Objective and Subjective Meanings of Life

This post is aimed at exploring the Ultimate Question: Purpose of life. Let me begin by classifying the kind of possible purposes of life  into two broad categories : Objective and Subjective.

By Objective purpose I mean the kind purpose which are assigned to us externally i.e. "from the outside". This sort of purpose would be the one assigned by a creator to its creation e.g. god to man . Or a programmer to a robot  or to chickens by the farmer  (i.e their very purpose of life is that they can be eaten  infact the particular variety of Broilers chicken would not have existed had there been no humans with desires to eat them) .

By Subjective purpose I mean the kind of personal purpose which an individual assigns to himself  as the goal of his life. Such a purpose could be anything and could even be extremely trivial. what are various examples of such purposes ? It could be things like experiencing  a good loving family life, traveling the world to experience world culture , helping others via philanthropy and social works, seeking knowledge and truth , excelling in ones career and job, pursuing creative works such as art, obtaining power , wealth etc etc  or a combination of all of these. It could be anything.  Each one of us will decide for themselves what is it going to be our calling.

Given the aforementioned descriptions it seems obvious to me that if God doesnot exist their would no reason think that human life has any kind of objective purpose. On atheism, humans beings are just contingent unintended by-products of naturalistic processes that causes complex systems to arise . Should we rewind and replay the course of the universe,  we would have a very different sort of reality. There is no objective purpose of life if God doesn't exist.  Having conceded this point , I would argue that the atheist can still have a purpose of life. There is absolutely nothing which stops such a person from going ahead and adopting a  personal subjective meaning to what he wishes to accomplish in this life. There can still be subjective purposes to life if God doesn't exist. i.e a person can still find meaning in activities such as the knowledge and intellectual pursuits , reading books.,self-development, the company of friends, in travel, food, movies, games,  in enjoying a loving relationship, spending time with a loving family, pursuing hobby projects. Basically anything that ones find worthwhile doing.

Whats the point ? 

At this stage one might be tempted to object to subjective purposes with something like this : "what's the point?, its all useless and meaningless anyway on the grand scale , why bother seeking knowledge, helping others etc when its not going to matter on the cosmic level . the universe will exactly be the same whether one tried or not . so why even bother? " .

But i find this objection a bit puzzling . Why must a purpose count only if it effects the cosmos on some grand scale ?  Isn't the fact that the person pursing his subjective purpose is ultimately fulfilling his desires itself a reward  for that person?  what other reward could we ask for apart from desire fulfilment? even in case of objective purposes we are also ultimately working towards desire fulfillment , if not our own atleast that of the creator.  Clearly all purpose is ultimately linked to desire fulfilment whether it is subjective or objective.

Interesting thing to note  is that  even the theist use many subjective purposes as a guide to there lives in addition to there objective one. If they didn't you would think they would embrace some sort of religious monasticism becoming a astetic who wanders the roads in search of God and yet a theist would pursue wealth, power, worldly happiness, worldly knowledge, family life  as much as s/he would pursue spiritual ones. That alone demonstrates that subjective purposes aren't as useless as one might be tempted to think on first glance . Even without god we can live purposeful ,  fulfilling and satisfying lives which are free (or substantially free)  from nihilistic worries.


Isnt Objective always better than Subjective ?

No. The purpose which is assigned to us externally (i.e an objective purpose ) is not automatically and by default always preferable to any personal purpose of life which one might assign to himself and herself (i.e subjective purpose) . Ultimately it depends on the actual content of the purpose instead of whether it falls in the objective category or subjective category .


Here is a hypothetical thought experiment to demonstrate that it is possible for  subjective purposes to be  far more  preferable to objective ones :

Imagine a farm with a lot of chickens on it being born only and only for a singular purpose: to be eaten by human beings as food. Now imagine somehow one such chicken obtains self-awareness and self-reflection to the same extent as humans do. Such a chicken ponders on its purpose of life and realizes its very reason for existence is so that it could be killed by another superior species for food. The chicken escapes the farm and decides to reject this purpose which was objectively forced onto it from the outsides by its "creators" and instead decides to find its own meaning of life which might consist of activism for chicken rights, traveling the world seeking knowledge etc etc. whatever it selects as its personal purpose it seems clear that in such a scenario any subjective purpose which that chicken chooses would be million times more superior to the kind of objective purpose it was assigned by its creators

Similar situations arose in the movie The Island where clones discovered that there very purpose of existence was to be killed for organ harvesting in case their original needed the organ. They decide to reject the purpose , escape from the detention facility and ultimately choose to lead there own lives with there own purposes of life. Although the movie doesn't depicts their future but its safe to extrapolate that whatever purpose of life  they would have assigned to themselves  it would probably  have been superior to the one they were created for.

But lets get back to reality : Is it not possible for at-least some human beings to be in a similar position when it comes to objective purpose assigned to us by God ? The purpose of life in religion is somewhat close to something like obey and worship god,  or even "Enjoy" God etc. In this case , whether a person finds this objective purpose preferable over subjective ones or not  ultimately depends on the personal views and tastes of person. For example, I personally don't find much love towards the idea that  I exist  purely so that I could worship/obey the creator first on earth and then for an eternity in heaven. Given the choice I would rather pursue my own desires (and that of my loved ones) rather than some invisible deity.

I have nothing against  worshiping and obeying a  morally worthy diety but I would personally prefer the pursuit of knowledge, reflecting on various philosophical puzzle, the pleasure of the company of friends and family and even the pursuit of wealth and power over the objective purpose of mindless worshiping rituals  anyday. Perhaps it  might be that I would come to respect God and worship him on my own (thereby "enjoying" him) but I can only see that at best as just one of the underlying purposes of life. Defiantly not the most preferable one.

Therefore it seems to me that even without god a person can live a fully "purpose-driven life" which might actually be far more interesting and meaningful given the fact that we are free to choose whatever path we want to take.

Naturalistic explanations as an alternative to Design-based (teleological) explanations

The design arguments has captured the imagination of thinkers since the ancient times. The arguments attempts to conclude the existence of  a intelligent mind as the cause of the complexity and order of the universe or some aspect of the Universe (e.g life)

It is generally remarked that the progress of science has had a fatal effect on the strength of classical Design arguments. Why is that so? I believe the reason is this: when we look at the history design argument its strength has always arose from the fact that we know of only one alternative to Design :random chance. So if something is not the result of intelligent planning by a mind it must be the result of sheer coincidence. For example Epicurus an atheistic Greek poet proposed that atoms are always in motion and sometimes they collide and clump together and those chunks can accidentally take the shape of complex systems e.g. human beings. (he relied on the possibility of an infinite regress to increase his probabilistic resources). However the complexity of the world and the way things are interconnected with each other (E.g. human beings suited to their environment) is simply too much to be explained as a sheer coincidence (moreover infinite regress idea itself has some puzzling implications). Our intuitions strongly seduce us towards an intelligent planner. and I tend to agree. Infact had I lived in such a time I would have considered the design argument to be an extremely powerful demonstration of a mind.

The sentiment is understandable for when ancient humans pondered on the world they were aware of only one model of how organisation and complex systems arose and that was the model of intelligent agents making things (the Design model). Design is how humans crafted material and we were familiar with that so it was natural to extrapolate that to the natural world and assume that natural object must have also arose via design.

But with the progress of science we have discovered the concept of laws of nature. Every scientific explanation appeals to these laws (along with chance ofcourse) in order to explain natural phenomenon. What do we mean by law of nature ? We observe that mindless matter has certain attributes that gives it certain abilities e.g. the ability to attract other matter, ability to carry charges, ability to release energy and break apart etc. It is these powers , abilities and liabilities of matter that we are referring to as laws of nature. So when I throw a ball in the year its not just a coincidence that it falls down. Had it been a coincidence it could have continued moving upwards or went sideways or diagonally but rather it falls down as the natural law called gravity dictates that matter must behave such and such way.The project of science is to attempt to explain every natural phenomenon in terms of interaction of these powers and abilities of mindless matter.  Any explanation that appeals to these laws of nature as an explanation of the world is termed as a 'naturalistic explanation'.

For example given Newtonian mechanics and gravitation its very easy to explain how space dust can come together to form star.-planet systems. No intelligent designer is needed in this respect. Similarly Consider biological evolution , which is excellent example of how natural law interacts with chance to give an naturalistic explanation of a complex phenomenon. In evolution the natural selection represents a non-random (guided) selection of organisms based on their ability to survive in the environment. This guidedness arises due the organisms own attempt to survive against environments , predators, sexual selection. Natural selection work on the variation generated via random mutations which itself is a purely chance event. Hence evolution is a non-random selection (law of nature) of random mutations (chance).

Similarly Consider how how geographical features such mountains and seas and rivers arise due to the movement of tectonic plates. Look at how snow crystals are formed thru very simple laws of of geometry, symmetry and crystal formations. Look at how fractal-based natural patterns emerges via the action of very simple rules being repeated over and over. Why is intelligence needed to explain this when the powers of mindless matter are themselves enough to account for the incredible complexity of the world? 

Laws of nature can generate a sense of guidedness and an illusion of teleology(purpose) in nature even when their is no minds or intentions behind things.  Every succesful scientific theory is an empirical evidence of the power of natural laws to generate complexity and organization in the world.

But what bout the Origins of the laws themselves ? The fact that science has not yet been able to explain the existence of these laws has motivated theologians to construct a design argument asking for the very existence of these laws rather than the effects these laws can create. This is often remarked as the Finetunning argument.  The idea being that the laws of nature (or the physical constants) must be in a certain way in order for them to cause the complexity of the natural world. I plan to dedicate a separate post for discussion of finetunning but for now i will note the following 3 things:

firstly, it should be kept in mind that the laws themselves explain the other natural phenomenon e.g. planets, life etc so here we have literally less to explain. Our burden of explanation is now only limited to explaining the laws themselves. its not that we have two tasks left e.g. explain laws and also explaining the resulting complexity of the world.

Secodly,  the question of "why these attributes and not others" can be asked in respect of anything that we would invoke to explain the laws of nature. so we can ask why if god had slightly different intentions , powers , knowledge , motivations then universe as we know it would not have existed.  so its as if someone fine-tuned the attributes of god.

Thirdly, It seems hard to deny that God himself is not a form of order . Perhaps he is not a physical order but certainly a mind capable of producing 'complex' ideas and transforming them into complex 'realities' is a form of order. and so the question of "where does order and complexity comes from" is still unanswered. at one point or another we must concede that some order and complexity might just be a brute fact of nature.

God and Desirability of Purpose

During debates on the existence of Gods one sees the question of purpose of life being raised quite often (take example of Lowder vs Fernades debate , audio can be found here ). The idea being that if there is no God then life would be utterly meaningless and purposeless. But I find this extremely puzzling - not the actual question of purpose of life ofcourse (that itself is quite a genuine question) but what confuses me is why  such a question being raised in discussion aimed at assessing God's existence?

Suppose one were to concede the maximum  that without god there simply cannot be any purpose of life and nihilism is the only option for the atheist. What follows from that? It seems quite obvious that the only conclusion one could establish from this concession is that : therefore atheism is depressing.

But surely that's an irrelevant conclusion. Reality has no obligation towards us to make us feel good . It might be that perhaps reality may  indeed turn out to be quite depressing. The mere fact that a belief makes us happy, content and provides psychological / emotional comfort is itself no reason to conclude that the belief is true.  All of us can think of a million examples of cases where a lie might make us feel happy and truth can make us depressed. There are a large number of truths which we may find undesirable such the death of our close relatives or failure in a particular task , yet we don't declare them as false merely for that reason of being emotionally painful. The desirability of a belief is completely independent of its truth .Therefore it follows that the question of "what is the meaning of life" , while it might be an interesting puzzle for humans to ponder (perhaps the most important),  it is completely irrelevant as an objection against atheism in the context of God's existence. It is nothing more than an emotional argument.  

If it is indeed the case that life is absolutely meaningless then the correct rational attitude towards this is to face our situation with courage and humility rather than to take refuge from it in comforting lies.. However  I believe the concession that without god nihilism is our only option itself is quite an exaggeration. While one may not have any ultimate  and cosmic purposes without god  that doesn't stops us from assigning a subjective purpose to it. More on that in later posts.

The Puzzle of Consciousness

‎"When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote... of a soul?" (Lanning - I, robot)

Here's is a thought experiment to demonstrate why in my opinion , self-awareness and consciousness is such a mysterious phenomenon:

Imagine i attach my laptop with a accelerometer type sensor that can measure impact force e.g. the kind used in car test crash dummies.  Then i write a little program that basically generates  screaming voices depending on the threshold of the impact on the sensor . Higher the impact more painful sounding is the scream . afterwards  I proceed to punch the sensor again and again and hence my computer starts screaming .But in this scenario i think everyone would agree that the computer isn't really genuinely "feeling" pain and aware of it in the same sense as say a human would have been .... it merely behaves as if it is self-aware yet it is not really self aware. for example it doesn't ask "why i am being hurt ? ". It would be absurd to attribute any self aware to it.

But now fast forward to 1000 years in the future where we have managed to create robots with exactly the same level of emotional and intellectual complexity as the human brain posses . Now if i  proceeded to brutally beat that robot and as a result the robot starts crying and screaming , again , just like the case of my computer , we should still technically say that the robot isn't really self-aware of the pain . its just random codes behaving as if it is self-aware. i.e it doesnt posses an inner subjective sense of self which can experience the pain.

  

Here is where the puzzle arise . As per physicalism  which seems to be supported by   science atleast in the context of mind-bran relationship,  aren't humans also like extremely complex robots ? if so then why is it that such a robot need not be self-aware yet we are?  what is the thing that causes that difference ? THAT  is the fundamental  puzzle of consciousness .  

In this post i am merely attempting  to  lay out the problem . The relevant solutions are to be left for a later time i am afraid.