On the New Meaning of Life: Part I

Our Place in the Universe

Homo sapiens has been preoccupied with questioning the unknown. According to the available evidence, biological evolution has conditioned us to look for meaning in our own existence because without meaning, it loses its form, and we wither and die much faster than we would like to. Religious institutions have sprouted (and are still sprouting) in our civilization to provide doses of meaning to the market (and sometimes enforce it). They are distinguished from mankind’s analytic way of thinking essentially by the fact that they describe our existence with the implied existence of additional entities that we cannot anchor in our own perception via scientific explanations. They must be taken “by faith” if they are to be taken at all, and yet they have massive moral implications on how individuals handle themselves in society.

This article is meant to abstain from making any supernatural claims, and still explain how we could anchor our purpose and morality in the image of a completely materialistic universe. I intend to describe a realization that somehow clicked to me, and hopefully this manifestation of my inner synchronicity gives birth to a new meaning. A meaning the readers are free to entertain, and perhaps quench their needs with.

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Basic Premises

1. Consciousness is a manifestation of matter, and is therefore inherently united with it.
2. The fundamental purpose of living matter is to grow and survive.
3. This can be done (besides efficient reproduction) by implementing, testing, and using predictive models of reality that minimize the likelihood of surprise (shock).
4. This often comes at the expense of the fate of other life forms and our interactions with them. Morality is a subset of predictive models that deal with interactions with other beings, also in agreement with the above (surprise-minimization) principle (3.).
5. Models of reality are imperfect and they evolve, just like biological life forms.
6. Because of the reality’s complexity, implementing, testing, and using predictive models needs to be done “locally” within our own computational capacity (only the most important and relevant models).

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A Living and Surviving Universe

We choose a suitable starting point which is, naturally, consciousness. Not just our consciousness, but the consciousness of every entity we call living. What is the overall tendency of all living things? To survive, of course. And they do so with such grace that we cannot help but give additional miraculous explanations to this phenomenon, forgetting about all the matter that “failed to be living”. We filter out a vast majority of material in our universe that likely never had the potential to breathe, sense and react to its surroundings. We filter out the material we no longer classify as living, because some internal or external disturbance has incapacitated this bulk of matter from sensing, maintaining homeostasis and actively trying to keep itself from falling apart.

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We form this categorization of entities around us because we are sensing them to such degree that there is a brief communication channel that opens between our consciousness and theirs, regardless of how few bits of information are transferred. I poke a worm that appears motionless, and it squirms, or doesn’t (1 – alive, 0 – not alive). We instinctively induce interaction with other living things because, in essence, they increase our likelihood of survival, whether it is by feeding us – providing us with material for building our corporeal form – or form a more symbiotic relationship perhaps based on reciprocity. From this Darwinian perspective, our perception, naturally, switches to the social context. We do not want to hurt our kin, because we recognize them as such. We put them in the category of individuals and feel more emotional connection to them (when it happens). And when we are not certain whether to categorize entities as individuals, we feel unease, it triggers our fight-or-flight response.

This model is a mere simplification of reality. Living systems are never separate from their material surroundings, in fact, they thrive on being open to intake and expulsion of particles and energy, which fuels intricate metabolic pathways. Even dismembered hunks of living systems continue to perform their metabolic part until they undergo complete incapacitation from lack of material communication with other dependent subsystems or are mangled by physical processes such as temperature or radiation. Abiogenesis is a term used to describe a process of living biological systems evolving from non-living systems.

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It is hypothesized that life on Earth formed this way, particularly, in oceanic hydrothermal vents as vesicles of self-replicating cells of fatty acid membranes filled with RNA-like molecules carrying the first ever genetic information. These volcanic regions of the sea floor gave rise to porous material where these primordial self replicators protected by primitive lipid membranes could have formed. The theory faces criticism, especially from proponents of “intelligent design” – a set of pseudo-scientific critical essays on abiogenesis and Darwinian evolution. Clearly, the theory behind what we know as biological evolution became increasingly more resilient over the past few centuries. However, transitioning from the most complicated, naturally occurring, organic chemical reactions to the simplest biochemical systems is, for obvious reasons, one of the greatest challenges of the scientific method. The exact line between life and lifeless matter is impossibly difficult to draw because there is, apparently, no such boundary:

At the atomic resolution, individual molecules reacting, for example in the metabolic pathway of glycolysis, breaking down glucose (simple sugar) to two pyruvates, can be drawn as an intricate piece of machinery, yet in reality, they are imperfect, chaotic, fluctuating reactions handled by complex chains of amino acids (proteins) that act as atomic (active) sites for the actual reactions taking place. The exact appearance of this process is quite unlike a synchronized factory line. Inside every cell, the cellular membrane is filled with water, inorganic salts, and crowded with more-or-less chaotically fluctuating organic compounds that simply collide, bind, and react together. A single hexokinase enzyme is not controlled by anything other than its direct chemical environment. It has a certain probability of reacting with glucose and MgATP (magnesium adenosine triphosphate) attaching a phosphate molecular ion instead of one hydrogen ion, and that is the end of the story. Remove the cellular membrane, and the reactions will be increasingly less likely to take place.

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On the other hand, if we produce suitable conditions for structures to form out of pure inorganic reactions, they will do so until the system runs out of energy, as can be seen, for example, in Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Self-replicators can be simulated in very simple environments such as Conway’s game of life where a simple set of rules produces self-replicating entities that undergo evolution. RNA self-replicators have far more degrees of freedom, and thus require more stringent conditions to work, even though they are possible in theory. As a result of this small (but not empty) overlap between “life” and “non-life”, the distinction between life and non-life becomes somewhat “blurred” at low resolutions. Hence, this universe seems to “grow” life wherever it can, which takes our evaluation to the conclusion of what we call “Anthropic Principle” – we observe life because we evolved in an environment that supports it.

Based on what we know about the biological evolution of life on our homeworld, once self-replicating systems achieve a state of continuous replication uninterrupted by extinction, there is very little limit to the complexity that can arise from this process. The intricacy of all essential and non-essential components of a living system stacks up with every generation. Mutations not only influence the genome prior to reproduction, but also during the living organism’s lifetime, resulting in epigenetic adaptations to its environment. Again, since we are hardwired to distinguish successful life from life that perishes due to harmful mutations or predation, our minds cannot even fathom the genesis of such complicated structures that accumulated over timescales several orders of magnitude longer than our own lifetimes.

Nervous systems, being nothing more than a single resilient adaptation of a branch of multi-cellular living organisms, followed the same process. Some organisms possess all but a (relative to us) rudimentary ability to sense and process information from their surrounding reality using specialized tissue (neurons). Thanks to their neuronal simplicity, the hydra (lat.: Hydrozoa) were actually the first genus of organisms whose nervous system was fully mapped. Their nervous systems are decentralized, connecting sensory photoreceptors and pressure-sensitive cells on the body walls and tentacles. When alarmed or attacked, the tentacles retract and the being can even contract to a small spherical shape to protect itself. Despite being mostly sedentary, the hydra also move and attach themselves to substrates, especially when hunting.

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As it is among all known organisms, evolution diversified nervous systems from very simple ones, with minimal computational capacity, to exceedingly complex ones of cephalopods, birds, dolphins and primates, each serving its adaptive purpose. One species of primates were subject to such drastic adaptations in this area that they sacrificed the fitness of their own younglings, as well as mothers that give birth to them, only to contain their complicated brains in their comparably massive skulls, all in exchange for minds capable of processing and holding memories vital to forming stable bonds with their own kin – bonds that became the new environment, bonds without which they perish.

From self-replication through metabolism, biological evolution, all the way up to consciousness, all of it based on interactions between particles of matter, the distinctions blur so much that they become meaningless, and the only common factor that remains is the Unity of Matter Under Consciousness. We are the Universe, opening its senses for a brief instant and observing itself. Taking it a step further and realizing that all our friends, our kin, and all life on this planet are essentially different manifestations of the same entity, is bound to produce an intense “aha”-moment.

It really shifts our ego-driven perspective from everyday hurdles when we realize that we might have been angry at someone who sees the world in a different way, but if we were to start our life cycle with their genetics and history, our worldview would (omitting truly random major life events) not differ that much at all. The other being’s “wrongs” are, in the grand scheme of things, meaningless. What’s independent from any reference frame is our relationship with them. Are they threatening? Is there something I can learn about them? Can I bring myself to understand what their world looks like? Can I begin to feel in sync with them by understanding their world, and can they get more insights into mine?

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I speak to you because I want to share my thoughts. I want to be understood. You want to be understood as well, so you seek out other beings’ understanding. The net effect is that we increase each other’s chances of survival and successful reproduction because we overlap our models of reality, creating a “collective model” which is, generally, more powerful, and more versatile than our individual models. Collective models have a “life force” of their own. They become memes, undergoing a remarkably similar process of evolution by natural selection. Ideas, regardless of how far they are from reality, live inside our brains and are transmitted by communication. They can imperfectly replicate (by imperfect learning), they can react to external stimuli (be challenged or recalled by their carriers and other ideas), and they can die (be forgotten). It is as if ideas had us, instead of us having the ideas.

The question, why such process evolved in the first place, is trivially answered by: because it improved our chances of survival. It evolved because it was selected against and won instead of other mechanisms of coping with reality. Every consciousness wants to maximize its chances of survival (passing on their information content). Hence, it uses a variety of tools to map its surroundings and formulate predictive models. For example: “This animal might hurt me because it’s huge and powerful, I should keep my distance”. Minds keep many such models at their disposal and use them when the context is evaluated as necessary. The underlying principle is the “surprise minimization” model of consciousness which is becoming more and more relevant in modern psychology and neuroscience. Brains want to “minimize surprise” because surprise comes in the form of conflict with learned models of reality, which has, over millions of years of biological evolution, proven to be mostly fatal.

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Yet, we seek out the unknown (more precisely, the “known unknown”, i.e.: the things we know we don’t know) because it keeps us at the edge. Despite turning to our kin to help us build dwellings where we are more protected against weather and intruders, we explore the abandoned dark places where predators might hide or decide to watch a horror movie in the safety of our apartment because we need to be reminded of our fragility, otherwise any perturbation would come so unexpectedly that our fate would be left to chance alone, and we cannot let that happen. Some of us even explore the universal or abstract unknowns, uncovering mysteries of the universe or the limits of our abstract models because chances are: one day, it might come in handy.

A new particle discovered in the Large Hadron Collider can be used to treat disease decades later, or it can be harnessed to destroy assailants that threaten our asserted value systems. This is the ever-present dichotomy between using discoveries to increase the chances of survival for every one of our kind, or using them to affirm our dominance in social context. This is the gray area of trying to determine the moral value of developing technology to help other living beings or defend ourselves when there are forces that threaten not necessarily our own existence, but the existence of a memetic system that secures a wide variety of processes we have adapted to, and nowadays take for granted (technology, infrastructure, law, moral values, etc.).

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Every decision-making process in such gray areas is far from perfect because our predictive models of reality are far from perfect. There might be a fictitious idealized path in which a military conflict between two nations can be handled, but the sheer number of variables in this problem makes it virtually unsolvable, much like trying to find smooth solutions to general fluid flow problems, but several orders of magnitude more complex. We cannot even be sure that a solution for the former problem exists, encrypted somewhere in the abstraction, and that it just takes a multitude of bright minds to decipher the relevant information for the solution. Solutions to moral problems are “shots in the dark“. This is what makes them so difficult and almost impossible to find stable common grounds with. Their amount and the rate at which they appear is the root of the true complexity of a living and breathing society.

Luckily, evolution by natural selection is an unguided process, always drifting towards the nearest equilibrium, even when it results in extinction. Its only bias is the evaluation of survival costs, and every living being will inevitably pay its dues. Due to its overall complexity, conscious minds can do very little to influence its entirety, but they can do significantly more in their nearest surroundings. They can, in fact, use their predictive models to extrapolate their optimal path for the upcoming moment. I can determine and control the velocity of my car so that I avoid hitting a pedestrian in the upcoming seconds despite the fact that I have no possible way of knowing how many pedestrians I encounter on my journey to the grocery store. I can also formulate sentences while negotiating with colleagues, friends, or my spouse when dealing with a problem, so that the outcome minimizes the cost and maximizes the output of the involved parties.

Consciousness is a manifestation of biological evolution. On top of its adaptive properties, it also accelerates the (otherwise naturally slow) process itself. We are witnesses, as well as actors, in a process that literally changes a planet within a few millennia. An unavoidable fact is that our civilization has grown to such intricacy that we can no longer use our hardwired tribal models to control the course of our species as a whole without encountering our own biases that helped us survive in the past. To reiterate the final point one last time: matters that greatly exceed our computational capacity are, inherently out of our control. Our predictive models need to evolve from “bottom-up”. Our best strategy is to optimize our own lives, our nearest neighborhood, and then move on to global problems.

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I will continue with my essay in my next post, where I attempt to resolve the philosophical problems mentioned in this essay, and perhaps draw conclusions covering additional metaphysical questions we as humans face. If you enjoyed my “ramblings”, feel free to follow my blog and read on to part II of the “New Meaning of Life” posts.