One of the most vexing problems of armchair philosophy — the kind you and I might do while putting off doing the dishes (assuming you and I are not philosophers) — is the problem of the Meaning of Life.
It’s not very hard to end up asking this question. If, for instance, you have a three-year-old, you’re very likely to encounter an endless string of whys that lead you down a path to existential uncertainty: why anything? Why do I have to go to work, anyway? What’s the point? Of anything? For what purpose are we here?
Of course, if we were philosophers (or weren’t pretending that we’re not), we wouldn’t frame the question in quite this way. We might say something about deontology or eudaimonia if we weren’t careful. For the purposes of this article, however, we’ll try to restrain ourselves. It’s not that the study of duty and individual morality or the idea of human flourishing are unimportant or uninteresting; it just turns out to answer this question that we can mostly do without. So we will.
(Aside: we will not simply ignore the important issues underlying ethics, ontology, or epistemology — we cannot simply charge through, reasoning poorly, and declaring victory at the end by being blind to our mistakes.)
One of the first blunders we might make on our quest to find the Meaning of Life is to run afoul of the naturalistic fallacy, also known as the is-ought problem. It would be really nice, you see, if you could, after observing how things are, conclude what one ought to do, or what one’s purpose ought to be, because the scientific method is amazingly good at helping us make accurate observations. We are really good at “is”, when we want to be. But there is a problem.
In brief, the problem is this: noting how something is seems to be in an entirely different category from stating how something ought to be. A jump from one to the other appears to be a category error. Ought-statements can be justified given a goal: if you want clean clothes, you should wash them. And goals can be justified as needed to reach a larger goal: if you want to fly to Iceland, you need to get to an airport. But if you merely describe how something is (“Iceland is wonderful”), from whence comes any imperative to act absent an existing goal (“I want to be happy and wonderful places make me happy”)? David Hume is famous for articulating this problem in his Treatise on Human Nature, and it has been vexing attempts to ground purpose in observation ever since.
To solve this puzzle, we will follow three principles.
The principle of No Imaginary Friends states that you can’t just make stuff up and declare it to be real. For example, I can’t declare that some deity exists who somehow has solved this problem — we needn’t worry how — and we just need to read off the deity’s answer. Philosophers have a lot of imaginary friends, so we’re going to lose most of philosophy this way (not to mention all of theism).
The principle of Don’t Give Up states that despite not having imaginary friends around to help you, you still must do the best you can with what you can justify. No nihilism, not even any postmodernism here. If you want to imagine you have a deity as a friend, but you actually have a hamster, you just see how far you can get with your cute little hamster.
The principle of Only Mostly Sure states that uncertainty is acceptable, and indeed, we should be careful not to be too confident in our conclusions. We will accept answers that are not definitive, but we will be open about the degree to which they are open to question.
Let’s get started!
The Meaning of Life can, for our purposes, be recast as follows: what is the overarching goal (or ought) for people, from which all correct imperative (moral) statements ultimately derive? Now, according to No Imaginary Friends, we can’t assume there is one just because we want it, but it’s also not obvious that there couldn’t be one under any circumstances, so we can look.
The key concept here is a goal. What is a goal, anyway? It seems to have something to do with an internal conception of a possible future state of affairs that one can use to direct actions in such a way as to increase the chance that the actual state of affairs will (more closely) match the conception. Individual people clearly have goals — for example, I have the goal of completing this article, and I am typing right now to change the state of Medium to become closer to my conception of having this article published on Medium.
We’re essentially asking for some sort of Ultimate, Universal goal. Before we can tell if there is such a thing, we first have to ask if it’s possible to detect goals rather than simply be aware of having one oneself. Here, the answer seems clearly yes in at least some circumstances: if we observe someone walking around to different doors in a house and pulling on them, we can note that all the complexity of their behavior can be compactly described by the goal of getting into the house. We’re Only Mostly Sure (maybe they have a doorknob-touching fetish?), but that’s okay. More generally, when we see a system where there are a wide range of possible behaviors, but out of all those possibilities, the behaviors chosen are all likely to lead towards the same or a similar state of affairs, we can infer that the system has a goal.
If we want the Ultimate, Universal goal, we obviously want to ask if the universe itself has a goal. And the answer there seems a resounding no: not only does there not appear to be any conception of a future state of affairs, even those dynamics that have a wide range of possible outcomes (e.g. quantum mechanics) appear to be undirected in their randomness, not all pointing towards some consistent state of affairs. We’re Only Mostly Sure, but there appears to be no universal goal. And we’re allowed No Imaginary Friends, so we can’t just postulate one and keep going.
And yet, we Don’t Give Up. So we ask instead: okay, what is the biggest justifiable goal we can find? This one isn’t very hard — the initial question asks it! The meaning of…life. Life is operationally goal directed: the goal is to perpetuate life (of the same kind). On the one hand it is merely the consequence of a tautology: that which survives is that which survives. If there is any way for a process to reliably keep the same kind of process going, once you get it started at all, you’ll tend to keep it around. That’s exactly what life is doing. In fact, we get a whole series of nested goals, but the two most distinct ones are: the goal of life is to perpetuate life; and (since we tend to selfishly focus on ourselves) the goal of Homo sapiens is to perpetuate Homo sapiens. The latter goal is a particularly interesting one because although for now we have no choice, it’s possible in the future that technological developments will divorce species from cognitive life, and then we have two goals that might even be at odds: species perpetuation and perpetuation of consciousness. But for now, this is all hypothetical, so we neglect it.
Before we go on, first some justification is in order for the purpose of Homo sapiens. If you watch all the diverse things we do, including build nuclear weapons, it’s not entirely obvious that the goal we should infer is self-perpetuation. It looks like we’re doing something rather different. However, there are three observations that can reassure us that we should be Mostly Sure about this. The first is homology: it’s quite clearly true of basically every other species, so we would expect it also to be true about us. The second is behavioral analysis: from our fascination with sex to affinity for forming coalitions, we have myriad behaviors that are consistent with the goal of perpetuation (and the realities of our evolutionary past)…and if they misfire sometimes, that is no more indicative that the goal is different than that a moth flying repeatedly into a lightbulb is indicative that the core goal of the moth is actually to bash and burn itself on lightbulbs. And the third is introspection: if we ask ourselves, “What is worse, every human dying and us going extinct, or just me and my children (if any) dying,” almost everyone intuitively feels that the first is drastically worse. Not only do we seem to have the goal, but it seems to have transferred from instincts to conscious accessibility.
We therefore can be Mostly Sure that the Purpose of Life is to perpetuate itself, and that (therefore) the Purpose of Human Life is to perpetuate human life. (There is a great deal more to think about regarding e.g. the conflict between benefit to one’s own children and the rest of society — there is much to talk about here, including the high degree of homology of DNA between all humans, zero-sum vs. net positive interactions, and so on. Who knew “purpose” could be so complicated!)
But wait! That might tell us what our goal is but it doesn’t tell us that this is what our goal ought to be!
What is this “ought” thing, anyway? Are we imagining some universal Ought? If we couldn’t even find a goal, we certainly can’t find an Ought. No Imaginary Friends!
The only creatures we’re certain even have a robust enough sense of “ought” to do this rather heady analysis is humans. But our sense of what ought and ought not be does not leap unbidden from nowhere, divorced from everything. Our sense of ought is. It is what it is, and it is there either randomly or to serve the goal of perpetuation. To the extent that it’s random, that it is what it is is unjustifiable — it just is. To the extent that it’s selected because it is serving the goal of perpetuation, any aspect contrary to that is an error, just like the moth’s error of smashing into the lightbulb. The goal of perpetuation is ontologically prior to the cognitive conception of “ought”.
If you decide to throw off these irksome constraints and embrace something else, keep in mind that if your value system isn’t ultimately girded by perpetuation of life, you run the risk of losing all the entities capable of making a value judgment. This is certainly irritating if one hopes to have a temporally stable estimation of value.
This is all perhaps rather unsatisfying. We are mostly sure that the meaning of life is simply: more life. And we ought to accept that meaning/goal only because our sense of “ought” itself is either aligned with that goal or it’s broken — and we got the ought from an is not through some rational stratagem but because the ought-module is implemented physically and it simply is what it is.
However, this view is entirely too dour. Within the simple statement of “more life” lies the vast variety of ways to organize human society and the robustness of distributed systems and the effectiveness of flourishing humans at perpetuating life and the sophisticated analysis and justification for goals. Your real friends aren’t that much less interesting or even, practically, all that different than the imaginary ones.
Addendum: noticing that we cannot escape having a physically implemented system that informs us of what we “ought” do, which was sculpted by randomness and by evolutionary pressure with the inferred goal of perpetuating life, does not mean that we should seek to simply indulge our whims and passions!
Indeed, the entire point of the system seems to be to get us to be more reflective and thoughtful because this is a better strategy individually and when in a coalition with other humans. So we’re free to use all of our powers of rationality and generalization to conclude things like “murder is wrong”. The point is that, without imaginary friends, we can’t escape being ultimately grounded in our own notions and in the necessity for survival. This means that we must give up simple reasoning like “it’s wrong because God said so” or “it’s wrong because you wouldn’t want to be murdered” and instead weave a complicated (but correct) story about how to organize ourselves — distributed semi-rational actors — when collaborating in the face of freeloaders and treachery. If something seems obvious but you can’t prove it, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong; it just means you don’t have a proof. So losing easy but unsupportable justifications isn’t a death knell to, say, morality; the justifications were always only rationalizations anyway, and as such, we couldn’t actually ever agree on them…we instead can just accept some uncertainty and carry on with what seems to work while we’re trying to figure out why it works and if there’s actually something better that we can reveal once we get our justifications in as good of shape as can actually be had.