I've joked sometimes that if I needed to come up with an epitaph for my gravestone, it might be, "I don't know." Yet of course, "not knowing" isn't a very satisfying answer. I'm reminded of the line from Paul Simon's song, disapproving of a person constantly saying "I have no opinion about that" by reframing it as, "I have no opinion about me."
There's a great deal that we don't know. "How did wings develop on animals?" or "Why are there so many galaxies and stars?" Science is working on those, but most of us don't lose sleep over them. The questions that we all seem to care about a lot more are, "Why are we here? What gives life meaning? What should I do with my life?"
I've argued that there is <no objective morality>. I've argued that <there is no God>. I'm not sure I need to argue that there is no objective "meaning of life" in the absence of objective morality or God, as I can't see what candidates there would be.
The best answer to, "What should I do with my life?" is to pick something, decide that it's what's important, make it your own, and work for it. In the absence of objective morality, there is no argument to be made as to why any choice you make would be fundamentally, profoundly right or wrong.
Yet when we look at what humans pick and what guides their choices, there is a great deal they have in common. So I offer answers to questions that are slightly less profound than "What is the meaning of life?", namely: "Why are our minds the way they are? Why do we want some things and want to avoid others? Why do we think some things are important or moral or 'right living' and others are not?"
This will take a while. I've divided it up into seven separate posts.
The best framework I know of for making sense of our lives and the world is evolution by natural selection. This is the foundation of all of modern biology, and one of the best-supported scientific theories there is.
You can look up <Evolution> so I won't go over the basics. But one critical concept I want to raise is the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA). We humans (and our hominid ancestors) evolved over the course of millions of years in hunter-gatherer bands. Only in the past few thousand years have we lived in larger units of political and economic organization, initially triggered by agriculture. That is not very much time for natural selection to change our minds. We may sometimes have traits that were adaptive in the EEA but are not adaptive today.
Our bodies evolved countless unconscious processes -- regulating temperature, water content, eliminating waste through kidneys, healing wounds with scabs, on and on. All the "lower" life forms have their own versions of solutions to such problems, and often our solution is the same as organisms quite different from us. These are the focus of the field of biology, but I focus below on our conscious experiences, since those are what concern us.
We are mammals, and we share with other mammals a great many things. We mammals feel pain when our bodies are damaged, and this unpleasant sensation motivates us to avoid such situations. We avoid being too hot or too cold. We enjoy food, and it's no surprise that we are motivated to find enough. Even people who have been hungry for a long time never really adapt to that circumstance -- they always want enough to eat. That is of course entirely consistent with surviving.
The exact relationship between conscious experience and the physical world is an unanswered puzzle and one which many thinkers (and I) see absolutely no prospect of answering. But whatever the relationship, it makes sense that our conscious experience shares the same goals of survival with our physical bodies. We know conscious experience depends on a physical body, and if your consciousness is in control of your actions and has no interest in eating, the body will die and with it the consciousness.
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