What is the meaning of existence?
Truth and free will
The most important question is why we exist; what is our purpose, and how do we derive true meaning from an existence forced upon us without even the courtesy of an explanation?
A question of will
Somehow, we are cursed with the instinctive need to answer the unanswerable, to attribute meaning to an existence that at first appears meaningless. We need to attribute meaning to our existence, yet we never freely willed this need. We either make it our purpose to seek meaning that is never to be truly found, or we delude ourselves with arbitrary meaning for our lives, when meaning is not for us to give, but rather, it is for whatever brought us here. Or, we descend into purposelessness, and take the mantle of pessimistic realism, living a life bereft of purpose, excitement, hope, or connection. The, we just survive, not because we want to live, but because we’re too afraid of dying; yet another instinct forced upon us, the sense of self-preservation we never freely willed. And what of the suicides? Even their resistance of the instinct is still a response to it.
So desperate are we to find meaning, that we knowingly make up stories and mythologies of gods and demons to help us pretend we have an answer, even a fantastical one. Out of the thousands of mutually exclusive religions out there, at best only one of them can be true, and all the rest must be lies. Therefore, unverifiable and unfalsifiable religions cannot offer truth (except for the hubristic ones presuming that they alone possess truth, without any logical argumentations required).
Yet, other questions arise: why were we instilled with this desperate urge to find meaning and purpose, albeit a deluded one? How free is our will if we never freely chose to need what we need? How can free will exist when we aren’t even free to choose what we need? How free are we when what we want is not freely willed, but rather, it is the result of our fixed mental algorithms, which came about from our nature, and from random life experiences?
All we can do is deduce an interpretation of a meaning of life, and of existence, given what we can perceive... and given the ways in which we process what we can perceive.
Unfree will
We have no true free will, nor freedom to act within our unfree will. This is easy to prove. Our decision-making relies on our mental processes, our neural architectures acting as rails forever determining the path of a train; deviating from them would mean derailment, and the destruction of the train, in this case, our self. We wouldn’t be who we were if we thought differently. For example, one decides to exercise and another decides to be sedentary; this depends on how they process input, given their personal considerations, values, self-image, and what they hope they can achieve. And all these vastly different parameters are given; they were not freely chosen by these two people. So, whatever decision you “freely” make relies on parameters and cognitive methodologies that were not freely chosen by you.
As a caveat - I shouldn’t have to clarify, but I will anyway - I am not excusing evil deeds by attributing them to deterministic factors. There is a huge difference between excusing and explaining. We are still responsible for our actions, good or bad, even though we weren’t responsible for the factors that made us the way we are. We are what we are, and that’s that. We still have to pay for our misdeeds, as we are entitled to benefit from natural advantages that we never earned. Life isn’t fair, and that’s it.
Our illusion of free will is determined by our neural pathways, which they in turn were formed by genetics and randomly acquired events, influences, trauma, education, and indoctrination. Even what we consider “education” is just our random and circumstantial access to information that we happened to stumble upon at a specific time in our life when that information could have made a relative impact. For example, if you happen to read the laughable communist manifesto at 8 years old - the childish fairy tale that it is - you’ll probably take it seriously, and imagine Marx to be your personal Santa Claus with a bag full of free stuff made by gulag elves. If you read it at a more mature stage in life, you’ll probably pinpoint the insane and evil implications of communism and of socialism in general. So, what you think was your freely acquired conclusion to the same input does not rely on your free will, but rather, on random external circumstances.
The darkness of free will
To truly have free will means to have no defining framework of thought; to be everything and nothing at the same time. But then, you cease to be you. True free will denies you your individuality. Just like every computer processor requires unchanging electrical pathways, so do we need a defining framework. We aren’t who we are without the foundations of our personality, the steadfast framework that defines who we are. You are not free to conceive yourself and your reality any differently; and this is a good thing. Freedom to not be you denies you your own self. Even choosing to change who you are is the result of randomly acquired input processed by your randomly acquired mental processes.
With pure free will, we cannot exist as individuals. And even if it were possible to exist as distinct entities with free will, we are - as it stands - deprived by our nature of all possible choices. This means there isn’t much room to expand our will beyond the limitations of our physical body, our limited time of existence, and the limited confines of our planet. So, how free are you if you are free to roam your prison room, or free to think only what your limited mind can perceive? Not only that, but we are programmed by our nature to waste the vast majority of our existence laboring to satisfy our physical and emotional needs, a task that is meaningless, really. So, how free are we to explore what we can explore, given the limited resources at our disposal?
Most of our existence is simply driven by instincts, which are nothing more than biological programming by our nature. Our needs are simply the unfree urges that compel us to act a certain way. Even when we ecstatically satisfy those needs and urges, we are subject to our biological programming that rewards and punishes certain behaviours. Even if we stubbornly resist our instinctive urges, they are still there affecting us, and our resistance to them is still a response to them.
We are not free; we cannot be free. Pure free will cannot exist in individuals; by its definition, and by theirs.
Yet, the only measure of free will we can attain may perhaps be the realization and acknowledgment of the parameters and mental architectures that make us unfree by definition. This means that, those who believe they are free are indeed hopelessly unfree. And those who conceive their mental shackles have a measure of freedom of will, at least the freedom to see reality as it is: a prison of self.
So, here we are, aware of our own inability to be free. We exist in the prison of our minds, escape from which would mean the destruction of who we are. Simply ‘who’ we are, and what defines us, are the ball and chain of an existence from which there can be no escape, for as long as we exist.
I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.
- Nikos Kazantzakis
Courage to acknowledge the facts
With the limited powers of perception allowed to us by our nature, we can observe that we are marooned in a reality that denies us the courtesy of knowing why we are here. We are endowed with the indignity of animalistic instincts, the curse of an instinctual urge to have to consume life to sustain ours. We are doomed to be humiliated in disgust of our bodily secretions, to mindlessly seek meaningless chemical pleasure in our carnal delights, to surrender to power-lust and feral aggression that are the consequence of instinct-programming rather than of logical free will, free from deterministic factors.
It is apparent that reality is indifferent to us. People live and die purposelessly; even those who find an arbitrary purpose themselves are in deluded denial: it is not up to man - who did not make man - to give meaning to man.
Our reality disrespects us in our helpless surrender to our fragile nature, and it denies us the kindness of communicating with us. It denies us information that would help us survive and avoid suffering, and it does not consider us worthy of truth nor of acknowledgement; no matter how many religious theories we reverse-engineer to fit our desperate wishful thinking.
Reality denies us meaning for ourselves. The fact that so many living organisms live and perish meaninglessly - at the mercy of a nature that appears not to value us - shows that we are not worthy of having meaning for ourselves. If the nature that made us deems us unworthy of communicating to us meaning for ourselves, then we have none.
We are not important enough to even contemplate the notion of meaning for ourselves: Assuming my life has meaning for me is considered ego-driven hubris… so lowly in humiliating humbleness we are. And I know that no one wants to consider this possibility, as the implications of meaninglessness are worse than the concept of inevitable death itself.
A possible meaning
Yet, there could be meaning in our existence, not for us, but for the entities or inconceivable concepts that put us here. It is ludicrous for an ant in an ant farm to presume that its life has meaning for the ant itself. Yet, its life has meaning for the owner and observer of the ant farm. One individual ant is unimportant. The ant farmer will not bother tending to a single ant’s need for purpose, and he will not trouble himself with hearing an individual ant’s cries and prayers. But there is insight to be gained from observing the ant farm, not for any ant individually, but for their observer.
Sadly, it appears to me that we are here to produce data and insight for some purpose that is beyond us, a purpose that does not serve us as individuals, and which does not grant us individual meaning. Just like any simulation, we seem to be programmed NPCs without a purpose for ourselves, condemned to serve the purposes of others. There is meaning for the simulation, but not for the NPC in it.
Getting evolution out of the way
The theory of evolution does not hold logically because it asserts that complicated biological mechanisms that work harmoniously with each other emerged randomly and in parallel, again and again and again, for no reason at all. This a highly improbable occurrence, especially given the extremely limited time that life had to evolve (~2 billion years, they say).
Assuming the infinite rearranging of matter to somehow create the first self-replicating biological matter with the potential to mutate - and then mutate to sustainable and purposeful instances again and again and again in only 2 billion years of randomness - one would need the purposeful programming of infinitely rearranging matter to cover all possibilities instead of just producing infinite instances of the same most feasible arrangements. For example, the infinite monkey theorem is flawed: infinite keyboard strokes by a monkey will never produce the works of Shakespeare. Why? Because an actual monkey would slam keys in and around the same key clusters, and then get infinite combinations of the same gibberish. To get the monkey to cover all possible key combinations would require purposeful programming. The same applies to the ‘hurricane in a junkyard’ theorem: to cover all possible possibilities in random arrangements, you need purposeful programming, otherwise you get infinite instances of the same feasible instances.
Let me put it differently: an infinite spin of the roulette will give you every possible number on the roulette wheel. But you will never get any number beyond those numbers, no matter how many times you spin the wheel. Plus, the wheel needed purposeful programming to make its results as randomized as possible, plus the selection of numbers was purposefully made. Such controlled experiments in themselves disprove randomness. Even a computer simulation of randomness requires a purposeful set of programming rules.
But what about the infinite regression argument? If this reality requires causation, then its base reality needs causation too, and its base reality too, and on and on, without end. Wouldn’t it be easier to assume that a single reality can occur without causation? I don’t know. All I know is that we cannot perceive everything. But consider timelessness - existence beyond time - and therefore, beyond causation. Our entire timeline could be within such a timeless reality, forever unchanging, like a music record, with a beginning and an end, doomed to be the way we are, forever and never. Other such timelines of other realities could also exist in timelessness. This could explain causation without cause.
Conclusion: The answer to the meaning of life
‘What is the meaning of life?’ is not the right question. The right question is ‘For whom is there meaning to life?’
I believe there is a meaning to life and existence, but this meaning is not for us. In an ant farm, there is no meaning to the life of an ant for the ant, but there is meaning to the existence of the ant farm for its observer. An ant’s individual struggles, joys, dreams, and aspirations of an afterlife are unimportant and meaningless. What is meaningful is the data generated from that simulation, for whatever created this simulation.
For whatever reason, our existence appears to serve a purpose that we can only deduce with the little observation and processing power that is granted to us. If we exist in a time-bound reality, then there must be some kind of causality, a purpose that perhaps serves an overarching reality that is timeless and free from the confines of determinism.
But timeless freedom comes at a cost: without determining factors, no entity can exist as a clearly defined individual, a distinct consciousness separate from others, with unique experiences to its environment. Without unfree will, there is nothing to be experienced in a unique and meaningful way. Freedom to be all and nothing at the same time deprives individual experience. So, perhaps this reality is just a simulation, a video game for someone to experience something.
Perhaps this is the purpose of our reality: to enable a timeless consciousness that is chaotic and undefinable to experience distinct individual experiences through each and every life. The time limit of our lives makes them more distinct in experience, as infinitely long lives would tend to amalgamate into similar vapid personalities, each having experienced the same experiences infinite times.
An analogy would be the fantasy of an immersive role-playing video game: to escape our mundane reality, we create fake realities that, for a few moments, convince us that we are someone else, someone better, someone more clearly defined by parameters that we value. But most importantly, with video games, or any other fantasy-inducing medium such as theatre, movies, or literature, we fantasize about experiencing the protagonist’s purpose, that is more interesting and more gratifying than the purpose of our real lives.
What if our reality is just this - the fantasy of an entity craving for identity, purpose, and meaning? And if this is all we are, does any purpose we tell ourselves our life has hold any true worthwhile meaning? If this is all we are, then does the entity that made us possess any true meaning itself? After all, if we are nothing but a video game, a fantasy for momentary escapism, then what are we an escape from? Oblivion? Incoherent timeless chaos? The hell of an eternity without purpose, without definition, without organized thought, without defining attributes that determine individuality? What a hellish nightmare it would be to think all and be all at the same time…
Our reality may well be a limited string of time in a sea of timelessness. We experience time, but our time is set in stone; forever doomed to be as is, archived for eternity, recreated eternally with infinite points of present time playing back again and again.
If it is any consolation, what we are carries the essence of the consciousness that made us, a consciousness that may even be unconscious, since it remains undefinable in its timeless vastness… in its infiniteness, in its unending conflict of all possibilities, all thought patterns, all eventualities, existing simultaneously, without end, without growth, without resolution, without aspiration.
Perhaps this, the experience of hope, of aspiration, and of dreaming for something better - no matter how delusional - is why we are here. We are someone’s dream. Perhaps, our awareness of this dream will make it a lucid one, and only then perhaps could we hope to taste that little measure of free will that may be attainable. Only with a lucid dream, being aware that we are in a dream, could we perhaps gains some control over the dream.
Free will is chaotic, as it denies us our self-defining individuality. Unfree will is deterministic, as it denies us agency. What if true meaning resided somewhere in between? What if the attainment of such awareness - that of our unfree reality - is worthwhile meaning in itself… the only meaning and agency afforded to us?
Thank you for reading. I appreciate your time.
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A question of will
Very well written! Plus I am in complete agreement with you!