100 | Solo: On Life and Its Meaning

A podcast only hits the century mark once! And for Mindscape, this is it. There have been holiday messages and bonus episodes and the like. But this is the 100th officially-numbered episode. To celebrate, I decided to treat myself to a solo episode in which I reflect, somewhat non-systematically, on the age-old question of the meaning of life. I end up spending a lot (most?) of the time talking about the meaning of “life,” i.e. what it means to be a living organism in a naturalistic universe. But then I go on to muse about the construction of human meaning in a world where values are not imposed on us or objectively grounded in physical facts.

I think life does have meaning, and it’s important to understand what forms it might take. I settle largely on the idea that humans can conceive of different possible futures, assign value to them, and work against the natural order of things to create something that otherwise would not have been. This is far from the final word, even in my own mind; it’s an invitation to think and converse in a reasonable way about some of the biggest questions there are. Just like the podcast in general.

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Here are some modern works offering other perspectives on the meaning of life:

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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll, and here’s a question for you. What is the value of a human life? This is not a completely academic question, of course. Right now, we’re struggling with the existence of a pandemic going through the whole world. The novel coronavirus COVID-19 disease is causing people to wonder how to balance getting the economy and society, more generally, back to work versus the possible cost of deaths because people are spreading the virus back to each other. And the answer, if you wanna know the value of the human life, is between about 5 and 10 million dollars. That’s the number that economists have thought of. If you go into an industrialized country, if you look at the economic value of a human life, you need to put a number on it. I know that, in some sense, we think that life is infinitely valuable to the person living it. That’s all they have. If they lose that life, there’s no other loss that really matters.

0:01:00 SC: But on the other hand, you can’t just say, “Well, I will spend all of the world’s resources to save this one person’s life.” There has to be a limit because there might be someone else’s life that also needs saving. So how do you spend your money? How do you just do that cold, hard, brutal calculation? And the answer is, if you wanna know how much money it is worth spending economically to save a life, it turns out to be between about 5 and 10 million dollars. But this is a different question that I want to answer today, although it’s a closely related question. The question I wanna think about is why life has a value at all, why our lives matter. That’s right. We’re gonna talk about the big-picture question of, what is the meaning of life? Why should we care about it at all? Now, as you know, I am not necessarily an expert on the question of the meaning of life but on the other hand, this is the 100th version of The Mindscape Podcast, the 100th episode.

0:01:53 SC: It’s not actually the 100th episode because we’ve had bonus episodes and holiday messages and stuff like that, but this is number 100 in the numbered episodes of Mindscape so I thought it’d be worth a little self-indulgence, if you like. I’m gonna treat myself to be able to talk about a subject which I’m not an expert in but I have thoughts about. And that’s very much in the spirit of Mindscape. On the one hand, I want to talk with experts who have something to say, who know something. But on the other hand, I wanna encourage everyone to talk about everything. I wanna talk about it in an educated way, but I don’t think you need to be an expert to have opinions on things. No matter what your level of expertise is, by all means, have opinions and talk about them with other people, just being willing to update and change your opinions when experts explain to you why you’re not right.

0:02:44 SC: So we’re gonna explore a big topic, the topic for which there might be no other topic that is bigger, okay? This is not necessarily about finding the final answers to the meaning of life, about thinking out loud, thinking about the issues that are relevant, both scientific and philosophical, because they both matter. And that’s what we’ll be talking about, how things matter, why things have meaning at all. Now, I can’t let you go quite into the podcast without admitting and acknowledging that we’re in a very strange time right now, not just because of the quarantine, but worldwide, things are going on, not just climate change and threats to democracy worldwide, but as I record this, we’re in the middle of protests and violence in the United States sparked by the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. I just myself went through my first ever curfew, city-wide, last night in Los Angeles. We were told not to leave our houses between 8 PM and 5:30 AM.

0:03:49 SC: It’s a different thing than being under quarantine, where you’re told to stay at your house in the sense of not going out and socializing, but you can still go out to do shopping and other necessary things. This was a different situation for very, very different reasons. And in a sense, it’s a related reason, right? The movement that started a lot of these protests came from the Black Lives Matter movement. The point being, of course, everyone… The wise guys that say, “Well, all lives matter.” Yes, that misses the point. The point of the movement was and Black Lives Matter are lives. Black lives are lives. They should matter just as much as any other lives. And there’s a feeling that I’m not gonna get into today, but I’m broadly sympathetic to, that we treat black lives and certain other lives here in the United States as being worth less, as mattering less, and I think that that is a problem, a mistake. Not what I’m gonna be, again, facing today, but I do wanna acknowledge it.

0:04:48 SC: And I also want to acknowledge that it’s a complicating factor when you wanna talk about science or philosophy or for that matter, art or cooking or whatever, to acknowledge that the world is going through struggles outside, and those struggles don’t hit everyone equally. Some people are struggling more than others, and I do appreciate that. And so there’s a question of whether or not anyone should be thinking about abstract philosophical issues or cosmology or particle physics when there’s a police brutality and shops and restaurants being looted on the streets of the country that you’re in. Let me just say that it is exhausting it. It can be really wearying, really trying, not just to live through the realities that we’re living through, but to fight against them, to try to make things better, right? And if there’s any direct relationship with what I’ll be saying in today’s podcast with what’s going on in the world around us, it’s that I think the lesson at the end is that the struggle is worth continuing, that as exhausting as it is, as tiring as it is, as distracting as it is from other things you might want to be concentrating on, it is worth the effort to keep your chin up and try to make the world a better place.

0:06:06 SC: We might disagree with each other about what that systematically, operationally, means to make the world a better place, but we should be able to agree that it’s worth the effort. And that’s worth saying, even though it can sound trite, but it’s worth repeating because it is a struggle. It’s a real struggle. Different people have different capacities for dealing with it in different ways, and that’s important to recognize. So I’m not about upbraiding anyone else’s choices about how to deal with the situation, but about encouraging those who are trying to make the world a better place. To make their individual lives better, to make the lives better of everyone around them, that is something very worth doing. That does have meaning that doesn’t matter. So with that, let’s go.

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0:07:08 SC: Those of you who’ve listened for a long time know that I’m not somebody who thinks that science can answer every question. I love science, it’s what I do, it’s very, very important but science has a role and that role is figuring out what happens in the universe, what the universe is made out of, how that stuff behaves, how it interacts, how it changes. In other words, the role of science is descriptive rather than prescriptive. The role of science is not to say what should happen, is to say, what does happen. Nevertheless, even when we’re talking about an extremely philosophical topic like why does life have meaning and what is that meaning, it’s my predilection, I can not possibly stop from first thinking about the science behind it. In this case, if you’re gonna say what is the meaning of life, then you can sort of equivocate a little bit about the meaning of the word meaning and rather than talking about meaningfulness in life, we should perhaps start by talking about the meaning of the word life, the definition, what is it that we mean when we say the word life?

0:08:09 SC: And one of the great things about this topic is because it’s so broad-ranging, I’m gonna get a chance to remember a whole bunch of things that we’ve said in previous podcast episodes with previous guests. So we’ve talked about the meaning of the word life in the context of life on other planets a little bit. We talked about it with Kate Adamala, with Sara Imari Walker, with Kevin Hand, all of them were thinking about exobiology and life on other planets, but we sort of skipped by the details of that discussion. We brought it on to the table, thought about it a little bit, and moved on, we haven’t had a focused discussion on really what we should mean by the word life. When is something in the universe qualify as being alive versus not being alive? So I mentioned that because it will be a future podcast episode, I think it has an important thing to focus in on, so we’ll be talking about that. But for today, we’re not gonna necessarily need the once and for all meaning of the word life, what we’re gonna need is some properties, okay, some aspects, some features of life that’ll be relevant to this question of what is the Meaning, with the capital M of our individual lives.

0:09:16 SC: So I’m not gonna… There’s a big… There’s lot of background here, okay, it’s gonna matter a lot, for example, whether the person asking this question is religious or not in principle. And I do not want to spend time justifying my personal beliefs about religion and otherwise, I think that’s a thing worth doing but not in this particular episode of this podcast. So rather I will just be telling you what they are, so that you know what my commitments are as they say in the philosophy circles. They are to what you might call naturalism, in particular, physicalism. That is to say, there is only one world, the natural world. People sometimes think that it’s hard to define naturalism because what do you mean… Well, how would you know if something was supernatural, or non-natural or not? I don’t think that’s something that’s difficult to define about naturalism. I think what’s actually difficult to define is supernaturalism. When would you know that something did not fit into the natural order of things? But that’s okay, again, I’m not trying to find the once and for all definitions, I just wanna tell you where I am coming from. And so, my version of naturalism, is physicalism by which I mean there is only the physical world at ground. So in contrast, people like David Chalmers or Philip Goff would at least, previous Mindscape guests who talked about consciousness and panpsychism.

0:10:37 SC: They would at least be open to the idea that in addition to the physical stuff of the world, the material stuff that makes us up, there are also mental properties. Even if there’s only physical stuff, even if it’s not a dualism between physical stuff, and mental stuff, they would still argue that it’s at least conceivable, perhaps even advisable to imagine that physical stuff has mental properties as well as physical properties. So I am not going there. That is not where I am coming from. I’m imagining that when we talk about life, we’re talking about something that is a 100% physical, all the way down. And it’s important that we’ve learned as we’ve learned about physics and biology and other things, we’ve learned something about that particular thing that we call life. Most importantly, it is fundamentally a process, it is not a substance. So not only is there no separate mental realm like Descartes might have imagined where there’s disembodied mind that somehow communicates with your physical body in a very obvious kind of dualism. But there’s also no kind of fluid or stuff that qualifies as living versus non-living. Living is a property that different kinds of material can have under the right circumstances.

0:11:51 SC: And this is a very traditional common move in the progress of science. We realized that something that we thought was a substance is actually a description of some kind of process. A famous example is heat, right? It used to be thought that heat should be thought of as a fluid that could move from one thing to another and the name of that fluid was called caloric. And this makes perfect sense in a lot of ways. If you take two blocks of metal, one is hot, one is cold and you put them in contact with each other so they’re touching, they equilibrate, the hot one becomes a little cooler, the cool one becomes a little warmer and what it is exactly like is the flow of a fluid from the hot thing to the cool thing. It’s like if you have two tubs of water and you connect them by a little tube, they will reach an equilibration where both of the tubs have the same level in between, right? So, it’s not crazy or obviously wrong to think of something like heat as a substance. But then you do the science, you learn what it’s actually made of, you realize that all of this stuff is made of atoms and the atoms have little jiggly motions that you can’t keep track of, and what you mean by heat is the average thermal energy in those jiggly motions. So, it’s a description of what is going on in the actual stuff, but the actual stuff, are the atoms, it’s not a separate thing that is the heat.

0:13:09 SC: Likewise for life, just like heat, you would not be completely crazy to think, a priori, that life was a thing. And it was in some things that we called living organisms, and that life was not in other things, right, some élan vital or life force that left your body when you died. Again, not completely crazy but also not correct. That is not how life actually works. In the naturalistic point of view that we now have, that I now have, people who agree with me now have, that I discussed in great detail in my book, The Big Picture, if you want more details here, life is a way of talking about certain reactions, certain dynamical processes characteristic of certain kinds of collections of atoms and particles and physical stuff, okay? Again, I’m not here to justify these statements, just letting you know what they are. But we can dig a little bit more deeply. It’s not just that life is a process. It’s a particular kind of process.

0:14:07 SC: By process, what I mean is, some people ask… I did a debate years ago about whether there’s life after death. One implication of my view on what life is, is that there is not any life after death because life is a process, and the process ends when you die. There’s no place for the information that contained the essence of you to go when you die and your physical body ceases to exist. There’s no mechanism for that to be preserved outside your physical body. And one of the questions I get in a debate like that is, “Well, Smart Alec, where does the energy go when you die?” When you’re alive, you have energy, right? You can move around. You can run. You can jump. When you die, you can’t. So where did the energy go? And from this perspective of life as a process, there’s a perfectly reasonable answer to that, which some people get, and a lot of people seem to not quite believe when I give it to them.

0:15:02 SC: But the answer’s the same as where the energy goes when you turn off a flashlight. Or where does the energy go when you put out a candle? The answer is, it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s still there. The energy is not a fluid either. The energy is a description of stuff, and the energy stopped doing something that it was doing, right? It’s not that it went away. When you have a flashlight with batteries inside, you turn the flashlight on, the batteries are doing something. They’re making electrical current flow through a filament and lighting up, sending photons through the room that you’re in. And when you turn the switch off, the energy doesn’t go away. It just stops doing that particular thing. When you turn off a candle, there’s a chemical reaction, when the candle is burning, that is converting the substance of the wax of the candle and combining it with oxygen in the process of combustion. And it’s giving off light and heat, thereby. And when you put the candle out, the energy that is locked up in that wax that could potentially burn just stops burning. It stops changing in that particular way. It stops that particular process.

0:16:07 SC: So that’s what happens when we die, right? Dying is part of living. It’s something that’s gonna happen to us all, and it’s a cessation of a certain set of chemical reactions going on in our body, okay? And that leads into the fact that life is not just any old process, but it is a particular out-of-equilibrium process. So there’s a lot of processes. The word process is a very broad thing. The planets going around the sun is a process in some sense, but no one is going to mistake planets orbiting the sun for being alive, just on the basis that they’re moving, okay? One of the features of a living organism is that it is an open system. A living organism exchanges energy, but also information and influences with its surroundings. So a living organism is a certain kind of physical object which manages to maintain some sort of structure, even though it is changing, over time.

0:17:08 SC: And there’s different kinds of change in a living being, right? It can change just by walking around and moving. Some of us can, anyway, like a tree, maybe, isn’t very good at that, but living beings can grow, again, some of them. Individual cells maybe don’t grow very much, but multicellular organisms certainly do. And living beings can change just from day to day. You can go to sleep and so forth. That’s a certain kind of change, but it’s a very specific kind of change. It’s not simply motion. It’s kind of a maintenance of a structure, over time, that would not necessarily have been maintained under ordinary circumstances. Erwin Schrödinger, who I’ve talked a lot about in the last year or two in the context of quantum mechanics, later in life, he wrote a little book called, What is Life? And people made that book very famous. It’s a wonderful book to read. This was the 1950s, before we knew about DNA or anything like that. But Schrödinger, in some sense, predicted the existence of DNA because he said there must be a way for information to travel from generation to generation, and what kind of physical system can do that?

0:18:10 SC: We knew that information traveled from generation generation for a long time, but Schrödinger, as a physicist, is saying what kind of actual information-carrying substance could it be? And he figured out that it needs to be some sort of thing that was rigid enough to be kind of like a crystal. It’s sort of lasts from generation to generation, but it can’t just be a regular crystal. It can’t be something that is the same, over and over again, because no information is conveyed by passing on something like that. So it has to be what he called an aperiodic crystal, something that has structure, has information, but is not just repeating the same structure over and over again. And that’s basically what a DNA molecule is. A DNA molecule is a list of little base pairs in a particular order that can be preserved from generation to generation. So people are very… Sorry, that was a little bit of a digression. That’s a very important part of Schrödinger’s book, but I think that an equally interesting part of his book is his answer to the question in the title, What is life? And that gets a lot less attention. And I’m not gonna get the exact quote here, but roughly speaking, what Schrödinger says is that life is a physical process that continues on long after it should’ve stopped.

0:19:22 SC: Now, that’s a contentious kind of definition to give ’cause what do you mean, “Should have stopped.” After all, the earth goes around the sun for millions and billions of years. It never stops. Like how do you know when something’s going to stop? But what Schrödinger is trying to do is to distinguish between something like a ball rolling down a hill, which is an open system. The ball can bounce, it can emit noises, there is friction etcetera, etcetera, and the ball will generally roll down or a rock or whatever, roll down to the bottom of the hill and stop. It will not pick itself up and climb back up the hill. Whereas a living being when you feed it, when you give it the stuff it needs from the outside world can keep going. A person unlike a rock or a boulder can not only go down the hill but then back up and then down and then back up again. And not in a simple way, it’s by taking in free energy from our environment. That’s why in Schrödinger’s book he talks a lot about entropy and free energy.

0:20:19 SC: Very roughly speaking, you all know if you’re listening to this podcast that I like entropy and it’s a measure of the disorderly-ness, the randomness of a physical system and very roughly, if you have a system that has a total amount of energy you can divide that energy into the high entropy energy, the useless energy, the energy that is in the form of just heat and random motions and then on the other hand, what we call the free energy, the energy that is locked up in some way, that can be used to do work like climb up a mountain or something like that. And Schrödinger tried to relate that to negative entropy and I don’t really think that’s very helpful, but the point is there’s useful energy, free energy and useless energy and tropic high entropy energy. And so what Schrödinger is saying is that, what a living being does is take in free energy from the environment, whether it’s through photosynthesis, you’re out there and the sun taking free energy from the rays of the sun or we human beings might eat other organisms and get free energy from there, and we use that to maintain our structure.

0:21:24 SC: So if you think about it, a person can sit still, a well-trained monk or mediator can sit extremely still and appear from the outside not to be moving but that’s a different kind of stillness than a chair or something like that. A chair maintains its structure on the basis of the fact that it is made of things that are not themselves moving, right? A chair is made of little pieces of wood, which is made of molecules, which are basically sitting there in the same configuration over and over again. You might call that a micro-static kind of sitting in place. Whereas in a living organism is not micro-static because no matter how good you are at slowing down your breath and your heart beat and not itching or anything like that, not wriggling in your seat, there’s still processes going on inside you. Your heart is beating, you are breathing, ATP is being generated, blood is moving through your system, signals are being sent through your neurons and so forth, all that is happening beneath the surface while maintaining in fact, the point of a lot of these motions is to maintain your basic continuity of physical structure.

0:22:36 SC: So remember when I talked to Antonio Damasio and he emphasized the role of feelings in the maintenance of homeostasis. So that’s what a living being has. A living being has a homeostatic kind of stationary continuous existence versus a micro-static existence. We can be more or less the same that’s what Schrödinger was getting at, we can maintain our structure, our integrity over time, not because we’re made of things that are stationary, but because we’re made of things that are churning around doing the work keeping us in a more or less continuous structure. And that’s what Damasio thinks of as the origin of feelings. He thinks that feelings are ways that our bodies or our brains feel that we are deviating from the place or the equilibrium we want to be in and then we sort of move back toward it, okay? That’s what homeostasis is. The restoration of that sought for equilibrium structure. And something that is very, very important about how life becomes homeostatic is that it is through processing and exchanging not just energy with the outside world, but information. So a classic example of a homeostatic system is a thermostat. You put a thermostat on your wall, you set it and you say, keep it between 71 degrees and 72 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, okay?

0:24:00 SC: And that’s a very simple straightforward thing, there’s a very, not very complicated mechanical gizmo inside that will adjust the heat or the cooling to keep you at the same temperature, and that’s homeostasis. But the kind of homeostasis that a living organism goes through is much more elaborate than that, right? We’re constantly getting information from the outside world and from inside ourselves, exogenous and endogenous, if you wanna be technical about it, and we’re adjusting in very complicated and subtle ways. Not only are we just immediately regulating the temperature of our bodies, but we’re also thinking and we are reacting in potentially complicated ways to the world around us, okay? So I’m building all this up because I wanna emphasize that part of being a living being is this maintenance of the structure over time through processes, through the things changing and part of that is thinking and reacting to the world in ways that involve the exchange of information. Learning about the world, contemplating the world.

0:25:04 SC: Simple organisms will do this in extremely simple and perhaps trivial ways. More elaborate organisms will do this in much more elaborate ways. And at the end, it ends. This is a feature of life that I already mentioned. One feature of life is that it is temporary, okay? We’re all going to die, had a podcast about this too, with Megan Rosenbloom about the death positive movement. Facing up to the fact that one day we are all going to die from a cosmic perspective even something like a bacterium, which you might say bacteria are immortal, they just sort of split, and they don’t die of old age. You can kill a bacterium but they don’t die, they don’t run out of… With their ordinary life span, they just undergo fusion into two bacteria. But cosmically speaking, the sun is gonna burn out, everything’s gonna fall into a black hole, the black holes will evaporate. At some point every living organism is going to cease to exist. So whatever the meaning of life is, it can’t involve a search for permanence in any real way because you can’t achieve permanence in life.

0:26:10 SC: Whatever the meaning of life is, it’s going to have to face up to the scientific fact that life is temporary, okay? Again, given my commitments to naturalism and physicalism and so forth, which I am very, very committed to. Okay. So that’s, I think, all we need to know or think about, about the nature of what is life, but I do wanna talk about a little bit more detail about this feature of life that we exchange information and we think about the world because that comes into this notion of emergence that is crucially important. Again, in The Big picture, I talk about emergence at great length. And one of the important features of emergence, I mean, very roughly speaking, emergence is a sense in which, at a higher, course-grained level of description, there are patterns that describe what happened, which might not have been immediately evident if you just look at the microscopic, fundamental level, okay? Now, there’s a lot of debate and dissent and disagreement about what we should exactly mean by the word emergence. And then people go around defining weak emergence and strong emergence and so forth. And I’m not gonna get into all of those fascinating questions right now.

0:27:20 SC: At the technical level, what I’m referring to here is weak emergence, okay, not strong emergence. But what I wanna get at is the point that these emergent higher-level descriptions can be of a completely different character than the lower-level description. So a classic example of emergence is, if I have a bunch of atoms in a box of gas, I can describe them using kinetic theory. I just describe every atom. I know where it is, okay? It has a location. And I know its velocity or its momentum. And then in principle, I could use the laws of physics to say what all the atoms are gonna do using Newton’s laws or whatever, quantum mechanics if I need that. Or I can average things out, right? I can say, “Well, if I take a little tiny region, maybe a cubic millimeter of space, and I can figure out the total number of atoms in there and their total momentum etcetera, I can define a temperature and a density and a pressure in different directions. And from that, I can find description of the air in the room in terms of a fluid, right? It has those fluid properties, and I can forget the fact that really it’s made of atoms.

0:28:29 SC: That is an example of emergence. I have a description of what’s going on in the air in terms of a fluid that in some sense is way simpler. I need a lot less information to accurately model what is happening in the air in the room than is contained in the more comprehensive atomic description, okay? That is a feature of emergence that is absolutely central. It is the appearance of a useful pattern based on incomplete information. It’s an example of a kind of real pattern, as Daniel Dennett talked about in my podcast with him. It’s not subjective, okay? It’s not just our inability to see the atoms that matters. There is a real structure to the nature of the system that allows us to describe the air in the room as a fluid, even though it does not make use of all of the information, and that’s very crucial.

0:29:22 SC: My favorite example of emergence is actually not… Well, the box of gas is a good one, but here’s another one that seems even simpler. Think about the earth going around the sun, okay? We think it’s very natural that if you give me the position and velocity of the earth, and I know Newton’s laws of gravity, I can figure out how it moves around the sun, okay? We’re not surprised by that. But if you think about it, that is an enormous simplification because the earth is a collection of atoms, right? There’s roughly 10 to the power of 50 atoms, and in principle, every single one of those atoms has a position and a velocity. And the idea that I can give you a tiny amount of information, much, much smaller than the full specification of the position and velocity of every atom, and yet get useful information to be able to predict what will happen next is amazing. So what I give you is the location and the velocity of the center of mass of the earth. So I don’t give you random information. I give you some very, very specific information.

0:30:26 SC: And from that center of mass position and velocity, I can predict the motion of the earth. But if instead, someone said, “Okay, I’m gonna give you… If there are 10 to the 50 atoms in the earth, if I’m gonna give you the position and the velocity of 10 to the 50 minus one of them, but I’m not gonna give you the position of velocity of the remaining one, what could you tell me about where the earth is gonna go?” Strictly speaking, the answer is nothing at all. I mean, maybe that one atom has as much momentum as all the other atoms in the earth combined but in the opposite direction, okay? If you don’t know what that one atom is doing, you can’t predict anything. And that’s an extreme example, but let me give you a slightly more vivid example. What if I told you the positions of every atom but not the momentum of any of them? I’ve given you half of the information that there is to know about what’s going on in the earth, and you can predict precisely nothing about what direction the earth is moving in.

0:31:23 SC: So that’s the generic situation in physics. The generic situation is, if you don’t give me all of the information about a physical system, I can predict almost nothing about what it will do. Emergence is an example of this sort of narrowing of the phase space of the system to a very, very much smaller set of possibilities, which nevertheless give me some handle on what is going to come next. That is a real feature of the universe, a real pattern, as Dan Dennett would put it. And anyway, again, I got enthusiastically distracted from my point. My point was that the example of the earth and the center of mass is very vivid ’cause we can understand it, but it’s also not characteristic of emergence in many other cases because in many other cases, the emergent description might seem very different from the underlying, more fundamental comprehensive description.

0:32:18 SC: In the case of the earth, the description is the same. For the individual atoms, you would give me positions and velocities, or for the earth’s center of mass, you would give me the position and the velocity. But in the box-of-gas example, the description is a little bit different, right? Instead of giving me positions and velocities, you give me fluid descriptions, temperature, pressure, density etcetera. That seems a little bit different, but maybe it doesn’t seem as different as it could be. The point is that in a world where you’re trying to describe emergent properties of open systems the emergent description that you have might be different in-kind. Might be an entirely different kind of description than what you have at the lower level.

0:33:00 SC: And in particular what I wanna emphasize is, that the fundamental laws of physics as we understand them are moment-to-moment. They are Laplacian and in the sense of Pierre-Simon Laplace and Laplace’s Demon, right? If you tell me everything about the world right now, I can tell you the next moment and the previous moment, using the laws of physics. So the laws of physics, as we currently understand them at the fundamental level are not teleological. Systems do not reach back into the past or predict into the future very, very far in order to figure out what to do next. Systems are not oriented towards goals according to our best fundamental physics that we have today. And why I’m saying this is because, wait for it, the emergent description of sub-systems of the universe might very well be teleological.

0:33:51 SC: There’s no reason why not, okay? Just because the underlying description is not teleological, it’s just moment to moment that doesn’t mean that our best description, our most compressed, most successful real pattern that we identify is necessarily equally moment to moment. It might very well seem teleological. That is allowed by the fact that we do not live in equilibrium, okay? We have an arrow of time. We live in a universe where there’s a difference between the past and the future ultimately arising because entropy is increasing. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Entropy used to be very low in the past. It will be higher in the future, it is changing and that gradient, that change in entropy over time allows for the existence of real emergent patterns that treat the past and future very differently. There’s no obstacle to that in principle and we’re allowed to ask then, does it happen in practice? So in particular, I want to suggest that even things like purposes can emerge at the higher level of description.

0:35:00 SC: And I’m really gonna do a very slapdash job of defending this. This is a controversial idea in the philosophy of science in general or metaphysics or whatever you wanna call it, but I’m on the side that says that things like purposes and goals can be emergent phenomena. Now, I should sit back a little bit and think about the fact that there are different things that you might mean when you say the word purpose. One use of the word purpose is sort of the use of something. What is the purpose of this hammer? It is to hammer nails into the wall. Even if it’s purely biological what is the purpose of the long neck that a giraffe has? Is it because it wants to reach… It enables the giraffe to reach food up there high on the trees, or is it because giraffes of the opposite gender find the long neck very sexy and are more likely to reproduce for you, with you or anything like that? I talk a little bit about with Neil Shubin on the podcast about the pressures that evolution does and does not give you for different things.

0:36:04 SC: And you could have an attitude that would argue that the vocabulary of purposes is just inappropriate when you talk about the length of the giraffe’s neck. You could say, “Look, what I’m keeping track of, or what I should keep track of. Is the genome of the giraffe, right? The genetic information contained in the giraffe’s DNA, and that is going to be passed on from generation to generation and some of it will be passed on, and some of it is less likely to be passed on and through various kinds of pressures, the kinds of genomes that got passed on, gave giraffes longer and longer neck over. And there I’ve described what happened and I never used the word, “The purpose of the neck.” The phrase, “The purpose of the neck is to help the giraffe reach leaves high on the trees.” My point is, that you can talk that way but I can also talk in the language of purposes at the emergent level. I can simultaneously believe that there are no purposes to electrons or protons and neutrons simply obeying the standard model particle physics and that there is a purpose to a hammer or to the neck of a giraffe.

0:37:13 SC: One simple way of saying it is, of course, there are purposes in nature because I’m in nature and I have purposes. I have reasons why that I would like to do things. So there’s a difference with saying that something isn’t part of the most fundamental comprehensive description and saying something doesn’t exist at all. But when we’re talking about the meaning of life, remember that is where we eventually wanna get here, we talk about meaning in that sense. The word meaning and the word purpose, are often conflated and in fact they’re very similar to each other. They’re related, they’re not completely independent, but the meaning of life does not come from a purpose in the sense of something that is being used for some purpose. That would be or could be true if you are not a naturalist, but a theist. If you thought that God or some other higher being, created the universe and created human beings for some purpose, then that purpose could be inherited by us human beings. That will be perfectly okay.

0:38:09 SC: That is not something that I’m going to help myself to. So therefore, the idea of a purpose as a use imposed from the outside, is not going to be relevant to my conception of what the meaning of life is. But there’s another idea of what you mean, what you might mean by the word purpose which is simply a goal, right? My purpose in doing this, is to reach this target in the future. Okay, what I care about is achieving a certain kind of thing. So that’s my purpose I’m doing this in order to achieve a certain kind of thing. And here, I think this is a relevant conception to when we think about life in the real world, even as physicalists. Again, the example, I think I gave this example on The Big Picture, I used this example otherwise. But think of a cat chasing a mouse, okay? There’s two different ways, there’s many different ways, but let’s consider two different ways of describing what is going on.

0:39:04 SC: One way of going on, of describe what’s going on is to give all of the microscopic information about the cat and the mouse in their environment, all of what their cells are doing all the signals being sent from neurons, the pumping of their heart and so forth. An enormous amount of information in terms of which presumably you could very accurately predict what’s going to happen next. Or you can just say, “The cat is trying to chase the mouse. The cat has a goal, the cat has a goal which is to catch the mouse.” Now that might not be able to give you quite as reliable, rigorous, careful, predictive capacity, but you get a lot for very little information. This is exactly that kind of emergence that we’re talking about. Whenever you can describe something with some usefulness, some amount of real information, predictive power for example, attached to your description that requires a lot less input than the microscopic information about the system you’re talking about, then you have emergence.

0:40:04 SC: So if you have an efficient description, then to people like me or to people like Dan Dennett, you call that a real thing. It really exists. Maybe it only exists at the emergent level, but it’s never less real, it is not an illusion. So to the extent that a cat has the goal of catching the mouse, goals are real. Purposes in that sense are real things. It’s not something that’s okay to talk about. And to be fair, there are layers here. There’s a spectrum of complexity when we talk about goals and how they emerge as it were. So a bacterium, there’s a famous fact about bacteria is that if you put it in a petri dish with a gradient of nutrients, so there’s more nutrients on one side of the dish than on the other side of the dish, the bacterium can figure that out.

0:40:52 SC: The bacterium can move itself in the direction of the higher concentration of nutrients, okay? In some sense, that is operating toward a goal. The bacterium would like to be happy and in the region of the petri dish that has more nutrients. But that’s not a very rich sense, it’s really not a very necessary sense. By saying the bacterium has the goal of being in a higher nutrient part of the dish, that’s not any simpler than saying the bacterium moves in the direction where there’s more nutrients, right? Just as a fact, there’s equal amounts of information either way, you don’t need to use the goal-oriented language. But as life evolves as it becomes more complex, our ability as living beings to conceptualize the world becomes richer, becomes more complicated. So a very simple being, a bacterium or a very tiny little organism basically lives in the here and now. A bacterium does not have a nervous system, it does not have the ability to conceptualize and keep images of the outside world inside of itself.

0:41:57 SC: There’s no symbolism in the brain of a bacterium because it does not have a brain, but as nerve systems evolve, and as we evolve brains, organisms extend their reach from just the here and now, to greater sized regions of both space and time. So I suspect, I’m not an expert on this, I’m an expert on the biology, I suspect that space came first. I suspect that primitive organisms first figured out how to represent different parts of their physical environment right now, around them. I talk in The Big Picture about the example that was given to me by Patricia Churchland another podcast guest, about a certain study of C elegans, little nematode roundworm. This study said that… The nice thing about C elegans is we know how many neurons there are and we’ve mapped them all out. It’s like 300 some neurons, we know exactly how many there are, not that many. And there was a claim in a study that said one single neuron could be pinpointed as having part of its job was to distinguish between forces that acted on the nematode from within itself, endogenous forces versus from the outside world, exogenous forces.

0:43:11 SC: So, in some very vague sense this could be thought of, Churchland says, as the beginning of self-awareness, the beginning of telling the difference between me and the rest of the world. But of course, that capacity becomes richer and richer and richer as time goes on as we extend our mental capacities, right? And time in particular, is something that really becomes very useful when we learn how to not just think of the present moment, but to think about other moments in time, the concept of mental time travel. Not physically traveling to other moments in time but remembering the past and imagining the future. This is something I’ve talked about in different ways on several different episodes of the podcast with Jenann Ishmael, with Laurie Paul, we talked about how our self-conceptions are bound to different ways of thinking about the past and future. Remember, the one I had early on with Malcolm MacIver who studies how fish climbed up on to land and start looking around.

0:44:13 SC: And MacIver makes the point that you can at least to some extent, and this is always gonna be messy biology. It’s never nearly as clear and precise as physics, but to the extent that you can make these statements, MacIver wants to argue that fish climbing on the land was in some sense the birth of imagination. Because what he says is, if you’re a fish under the water, you can’t see very far in front of, you can see a few meters, that’s the attenuation length of light traveling through water and you’re moving at meters per second. So you have all of the evolutionary pressure on you is to make a very quick decision. When you see something you don’t have lot time to contemplate alternative possibilities, whereas, when you climb on to land and now the attenuation of length of light is basically infinite you can see for kilometers in front of you, now there’s a new option that your brain has which is to contemplate different future possibilities. So I believe it is true that evolutionarily, we first evolve the capability to remember things. There’s a part of our brain that becomes devoted to memory, to storing information about our past experiences.

0:45:21 SC: And when it becomes useful to hypothetically imagine future possibilities, we basically re-purpose that part of the brain to also be a little stage on which we can put a play and we can imagine different scenarios. This was what you might think of as the birth of imagination. The first time when the living being can really think about the space of all possibilities. And so, that’s what opens up the possibility to us of an emergent description of living beings as ones that have goals, because they can contemplate future possibilities. That’s a much richer thing than a little bacterium is doing. It’s not just that we’re responding to the pressures or the incentives of the instantaneous moment and point in space, but we’re contemplating a much richer environment of possible things to do and we’re thinking about them. So there’s also the importance of cognition coming in here, not just responding instinctively or subconsciously, but thinking about things rationally and reflectively that goes hand in hand with the importance of imagination and the space of possibilities.

0:46:29 SC: Now, you might remember that I had a podcast with Karl Friston, who advocates this idea of the free energy principle in the context of basin models of the brain and what Friston wants to argue is that, what our brain tries to do is to come up with a model of the world that minimizes surprise. That we want to sort of be surprised as little as possible. Now, and this is tricky thing, and I think that people have trouble both on the formal level understanding what’s going on there, but also, they have difficulty in buying it because they say, “Look, plenty of times I do things that do not minimize my surprise. I watch movies that I don’t know what’s gonna happen next. Spoiler alerts are bad. I mean, sorry, spoilers are bad. I do not want to minimize my surprise, I want to be surprised sometimes.” And Friston’s response to that is, “Well, sure but in a simple organism, it would just try to minimize surprise. In a more complex organism because of this mental time travel capacity, what you might want to do is minimize your net surprise over the future, okay? You might want to anticipate the fact that surprising things are gonna happen to you and therefore introduce surprise to yourself so you’re ready to deal with it.”

0:47:42 SC: So I think I like that answer a little bit. It’s not quite sufficient to me, and I’m not gonna blame Karl Friston, it might be that I just didn’t understand what he was trying to say, but it would still be true that you could just lock yourself in a dark room and sit there not doing anything and you would never be surprised. The problem is not that you’re imagining a future in which you might be surprised, the problem is that you would die if you just locked yourself in a room. And I’m sure that Karl Friston knows this perfectly well, but didn’t get quite around to asking about it. The point is that we don’t simply try to minimize a surprise, that can’t be it, full stop, right? We have other constraints, there are other things we need. This goes back to Damasio’s point about homeostasis. We get hungry. We get thirsty. We get tired. We might want to reproduce, we might want other people to approve of us. There’s a whole bunch of motivations that people do have in the moment that get in the way of the simple goal of just minimizing surprise. So maybe you can say something like our brains want to minimize surprise subject to all of these really complicated constraints working at cross purposes in some sense.

0:48:54 SC: Maybe there’s a theory in which you can think about the origin of goals and the origin of purposes from that perspective. I don’t know, but it’s interesting to think about. And the other footnote here about the relationship of human beings to the past and the future reminds me of the discussion with Astra Taylor. From a very different perspective, we talked about the future of democracy, and why democracy is important. Something we didn’t talk about very much, I don’t think, but was in Astra’s book, was the idea that it’s interesting how we human beings put ourselves under obligations to the wishes of people who are no longer around. We, in our society say that dead people have rights, right? And most obvious example, a person can die and leave a will and that will they can give instructions and say, “This money should do this, and if you don’t mow the lawn every week, I’m gonna take away your inheritance.” Even after your dead, we respect those wishes. And in some sense, why do we do that? It’s worth asking why do we care what dead people think? They’re not around to approve or disapprove of us?

0:50:05 SC: And partly, it’s because maybe even at this advanced stage of human civilization many of us don’t really believe that we’re gonna die. Maybe we think that even after we die we still exist on in some ways, and the people who already are dead are watching us and disapproving of us, that’s absolutely maybe subconsciously part of our motivation. But I think there’s a more important part which is that here and now as we are alive, we want our wishes to be obeyed in the future. We can imagine again, mental time travel, we can imagine that someday we will be dead and we would like it to be true that once we are gone our wishes for our inheritance or whatever, are still respected and therefore by some reflection principle, we say we should respect the wishes of people who’ve already died. So again and again, I think it’s very important as one of the foundational features of what it means to not just be a living being but to be a higher level, advanced, cognitively living being is a projection of ourselves into the space of possibilities in the future as well as into the space of what did happen in the past and that’s gonna be important coming up when we talk about meaning.

0:51:17 SC: Okay, so let’s talk about meaning. I laid the ground work as much as I could for on the science side of things, trying to explain how I think about what it means to be a living, thinking person or organism. But where do we get these ideas about values like meaning? I take it that the meaningfulness of life is one of the values that we have, and this is gonna be a contentious subject. It’s closely related to, but not the same as the question of morals, morality or ethics, and how that relates to science. Those of you who listen to my podcast with Sam Harris, he was not on my show but I was on his show. We talked about ought and is, something that I talked about on my blog, my book, and so forth, and in other places, but I’m on the side that says, just like David Hume scolded us about, you cannot derive ought from is. And this is a longer conversation again, I’m just telling you my commitments here not really justifying them. But my attitude is that science tells us what happens in the world, it doesn’t tell us what ought to happen.

0:52:22 SC: Science is necessary if our values are going to make sense, because if we don’t understand what is true and real about the world, then we’re going to come to incorrect conclusions. For example, most obvious one your values might be very different if you believe that you are created by a loving and all-powerful God, than if you believe that you evolved through natural selection. You might believe that God has given you instructions in the sense of some particular sacred text that tells you what to do, whereas if you don’t believe that, then you think that there must be some other origin of your values. So clearly, your understanding of how the world works, can affect your values in important ways. All I wanna say is, if you’re a naturalist they do not determine your values. You can’t just say, “Well this is how the world is, therefore this is how it should be.” That is just a non-sequitur, is just a violation of the rules of logic, okay?

0:53:22 SC: So what that means is, that if you live in a world where there’s an objective reality out there, I talked with Liam Kofi Bright about what that means for there to be an objective reality out there and how to get it, but that objective reality doesn’t give us instructions, it does not tell us what is right and what is wrong, it does not tell us what the meaning of our lives is. The other thing I wanna emphasize besides the fact that we’re not going to derive meaningfulness from science any more than we’re gonna derive morality from science is that, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it. What it means is that there is no objective grounding to our meaningfulness of life just as there is no objective grounding to our morals but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. We can subjectively construct meaning just as we can construct morals. There’s a difference between being subjective and being arbitrary. I give many different examples here. Usually, in terms of something like basketball ’cause I like watching basketball and playing basketball.

0:54:20 SC: There are rules that we invent in basketball. There’s a three-point line, you can’t double dribble, you can’t foul, all these things. We certainly made these rules up. These rules are not out there to be found in the fundamental laws of physics. We could have made up other rules, indeed we are constantly tweaking the rules a little bit. But it would be entirely wrong-headed to say that therefore the rules are completely arbitrary. Some rules for a game like basketball or chess or whatever you wanna contemplate, are better than others and the reason why they’re better is because they fulfill some purpose, some goal better than others. When we play basketball, we have various goals we want to have fun, we want to make it an exciting game and so forth. It’s exactly the same for morals or for meaning. We have goals, we have emergent things, that we would like to have happen and from those, we can go to construct rules of moral philosophy or meaning in life. So in some sense the morality example is a good one, even though it’s different than meaning and I’ll probably say this again, but the reason why morality is different than meaning is morality has to do with other people.

0:55:34 SC: Morality is how we treat others, how we want to be treated whereas meaning in some sense is more singular, it’s more for us, what is the meaning of our life. It can be related to other people, clearly, other people can be important in it. But if you were on a desert island, when you were literally on the only person who existed, it would be hard to talk about morality, but it would still be very straight forward, to talk about meaningfulness. You could do more or less meaningful things even if you were alone. So they’re not exactly the same thing. So in some sense, long story short, I think of moral philosophy as a codification of our inner subconscious preferences for how we want to treat other people, and how we want to be treated. So even though I’m not a moral realist, I do not think that moral structures are out there to be found in nature, that are completely objective and foundational. I do think that there is work to be done under the rubric of Moral Philosophy namely taking our inner preferences, the various inclinations and intuitions we have that come from a variety of places. They might come from our biology, they might come from our upbringing, they might come from our cognition, thinking about them and bringing all these preferences to light to the clear light of reason so that we can think about them, okay?

0:56:50 SC: The job of moral philosophy is to turn our inner impulses into a system that makes sense rather than just this and that impulse which we sort of reach for, “I like this better, I don’t like that better,” let’s think about it, let’s ask ourselves, “What is it that we like better? How do we want to be treated by others? Let’s ask other people how they want to be treated, let’s talk to them, let’s get their opinions and let’s figure out what moral system we should construct.” I think in this process and by the way, whether or not you think that that is what should happen, whether or not you think that, in other words morality is constructed rather than objective, it’s hard to deny that that is what actually happens. What actually happens in the world is that people contemplate what they want to be the case and they talk to other people and they try to figure out a system to live by. So admitting that that’s what happens is not the end of the world, it’s not anything goes, or anything like that. The good news is that individual people have largely overlapping preferences for how they want to act and be treated. Not a 100%, so there will be disagreements and there will also be as Sharon Street puts it, there can be a more coherent Caligula.

0:58:04 SC: There can be a person who just has moral impulses for which the rest of us are horrified by them and just will never agree with them. And the point is that you can’t argue with them that they are wrong on the basis of logic, or science or reason, okay? What you can do is put them in jail, or you can stop them from causing harm in some way or another. And again, that is what we actually do. So the fact that people who have different moral systems than us are not making logical or reasoning mistakes, doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for having moral conversations. And I think the other thing I wanted to say about that is, when we do this process of moral philosophy, when we go from admitting that we have certain preferences for how we want to act and be treated to trying to make it into a system that is logical and internally coherent, it’s easy to over-simplify. There’s a very easy mistake that can be made of the following form, my starting point is, a set of moral preferences that are subconscious in some way that are ingrained in who I am, I try to turn them into a logical coherent system and then I realize that the logical coherent system I constructed suggests that certain things are moral, that are completely at odds with the preferences, I started with, right?

0:59:23 SC: So here’s an example, and this is a intentionally contrived example, so don’t complain that I’m not giving you a realistic example. Let’s imagine you said something like the following, “I like to be happy. I like other people to be happy. When I talk to them they like to be happy, okay? There seems to be more happiness in the world, when everyone is happy. Therefore, I will invent something called utilitarianism. The simplest version of which is just the greatest happiness that can possibly exist. I will imagine that I can measure the amount of happiness in every individual person and I will add up, that happiness. Maybe I will call it utility. So it’s not just happiness but some higher level concept but the point is I added up, okay?

1:00:08 SC: Different people have different amounts of utility, I’m gonna add it all up, and I seek to maximize utility, I seek to have the most utility the greatest good for the greatest number, that’s what I wanna have.” And that seems like a relatively plausible… It’s a cartoon, a caricature, sorry utilitarians, I’m just using you as an example here. But it seems like that’s not a completely crazy version of reasoning from moral impulses to a system, right? But then someone says, “Okay I have just realized that this particular person has very a large number of healthy organs in them. They’re very healthy person. And I have 20 other people, all of whom have one or the other crucial bodily organ that is going to fail soon, and they’re going to die.” So on the basis, strictly of maximizing the happiness of the world, I should kill the person with healthy organs and give all their organs to 20 people and save their lives.

1:01:05 SC: And just so that they’re not made sad by it, I will do it in secret so the people who get the organs don’t know that they caused another human life to disappear in order to save their lives. So now I’ve saved 20 lives, at the cost of one, I’ve increased the utility of the world. Most of us would say, “No, I don’t wanna do that. I don’t think that is a moral thing to do. That person who is perfectly innocent has a right to live their life.” And don’t nit-pick thought experiment, the point is, in principle it’s completely possible that we construct a system that violates our starting points in some dramatic way. And what I would say, so there’s two different ways to go when you say that. One way to say is, the system is always right. I do not admit the possibility that I invented the wrong system so if I reach a preposterous conclusion, I should train myself to be strong enough to accept it. And some people will do that. The other possibility is, I didn’t do a very good job of systematizing my moral inclinations in the first place.

1:02:08 SC: That’s what is trying to be taught by something like the famous trolley problem. The trolley problem, where the trolley is gonna hit five people but you can push a switch that would switch it to a different track and only kill one person, and the point is not, there’s an answer. The point is not that there is some correct thing that we can derive. Is it better to kill five people or one people? The difference is, if it were just kill five people versus killing one person most would say, killing one person is less bad, but the point is that you have to actively kill the one person. So, there’s complicated more elaborate versions of the trolley problem, where you have to stop the trolley by pushing a person into the path of the trolley rather than just flipping a switch. And the point is that this trolley problem is trying to get at the fact that our moral inclinations come in different forms. Some forms are, yeah, more happiness all around is a good thing. But other forms are individuals have rights, right? Individual shouldn’t be sacrificed.

1:03:07 SC: That’s where you get people like deontologists, like Immanuel Kant who says you should treat people as ends, not means. And people have individual rights, all by themselves that are not subservient to the common good. I am not here to actually adjudicate between these different systems of deontology rules-based morality versus consequentialist-versions of morality. What I’m trying to say here is, it’s okay. It’s okay to have these competing impulses and I think that the right thing to do, is to resist the urge to over-simplify when we turn them into our systems. I do think that moral systems should be logical, I don’t think they should be internally incoherent or self-contradictory but they could be fuzzy. They could be like, “I want to increase the greatest good for the greatest number most of the time, but I also want to protect some individual rights or obey some certain kinds of rules and therefore here are the guidelines that I figured out.” Exactly because what we’re doing is constructing our system.

1:04:17 SC: We start with values, then we construct philosophical systems from them. We have to admit that the construction might be inherently fuzzy because our own understanding of our initial inclinations might itself be a little bit fuzzy. All of this will have implications for finally what we’re getting to now, which is the role of meaning, the meaning of life. Why are we here? What are we doing about it? Why do our lives matter?

1:04:40 SC: Again, like I said before, related to questions of morality but different. Also by the way different from happiness. You might just say, “Well if morality is the greatest good for the greatest number I want everyone to be happy. Maybe the meaning of my life, is that I should be happy.” This is a turn that many people have made in recent years, a more individualistic version of the meaning of life where they’re trying to be happy themselves, and I don’t like it. Well, I don’t think it’s meaning anyway. I think happiness is overrated. I think that happiness is a good thing, but I don’t think it’s a goal. I think that there’s not like the point of life is to be happy and then stay exactly that way. I think that that’s a mistake. The philosopher Owen Flanagan, when I talked with him when I interviewed him for The Big Picture suggested the following thing to think about. When you think about people who’ve led meaningful lives in the sense of having an impact on the world Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Florence Nightingale whoever, people who have really done something to change the world and hopefully a positive way, but we can argue about that. It’s not the point.

1:05:51 SC: The point is, Flanagan says, “When you think about these people as people, does the first thing come to mind, is it that they were happy? Do you think about these people or they were happy all the time that? That’s what they achieved by fighting against social injustice or something like that?” Maybe they were happy is completely possible that they were happy, I’m not saying they weren’t but I’m saying it wasn’t the point. Even if they were unhappy, even if they really struggled inwardly, it would not be evidence that they did not have meaningful lives, that their lives didn’t matter. Being happy is fine, but it’s different. It’s different than having meaning in your life. Likewise, meaning, like I said, is different than morality. Morality is more about how we treat others, how we want to be treated by others. It’s a social kind of phenomenon, whereas meaning even if it’s not just happiness, meaning is still individual. Again, it can be related to other people. You can find meaning in being a good person, in being moral, right? That can be the source of your meaning, but that’s not what meaning is. You could also have sources of meaning that had nothing to do with other people. You can have your secret project that gives you a great pleasure and gives meaningfulness to your life that no one else ever knows about.

1:07:08 SC: And so meaning is closer but still not exactly the same as this idea of having a purpose or having a goal. I did the podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman about his updated view of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and he wants to replace the pyramid, that is the… Maslow didn’t ever draw the pyramid, but the usual popularization of Maslow’s hierarchy is a pyramid. Scott wants to replace it with a sailboat, which I like because it goes back to that idea that life is a process, that life is constantly changing. But where I pushed him is that he thinks that sort of the culmination… Well, the culmination of the whole thing is transcendence, I’m not quite sure what that means, but in the actual sailboat the top-most piece was purpose, having a purpose. And I think that’s a little bit… It’s not quite on the nose, it’s closed but it’s not exactly what we’re pointing at because purpose has this connotation, that we talked about of having a goal, right? I presume it’s not purpose in the sense of being used for something. We’re not thinking of ourselves as hammers and screw drivers, but I also don’t think that having a goal is the most important point in life.

1:08:23 SC: Because the thing about goals is they can be achieved. You can get them, right? Like my goal is to walk across the street and I walk across the street and I’ve done it. Meaning isn’t fulfilled by some specific achievement. Again, achieving things can absolutely be part of how you find meaning in your life, but it’s not what meaning is. It might be a driver but it’s not identical to it. Were I to write a book on psychology and the meaning of life rather than a sailboat, I would pick a surfboard. I’m not even a surfer myself, I don’t go surfing but I think about life as a process and this idea, this goes back to the happiness idea, this idea that we find a perfect happy place and just stay there can’t be the source of meaningfulness in our life. Life is a dynamic process pushed or enabled, let’s put it that way, by entropy increasing and life is temporary. So, to imagine that the meaning of life, that the purpose of life was to achieve happiness and then just stay there would be like to imagine that the purpose of surfing is, to sit perfectly still on your surfboard. And that’s not gonna do it ’cause you’re gonna not succeed, you’re gonna fall in the drink.

1:09:37 SC: The story of surfing is making constant adjustments, being in constant communication with your surroundings and adjusting, trying to maintain that homeostasis, that upright stance that success in surfing for just a little while. And you notice something else that tickles me about the surfing analogy is that, it’s motion. You move when you’re on the surf board, it’s not fulfilling if you just take your surfboard out there and to perfectly calm water and sit there that does not fulfill your goals in surfing but it’s also not a matter of getting anywhere. This is why I’m saying that having a goal is not quite the same as having meaningfulness in your life. When you’re surfing, you just move toward the shore, and then the wave peters out and then you go back and you do it again. And the net amount of distance you’ve traveled, you’ve traveled individual distance but it’s back and forth. Positive and negative. And at the end you come back to exactly where you left. And that’s actually a much better metaphor for life, I think. It reflects not only the fact that life is homeostatic and needs to respond to the world around it, that life is dynamic and change is an important part of it, but also that it’s temporary, right?

1:10:50 SC: That every ride on your surfboard or even your entire day of surfing comes to an end and you didn’t get anywhere at the end of it and you came in with nothing, you left with nothing, but still, there is something to the journey in between even though it’s not a journey between A and B, it’s a journey between A and A, in a very complicated way, the journeying matters. The surfing is actually fun in some sense. So, finding meaning in life is a little bit more elevated than finding happiness and surfing maybe part of your meaning your life could be surfing. I guess, like I said, I’m not personally a surfer. But it’s close. It’s close to that idea of having a goal and I think that it’s somewhat closer to an aspiration, the idea… Not that there is a specific goal in front of us, but that there is a direction in which we want to move. There’s some way in which we would like our lives to be different than they could be. I like to think that meaningfulness can be thought of as a codification of our aspirations inside our subconscious aspirations for our lives just as morality is the codification of our preferences for interacting with others.

1:11:58 SC: Slightly different things but a similar sort of parallel construction. We start with aspirations, we start with things we want to be true or directions we want to move in and we think about them, we bring them to our conscious attention and we try to figure out what is the system? What is the reasonable way to put all of these things together? So I wanna dive into that a little bit more deeply, but first just so you’re not surprised at the end, let me emphasize the importance of the fact that in this point of view meaning is being constructed meaning is not objective. I’ve tried my best to read other people talking about meaning of life stuff and I never get very far, it just doesn’t quite speak to me. And a lot of times, not necessarily all the time, but a lot of times it’s because the implicit goal in such a project is to come out with the end and say, “Here is the meaning of life. Here is the answer,” right? Very rarely do they succeed in doing that. But I don’t even think that that’s the question.

1:12:55 SC: I don’t even think that’s the goal. I’m a meaning pluralist. I think that there’s all sorts of meanings that one could have. If you think that meaning is constructed by starting with the fact that we have aspirations within ourselves and we sort of systematize them, and figure out what they are and then move toward them in some way. Those aspirations can be simple. They can be as simple as a bacterium moving in the direction of more nutrients or they can be extremely complex. They can involve very impressive feats of imagination thinking about different possibilities and meaningfulness can be something that is fulfilled from moment to moment. It could be… Let me put it this way, we often think about finding meaning in life, and what instantly comes to mind is some amazing achievement, right? A great scientific discovery or climbing Mount Everest or making a million dollars. What I want to suggest is, number one, little tiny achievements can also bring great meaning to life.

1:13:58 SC: Maybe you have a really good doll collection, maybe you make a really big ball of twine in your backyard, okay? But also, there are processes that literally happen every day, that can be sources of meaningfulness in your life. Living a dutiful and honorable life, going to work on time and doing your job, raising your family, putting food on the table, making a good meal or even just having experiences. You forget about other people, like the experience of going to Mount Everest might be very important, the experience of having a good meal that someone else made might be important, the experience of having a really nice vacation or just hanging out with your friends, these are also things that you can aspire to and that can bring meaning to your life. So what I’m doing without yet completely finishing the project of being careful about what we mean by meaning, I’m just emphasizing the fact that it’s not one size fits all. It’s not that there’s some right answer to the question, “What should your meaning… What should the meaning of your life be?” Once we admit that meaning is constructed by individuals, then they’re gonna find different. They’re gonna be pluralistic about what their meanings are.

1:15:13 SC: You can find meaning in following rules or in breaking them. If you wanna go into the podcast with Michele Gelfand about tight versus loose societies, there’s different ways to be successful either, individually or socially, vis-a-vis your attitude toward rules. You can find meaning and new experiences but you can also find meaning and familiarity. If you really like the ritual at the end of the day of having a glass of wine with your loved one or your family, or you like the experience of going out to the movies Thursday nights or whatever, that’s great. That is absolutely a way that you can find meaning. You can find meaning in artistic expression, in learning new things, in discovery, in changing the world but also in being a good friend, doing a good job at work, keeping a happy home, petting your cat, and listening to it purr, okay? These are all ways that we can find meaning in our lives. These are all versions of the aspirations that we have, I wanna make that cat purr when I pet it, when I give it scratches in exactly the right place.

1:16:17 SC: And finally, it’s not necessarily in comparison with others, even if you think of you having, yourself having aspirations, did you want to achieve something in some way? It’s not that you wanna achieve something that is better than anyone else. Again, it might be, I mean maybe you want to have the biggest ball of twine in the backyard of anyone in your state. Good for you. Very few people find meaning in having sort of a mediocre medium-sized ball of twine, but that’s not the only thing it could be. It’s really what I wanna suggest is that it’s much more a comparison with yourself than with others. There’s two important things. What I wanna suggest without saying, “Here is the correct meaning to have in your life.” I wanna suggest that two things are very important to it, first, I think that it needs to be conscious or self-aware. Even if you’re not aware that what you’re doing is finding meaning, you have to be aware that you are doing something that you didn’t need to be doing. That it wasn’t just a necessary part of your life.

1:17:21 SC: Meaningfulness doesn’t come from just existing. Meaningfulness does not come from just surviving from day-to-day waking up in the morning. Look, surviving day-to-day can be hard, don’t get me wrong. It can be a struggle, it may be it is all you can do, and maybe it’s a struggle to even do that and there’s no disrespect, if that’s the kind of situation you’re in, but that’s not where you get meaning from. Meaning comes from I think a little bit of aspiring to do more than just simply existing. So I think it’s important in the construction of how we find meaning in our lives to make that promotion of our subconscious aspirations to conscious ones. To bring them, in Daniel Kahneman’s language from System 1 into System 2, from just impulses below the surface to things that we think about and say, “I want this, I would like to achieve this, this is what would make me happy.” Again, you don’t need to consciously be saying I’m constructing meaning for my life, but need to be making some choices in some conscious way.

1:18:22 SC: That’s one thing. And the other thing, is I think that meaning should be thought of as requiring an engagement with possibility. What is that supposed to mean? In some sense, look, every decision you make is an engagement with possibility, by which I simply mean if you choose to turn left rather than turn right, you thought to yourself, “Well, there were different possibilities, and this is what I did, and this is what I didn’t do.” For that matter just objects obeying the laws of physics in some sense can be engaging with possibilities, a path that obeys Newtons laws of physics is one that doesn’t disobey, so it’s in contrast with other possibilities.

1:19:03 SC: Morality doing the right thing is different than doing the wrong thing. Okay, but there is a difference here. I think that the difference is that making a decision, might just be a matter of saying, this particular action is the correct one, the appropriate one. It does not necessarily get its correctness or appropriateness in virtue of its difference with the other ones. The path that the planets obey around the sun, obeys Newton’s laws of physics. Once you know that, once you know that the path is the one that obeys laws of physics, you don’t need to know anything about the other paths. There are things you could say about them, but you don’t need to know them. The point of the path that you take is not that you didn’t take these other paths. The point of doing a moral action it’s not made moral by the existence of immoral acts, right?

1:19:53 SC: Whereas I think that meaning is different, meaning is about bringing into existence something that wouldn’t otherwise or naturally have been there, something that gains value exactly in virtue of its comparison to other possibilities. Bacteria don’t have a meaning of life but a human being who can say, “Well I could do this, or I could do this other thing. And if I didn’t do anything this third thing would probably come true,” and making conscious cognitive choices about which to do. That is what I would say is the origin of meaning, whatever that meaning might be. Again, it might just be a mode of existence. If you say, “Well I get meaning from being a dutiful soldier.” Well, that’s something that you don’t have to do. There’s gonna be difficulties, right? There’s gonna be obstacles to being dutiful. There’s gonna be temptations to not being dutiful, you can get meaning out of life by being a devoted, spouse, right? By not cheating, on your loved one. There could be temptations that you overcome.

1:20:56 SC: There’s all sorts of ways in which you can bring something into existence that wouldn’t otherwise or naturally have been there. It could be that you create a great work of art or a great scientific discovery or you build a company and make a million dollars or you construct a monument. It could be that you have an experience or adventure or simply a life well-lived. But these are all things that you get credit for by making choices that brought them into existence. The key to me, in my mind, you can disagree but the key to in my mind to meaningfulness is the ability to be able to say, “Were it not for the choices I made, that would not have been.” There’s an option. There’s some sort of intentional cognitive deviation from the easiest most readily naturally available path. That’s where I think meaning comes from in some sense. Now, the ways in which you are going to deviate from the easiest possible path are up to you, are going to be different. And maybe I’m being very, very… I really think that it is a mistake. There’s always mistake people make in this. I’m sure that I make it also, but to sort of project my favorite things to do and say that they’re universal and everyone else would do them, right?

1:22:13 SC: I mean academics do this all the time, academics when they talk about a meaningful life. Academics are people who like thinking about things and reading books and writing and creating works of pros and literature, and so very often, that’s what academics say is the place to get a meaningful life from, from reading and learning and discovering. And those are perfectly good ways to get meaning in life from but they’re not the only way, so I wanna try to avoid that. Nevertheless, the one tiny sort of non-trivial substantive thing I will say is that if what I’m saying is correct, that meaning is necessarily conscious and self-aware and that it results from an engagement with possibilities from a comparison with what you did do with what you didn’t do, then there’s an extent, certainly a sense in which harder aspirations lead to more meaningful lives, right? Doing something that has a little bit more of a deviation from the easiest possible path leads to more of a sense of accomplishment, leads who are more meaningfulness. And that’s easier said than done, okay?

1:23:19 SC: I mean sure, you wanna say, “Well, yes, I’m very interested in doing difficult things but there’s all sorts of different kinds of difficulties that we face in life.” You might say, “Well, going to the gym every day or a couple of times a week or whatever it is, is difficult. Losing weight is difficult.” Yeah, these are difficult in very sort of manifest ways. By the way they’re not equally difficult. Some people can’t wait to go to the gym in that case, good for them, but it’s not necessarily something that wouldn’t have happened automatically. That’s not consciously bringing that meaningfulness in their life, they’re just enjoying themselves, for others, it’s a big struggle to go to the gym. But what I wanna say is that there are other ways in which things can be hard, and I’m thinking mostly of, thinking, I’m thinking mostly of the search for truth. The search for what we believe to be correct, about the world.

1:24:14 SC: I had the podcast with Paul Blume where he had this book called Against Empathy and I get his point. He was trying to say that empathy is something that we naturally have for people like ourselves and that can be distortive because it’s different than being purely rational about morality, and how we should behave in the world because a purely rational consideration wouldn’t give extra benefit to people like ourselves. So, he’s against empathy in that sense. I don’t think that’s the right attitude to have toward empathy because I think that sure, it’s easier to be empathetic for people like yourselves, but that’s not an argument against empathy, that’s an argument against doing empathy badly. I think that in order… That there’s a relationship between empathy and the search for truth, which is not that empathy gets in the way, but then empathy is a crucial tool, in searching for truth.

1:25:13 SC: There’s an overwhelming temptation, and this is especially true in people like me and people who are science-oriented, STEM kind of people, logical thinkers, people who like reason, especially on the physics or engineering side of things, we have a weakness for simple explanations for cutting through the bullshit, and finding the simple essence of things. The spherical cows. And a lot of times that involves paying attention to some things in the universe and not paying attention to others. This is a crucially useful technique in physics, where Galileo, if you’re following my videos, the biggest ideas in the universe, I give an enormous credit to Galileo for saying “Look, let’s ignore air resistance and see what happens if we do that.” Crucially important for physics, but you need at the end of the day, if you want to get an accurate view of the world, put the airy systems back in. And I think that when we… I’m saying this… Let me back up a little bit. As I mentioned, the introduction, I’m saying this when the country around me, the society around me is in a mess. There are literally violent protests going on on the streets.

1:26:25 SC: There’s police brutality, there’s racism in addition to the fact that there’s a giant pandemic that is shutting down the whole world. It’s a tough time in a lot of ways and people in tough times, it becomes harder to think in subtle and nuanced and complex ways. It becomes easier to look for simple mottos and simple things to say because you’re very sensibly anxious and sad and frustrated and angry and you think, correctly, that this is just not a time for delicacy, for taking other people’s feelings into consideration. There’s gonna be some people who see this or that piece of video and they’re gonna see the people who they don’t like or suspicious of acting badly towards people they do like or sympathize with and they will say, “See, I was right all along. And you other people are to blame.” And I’ve tried to say that in such a way that it applies to a lot of different people.

1:27:33 SC: And the complicating factor is that sometimes they’re right, right? Sometimes some groups really are being picked on by other people, and they’re just telling the truth. But this is all to the direction of saying that when you say that you get meaning out of doing something that is difficult, that is not natural, not obvious, not falling down the stairs, that is actually something active and aspirational, part of that is not just lifting up heavy weights, in some very direct physical way. Part of that is making the mental and emotional effort to understand the world in as complicated and precise a way as possible and that includes understanding other people. And not every police officer is brutal and racist, not every protester is violent and is looting. And we need to find… Part of the struggle, part of the difficult thing to do is to find the common ground. That’s not to let the real racists off the hook either. That’s part of the nuance, that’s part of the complication. We can simultaneously say, there are legitimate wrongs in our society that we need to work to fix and that not every person is participating in those wrongs and we have to make the effort to do that.

1:28:52 SC: Living in a world where things are going badly can be difficult, like I keep saying it can be tiring and exhausting, and if there is some lesson in what I’ve been talking about here vis-a-vis the meaning of life, it’s that you shouldn’t give up anyway, that, if meaningfulness comes from contemplating alternate possibilities in our lives and recognizing that there’s something that we would like to be the case, but that won’t happen automatically, something that we need to work for. And that’s where meaningfulness comes from in our lives, then it follows that there is some worthiness to doing that, to continue to try. Look, even if it doesn’t work. I tried to be very clear that meaningfulness doesn’t come necessarily from achieving something. It comes from aspiring towards something. Sometimes we’re cysiphists and the ball’s gonna keep rolling down the hill. Other times we get to the top and we achieve Mount Everest. You don’t know ahead of time, often times, but it can still be meaningful, it can still be worth the effort, it’s very hard.

1:30:00 SC: I don’t wanna denigrate or dismiss the difficulty of the continuation of the struggle to make the world a better place, it’s the biggest struggle there is, but it matters. It’s worth continuing to try to do it. Again, different people listening are gonna different ideas about what it means to struggle to make the world a better place, that’s okay. But it matters that we struggle, it matters that we try, it matters that we don’t give up. It is in some sense that what matters. It’s why our lives are not just surviving, are not just existing persisting from day-to-day. A bacterium, that’s all it can do. It’s only choices to try to keep living. A human being has other choices, more loftier choices, more meaningful things that it can try to do. And I hope that despite everything in all the ways that the world tries to run us down that we keep trying, that we keep struggling that we keep trying to make things better.

1:30:53 SC: I think there’s plenty of evidence that we are. I see plenty… Even as depressing as it is to open up Twitter and look at what’s going on. I see plenty of evidence of people doing inspirational things in addition to all the bad things. There’s a lot of good things going on out there, there’s a lot of room for more. I’m gonna try. I certainly do not think that I’ve achieved anything completely blameless, laudable life. I’m trying to do better all the time, trying to understand what other people want, to try to be more generous towards people who I disagree with, to try to split my time in the most useful way possible, between doing things for me, doing things for my friends, doing things for my family, doing things for the rest of the world. It’s a complicated world out there, but the struggle matters, it is what matters, and I think that it’s worth it, it is meaningful. Let’s keep it up. Thanks.

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8 thoughts on “100 | Solo: On Life and Its Meaning”

  1. Congrats on your 100th episode (although i wish the celebration were under better circumstances).
    Very clear, thought-provoking and enjoyable episode. Thank you.

  2. I thought I was going to hear Professor Solo, doctoral fellow for advanced research, from Snooty Pants U. This episode puts into stark relief the great communication style of Sean Carroll. Very approachable, very wide ranging, and in an intelligible, down to Earth style that is the mark of a good teacher.

  3. One of the most challenging puzzles for philosophers and scientists is how did consciousness originate? Did it emerge from the complexity of the organization of neurons, or is there some other explanation. The idea of panpsychism grew out of the realization that consciousness could not have emerged solely from the material elements of the periodic table unless those elements had a spark of consciousness. It is an interesting idea, but how would one test it. Another idea that is not particularly amenable to testing is the
    Greek’s idea of the logos which refers to words, which are the outer manifestations of self consciousness. Max Planck, the discoverer of quanta, as he immersed himself in the developing theory of quantum mechanics said, “We can never get behind consciousness.” What if consciousness is not emergent, but is the ground of all being.

  4. Thank you for the podcast. I’ve looked forward to every Monday since the first episode. After 100 episodes, my favorites (not in order) have to be Roger Penrose, Leonard Susskind, and Daniel Dennet. I think it would be cool to hear from Brian Cox about quantum mechanics or Richard Dawkins on evolution or related topics. Oooh or maybe Steven Pinker on linguistics or consciousness. No matter who you talk to, I enjoy it. Thanks again!

  5. Happy Centenary, Sean!
    It still feels like a new podcast. Still the best cast on the web.
    Would still love to hear an in depth discussion with you and David Deutsch on many worlds and quantum computing.

  6. Thank you for 100 excellent podcasts Sean. Please have more solo episodes in the next 100!

  7. Great work on this, Sean! I listen to virtually all of your podcasts, and I thought this one truly stood out.
    I would love to hear you and Rob Bell in conversation some time. I don’t know if either of you have considered this. If you’re not familiar with him, you might check out “Everything is Spiritual” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2rklwkm_dQ&t=47s). His angle has a religious bent, but his goal is to tie everything together, and I think he does it very well. Anyway, I’d sure like to hear how the two of you might cross compare and perhaps challenge each other’s thinking.

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