The purpose of life …

August 31st, 2008 admin Posted in Philosophy |

Kavita is driving her Pontiac Vibe south towards Charlotte, North Carolina, and eventually Atlanta, Georgia; it is still the beginning of this Labor Day weekend. I am settled is the passenger seat with the laptop in my lap and Louis Armstrong’s Greatest Hits enveloping us.  The sun is setting to my left, lining the edges of the blue-gray clouds in brilliant yellow-orange.My thoughts drift in and out of a notion I stumbled upon a couple of weeks ago. It came unannounced and in a spark of realization. However, it has stayed with me for quite some time. And I now think that it deserves some more inspection and hence this write-up. The notion, the thought, was with respect to a question all of us ask ourselves, and wonder about, at some point in our life. Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Are we simply on nature’s rollercoaster, evolving forever to be able to survive, as the conditions allow it? Is life just purposeless meandering of helpless beings? Is purpose something we concoct and associate with life to try to give it some shape and meaning? Are we just telling ourselves stories to make passing our time here a little easier? Are these stories about the purpose of life, and we know there are many versions, with many names, just the grandest of the entertaining illusions created for us and by us, entertainment-seekers?

Mankind is different from all other living creatures, mankind claims. Why? That is the question. And in that “Why?” lies the answer - reason - the ability to reason and the thirst for reason. The ability to reflect, to introspect and to innovate is a manifestation of the same distinction. The introspection that helped us identify this distinction, and the introspection that is the distinction, are one and the same. The question is the answer. And though this kind of an answer seems vaguely incomplete, almost too obvious to be significant and only escapist wordplay, this general principle of self referencing is central to intelligence.  Humans are considered different from other living creatures because they are intelligent – capable of participating in a closed loop of self-evaluation and adjusting behavior to the findings of such an evaluation.

Before trying to experiment with the notion of self-referential answers and self-fulfilling prophesies about the purpose of life, let me go back and try to work on one of the questions that I raised about the need for a purpose of life. We could say that our existence is just a chance happening that rolled out of millions of years of chemical reactions that happened simply because the chemicals were in the right place at the right time. These chemicals were helpless and had no say in the reactions at least until a point when the chemicals became sophisticated enough to preferentially seek out the right place and the right time. Prior to such time, the direction such reactions took were driven by the state of affairs in the rest of the universe, or, in other words, chance. Gradually, the chemicals involved in the chemical reaction became more sophisticated and were able to extricate themselves somewhat from the mercy of chance. The beings, like humans, had the power to identify and appreciate to some degree, their position in the scheme of things, their significance and insignificance with respect to the rest of the universe. Even if they did not have the answers all worked out, this chance chemical reaction had reached a stage where it was curious enough to question the need for that very reaction. The reaction itself started off as a mathematical probability. The direction the reaction took, the continual readjustments to keep the reaction alive, though also not immune to chance, does seem to point towards something more than just survival. The evolution of species, most recently humans, sometimes seems wholly unnecessary. Other animals alive today are perfectly suited for today’s environment. Yet there was something guiding the chemicals to continually keep reacting in a way so as to develop newer species, not necessarily any better suited to the environment, but definitely better suited to think about this question - What is the purpose of this reaction – the reaction which has reached a scale where it can finally identify its existence and think about itself? And when we pose the question thus, the answer seems to scream out at us. The reaction has reached the point where it can identify itself, and is trying to figure out where it is headed. Maybe that is the goal of the reaction, at least for the time being – figure out where it is headed. Put another way, and this is the claim I was driving towards, maybe the purpose of life is to figure out the purpose of life!

I have not established a reason for why there needs to be a purpose to life. I have just tried to argue that there must be some other reason to life than perpetually trying to be best suited to the environment we find ourselves in. But maybe that argument is unsatisfactory. Even so, coupled with the reasoning mind, that argument, at least, nudges us towards a related, yet different, purpose - trying to figure out if there is purpose to life and if so, why. Not what, but why?

Either way, that is whether we say, “The purpose of life is to figure out the purpose of life”, or, “The purpose of life is to figure out if there is a purpose of life”, the open-endedness of this simple closed-loop recursion is similar to the answer to why is man different from other beings.  Stepping out of the mind-warp that this self-referential statement can lead to for the time being, I would now like to think about the similarities that this notion has to the many other answers to the same conundrum. This quest has the quality of being never-ending - an infinite, perpetually uplifting, notion, which is a quality found in any religion and any other answer to this question. The notion of self-referencing has a powerful individual appeal. Each thinking mind can seek to define its own purpose of life based on introspection. This is like each person defining and following his or her own religion, and more importantly recognizing that everyone else has a different, unnamed, religion.  Whether one chooses to figure out the purpose of life or to figure out if there is a purpose to life, they have a purpose in life. This seems better than any rigid doctrine that disallows continual refinements, and is certainly better than the aimlessness of a skeptic who either says, “I will never know the purpose of life”, or “I don’t care what the purpose of life is”. In fact, this self-referential notion allows the skeptic to hold his view as long as it seems reasonable.

I found this relevant quote today (09/24/2008):

“The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one.” - Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents.