On the New Meaning of Life: Part II

A Possible Resolution of the Aforementioned and some Additional Philosophical Problems

My previous post introduced a variety of philosophical premises for understanding consciousness and its formation from matter, the birth of morality, and the overall context we find ourselves in. Since the complexity of life is unbearable for virtually all of us, in this essay, I shall elaborate on a more “algorithmic” approach to navigating through reality. I will also touch on ever-present theological problems such as: “Does God exist?”, “What happens after we die?”, and most importantly “What should we do with our lives?“.

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The technique to solving moral dilemmas or multi-lemmas can be summarized as nothing more than “educated guess“, just like when trying to solve a technical problem. The imperfect systems of morality exist and have existed for millennia. Legends and myths taught our ancestors how to handle certain situations in life. Those were the early predictive models that were cryptic on their surface, yet they spoke to us very deeply. We tend to learn faster from the fates of others than from more elaborate technical descriptions.

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As individuals and as a society we need to do what brains do: try multiple available models to find the best fitting model so that we are least surprised when something goes wrong. Thankfully, our own limitations loop back to reduce the complexity of our ambient reality. If a “badly fitted” model of reality results in no surprise for our own perception and our chances of survival, we should not occupy our brains with it as much as with the relevant models, i.e.: trying our best to solve the world’s problems when we have not yet resolved our own life to a significant degree is counterproductive.

The emergent meaning of life really depends on one’s individual context, even though the more different our contexts are the harder it becomes to sync with other individuals. Most importantly, we should sense reality as much as possible so that we can construct and update reliable models based on which we should act. Then we extrapolate paths from the available models, so they minimize surprise, and locally optimize our chances of survival (our own or of our kind, tribe). Ultimately, we want to preserve the bits and pieces of our own emerging consciousness and the minds of those that we hold dear. We maximize the feeling of happiness and satisfaction when we pursue a “meaningful abstraction” at each point in time, that is: work on something useful for the survival of a maximum number of the members of our tribe or species. Provided, of course, that we can change our abstractions when necessary.

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Hence, this models the “distribution of meaning” quite differently among individuals. Not everyone’s meaning is the same, but the meanings of those close to you, or those you regularly interact with, should be reasonably close to your own, or at least not in conflict with your own. Otherwise, a restructuring event can take place (unpleasant events like conflict, fight, or even war). Even though we can agree that there is some absolute reality out there, we can only agree on a mutually overlapping subset of its projections onto our individual minds. Meaning is defined by the presence of conscious minds, and therefore cannot permeate the universe without it containing living, sensing, and contemplating minds. It needs a computational substrate just like the operating system on a computer you’re using needs its circuitry.

And now the ancient question: Was our Universe created by an intelligence of some kind? Short answer: We do not know, nor can we verify or falsify this claim. Could there be intelligences that govern our behavior? Perhaps. For example, in the computational domain of morality distributed around human brains, the memes’ Darwinian will to survive can shape our perception of what is right and what is wrong, stabilizing our societies to a considerable degree. Nature itself can also be thought of as a deity because it has some form of agency on some of its subdomains. As noted, physical and informational systems respond to stimuli and sometimes try to preserve their own existence. Their behavior is, however, (merely) emergent. There is no intention to their action. A star collapses because it exceeds its physical limits of density. A species goes extinct or pushes our other life forms because of underlying inter-species dynamics in its ecology. Nature appears to act without intent. Gods may only exist as memes, or alternatively, a single God can unify all life under the primordial proto-meme of “trying to survive” because the meme itself is trying to survive in our minds in much the same way as biological life forms try to survive in their environment.

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What is “after the end of the road” then? What happens after we die? As tragic and unacceptable as it may sound, our current mode of consciousness shuts down. We cease to sense and create models of reality. However, information about us, even our own approaches to creating and updating models of reality, can survive our biological death. We can live as a memory in the minds of beings we interacted with. We can create tools and concepts that can be used by our tribe for centuries and millennia after our passing. Yet for our own perception, the same void as from the time before we were conceived and born inevitably awaits. This maps to the perception of humankind in the context of the history of planet Earth and our solar system, and even much further to the context of our Universe which produced matter and interactions that will after eons stop occurring altogether because the accelerating expansion of spacetime and second law of thermodynamics will ultimately lead to time itself being physically meaningless (no interactions between particles will essentially mean that there will be no distinction between forward and backward direction in time). On the tiny quantum-mechanical scale, virtual particle-antiparticle pairs “materialize” out of vacuum energy, and after extremely brief moment annihilate each other and explode in a subatomic burst of electromagnetic radiation, returning their borrowed energy back to the substrate they came from. Void to void, much like virtual particles and the Universe itself, we come to be, and dissolve back into nothingness.

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From the physical point of view, reality is every interaction between particles of matter and radiation, the expansion of the Universe (Big Bang), and physics that emerged within the singularity. Fictional and conceptual worlds formed via human imagination can also be thought of as “realities”, as long as they can be studied, constructed, and interacted with. Fictional and semi-fictional stories survive because they carry some helpful form of models of our own reality in them. In fact, they have been used for the very purpose of transmitting a moral message ever since the dawn of humankind. Regardless of the limitations or the relative complexity of our reality compared to fictional worlds, the question whether we live in a simulation is completely irrelevant because we only know more about our particular reality because our minds have simply evolved with it and spent most time inside of its constraints. We can never know it in its entirety because new rules emerge as we zoom in onto some of its subsets, yet we can possess and update sufficient knowledge about its constraints and logical consistencies to build stable models of it, and ultimately, survive.