How Life Has Value, Even Absent Overarching Purpose

Wherein lies value?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Among the most-common questions from philosophy is, ‘What is the purpose of life?’ After all, as Plato pithily said, humans are ‘beings in search of meaning’. But what might be the real reason for the question about the purpose of life? I suggest that what fundamentally lurks behind this age-old head-scratcher is an alternative query: Might not life still have value, even if there is no sublimely overarching purpose? So, instead, let’s start with ‘purpose’ and only then work our way to ‘value’.

Is an individual's existence best understood scientifically — more particularly, in biological terms? The purpose of biological life, in strictly scientific terms, might be reduced to survival and passing along genes — to propagate, for continuation of the familial line and (largely unconsciously) the species. More broadly, scientists have typically steered clear of deducing ‘higher purpose’ and are more comfortable restricting themselves to explanations of empirically, rationally grounded physical models — however inspiring those peeks into presumed reality may be — that relate to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of existence. The list is familiar:

• the heliocentric construct of Copernicus and the mechanistic universes of René Descartes and Isaac Newton
• the Darwinian theories of evolution and natural selection
• the laws of thermodynamics and the theory of general relativity of Albert Einstein 
• the quantum mechanics of Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger. 

But grand as these theories are, they still don’t provide us with purpose.

Rather, such theories focus on better understanding the emergence and evolution of the cosmos and humankind, in all their wonder and complexity. The (not uncommonly murky) initial conditions and necessary parameters to make intelligent life possible add a challenge to relying on conclusions from the models. As to this point about believability and deductions drawn, David Hume weighed in during the 18th century, advising,

             ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’.

Meanwhile, modern physics doesn’t yet rule in or rule out some transcendent, otherworldly dimension of the universe — disproof is always tough, as we know, and thus the problem is perhaps unanswerable — but the physical–spiritual dualism implied by such an ethereal dimension is extraordinarily questionable. Yet one cannot deduce meaning or purpose, exceptional or ordinary, simply from mere wonder and complexity; the latter are not enough. Suggested social science insights — about such things as interactions among people, examining behaviours and means to optimise social constructs — arguably add only a pixel here and a pixel there to the larger picture of life’s quintessential meaning.

Religious belief — from the perspectives of revelation, enlightenment, and doctrine — is an obvious place to turn to next in this discussion. Theists start with a conviciton that God exists — and conclude that it was God who therefore planted the human species amidst the rest of His creation of the vast universe. In this way, God grants humankind an exalted overarching purpose. In no-nonsense fashion, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza took the point to another declarative level, writing:

‘Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived’. 

This kind of presumed God-given plan or purpose seems to instill in humankind an inspirational level of exceptionalism. This exceptionalism in turn leads human beings toward such grand purposes as undiminished love toward and worship of God, fruitful procreation, and dominion over the Earth (with all the environmental repercussions of that dominion), among other things. These purposes include an implied contract of adding value to the world, within one’s abilities, as prescribed by religious tenets.

One takeaway may be a comfortable feeling that humankind, and each member of our species, has meaning — and, in a soul-based model, a roadmap for redemption, perhaps to an eternal afterlife. As to that, in the mid-20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in characteristically unsparing fashion:

‘Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal’. 

Universes constructed around a belief in God, thereby, attempt to allay the dread of mortality and the terror of dying and of death. Yet, even where God is the prime mover of everything, is it unreasonable to conceive of humankind as perhaps still lacking any lofty purpose, after all? Might, for example, humankind share the universe with other brainy species on our own planet — or even much brainier ones cosmically farther flung?

Because if humankind has no majestically overarching purpose — or put another way, even if existentially it might not materially matter to the cosmos if the human species happened to tip into extinction — we can, crucially, still have value. Ultimately value, not exceptionalism or eternity, is what matters. There’s an important difference between ‘purpose’ — an exalted reason that soars orders of magnitude above ordinary explanations of why we’re riding the rollercoaster of creation — and ‘value’, which for an individual might only need a benevolent role in continuously improving the lot of humankind, or perhaps other animals and the ecosphere. It may come through empathically good acts without the expectation of any manner of reward. Socrates hewed close to those principles, succinctly pointing out,

            ‘Not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued’.

Value, then, is anchored to our serving as playwrights scribbling, if you will, on pieces of paper how our individual, familial, community, and global destiny unfolds into the future. And what the quality of that future is, writ large. At minimum, we have value based on humanistic grounds: people striving for natural, reciprocal connections, to achieve hope and a range of benefits — the well-being of all — and disposing of conceits to instead embrace our interdependence in order not only to survive but, better, to thrive. This defines the intrinsic nature of ‘value’; and perhaps it is to this that we owe our humanity.

Fermi's Paradox . . . But What If?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Seven decades ago, the physicist-of-atomic-bomb-fame, Enrico Fermi, pondered with his lunchtime companions at Los Alamos whether other intelligent life forms populate planets around the Milky Way, and if so, why we have no evidence of them? He purportedly asked, “Where are they?”, meaning, of course, the alien beings. Because if other complex, intelligent, technology-clever life forms have even a fraction of humankind’s proclivity toward curiosity and, let’s say, colonization, then why is there no evidence of them having acted on these instincts throughout our galaxy? From that conundrum, Fermi’s Paradox emerged.

The American astrophysicist, Frank Drake, later thought about which factors might be necessary to address Fermi’s question and, in particular, how many technological civilizations, emitting electromagnetic signals, might exist among the stars of just our galaxy alone. These became known as Drake’s Equation, and offer a way to calculate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way based on seven variables.* Although scientists can’t yet insert firm numbers for the variables, I think Drake’s effort remains a worthy first attempt at eventually quantifying an answer to Fermi’s question. Especially given that the physical laws of evolution could well differ among far-flung, unfamiliarly diverse chemical, biological, and physical conditions and constraints, yielding singularly different intelligent species.

Many ‘what if’ hypotheses exist by way of possible answers to Fermi’s deceptively simple question. For example, perhaps technology-based civilizations and species with sophisticated intelligence are too far separated by space and time, measured even in thousands of light-years to reveal any presence. Or perhaps, because of the finely grained conditions necessary for life with high intelligence to evolve (the ‘anthropic principle’), civilizations are so rare and scattered that it’s difficult to find each other. Certainly it seems that our own sending-receiving (and space-faring) technologies are too primitive to matter much yet in the sophisticated game of cosmic outreach. Or just perhaps other civilizations have spotted us, but regard humankind as too biologically and intellectually primitive a species to bother with whom to show their hand. Or perhaps they regard humankind as a prototypically warring species, never-endingly engaged in small-minded, lethal belligerence over territory, resources, and power. Perhaps all intelligent species tend toward self-isolating wariness that outweighs curiosity about ‘the other’. Perhaps Thucydides’ thesis that established and rising powers are compelled to go to war applies even on the interplanetary scale.

All that said, should there eventually be confirmation of alien intelligent species that are endowed with far higher levels of consciousness and intelligence than humankind — qualities having evolved over histories hundreds of thousands or millions of years older than ours — then the consequence would be culturally tectonic shifting. As a species, perhaps lulled by so easily triumphing over so many of our Earthly competitors, we’re prone to indulging in flights of ‘exceptionalism’. We’re predisposed to looking at our reflection in life’s mirror and — more often looking down, not up — seeing only reasons to preen over our capacity for rationality, creativity, and imagination. To be unseated, with a thud, by an alien species’ cognitive prowess — and the benefits to its civilization — could prove unsettling for humankind’s indulgences in unchallenged exceptionalism.

At the very least, discovery of our sudden non-uniqueness might compel reexamination of basic principles. It might lead to fundamentally questioning religious texts, customs, tenets, rituals, codes of morality, ‘spirituality’, and dicta. If so, the result may be to rethink and rewrite the underlying explanations and descriptions, widening out the aperture of religious philosophy and theology to take into account the new realities of not being alone in the galaxy and in larger cosmos. At the heart of such teleological investigation and reinvention might be questions, which never go away, about humankind’s purpose: about why we are here.

The stunning space-time topography of this universe isn’t hubristically ours alone. I venture it’s a matter of when, not whether, the ‘code’ to Fermi’s Paradox will be cracked.

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*Drake’s equation, as in our image, is typically shown as follows:

N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L,

Here N is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable; R* is the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life; fp is the fraction of those stars with planetary systems; ne is the number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life (the habitable, ‘Goldilocks’ zones around their suns); fl is the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears; fi is the fraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges; fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space; and L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.