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Tuesday, October 29, 2013

A Modest Proposal for Solving the “Meaning of Life Problem”


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My Modest Proposal for Solving the “Meaning of Life Problem”—and Reducing Global Conflict





This post was inspired, in part, by a recent conversation with two friends that followed a familiar pattern. My friends have adopted a Buddhist practice that makes them feel good. They urged me to try it, and I said I’m just not into Buddhism or any other spiritual path; I’m fine bumbling along in my usual fashion, gabbing with my students about why Freud isn’t dead, knocking particle physics on my blog, fretting over my kids, watching Homeland with my girlfriend.


Socrates, when he said "The unexamined life is not worth living," implied that there is one optimal meaning of life. 

He was wrong.

My friends became annoyed. They seemed to feel I was condescending to Buddhism and hence to them. Hoping for a truce, I said that we were, in effect, arguing about the “meaning of life,” and that all such arguments are silly, because the meaning of life is a totally personal issue.

My friends reacted with shrugs rather than eager agreement. At the risk of confusing or irritating even more people, I’ll try here to explain more clearly what I meant. In so doing, I hope to solve once and for all what I call the “Meaning of Life Problem.”

First, let me define “meaning of life.” It is whatever gives you joy, or consoles you when life has got you down. It is something you believe or do that makes your life worth living. And by “you” I mean not the collective you but the individual you, unlike every other person past, present or future.

Long ago, some of our ancestors came up with the idea that there must be One True Meaning of Life—one optimal set of beliefs, behaviors, values–for everyone. The most obvious embodiments of this idea are religions such as Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Scientology, each of which—to true believers—represents The Meaning of Life. The One and Only True Meaning.

If you don’t dig religion, you may still insist that some meanings of life are better than all others. The pursuit of scientific knowledge, for example, or artistic illumination, or social justice, or freedom, or pleasure, or power and glory. Socrates implied that there is one optimal meaning of life when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I loathe this aphorism. I enjoy pondering existence myself now and then, but I certainly don’t fault those who prefer, say, fly fishing or fantasy football.

When we assert that our favorite meaning of life is objectively, universally valid, we are committing what philosophers call a category error. We are placing the meaning of life in the same category as truth, which can indeed be objective and universal (in spite of what Thomas Kuhn and other misguided skeptics would have us believe).

The meaning of life belongs in the category of beauty, not truth. It is an aesthetic and hence fundamentally subjective phenomenon. You are moved by the Upanishads, the Koran, The Interpretation of Dreams. I prefer Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Breaking Bad. You believe in Allah or in Nirvana. I believe in free will and the imminent end of war.

In other words, what makes life meaningful is a matter of taste. Arguing that your meaning is better than someone else’s is like arguing that strawberry ice cream tastes better than Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, or that Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself is superior to Song of Solomon, or that Bach beats The Beatles.
You demanding that I love Jesus is as absurd as me demanding that you love my girlfriend (although she is awfully lovable).

There are as many possible meanings of life as there are individuals. “Plushies” and “furries,” for example, are people who have sex with stuffed animals or dress up in furry animal suits and have sex with each other. This behavior doesn’t appeal to me. But neither does being celibate and praying or meditating all day, which some religions have exalted as the best thing that you can do with your life.

My meaning of life isn’t even absolute for me, because it keeps changing as the circumstances of my life change. When I was young, I couldn’t imagine having kids. Who needs the hassle? Now my well-being is inextricably entwined with the well-being of my son and daughter. But I would no more urge my childless friends to have kids than I would exhort my gay friends to go straight.

It’s natural, if you find something that delights you, to want to share your discovery with others. I recently raced through all the novels of Jane Austen, and I’ve been raving about her to strangers at parties. But I accept that you can have a perfectly wonderful life without ever reading Jane Austen. After all, my life wasn’t so bad before I discovered her.

I’m not a total relativist. We can and should make judgments about the empirical plausibility and practical advisability of various beliefs and behaviors. But even if we rule out ideologies like young-earth creationism and white supremacy, that leaves lots of room for diversity. And most of the harmful consequences of beliefs stem from the insistence of believers that everyone agree with them.

I’m critical of religions that purport to be uniquely “true,” or that make empirical claims (for the therapeutic benefits of meditation, for example) that I find dubious. But I’m also critical of militant atheists who denigrate all beliefs that supposedly contradict their cramped, reductionist vision of reality. Science has told us a lot about how the world works, but reality is in many ways still as baffling as ever.

Hence I try to be tolerant toward people who have a greater capacity to suspend disbelief than I do about matters such as extra-sensory perception. The geneticist Francis Collins, who leads the National Institutes of Health, manages somehow to believe in modern physics and biology and in a loving God who occasionally performs miracles. As long as he doesn’t insist that I share his outlook, power to him!

So what does all this have to do with “Global Conflict,” which I mentioned in my headline? The notion that there is one true meaning of life is not only wrong. It may be the worst idea that humans have ever invented, in terms of how much harm it has caused.

If we can all accept that there is no universal Meaning of Life–and that each person must find his or her own unique, personal meaning—imagine how much more peaceful the world would be! My belief in this possibility helps make my life more bearable—and meaningful.

Photo by Eric Gaba of bust of Socrates in The Louvre. Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Socrates_Louvre.jpg.


About the Author: Every week, hockey-playing science writer John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science. A teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, Horgan is the author of four books, including The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and The End of War (McSweeney's, 2012). Follow on Twitter @Horganism.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.



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The Meaning of Life: The Sequel





In my last post, I argued that there is no single, “true” meaning of life, which applies to everyone. The meaning of life is a matter of taste, not of empirical truth. Thus, no matter how meaningful we find some belief system or activity or set of values, we shouldn’t insist that others embrace it.



Meaning of life, says 1983 Monty Python film, is, "Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then."


My post was inspired, in part, by two friends’ gentle attempt to persuade me to try a Buddhist retreat, but let me offer a more extreme example of proselytizing: I once encountered a Christian who, when I resisted his exhortations to embrace Jesus, compared me to a man on a burning plane, to whom he was offering a life-saving parachute.

He saw himself as compassionate. I saw him as nutty. Demanding that people embrace your faith because it works for you is as absurd as demanding that they listen only to Lady Gaga or have sex only with stuffed animals. If we could all adopt a live-and-let-live perspective toward each others’ meanings, we’d be a lot better off.

I hoped for, and got, some critical responses, which I’m posting, along with my replies, here. My Stevens colleague Garry Dobbins, a philosopher, objects to my interpretation of Socrates: “You err when you say, ‘Socrates implied that there is one optimal meaning of life when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”‘ Socrates was not saying that the only life worth living is one in which someone sits around all day examining his life! No! Socrates was saying that EVERYONE, whatever she or he does, who never, and regularly, challenges her or himself by asking such questions as ‘Am I lying to myself saying/doing this?’ ‘Is that bastard over there who just accused me of being partial, or prejudiced, really TOTALLY mistaken?’ and so on, is not living an ‘examined’ life, and is thereby not living up to what we might fairly call a ‘high’ standard. You might say to me, ‘I don’t CARE to live UP to any such standard!’ To which I would say, ‘Out of your own mouth you stand condemned: not mine!’ So, Socrates’ words are perfectly consistent with someone being a doctor, lawyer, or Indian Chief–or candlestick maker for that matter–and examining her, or his life, or NOT.”

My reply: “Garry, I admit Socrates irks me. To me he comes across as an arrogant jerk, bragging about how wise he is compared to poets, politicians and everyone else. (He’s wise because he knows how little he knows! The irony.) You try to soft-peddle the implications of his ‘unexamined life’ remark, suggesting that he’s asking only for a little ethical introspection now and then. I don’t buy it. Socrates demands much more of us. His allegory of the cave describes ordinary people as hopelessly benighted, living in a world of illusion. If you’re not trying to escape the cave, you’re not really alive, hence your life is worthless. This is exactly the sort of extremism that I’m deploring, and that I see in both religious and secular zealots today.”

Lee Vinsel, who teaches science and technology studies at Stevens, writes: “Isn’t your philosophy just a tepid form of liberalism? The problem with this kind of philosophy, which also fits some forms of Existentialism, is that it squishes all of the interesting tensions in life by pretending they don’t exist. The ‘Whatever, man; you do your thing; and I’ll do my thing; and as long as our two things don’t interfere with each other’s things, dude, then everything is copacetic, dig?’ answer isn’t very interesting a) because it describes what, like, dormant kids who sit around in their pajamas and play World of Warcraft all day think anyway, b) because this variety of liberalism has been around for a long time to not much effect, and c) because it experienced a major uptick in the 60s and look how that turned out. Finally, isn’t the fact that the U.S. liberal, ‘whatever, man’ consensus is leading our world right off the cliff environmentally and otherwise proof that philosophically this isn’t the way to go?”

My reply: “Lee, liberalism hasn’t had much effect? Really? Looking just at the 60s, that was an era of enormous advances in rights for women, gays, blacks and other oppressed groups, and major grass-roots challenges to U.S. militarism and imperialism. Young people questioned the values of their elders and experimented with alternative forms of spirituality and social organization. Many of those experiments failed, but they were well worth trying, to my mind. I also reject your suggestion that liberalism is somehow to blame for our global problems. Ideological self-righteousness–whether religious or economic or nationalistic–is what threatens to lead us ‘off the cliff,’ as you put it.”

A friend who’s into meditation writes: “You portray us as born-again Buddhists trying to browbeat you into trying Buddhist meditation because WE liked it. Not fair. In fact, we only argued that if you were going to keep CRITIQUING meditation, you should really try it. (Not by reading about it, interviewing people about it, or taking a class here and there over the years – but by doing sustained meditation.)”

My reply: “I’ve never been psychoanalyzed or taken an antidepressant. Does that mean I shouldn’t criticize SSRI’s or psychoanalysis? I’m often faulted for not knowing enough about things I criticize, but no one ever accuses me of ignorance when I praise their pet belief. Now, you could argue that my criticism of others’ beliefs is inconsistent with the live and let live philosophy I spell out in my post. I worry about that now and then. But when I look at the world today, I don’t see it suffering from an excess of skepticism. Quite the contrary. Anyway, that’s my convenient self-justification.”

Dr. Strangelove comments on my blog: “We like to believe there is no universal meaning of life. What about democracy, human rights, right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness? Don’t we all agree to that?”

I reply: “As I said, I’m not a total relativist. There are certain meta-beliefs, or meta-values, that are good for us to share, collectively, so we can create a society in which we can pursue our individual meanings as freely as possible. These are the meta-values embodied in liberal democracy. Now some people will devote their lives to promoting the spread of democracy, tolerance, open-mindedness, and so on, and that’s fine. But if you insist that others join you in your social activism–and that your life is more meaningful than the lives of others who are not social activists–that’s not fine.”

Prazeologue comments on Twitter: “Logically your observation is self refuting. If it is true then it refutes itself. Bit like saying ‘I’m always lying.’”
I reply: “Yeah, as I once said about Thomas Kuhn, all skeptics are self-refuting. When I say no meaning-of-life system is true, I’m offering up another meaning-of-life system, which must also be false. I get it. But that, I like to think, is a paradox and not a contradiction.”

Andy Russell, an historian of technology at Stevens: “I’m glad fishing is part of this discussion. At the moment one of my favorite philosophers is Billy Currington, who wrote ‘A bad day of fishin’ beats a good day of anything else [http://youtu.be/Pptj7_GXMks].’”

I reply: “Now THAT is a wise man. I bet Socrates never went fishing.”
Image courtesy Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python’s_The_Meaning_of_Life.

About the Author: Every week, hockey-playing science writer John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science. A teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, Horgan is the author of four books, including The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and The End of War (McSweeney's, 2012). Follow on Twitter @Horganism.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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