The Meaning of Life

1. The Meaning of Life Does evolution have anything to say about it?

2. Life, the universe and everything…

3. Purposes • We can value things in two rather different ways: • Some things are valued ‘for themselves’- these are things we seek or do simply because we value them (typical examples are good food, happiness, activities that we enjoy like skiing or swimming or reading; for some these might include religious observances …) • Some things are valued as means to things that we value for themselves. (Typical examples here are money (it’s a pathology to value money for itself), drudgery (work that must be done but which is not itself enjoyable), religious observances for some fall in this category rather than the first…)

4. Teleology • For Aristotle there simply were purposes ‘in the world’: the analogy between organisms and their parts and human tools and their parts was taken to be sufficient to justify speaking of the purpose of (say) the heart (today, A would say that this was to pump blood through the circulatory system– at the time this wasn’t known). • These purposes did not require a conscious, deliberate agent behind them– they were simply part of nature (or at least, part of how Aristotle understood nature: They play a role in explanation, answering ‘why’ questions of the ‘what for’ type: What do these organisms have a heart for? To pump their blood!).

5. Evolution and teleology again • Evolution eliminates this from our understanding of nature– there is no special role for purposes in a scientific explanation of what goes on in the world, even when it comes to living things. • The natural world, considered solely in itself, doesn’t have purposes at all. • This is the ‘mechanistic’ world view that has emerged from modern science; it’s been an immensely successful enterprise, developing powerful accounts of how things work that we’ve been able to use to achieve the unprecedented wealth, power and security we now enjoy, at least in the wealthy countries of the world.

6. Biology • Modern biology is a part of this project, and is also immensely powerful (its potential is still being explored and expanded). • Evolution is central to modern biology, as we’ve seen: it holds it all together, it warns us about the potential changes in disease organisms (multiple antibiotic resistance in bacteria) and pests (resistance to pesticides), and even suggests ways to avoid these outcomes (proper use of these drugs and chemicals can reduce or even prevent the spread of resistant strains).

7. Life and purpose • But for the science of life itself to give up on the notion of purpose seems paradoxical at best, and depressing at worst. • If the absence of purpose in a scientific description of life implies that there really just is no such thing at all, then that’s a downright ugly result– and it’s one that I could certainly understand people objecting to! • But the question is, does the absence of purpose as a fundamental concept in biology really imply that there are no purposes?

8. The Direct Answer • It can’t have that consequence, because we all have and pursue goals and purposes (our understanding of our own actions depends on this). • This may not be satisfying- in accepting modern science, including biology, while maintaining that we do have goals and values, we may be embracing some sort of contradiction (humans are like that…). The implication may still be there– we may just be (in effect) ignoring it.

9. On the other hand • Science itself (as a practice, as an institution, as an activity) is among the actions we can’t understand except in terms of purposes– in the case of science, the overarching purpose of seeking a powerful explanatory account of the world we live in, and local purposes like understanding the structure of atoms, the origins of camoflage or mimicry in butterflies, etc. • So if modern science’s description of the world rules out purposes, it actually undermines our understanding of what we’re doing as scientists– a very peculiar result.

10. So far • The emphasis so far has been on just how much we would be giving up if we gave up on purposes altogether. • If purposes aren’t ‘built in’ to organisms (and nature) in general, as Aristotle thought), could they arise in the course of evolution? • Some have proposed ‘emergence’ as an answer to this. • On one account, an emergent property of a system is a property that its parts don’t have, but which the system as a whole does have.

11. Four approaches to teleology • Elimination: The scientific world view includes everything, but does not include goals at all– the world is just a mechanism and we’re part of it. • Reduction: At some point in the evolution of life, organisms really come to have goals as part of their nature. • Dualism: Ditto– but something special and non-natural must be added to make this happen. • Compatibilism: Interpreting what some organisms do in terms of goals is a way of understanding things that we use for different purposes than mere descriptions. We learn to apply it to ourselves and others in a well-motivated way, but it is a further sort of description– it’s aims are distinct from those of description.

12. On elimination • On one level this attitude is just incomprehensible: How can I understand myself if not as an agent who seeks certain goals? What is left of the self here, in fact? On this view, I’m just the sum of my parts, a collection of interacting cells–and those cells are dying, and being replaced all the time. There’s no continuing individual thing that is me, the agent, in the scientific world view.

13. Hard determinism (incompatibilism) • Think now about something that I do– whether good or bad. • How did it happen that I did this thing? • The answer for the elimination view is clear: my body’s parts and their arrangement, together with the circumstances, caused the body to make certain motions. • If that’s all there is to anything I or anyone else does, the whole business of praising people for good things they do and blaming them for bad things they do makes no sense– it’s all just a matter of the workings of nature. • Some people have defended this view (d’Holbach): Ethical talk and teleological talk are just noise that we make. • This noise may affect our behaviour in some ways (and so a tendency to make certain kinds of noise could even be selected for). • But there is nothing those noises are about; they don’t describe anything in the world…

14. It’s never anyone’s fault • From a descriptive point of view, neurons work in certain definite ways. • Given me as I am, placed in a particular situation, either there is something I will definitely do or there are a range of things that I might do (perhaps with different probabilities). • In the first case it is a mere matter of natural laws that I will do what I will do. • In the second case the laws don’t determine what I will do, but they do fix the probabilities: whatever happens is no more under ‘my’ control than in the first case. • Either way, whatever I do, it’s not my fault– any exactly similar thing will have the same probabilities of doing what I do.

15. Possible Lessons • Some endorse this purely scientific picture, and declare right/wrong an ‘illusion’ (and the concomitant praise and blame for actions unjustified). (This is a form of eliminativism…) • Some say that our responsibility for our actions is so fundamental and so obvious that we know there is something missing from this scientific picture of things– that some further ingredient plays a crucial role in generating choices, and it’s this ingredient’s role that makes us truly responsible for what we do. (This is a form of dualism…)

16. Two other possible lessons • Some say that there is a natural account of how some actions arise that makes those actions ‘free’ even though it’s also true that they are either determined by circumstances and natural laws or their probabilities are so determined. (This is a reductionist move…) • Finally, some say that interpreting an event as an action that someone is responsible for is not describing what happened and how it came to happen. This normative use of language serves a very different purpose from descriptive language: it helps us to deal effectively with our fellow human beings as members of social groups rather than describing & explaining the workings of the world. (This is what I’ve called a compatibilist view…)

17. Eliminativism • We’ve discussed this view– it’s also the position that Ruse and Wilson have adopted (with their ‘illusion’ hypothesis). • On this view even language itself is just a system of noises (and inscriptions) with certain effects. • This is indeed part of what a language is– but for Ruse and Wilson it’s all that language is, since meanings and intentions are just as problematic as right and wrong (in fact, this is pretty obvious, since meanings determine what constitutes correct or incorrect usage and true or false sentences– forms of rightness that turn on the norms associated with language.

18. Aside on games: PD • PD: B cooperate defect cooperate 3/3 1/4 A defect 4/1 2/2 Note: The payoffs give A’s reward first, B’s second. The cooperative dividend here is 2 (net difference between DD and CC); it’s automatically divided equally in this game…)

19. Games: Chicken Chicken: B cooperate defect cooperate 3/3 2/4 A defect 4/2 1/1 Note: The payoffs give A’s reward first, B’s second. The cooperative dividend here is 4 (net difference between DD and CC); again, it’s automatically divided equally in this game…)

20. Can we get some kind of evaluation out of these games? • Some reductionists think that these kinds of games provide reasons for a purely self-interested individual to bind herself to cooperate– which requires that she actually change her psychology in a way that makes her respect such commitments rather than cheat on them. • This is motivated by the availability of cooperative dividends (and the possibility of working out a way to share them).

21. An important lesson • The ultimatum game…here’s a game where knowing how to cooperate and what’s expected (a social issue!) is essential to playing successfully.