Pompous title, no? But what am I to say? I have, since my early teen years, been on a quest. Who am I? What am I? Why am I here? What is my life about? What is life about?
Most likely, everyone goes through a stage in life where these questions loom, if not large, at least lurk in the shadows. I have been cursed (blessed?) with a brain that won't let go of the question. So now, in my seventies, I am still asking myself these questions.
That is not to say that I haven't found some answers along the way. Hence this attempt to communicate my current thoughts on the subject. Perhaps, the answer to my question lies in the very writing of these thoughts and wanderings over the years. Perhaps, my life is about searching for the answers. Perhaps, asking the questions and searching for the answers is what fulfills me as a human, the results of a genetic and memetic destiny that started billions of years ago, and is destined to continue through the end of time.
Oh, how waxing philosophical satisfies my ego!
But why bother to write any of this down? Why take the time and effort? The first reason is to help me to get clear, myself, on what I am thinking. The process of putting down my ideas into words, ordered in a way that makes them consumable by another human being, forces multiple parts of my own brain to hear and react to my statements. This is important, at least to me, to render my thoughts consistent with who I am, who I want to be. So I write, and read what I wrote, and think about what I wrote, until the voices of dissent and discord soften to a low roar.
The second reason for writing this down is ego based - getting the satisfaction of sharing who I am with another human being. It is the same satisfaction I can get out of sitting beside my wife watching television. My belief that I exist, that I am important, is confirmed through my observation and communication with another human being. I believe it is part of my herd instinct, passed on to me through my genetic programming. I get pleasure out of being in proximity of my own species. It reduces the chances of me being picked out and killed - hiding in the crowd, a fish in a school, a part of a tribe. This is a survival strategy of our species, "we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” (Thinking: Democracy as an extension of herd instinct genetic programming.)
So I tread on thin ice! Both reasons are ego-centric. Beware, reader! Know that I struggle to make my words have value for you.
Also note, there are many, many assumptions, explicitly recognized, and implicitly hidden in the maze of misunderstanding. Keep your own thinking engaged. Ask your own questions. Test and re-test what I say against your own life experience. For if there exists truth, but it is not accessible to the human species, cannot be supported through the chain of life and death, passed on from generation to generation, then that truth will be hidden once more. Whereas, if we are able to find a shared understanding, that is propagated widely enough to find a survival niche through the eons of time, that truth will survive in our understanding of the universe.
Here is my answer to this lifelong quest, a circular argument, which I will take as an assumption: survival is important.
Where is the circular argument? Well, survival is important, because if something doesn't survive, it ceases to exist. And how will an argument that assumes survival is NOT important, survive? Survival seems equivalent to existence. Something exists, if and only if, it survives from one moment to the next. (Thinking: The universe exists without time, a state machine. It is only through our memory and imagination that time exists.)
That which survives, is, by definition, that which exists from one moment to the next. That which is observable is that which survives from one moment to the next, but which varies in relation to another observable. Existence is survival, continuity, but observation is difference, a relationship between two moments of existence. (Thinking: Time is the first derivative of existence.)(Thinking: A state machine can only experience time if it can remember past states and recognize a change of state.)
So what! Where am I going with this. Well, I believe that (nearly) everything about what life is, in the universe, is about existing over time (survival). I say "nearly," because it is not clear to me that life WILL exist over the vast time horizon of the universe. Life, at least as I experience my own life, and even as the human species will experience its own existence, did not exist at the beginning of time, and probably won't exist beyond some point in the future, either because of extinction, or evolution. (For this perspective, I am grateful to the PBS show, Eons, which I watch with regularity, and have seen every episode, as a reminder that there is more to life than my own.)
And how is life different from other objects in the universe which survive over time? How is life different from atomic particles, which have existed, and will continue to exist, for very long periods of time? (Thinking: And how is life similar to atomic particles?) (You see, reader, how disparate my thoughts, the many wanderings of so many pathways through my brain!)
Why am I starting with the end of the story? What was the start of the story?
Ever since I was 13 years old, no doubt because I was exploring the concept that other people existed, not just as objects through my perception, but as actual persons, like myself, no doubt it was through this exploration, that I asked myself, "Does God exist?" Well, actually, the thought never occured to me. But a good friend of mine posed the question. Not being raised in any religious tradition, I pondered the question as an intellectual curiosity. Does God exist? What is God? What is existence? So began a lifelong journey, the end of which (at least, so far) has led me to conclude that, yes, God exists, but that existence is defined as "that which I know I don't know, and that which I don't know I don't know). But basically, God is that which is unknowable to me in this moment. (Thinking: What does it mean to "know" a thing? Is knowledge the accumulation of "cause and effect" Is cause and effect the domain of "that which I am able to control"?)
As I passed though the many stages of my life, and as my world opened up to include others, I passed many landmarks, insights into my inquiry. I list them here, as they occur to me, not necessarily in any particular order of when I had them (though I number them to give them identity and group ideas underneath each:
- Science is a form of communication. It is a method we use to share one person’s observations/experiences/existence with others.
a) The success/survival of a science statement depends on the level of universality/sharing of the communication, and my/our commitment to pass on the meme to contribute to its existence/survival beyond my/our lifetime.
b) Science is a subjective communication, subject to the limitations of the observer and the ability of the observer to communicate to others. The acceptance of a scientific statement depends on the ability of others to replicate the scientific statement, reproduce and experience the statement for oneself (aka scientific method).
c) The scientific method is useful because it standardizes the communication protocol: What are the steps I need to take to successfully communicate my observations to others?
d) Science (and each scientific statement) is a probability distribution, where the variance measures the “universality” of the science. (Thinking: There is “hard science” and “soft science”, which depends on whether there is very little/no variance or “lots” of variance.)(Thinking: There is science which is independent of human species observation, things like gravity, nuclear reactions, most of the physical and chemical sciences. And there is science which is dependent on human species observation, like social sciences.)(Question: What philosophical arguments do I think an alien would agree with?)
e) Some things are knowable, through scientific inquiry. Some things are unknowable. And the boundary is constantly changing. The probability that the human species will know all there is to know is zero. The probability that the scientific method will continue to reduce the variance through explanation of the relationships between objects in the universe is certain. And the movement from uncertainty to certainty is a process that is driven by a need to survive though a strategy of control. - Religion is the complement of science. (Thinking: Both religion and science spring from the same questions of philosophy: Why am I here? What is the purpose of life?)
a) There are some things I will never know, that the human species will never know, that are within epsilon of never being known, where epsilon tends towards zero :-)
b) There are some things which are true, which I/we will never understand/know, but which I may be able to imagine.
c) God is all this, and more.
d) To believe in God is to accept my fallibility, my inability to understand/know everything.
e) To pray to God is to fight against my ego’s belief that I AM God, that I can know everything, that I can control everything. - My impact on the universe is infinitely small, yet infinitely important. (Thinking: Just as infinitely small increments can lead to a limit as n -> infinity. Or the ability of a very small change to make very big changes.)
- Truth is a probability distribution. It’s the variance we should be paying attention to!
- Every human being has their own point of view, their observed world. Our survival as a species may depend on our ability to share each point of view with the other points of view, yielding something which has value beyond each of our own lifetimes, beyond each of our own perspectives.
- Western philosophy (and logic) seems to be frozen in dichotomy! Free ourselves, oh learned academics, with the power of statistics. Let our relationship to our universe more accurately reflect the probability distributions of reality, rather than the binary logic of dichotomy. What if all statements had a probability of being “true” or “false”? What if the world was vastly more complex than one might be able to represent with absolute “truth”? We don’t loose any of our work, the eons of thought, science, honing ideas, winnowing out false paths. And we embrace a language with the requisite variety to describe the complexities or life.
- My search for answers could be limited to answers in my own lifetime, in my own life experience. But just as science looks for laws that apply throughout the known universe and across time, so I want to find a definition of life purpose that would apply to any intelligent life form across the universe and over time. (Thinking: I've introduced some undefined terms: "intelligent" and "life form". Both are difficult to define, though I can recognize them on Earth with a high degree of confidence.) (Thinking: What would be necessary to identify intelligent life in another part of the universe? Evolved to survive in a different environment?)
- My "answers" (really, hypotheses) should satisfy more than just myself. And the corollary, I should be open to observations by others that conflict and/or support my hypotheses. I recognize the power of multiple perspectives, especially when my perspective is limited by the biases of my own way of thinking.
- I test my hypotheses against the geological past of the universe. In particular, I study the Earth's geologic past, looking for clues as to what is universal in time and space.
- I test my hypotheses against the systems that do not appear to be "intelligent life forms". (Thinking: Thought experiments about the survival of elements, like carbon, and the earliest formation of our universe. (Thinking: Thought experiments about the "big bang" and the survival of a stable-enough universe.
- I test my hypotheses against the role of "species" and "organizations" as systems of survival. (Thinking: There are many insights and overlaps between thought experiments involving species and/or organizations and the role of religion, including, but limited to: reincarnation is the same as "survival of the species", prayer (humility) is a release valve for commitment to control systems, forgiveness facilitates "play" which introduces variation necessary for learning.)
- ???
- ???
and so on (it's a list in progress)...
Life is about survival, continuity, reverse entropy, information transmission. Everything else follows: from reproduction to evolution to cause and effect (Thinking: Cause and effect is a product of remembering the past and predicting the future. Though life has found a successful survival strategy through the use of memory to increase the chance of survival, it is largely the human species that uses imagination of the future to make choices that leverage observed cause and effect to increase the chance of survival. DNA depends on reproduction, with variation introduced by non-exact reproduction, and survival is the choice mechanism. Perhaps it is this non-exact reproduction that distinguishes life most profoundly from the other forms of matter, like carbon atoms, which have far greater chances of survival because of their "exactness". Life becomes possible only within the wobble of the universe.)
If life is about survival, then what increases the chance of survival? Being able to remember the past is a good starting point. But the previous state of the universe takes a universe of information to remember, exceeding the information content of the universe, making it impossible for even the entire universe to remember its complete previous state.
But smaller environments, subsets of the universe, local semi-autonomous zones exist, where bits of a stable environment can be remembered, long enough, to the benefit of the survival of some chemical memory constructs (such as DNA). And in these small corners of the universe, entropy is reversed, information preserved, passed on, built upon.
Over time, life moves from a non-exact replication somewhat random survival strategy to an intentional strategy driven by attempts to remember the past and predict the future. This is the (so far) successful survival strategy of the human species. We excel at remembering patterns that serve us in predicting future states to our benefit. We have bet on this strategy for some time now, leaving the realm of gene memory into the world of meme memory: sharing perspectives, comparing, verifying, articulating, updating ideas through a process of herd memory we call reasoning and the scientific method. (Thinking: Though this memetic knowledge has served us, it does leave us disabled as to that part of the universe which is not predictable. What life forms successfully exist in this less predictable world? As my father once told me, "Man may be the first to visit the stars, but the cockroach will not be far behind!" Not to mention bacteria!)
If I follow this thinking, survival of the human species has depended heavily on our ability to predict the future. But evolution, nature, God, does not really care. We might destroy (or nearly destroy) ourselves (choose your weapon: nuclear destruction, global warming, sterility from advanced materials development, artificial un-intelligence, etc.). Or we might use our powers of prediction to follow a less destructive path.
The harder path will be trying to become less destructive, because our genetic heritage has been successful through a long history of destruction. It seems unlikely that our genes will catch up with our memes, since memes change far quicker than genes. This means there will be a continual struggle between gene programming, genetically motivated survival choices, and memetic learning, memetically motivated survival choices. As I told my daughter recently, it will be, in any case, a bumpy ride!
I choose to work towards the memetic future of long-term forecasts and inclusive contributions. Our future survival, over the longer term, depends on our ability to survive the greater challenges of the universe, ones which threaten our planet, our solar system, and our galaxy. We are just discovering these challenges. In the long run, against these super challenges(1)! Not to mention other threats of which we are unaware!
It may take a village to raise a child, but it's going to take all hands on deck to save humanity!
Or, you could become/remain a nihilist(2), but I think my way of thinking will have a better chance of surviving. As some famous economist (John Maynard Keynes) once said, "In the long run, we're all dead." But if I'm running the marathon, and you're running the 100-yard dash, I'll be around 461.45 times longer.
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(1) I asked Gemini about non-human threats to life on our planet. Here's what I got:
- Cosmic Threats (From Space)
- Asteroid and Comet Impacts
- Solar Superflares and Coronal Mass Ejections
- Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs)
- Rogue Stars or Black Holes
- Planetary Threats (From Inside Earth)
- Supervolcanic Eruptions
- Mantle Plumes and Flood Basalts
- Geomagnetic Pole Reversals
- Biological and Climatic Threats (From Nature)
- Naturally Occurring Super-Pathogens
- Orbital Milankovitch Cycles
(2) I asked Gemini how someone could be a nihilist in the face of these threats:"For many people, discovering these massive cosmic and planetary threats actually makes them more likely to adopt nihilism—not less. When faced with the reality that a random asteroid, a solar flare, or the eventual death of the Sun could erase everything humans have ever built, it becomes easy to view human existence as a brief, accidental flash in a cold, indifferent universe. However, human beings process this realization in very different ways. Depending on the person, cosmic threats usually lead to one of three distinct types of nihilism.
- Passive Nihilism (The Weight of Insignificance) This is the most common reaction to learning about cosmic scale. A passive nihilist looks at the timeline of the universe and concludes that because everything will eventually be destroyed, nothing we do right now matters.The Logic: If the Earth is destined to be swallowed by a red giant, then every war, every masterpiece of art, and every scientific discovery will ultimately be forgotten.The Feeling: It leads to apathy or paralysis. The sheer scale of space makes human struggles look completely meaningless.
- Cosmic Nihilism (Philosophical Realism) Cosmic nihilism—often associated with writer H.P. Lovecraft and various modern philosophers—is the literal acceptance of human irrelevance.The Logic: The universe was not created for us, it does not care about us, and it will not notice when we are gone.The Reality: To a cosmic nihilist, these threats aren't "evil" or "punishments"; they are just basic physics. Believing that humanity is uniquely safe or special is viewed as a comforting delusion.
- Optimistic Nihilism (Finding Freedom in the Dark) This is how many people find peace and happiness through nihilism. Instead of being depressed by the universe's indifference, they find it liberating. If the universe has no inherent, pre-written meaning, and if everything will eventually disappear, then there is no pressure to fulfill a grand cosmic destiny. You are completely free to enjoy your life on your own terms. Mistakes are temporary, embarrassing moments don't matter in the long run, and the only meaning that exists is the meaning you choose to create right now. Because our time on this fragile planet is limited and constantly threatened by physics, our moments with friends, family, and art become more precious, not less. We are all we have.Ultimately, a nihilist looks at a supervolcano or an expanding sun and sees proof that the universe doesn't have a plan for us. For some, that is terrifying; for others, it is the ultimate form of peace."
