What is life about?

Why are we here, on this tiny planet circling a totally ordinary star which is one of billions that are in this minor arm of a basically insignificant galaxy, which is one among hundreds of billions of galaxies in the part of the universe we can see?

 

Chapter One: Why It Is Important To Understand The Meaning Of Life

What is life about?

In order to get some insight into answers, we have to have some idea about how we got here. If we accept different ideas about how life came to exist on this world, and about how human life in specific came to be here, we come to entirely different conclusions about why we are here.

For example, many people believe that an invisible superbeing that lives in the sky created everything. If this is the way humans got here, we know the meaning of life: we are supposed to be meeting the needs of the superbeing. Others believe that life came to exist as a result of random processes. Some burst of energy, say a spark that hit a soup of the right mixture of elements, started life. Since no intent was involved, there is no meaning to life. It is totally meaningless. Some people claim that neither of these simplistic explanations for the meaning of life make sense. They say that certain aspects of the operation of the activity we call ‘life’ have earmarks that make it impossibly unlikely that life came to exist by random chance. There had to have been some intentionally planning that led to the coding in DNA, for one example: there are three incredibly complicated codes, one of which (called the ‘genetic code’) has certain characteristics that tell us it could not possibly come from chance. Yet the simplistic idea of an invisible superbeing making all this through magic doesn’t seem to provide a reasonable explanation either. There has to be something else behind the existence of life here on Earth.

Over the last few decades, we have developed incredible scientific tools that allow us to understand things that people in the past could only guess about. We have scientific tools we can use to date fossils and other artifacts, helping us determine exactly when life came to exist on this world and what form it took when it arrived. We have tools to help us understand the electro-mechanical activities that take place in our brains when we think and in our hearts when they beat. We can sequence DNA and decipher the codes written in these incredibly complex molecules. We can figure out what must happen for the codes written in a long line of the rungs of the ladders of DNA to get turned into incredibly complex three dimensional proteins that perform the tasks needed for the activities of ‘life’ to exist.

The people who thought about the issue of ‘the meaning of life’ in the past did not have these tools. They did not exist. If we take full advantage of these tools, we can understand things they could not hope to understand.

Perhaps, if we can use these tools to figure out how life came to exist on this planet and how the processes of life operate, we use this information to figure out what it all means. For example, we will see that there are three entirely separate coding mechanisms used in DNA, a very simple one overlaid by a very complex one that is overlaid by a coding system of truly incredible complexity. The codes are not random: there is information encoded in the DNA. Perhaps this information provides some clue about the reason we are here and the possible destinies we may have. Perhaps there are other clues that people in the past could not possibly see because they didn’t have the technology to see them. Perhaps, if we could look at this information objectively and logically, we could find answers to questions that could not be answered otherwise.

Why Do We Care?

Why do we care about the meaning of life?

Why can’t we just accept that it is all due to the whims of an invisible superbeing that lives in the sky, works through mysterious ways, and is beyond us? We have a lot of things to do.

Our countries need to be defended, for example. This is an immense undertaking, one that requires more wealth than any other single activity of the human race at this time. We have to have children and train them to take over the tasks that we perform now, so that everything will keep happening as it has always happened. We have to worry about politics and make sure that the people of the opposite political party than the one we support don’t get into power. We have to worry about the price of gas, the cost of rent, the trouble of figuring out how to prevent illegal aliens from taking advantage of the services our tax dollars pay for.

We have full schedules. We have all been provided with reasonable-sounding explanations for the reason the world works as it does. There is a superbeing that loves us (one explanation) or a lightning bolt hit some primordial soup of organic materials and brought it to life (a second explanation). Either way, the people who came before us figured it all out and have devoted as much time to the topic as it deserves. Why should we bother to think about this?

There is a very important reason. In fact, if we look at the issue from a practical perspective, this may well be the most important issue the human race has ever considered.

Consider this:

What the common explanations for the meaning of life are not correct?

What if there are certain key realities of our existence—including those that are clearly pushing us down a path that lead to our extinction—that we could change if we tried to change them, but don’t even consider trying to change because we don’t want to think about these things? What if we have a destiny that is unrelated to anything that happens to us after we are dead? What if our destiny involves how we live while our bodies breathe and provide support for the electrical activity that takes place in our minds? What if the standard explanations for the meaning of life are just meant to placate us and trick us into accepting horrible problems and realities by making us think that they are supposed to exist and therefore we are being immoral to even think about changing them?

Why does the meaning of life matter?

If we don’t know the answer, we must guess.

Any guesses in this area are going to lead to beliefs that are going to affect our ideas about how we structure he basic realities of our existence. If we believe that we are here because a superbeing created the world, then created us, then divided the world into nations and set them fighting in wars, or because we think some superbeing wants us to dominate the land (‘hold dominion over it and everything that moveth upon it,’ as the religious text of the Old Testament claims), we will structure our societies to make them more likely to have the stresses that lead to wars and build new and better weapons.

What if this guess is wrong? What if we refuse to take steps to change the organizational structures of our world that lead naturally to war because we believe that life is about the things a superbeing wants us to do, and these things include war?

Perhaps you, personally, may believe that nothing you know or nothing you do can possibly matter, because you are nothing but a tiny cog in a giant wheel. Why bother with anything? Why not get some drugs and sit back and watch it all fall apart, using the drugs as needed to help you enjoy the final years?

But consider this:

What if you are wrong? What if every life, including your life, maters?

IF we happened to have been put here for a reason, and it is something other than adoring and worshiping invisible beings (or ‘being’ for people raised in monotheistic cultures) or serving the quasi-religious entities we call ‘nations’ by fighting in constant wars, then our lives our thoughts and our ways of thinking really do matter. If everyone passively accepts that there is no reason to think about this issue, and no one even tries to come to any understanding, we clearly will never understand. We will remain in the path that we are now on. We all know where this path leads.

But a few more people may just be enough to change the course of human events. In fact, at a certain point, the next person is the one that maters. What if that individual is you? How do you know this is not true? If it is true, then it really does make a difference. In the end, the path the human race takes through time depends on the state of minds of the people who live on this planet. If we focus only on practical issues like making guns and bombs for the current wars, building stronger defenses to keep people on the other side of the imaginary lines called ‘borders,’ and raising and training the next generation to take over these same tasks when we are too old to do them anymore, we may ignore the big picture and not even look at why we are doing all these insane things.

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I was raised in a different time.

The laws that allowed teachers to be put in jail for letting children science had been repealed.  But most school boards, including those that ran the schools I attended, still didn’t teach these things.  There were things that they didn’t want children to know.  Embarrassing things that would lead to questions the teachers couldn’t answer.  The scientific ‘theories’ would cause us to question things that the school systems wanted us to accept.

Why are we here?

What is the meaning of life?

We weren’t told this, at least not in so many words.

But the message came though pretty clearly:

Each school day started with a pledge of allegiance.  We all had to stand in a position of great respect, almost as though we were engaging in a religious ceremony, with hands over our hearts, as if to keep our hearts from jumping out of our chests due to the joy we felt as we recited the wonderful words.  We pledged allegiance to the flag, of course, as the icon of all things wonderful.  We then pledged allegiance to the nation which the flag represented, and to the god (who was named ‘God’) who was its guardian and controller.  We also pledged allegiance to the very idea behind the nation, almost as if the writers of the pledge were looking for numerous things to have children pledge their allegiance to and had run out of ideas, at least didn’t have any ideas that implied the territoriality, team spirit, and patriotism they wanted to instill.

Then class started.

The greatest skill I have acquired in my life, the most valuable and useful, is the ability to decipher the squiggly lines called ‘letters’ and combinations of letters called ‘words and sentences.’  But as soon as I had this skill, the people who ran the classes started to channel it.  They wanted me to use it for something very specific.  We were assigned huge amounts of reading, so much that, I presume, many children never really read anything that was not on the list of required books, perhaps because they were tired of reading after having completed the assignments.  A lot of the books were what I was told were ‘history books.’

Now, when I read books written for gullible children, I can see that they are definitely not real history books: they don’t present objective and informative information about our past so that children may figure out how our world came to work as it does so that they could work with others, all around the world, to try to make it better.  They were story books that followed a certain theme: there were good guys and bad guys.  The bad guys were horrible monsters trying to destroy everything worth living for. The good guys fought for things that were unquestionably good, like the things our country stands for.  This is why we pledged our allegiance to the flag: it represented the epitome of good and would be what we would be asked to kill for later.  This is why we sang to the glory of the country, to the great powers that lived in the heavens and guided it with a light from above.

We studied a field called ‘social studies.’

What did we learn in ‘social studies?’

Did we learn about social interactions and how to get along with others?   Did we learn what behaviors were socially appropriate in different social settings?   Did we learn about how to negotiate with others, how to get our way without having to resort to aggression or violence, how to mend a friendship ruined by an emotional outburst, and how to accept, reject, or offer gifts without offense?

If these things were taught, I don’t remember them.

I remember being taught about the institutions called ‘governments’ which were in charge of the structures called ‘countries.’  There were hundreds of them and I didn’t learn about all of them.  I only learned about the most wonderful government the world had ever seen, a perfect system created by perfect men with guidance from a perfect being and more generosity and altruism than any other collection of humans had ever had.

These ‘founders’ loved us, where ‘us’ means the people who would be born inside the borders they marked out.  to give us a good life, they removed the people who lived on these lands before they came (heathens who would not worship the things they worshiped) and brought in slaves to clear so they could collect the wealth this land produced.  They did all this for us. They wanted us to control our own destiny but with strict limits, to protect us from our own stupidity:  they knew better than we did what was good for us. We learned that we have been given, as a free gift, freedom, liberty, and total justice for all.  In return, we had to play a part in the system, follow its rules, work, pay taxes, and support any wars our governments declared, without questions.  If asked to fight, we must fight.  If asked to kill, we must kill.  If asked to die, we must consider ourselves honored:  our lives are nothing compared to the needs of the country.

Why are we here?

What is the meaning of life?

We aren’t told this directly.  But the message implied in all of the teachings is pretty clear. We were born into a team in a savage competition for resources.

We are here for our team.

We are supposed to love it with all our hearts and fight, kill, and die for it, without ever asking if these things are right or wrong. We are here to pay the taxes that will build the aircraft carriers, the ICBMS, the nuclear submarines, the doomsday weapons that our governments will have available, if defeat is inevitable, to destroy it all so that the other teams don’t get it.

Is this the meaning of life?

Is this why we were placed here, on this tiny blue speck of dust circling an insignificant star in one of the hundreds of billions of galaxies: to form into teams to fight other teams over things that are, in the end, totally meaningless?

This is not a logical explanation for ‘why we are here.’

It isn’t even a human explanation.

It is something we would expect from the highly territorial apes who act the same way, including those that are our evolutionary ancestors. It is not something a reasonable, logical, scientific person would claim was the reason for human existence.

What would be?

The Meaning of Life takes the same general approach that Forensic History takes to understand this issue.

Before we can start to think about what ‘life’ may be about, we need to have some idea what this term represents.

What is ‘life?’

Until very recently, the only explanations were supernatural.  A god or spirit (perhaps one whose name happened to be ‘God’) had powers to do things that couldn’t otherwise be done.  This god or spirit did magic and live came to be. Everything that happened after that is magic.

Now, we can study the details of life.  We can study the different ways different kinds of DNA work. We can study the different coded messages that are hidden inside of the DNA molecule (there are three codes that are overlaid one on the other), and translate the coded messages into configurations of atoms needed for life to take place, and then put them into position to replace any that wear out or arrange them to create new living ‘babies’ patterned on the DNA codes in their parents.  We can study the way the food we eat gets transformed first into essential nutrients, then into ATP (adenosine triphosphate, the only power source for all life on earth), then into electricity, which then runs everything in the bodies of all living things.

We can study the way that the strange set of events that lead to ‘sexual reproduction’ take place; if we do, we will see some pretty clear indications that this is not some random process but operates in ways that seem clearly to be goal orientated.  (To have evolution, there must be genetic diversity:  every single newborn of every species is a brand new genetic system.  These different beings then compete for resources, with the most capable winning. The result of this process—which can easily be studied by looking at historical data—is so stunning that it seems impossible for any objective person to claim it all happened by accident.)

More than 60 years ago, a team of researchers discovered three separate codes that are embedded in all DNA.  The exact same three codes, all of which are incredibly complex, run all life on earth, from the lowest to the highest. One of these researchers, Francis Crick, studied the code and determined how likely it is for such codes to arise from chance due to random events.

He determined that this was so incredibly unlikely that it would be unreasonable or anyone who claims to be a scientist to accept that we came to exist either as a result of random chance or as a result of magic (having been created by a being not subject to the laws of science).  In the time that has passed, mountains of evidence have accumulated to support Crick’s premise.  (You can find it in the book ‘Life Itself,’ in the resources section of the PossibleSocieties.com website.)

I am not saying here that Crick is right and I can prove it. I am only saying that this is a question we need to think about, openly, logically, and objectively.  Then, we have to do the same things scientists always do:  we need to gather evidence, come up with theories, and test the theories.

What is the meaning of life?

I will show that we can push aside the standard explanations pretty easily.  After we reject them, we are forced to allow ourselves to think life may not be about what we were raised to think it is about.  There might be more, a lot more.

Why does this matter?

We are now on a path that leads to extinction. Traditionalists say this is the best path:  the religious texts predict it (no one would believe a religion that didn’t recognize the way we will end up if we don’t change).  But they say it is for the best.  I have heard this many times:  life on earth is a test of our souls.  We must endure misery and hardship and never lose faith that it is all for the best. If we can keep the faith through it all, we pass the test and get to live in paradise for eternity.  (Not as living beings; living beings can never have paradise, but our spirits or souls can have it.)

This is an incredibly cruel test.

How could a benevolent spirit that loved us conduct it?

The answer is that it is just a temporary measure.  It will all end, one day soon.  When the end comes, all future souls will be granted entrance to paradise without having to take the test.  This event will be called something like ‘the rapture.’  We will all exist, from then on, in endless, orgasmic rapture.

If this is the meaning of life, there is no point trying to get ourselves off of the path to extinction.  In fact, people who believe this want to push us along this path even faster.

What if it is all an accident?  What if a bunch of atoms were in the right configuration to form an amino acid, 5 billion years ago, and lighting struck it, brought it to life, and this life evolved, as a result of random chance, into us?  If this is what happened, what difference does it make if we go extinct.  It is all meaningless.

But what if life is about something else?  What if it is about anything else.  We don’t have to know what this ‘anything’ is to know that if it is not random chance, our existence is not meaningless and our extinction will not be meaningless either.  If we are here for any reason at all, we have an obligation to do everything we can to prevent extinction at least until we can figure out this reason.

The Meaning of Life is a key part of the Possible Societies series.  It provides an answer to the question:  Why bother to figure these things out?  It takes some mental effort to come to understand the different possible ways societies work.  It takes some mental effort to figure out how we can get onto a path that will take us, eventually, to a sound society.

The Meaning of Life is designed to help you see why it is worth the effort.