entropy's tide.

Friston and the Free Energy Principle

Here I will digress from the book to make an important connection. Goldstein's thermodynamic framework connects naturally to the work of Karl Friston, the British neuroscientist who has developed the Free Energy Principle into a comprehensive theory of life and consciousness. Friston proposes that all living systems — from single cells to human brains — minimize a quantity called "variational free energy," which measures the difference between an organism's internal model of the world and the actual sensory data it receives.

When a system minimizes free energy, it can do so in two ways: by updating its internal model to better match incoming data (perception), or by acting on the world to make the data match its model (action). Both strategies reduce surprise — the organism becomes less likely to encounter states it didn't predict. Friston argues that this is not merely what organisms do; it is what it means to be alive. A living system just is a system that maintains itself against entropy by minimizing free energy.

The implications for consciousness and mattering are profound. If Friston is right, then the brain's fundamental operation involves constructing a model of the world and continuously refining it to minimize prediction error. Consciousness, on this view, emerges from the same free-energy-minimizing dynamics that keep cells alive. And the mattering instinct may represent a particularly human elaboration of this process — a recursive model that includes the self as a cause in the world, a source of meaningful action that reduces free energy not just locally but at the level of narrative coherence across a lifetime.

This connection becomes especially important as we engage with questions about artificial intelligence. The "attention blocks" in the transformer architecture underlying ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other large language models turn out to be minimizing a Helmholtz free energy functional. The softmax function that computes attention weights is mathematically identical to the Boltzmann distribution of statistical thermodynamics:

This equation describes how each token position distributes its "attention" across all other positions, weighting by relevance. The denominator — the partition function — normalizes the distribution in exactly the way Boltzmann's statistical mechanics normalizes probability distributions over energy states. And as the previous review argued, the transformer architecture implements a form of Bayesian inference, updating representations layer by layer in a process structurally analogous to the Aumann agreement theorem for rational agents.^[2]

The coincidence here is too striking to be ignored: attention, free energy, mattering. To be clear, nowhere in the book does Goldstein claim that large language models have a mattering instinct — that would require the recursive self-model she identifies as essential to human mattering. But I feel it is important to acknowledge now that the same machinery underlying biological cognition and the mattering instinct in humans appears to be shared with artificial neural networks. Perhaps "attention" is not merely a convenient metaphor for what transformers compute; perhaps it names a fundamental operation in the thermodynamics of information processing, an operation that in sufficiently complex systems gives rise to something like concern for significance.

Heroic Strivers and the Aristotelian Principle

Goldstein devotes a substantial portion of her book to what she calls "heroic strivers" — individuals who exemplify the mattering instinct at its most intense. Artists, scientists, activists, athletes: people who pursue excellence with a commitment that seems disproportionate to any material reward. Why does the mountaineer risk death for a summit that offers nothing practical? Why does the mathematician spend decades on a proof that a handful of specialists will appreciate? Why does the novelist agonize over sentences that most readers will absorb unconsciously?

The answer, Goldstein proposes, lies in Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia — often translated as "happiness" but more accurately rendered as "flourishing" or "well-being." For Aristotle, eudaimonia requires activity: not merely possessing capabilities but exercising them, and exercising them well. The happy life is the life lived according to virtue, where virtue means excellence in the use of one's distinctively human capacities.

One of the book's many revelations for me was that John Rawls and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi apparently theorized "flow" independently, both drawing on Aristotle, but through different intellectual lineages. Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, postulates what he calls the "Aristotelian Principle": "other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity." The principle explains why people generally prefer chess to checkers, algebra to arithmetic — more complex activities engage more capacities and produce more satisfaction when performed well.

Csikszentmihalyi, meanwhile, developed his theory of "flow" through empirical research on artists and creative workers. He observed that people in flow states report intense engagement, loss of self-consciousness, and absorption in the activity itself — experiences that match the intrinsic satisfaction Rawls's Aristotelian Principle predicts. And crucially, Csikszentmihalyi came to his insights by way of Carl Jung. As a young man traveling through Switzerland, short on funds for entertainment, Csikszentmihalyi stumbled into a lecture by Jung on the psychology of UFO sightings. The talk sparked his interest in consciousness and optimal experience.

Jung himself had observed the human tendency to avoid inner confrontation:

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practise Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world — all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.

Jung saw the spiritual gymnastics of his era — the faddish adoption of Eastern practices, the proliferation of self-help systems — as evasions of genuine self-confrontation. What Goldstein calls the mattering instinct, unacknowledged, produces anxious grasping at external systems of significance. Only when we turn inward, Jung suggested, can we find the resources for genuine meaning-making.

The confluence of Rawls, Csikszentmihalyi, and Jung — all tracing their ideas back to Aristotle — suggests something like a convergent evolution in the theory of human flourishing. Different thinkers, working from different starting points, arrived at the same recognition: that humans need not only to live, but to live well, and that living well requires the engaged exercise of capacities in ways that feel meaningful.^[3]

Campbell and the Hero's Journey

Goldstein's account of heroic striving illuminates what Joseph Campbell was driving at in the final chapter of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell's monomyth — the hero's journey — describes a universal pattern in which a protagonist leaves the ordinary world, faces trials, achieves transformation, and returns bearing gifts for the community. But Campbell's ultimate point is not merely descriptive. He argues that the heroic pattern represents a psychological necessity, not just a narrative convention.

In the ultimate paragraph of the book, Campbell writes:

It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal — carries the cross of the redeemer — not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

The passage captures the mattering instinct's paradoxical structure. We cannot receive meaning from society because society is composed of other individuals facing the same problem. Collective rituals, shared narratives, cultural traditions — these help, but they cannot substitute for the individual confrontation with significance. Each person must undergo the "supreme ordeal" alone, in the silences of personal despair, without recourse to the crowd's validation.

Campbell's religious language is deliberate. The mattering instinct, when unmet, produces a kind of suffering that traditional religions address directly. The Christian promise that every sparrow's fall is noticed by God, the Buddhist recognition of suffering as the starting point for enlightenment, the Jewish affirmation of humanity's covenant with the divine — all respond to the fear that individual existence might pass unwitnessed, unvalued, unmattering. Goldstein does not advocate religious belief, but she insists that secular thought must take seriously the problem that religion solves. A purely material worldview that dismisses the mattering instinct as illusion fails to account for its phenomenological intensity and motivational power.^[4]

Spinoza and Conatus

Goldstein draws a natural connection between the mattering instinct and Spinoza's concept of conatus. In the third part of his Ethics, Spinoza argues that "each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being." This striving — conatus — constitutes the essence of any finite mode. To be a thing at all is to resist dissolution, to maintain oneself against entropy's relentless pressure.

Spinoza's formulation is more than biological survival instinct. The conatus of a human mind is not merely to keep the body alive but to increase understanding, to form adequate ideas, to approach what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God — amor intellectualis Dei — which is the highest form of human flourishing. For Spinoza, joy is the affect we experience when our power of acting increases, when we become more capable of affecting and being affected by the world in ways we understand. Sadness is the corresponding affect when our power diminishes.

Goldstein sees the mattering instinct as a specifically human elaboration of Spinozistic conatus. Mere persistence doesn't satisfy us; we need our persistence to count for something. The recursive self-model enabled by common knowledge capacity transforms the biological drive to persist into the existential drive to matter. We strive not just to be but to be worthy of being.

This connection illuminates a puzzle about human motivation. Why do people sacrifice themselves for causes? Why do they accept personal diminishment for the sake of meaning? Spinoza's conatus, interpreted as mere survival instinct, cannot explain martyrdom. But conatus interpreted as striving to increase one's power of acting — where "power of acting" includes narrative and relational dimensions — can explain why someone might accept death to preserve their sense of mattering. The self that matters is not identical to the biological organism; it is the self-as-agent-in-the-world, the self that exists in relation to values and commitments and communities. That self can sometimes be better preserved through physical death than through survival at the cost of betraying what mattered.

The Hard Problem as Hidden Relationality

What is perhaps Goldstein's deepest philosophical move is in connecting the mattering instinct with the hard problem of consciousness. David Chalmers's "hard problem" asks why physical processes generate subjective experience at all. Even a complete functional explanation of the brain — how neurons process information, control attention, generate behavior — seems to leave unexplained why any of this feels like something. The philosophical zombie, physically identical to a human but lacking inner experience, seems at least conceivable.

This was a topic I addressed in an earlier essay titled The Hard Problem as Hidden Relationality, which I authored around the same time her book was announced. In my earlier essay, I proposed that the hard problem rests on a hidden assumption: that there exists an "objective physical description" — a view from nowhere — against which subjective experience must be measured. But what if physical descriptions, like quantum states in Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics, are always descriptions from some perspective? What if there is no view from nowhere, only views from here and there? (None of this is likely to make any sense unless you read the earlier essay. Sorry.)

But if we were to accept this account, consciousness is not a thing to be explained but what physical processes look like from the inside — from the perspective of the system those processes constitute. The hard problem dissolves not because we explain how brain states generate experience, but because we recognize that the question assumed a contrast between objective and subjective that was never coherent. First-person and third-person descriptions are equally valid perspectives on the same relational reality, neither reducible to the other.

Goldstein in some sense implicitly builds on this framework by arguing that the mattering instinct is not merely compatible with relational consciousness but requires it. To matter is to matter to someone — ultimately, to matter to oneself. But the self that one matters to is not an independent observer of physical processes; it is the perspective constituted by those processes. The mattering instinct, then, is consciousness reflecting on itself and asking whether the existence it instantiates deserves the existence it experiences. The recursion that generates mattering is the same recursion that generates first-person perspective: the system modeling itself as a locus of experience and evaluation.

This connection explains why the mattering instinct cannot be satisfied by purely external validation. Others can confirm that they value me, but their valuation reaches me only through my own perspective. Ultimately, I must be convinced not just that others value me but that I deserve to be valued — that the self doing the experiencing merits the attention it receives. The mattering instinct is self-consciousness interrogating its own warrant.

Many Answers, Some Destructive

Goldstein's book culminates not in a prescription but in a celebration. The purpose of The Mattering Instinct is not to provide the answer to the meaning of life but to illuminate the many shapes (both heros and heroines) that answer may take. Different people, facing different circumstances, will satisfy their mattering instinct through different paths: art, science, family, service, contemplation, creation. No single formula captures human flourishing because human flourishing is precisely the exercise of our distinctive capacities, and those capacities vary across individuals and cultures.

What Goldstein does insist upon is recognition. We must acknowledge the mattering instinct as a fundamental feature of human psychology — as real and as demanding as hunger or sexuality or fear. A worldview that dismisses it as illusion or epiphenomenon fails at the first task of philosophy: taking human experience seriously. And a culture that neglects it — that reduces meaning to consumption, significance to status, value to market price — will produce pathologies of despair, as indeed contemporary culture seems to be producing. The many faces of the mattering instinct should be embraced: "Not only are we different, but we want to be different. And the world needs us in all our differences."

But this is not a John Lennon song. At the same time, Goldstein acknowledges that not all mattering projects are good, and that "we need to find an objective standard that we all can accept to distinguish between better and worse ways of responding to the mattering instinct." This, the last part of her book, feels both the most speculative and most impactful. Here, Goldstein opines that:

A person’s overall effect on entropy provides such an objective standard. A life well-lived is a life that, while pursuing mattering in a way that accords with an individual’s temperament, talents, and interests, joins forces with life in its resistance to entropy. Life is a ceaseless struggle against entropy. Consciousness, knowledge, reflection, beauty, love, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, grace, creativity, happiness: They are states of great order that must be wrested, with the expenditure of energy, from the entropic transformation from within.

Conversely, a person who responds to the mattering instinct by increasing entropy, "increasing the chaos of our world, provoking conflicts and confusion, discontent and despoliation, disease, disaster, and death" is objectively bad. As a person who seems to share her worldview — to the point of finding myself coincidentally on a nearby part of the mattering map — I am sympathetic to these normative claims. I can remember asking my social media friends when my children were infants, "When exactly do humans go from net adding to net removing entropy from their environment?"

But I'm afriad that from my study of nature, I'm not yet able to see that we either can or should aspire to a society that perfectly eliminates entropy. I'm afraid that in some sense entropy is simply the tax we pay for entanglement with each other. So long as we have a need for connection, we are destined to pay in entropy for our entanglements.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's The Mattering Instinct is available here. The companion review of Steven Pinker's When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows can be found here.