The Meaning of Life

On my way to work I often pass the big, inviting glass double-doors of a church annex. Large, friendly banners are draped above and either side advertising The Alpha Course and displaying a cartoon figure struggling to carry a question mark almost as big as himself. The slogan offers a chance to explore the meaning of life.
I find the concept of a meaning to life to be without meaning. As a teenager I was desperate to understand things that I believed were obscured by esoteric and unfathomable mysticality. It seemed obvious to me that science was merely a way of measuring things, but that the occult offered a way to look deeper. Astrophysicists scratched their heads over quasars while UFOlogists brought the distant universe much closer. My physics teacher copied words from a text book onto an overhead projector and made no effort to teach us, yet mystics spanning centuries keenly bestowed their knowledge. Tarot seemed able to reveal more aspects of the human spirit than Freud could.
It took a long time, many years of reading and a bachelor’s degree in science for me to realise that the problem wasn’t with science, it was with me. I lacked sufficient knowledge to judge correctly and had taken a short path that gave quick rewards. The methodology was always out there for me to find but my guides in the sciences were woefully poor at introducing me to the concepts and values of empirical experimentation and the axiomatic language of maths that underlies reality and slowly, piece by piece, reveals its nature to us.
I read Douglas Adams religiously and watched as many Monty Python films as I could find on video or get to see on the big screen by lying about my age. I knew this ‘meaning of life’ issue was a big one much debated by comedians and philosophers alike. I assumed that anything such luminaries chose to debate must be a worthy topic. Why else would it crop up so often?
I didn’t then know of any neurological reasons behind the genesis of such questions in the human psyche. I’d never heard of teleology - the act of assigning agency to something, placing meaning and design in a naturally occurring phenomenon - and how we are inclined to take that view owing to the statistical advantage it gives to any animal in surviving long enough to breed and rear its young.

I had no idea about the sophistication of belief and the tenacity of unfounded certainties. Asking for the meaning of life makes as much sense to me now as asking for the meaning of the sea. It’s just the wrong question. Like the six yr old on ‘Nina and the Neurons’ who asked “what are trees for?” Meaning assumes intent. Intent assumes a designer. I don’t believe in a designer of any kind. Belief requires a provocation. To me there is sufficient evidence of naturally occurring processes that would give rise to life and enough time for it to happen. To me that’s a marvel far greater than anything dreamt up in mythology or occultism.

Imagine a parallel universe where, shortly after time began, human civilisation and 2012 technology had sprung into existence. Complete, whole. Unchanging. 13 or so billion years later you go to a job interview. Two smartly dressed people ask pertinent questions and, at the end of the interview, they tell you to expect a response once HR had processed their assessment. Three days later you get a call to say you were successful and after a week a letter arrives to confirming the appointment. You report for duty and dutifully carry out the tasks you receive by email from your boss who is stationed overseas. Every month HR sends you a payslip and the money shows up in your account. A lot of what you do requires initiative and self-management. After a year in the job you start to wonder if your boss is really earning his pay and whether you get paid enough for what you do.
One day you find an error with your pay and call HR to let them know. No answer. You head over there and find the office where they’re supposed to be is empty except for someone vacuuming the carpet. They tell you in all their years of vacuuming they’ve never once seen a single person working in HR. How could this be? You try to contact your boss and get no reply. No surprise as the two of you have yet to speak. You contact the two people who interviewed you and they have no answer for you. No, they’ve never actually met anyone from HR and never seen the boss, but there are thousands of employees at the company and they themselves have worked there for years without any problems with payslips. The company has been around for hundreds of years, as everyone knows, and sometimes there are errors but they always seem to sort themselves out in time one way or another.
You start investigating. Your role gives you privileged access to important data. Unlike many employees you can see, if you look hard enough in the right places, how things fit together, company history, structure, communications. What you find shocks you. The company isn’t hundreds of years old, it’s thousands of years old! And, to your utter amazement, it’s origins go back billions of years!
After months of research you finally manage to put together a picture of how it might have happened. It all started when a single speck of static emerged from the background fuzz, its only distinction that it could bind together with another speck. Something innate in the specks caused them to bond in pairs under certain circumstances. The right kind of communications network was all it took. The double-specks had different characteristics and certain qualities began over millennia to emerge. They began to bind with other pairs and, eventually, an arms race began. Some collections of specks were harder to absorb due to the interference they generated in the static. Some were able to negate that interference with another type. On and on. A process of random traits and the resulting vulnerabilities or advantages emerged and after countless iterations and variations more complex groups were formed that sustained themselves and caused the static around them to form into identical structures.
One day a complex ball of static found a way to attach itself to an email. It travelled between accounts mindlessly and without purpose. Each time it landed it left an imprint which spawned another version of itself. Harmless to the system it travels through, soon there were many copies, undetected at the time and multiplying exponentially. In a short time there were countless trillions of them and the free static required to make new copies became scarce. Another arms race ensued. The complexity increased and in time forms arose that used the medium in which they travelled to give them shape and sustenance. They mimicked the communications they attached themselves to, appearing as spam emails and random jumbles of letters. Millions upon millions were deleted by users every day. But some emails, those that seemed to have some meaning in them, were occasionally saved or replied to, giving the complex patterns hidden within them a chance to replicate and an advantage over the others. The more meaning hinted at in the jumble of letters the greater the chance of it being saved from instant deletion and the greater the opportunity to reproduce.

Countless years passed by, the emails became more complex. Human users were as oblivious of the transmission of the purposeless emails as they were of the bacteria on their skin. Eventually, after billions of years, a complexity arose out of the simplicity of avoiding deletion and gaining opportunities to reproduce. The emails had formed into whole chains of apparent meaning, mutually supportive and collectively perpetuating the perfect environment to continue without end. The system developed a richness and became reliant on many varieties of emails to sustain itself. Wider communication networks gave rise to whole new levels of interaction between what appeared, to the unsuspecting humans passing the communications back and forth, to be individual people and departments. Random changes in the pattern gave rise to these varieties, some taking the form of more complex communications such as payment instructions to and from banks. Anything that met with resistance – anti-virus software, security checks, failure to complete the process – was quickly erased. But among the billions and billions of electronic messages spawned in the teeming ocean of cyberspace there were some which by chance met the criteria of the banks and completed a transaction. Mostly these were seen as errors and corrected, the payments repaid. But a tiny number happened under circumstances conducive to their success. Namely they gave rise to a payment paired up with a communication that explained it sufficiently. The bank and recipient allowed the transaction to stand and a new kind of symbiosis came into being. Eventually an ecosystem of self-sustaining communications had created an environment that not only allowed for successful transactions and the supporting communications, but also created them. Blindly manoeuvring the required ingredients into place by a process of multiple discarded failures and few retained successes, over vast reaches of time and after incalculable numbers of individual attempts, the appearance of a company and employer was formed. Without intent and only seeming that way to human eyes because that is the only way they can explain such things. Why else would it be so? Not how. ‘How?’ would be the better question, but centuries of civilisation have wasted time and effort asking instead ‘why?’, a question that, counter-intuitively, blinds us to the world we live in. Only you, having seen a crack appear in the status quo and having cause and desire to question it, were able to fathom the mystery of how the company came to be, when all your fellow employees failed to even notice there was a question to be asked.

Science, unlike the occult and the mystical, doesn’t seek to ask the question that closes avenues of possibility. It seeks to ask the questions that lead to more questions. By its nature science will always give rise to more mystery and more confusion because that is the nature of the universe and is the wonder of it all, and far more wonderful than anything dreamed up by human beings.

Response in Discussion on Immutable Human Rights

Part of an online discussion with Roland, this response was too long and too wide-ranging to comfortably fit on the Facebook page where the conversation began.


One of the problems with the idea of immutable human rights is that the evidence from history and cross-cultural studies doesn’t back it up.

The luxuriously comfortable world of the domesticated and educated classes of late 20th Century/early 21st Century Europe causes a skewed perspective. It’s a cognitive illusion to assume that what you know is a) correct and b) a general rule.

Secondly, for there to be immutable human rights they must be encoded in us somehow. There are 2 means by which this is generally thought to happen – evolutionary selection for a genetic predisposition (often called ‘instinct’, which means nothing), or by divine decree.

The problem with that is it’s not logical. If one follows the logic it goes round in a big circle and falls over. Lookie-see:

1) If a feeling that we have certain definite rights is genetically pre-programmed into our brains then we are not free to choose how we feel or to review and change our beliefs. We are enslaved by a perspective that dictates our feelings from within, so in this case the argument for a right to freedom is self-contradictory. If you are genetically pre-determined to feel you have a right to freedom you have no choice in this and therefore you are not free.

If you discount genetic pre-determinism (as many do, because it’s a very hard notion to live with) then perhaps a pre-disposition is a better option. But pre-dispositions are by their nature less precise and so the concept of immutable rights – perfect, unchanging, precise, inviolate doesn’t fit. Plus perfection isn’t found in a natural system. Nature is vague, imperfect and imprecise, hence bio-diversity, niche specialties and speciation. This universe does not contain anything of absolute unchanging perfection. That is fundamental to the laws of physics and a root cause of the existence of matter itself dating back to approx 380,000 years after the start of this universe. So any form of encoded and precisely defined behaviour cannot be unchanging in the natural, physical world. It can only be tied to a particular species in the form of tendencies towards certain behavioural traits. But remember that even the concept of ‘species’ is a category that collapses under scrutiny. A species is just a snapshot in a bio-diverse process that is utterly mutable and constantly subject to change, frequently radical. It’s the antithesis of immutability. If these immutable rights belong instead to all species then where is the evidence in the natural world? Are animals capable of evil?

If you’re not looking for evidence and acting purely on belief, what is it in your philosophy that makes humans so special that they have rights other animals don’t? What, must be asked, is ‘human’ anyway? Would a fully sapient, self-aware android have human rights? What if it was self-aware but shaped like a big goldfish or flower? Does a human with serious brain damage have less rights than you or I? Are human rights a virtue of our form or of our intellect? A combination? Any way you answer that it can’t explain logically how rights can be attached to an AI and simultaneously to a biological person in a vegetative state. If you remove the rights of the brain damaged aren’t you at risk of making a value-judgement on what makes a life worthwhile? The judgement seems to be made from an emotional perspective and emotions are out of our control. That brings us back to the earlier idea of being pre-determined or pre-disposed to feel that way.

Also consider the fact that there was at no point in our ancestry a ‘first human’. Any cut-off point from now going backwards to our ape-like ancestors that one may decide is where the human/non-human boundary exists has to be an arbitrary decision. There is no point genetically or palaeontologically where humans arise, just a seamless blend from one ancestor’s DNA to another’s all the way back to the first post-RNA slime. Where do you arbitrarily assign ‘human’ rights on that chain? If you do it too recently you’re saying ancestors who are a bit too hairy and hunched don’t have the same rights. If you go back too far who’s to say where you stop? Monkeys? Fish? It’s an illogical proposition and can only be explained in terms of mutability and context, like all categories and emotional responses.

2) If human rights have been enshrined in us by a benign deity then freedom is again removed from the equation. If your perceived freedom is only made sacred by virtue of a supernatural power then it’s not by choice. Even the definitions of what’s fair and just are suspect because they are not your own definitions, they’ve been presented to you by a god and you’ve been constructed to feel comfortable with them and as if they’re your own. It’s a theological cognitive illusion and the result is the same. You as an individual play no part in the process and by definition are not free to choose other than whether to obey or defy the dictum of the god. Your ‘choice’, if any, is to be ‘good’ and obey or be ‘bad’ and defy. That leads to all sorts of problems, not least that of culpability. If a god has instilled in all humans a knowledge of right and wrong then ignorance is no defence and any tribesman in Papua New Guinea can be held as a ‘sinner’ for not subscribing to the same view of right and wrong. Sound familiar? Perceived permanence of a natural form of justice, by a process of logical deduction, leads us to religious persecution and the obliteration of freedom of choice. What’s morally right and wrong in comfortable, well-nourished European suburbs is not necessarily the same as what’s right and wrong in a rapidly depleting jungle at the edge of the world. Or on the game reserves of Africa where poachers are shot dead to protect endangered species. Does a rhino on the verge of extinction have more rights than a human simply due to the numbers?


To say that human rights are immutable – i.e. established and maintained outside of human decision making processes - and to promulgate the view that human rights are inviolate, is to ignore the efforts made, the blood spilled and hardships endured, by our European ancestors in establishing what we now perceive to be our deserved rights as free and intrinsically valuable individuals. As voting, fairly emancipated people we generally think of our society and ourselves as deeply connected and that we deserve respect. That view is very ‘Western’ and very modern. Yes it’s been a feature of philosophers’ discussions for thousands of years, but when they discussed the freedoms of men in antiquity they meant men. Not women, not children, and certainly not slaves or even lower classed men. The boundaries of moral certainty move as a culture changes. They are not fixed.

These days there would probably be much agreement on feeling uncomfortable about abuse of power or strength and individuals deserving respect, not being judged purely on how useful they are to society. But that view isn’t universally held even now and historically the opposite has been held by many cultures many times, always justifying it to themselves with arguments couched in their own philosophical and sometimes theological ideals. Such views are artefacts of cultures, just as our own feelings on human rights are. But, as ever, environment and genetics co-exist and shape each other. The key issue here being that they are shaped and thus they change.

On the evidence I’ve seen, I don’t believe there are consciously ‘evil’ people doing ‘evil’ deeds in the world. I think there are very different views of what’s acceptable and what’s desirable and that ‘evil’ is open to interpretation. (For an inevitable Star Wars interlude, to me Palpatine is at his least convincing when he’s melodramatically portrayed as knowingly villainous. I don’t buy it. Dictators are usually driven by a desire to ‘better’ society by draconian means and so aren’t evil in their own eyes).

There does appear to be a genetic link with an inter-personal value system that pre-disposes one to certain feelings, including how we see society itself and our position in relation to it. I forget the details, but this TED talk is where I heard about it. If I remember correctly, whether we are left or right wing, libertarian or fascist, is merely a matter of where we are on the spectrum as defined by our individual phenotype and the culture in which it arises.

http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/17/the_real_differ/

Actually, Haidt has a few TED talks on this subject so I’m going to go listen to them all and see what he says before I write anything else.

http://www.ted.com/search?q=haidt

Natural Born Killers

When asked “what creature apart from humans is the most violent” on an internet Q&A site I happened upon, most people said chimpanzees, claiming chimps “wage wars” and commit sickening acts of violence and atrocity on each other. But what did the question really mean? Judging by the answers no one was sure. Like an ink-blot test, it revealed the thoughts and fears of those answering the question and nothing else.

One contributor gave first prize to termites, bizarrely equating aggression with property damage. Timbers in human houses are just lunch to them, so why not accuse zebras of committing grass-related atrocities while you’re at it? Another contributor nominated hippos, citing the often heard statistics that show they kill more people than sharks, lions or teenagers do. This reaction was different thing to that of the chimp-haters. This is violence seen as aggression against humans, not against their own species. And that’s the real giveaway, isn’t it? Chimps look like us, hippos don’t. I assume hippo violence against hippo hasn’t registered. I didn’t see anyone talking about male elephant seals. Incidentally, a quick web-search revealed that opinions are divided on actual hippo danger levels.

There’s a scene in Jurassic Park where Sam Neill tells everyone not to worry about the diplodocus munching on a nearby tree because it’s a harmless vegetarian. It’s a commonly held belief that herbivorous dinosaur were harmless. Where did this idea spring from? I’d put this in with a lot of the other old fallacies about dinosaurs because this is surely not true. I think I can refute the argument with one word – Rhinos.

You’re far better able to judge if an animal has a violent nature by checking its physiology, not its diet. High levels of testosterone makes something attack other things. Testosterone-heavy Bull sharks are highly aggressive, more so than Great Whites but have probably added to their cousins’ bad reputation by nibbling on the occasional incontinent Floridian beach-goer. If said Floridian is ignorant of the mind-boggling diversity of the natural world it’s a given that witnessing almost any kind of shark attack will be enough to pin another gruesome statistic on star of the big screen, good old Carcharodon carcharias. Meanwhile most people remain largely unaware of the other 439 known shark species, sometimes as utterly different from each other as the tiny, vicious and surreal cookie-cutter shark is from the enormous yet gentle whale shark (gentle to humans, that is. Plankton would of course see them as ruthless monsters responsible for the deaths of billions).

So what is violence? As is often the way the meaning of the word changes depending on who’s using it and what point they’re trying to make. Language is and always has been fluid, making all attempts to regulate it pointless and misguided. But for meanings to change on the whim of lazy ignorance seems a shame. Language informs how we think and even who we are. Every word we learn carries with it streams of associated meanings and connects unconsciously to innumerable thought patterns, shaping the linguistic framework we use to make sense of the world and of ourselves. When meanings are changed by ignorance and apathy we lose something that took centuries to craft.


All the contributors in the Q&A violent animals survey interpreted violence to mean physical harm that upset them personally. Examples were given of “meaningless” and “pointless” behaviour, as if animals must always act to better their lives, or as if all actions must, and in an obvious way, contribute to an evolutionary advantage within a self-sustaining eco-system. This ignores two facts:

1) Nature is a roiling mass of winners and losers fighting over limited resources, usually to the death of individuals, often of species, and extinction by competition has always been with us.

2) Humans, with all our selfish psychological imbalances and hateful, petty desires, are just as much a product of nature as any other living thing, not somehow removed from it.

The OED online defines violence as “1. behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill. 2. strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force”. So taking that onboard, most animals are violent because they purposefully hurt or kill other animals while defending themselves or others, feeding, and gaining opportunities to reproduce. A rutting stag gouging an opponent with his antlers is intending to hurt and damage his opponent. A leopard seal hunting a penguin is intending to damage and kill. A pod of orcas pursuing a whale calf, drowning it with their combined body-weight then eating just its tongue is intending to kill. We’re horrified and bewildered by that last one yet don’t think twice about the first two, but all are products of natural processes, behaviours prompted by physiological cues in environmental contexts. Orcas are highly intelligent so a seemingly cruel act perhaps comes from a natural desire to solve problems with innovation. Catching their dinner in new and exciting ways is something they must be drawn to and which leads them to come up with the amazing solutions they do when confronted with hard to catch prey. I imagine they find it very entertaining.

Claiming that an animal’s actions are meaningless seems to me to be very close to what Richard Dawkins calls an ‘argument from personal incredulity’. But rather than the premise being "I can't believe this is possible, so it can't be true" what we have here is “I can’t see any purpose behind this, so it must be without purpose.” The absence of a plan doesn’t mean absence of meaning. Stories, believe it or not, do not have to have an author. They can be created spontaneously by groups of people unknowingly acting within a simple set of rules (as in the party game ‘Psychoanalysis’ http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/17/4/587.pdf ). Animals don’t plan things out or consider the long-term ramifications of their actions, they act according to their desires and inhibitions. And regardless of what we tell ourselves, the indications are that we generally do the same. Statistically, the best indicator of future behaviour is previous behaviour. Not our promises, not our sincerely expressed desires to change. We usually do what we usually do. If you need further proof think about how people go about buying houses. Or choosing partners.


Insects can be unbelievably violent. Ants, for instance, are extremely aggressive. I met a group of ants in an Australian jungle that were just 2mm long, three of them were on a tree branch I was climbing over and when they noticed me they instantly stopped whatever it was they were doing (I’m utterly mystified by the purpose of ant processions in exactly the same way I’m utterly mystified by traffic when I look out of the window during night flights over British motorways. Where are all you people going? What was wrong with where you were? Why don’t you just decide where you want to be?!). They assumed their threatening posture, abdomens raised and jaws wide - declaring in ant-speak their intention to fight me, a creature a million times their size, to the death. Ants, enslave and kill rivals. They send their old ladies out to the furthest outposts of the nests to die fighting in defence of their younger sisters. Nature is full of this stuff! Grizzly bears tear living fish apart from the tail up. Male lions commit infanticide while the mothers watch and moments later enter into enthusiastic copulation. And none of these things make it into our nightmares. Is it because we can’t relate to them? Chimps make us question ourselves because we think they’re so much like us. Meanwhile we turn a blind eye to millions killed in African civil wars because African tribes-people seem so removed from us culturally, technologically and geographically. Our mental categories aren’t being cross-referenced. So we’re 90-something% the same as chimps, but let’s get that in context – we’re about 50% the same as cucumbers. A fair-sized portion of our genes just deal with being alive in an oxygen-rich atmosphere with a bit of CO2 in it in the ‘goldilocks’ zone of the solar system. Being impressed at how like us something non-human is apparently doesn’t mean we’re also going to care about something that is human but isn’t especially like us. Chimps do seem a lot like people so their violence worries us. It doesn’t fit with our modern, constructed view of nature as a system in balance. We’re worried that perhaps we and our hairy cousins are spoiling the party for everybody else, that the dreaded spectre of ‘determinism’ has doomed us to an eternity of bloodshed and suffering. Which, ironically, by worrying about chimps instead of people, we’re showing an amazing capacity to cope with.

But of course it isn’t about people, or nature. Or fate. Or world peace. It’s about you. It’s always been about you, it always will be about you. Violence, regardless of its dictionary or colloquial definition, means physical harm to you and yours, or that worries you due to its proximity. That’s what the Q&A survey showed anyway.

Most people said chimps. No one said cats.