SUNDAY, MAR 14, 2021: NOTE TO FILE
The Meaning of Life?
Schopenhauer updated
'If you knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they want to be resurrected, they would shake their heads.' —Arthur Schopenhauer
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: 42, FROM THE WIRES, LIFE, UNIVERSE, EVERYTHING
Abstract: Why speak of meaning? Life is an endeavor to persist as adaptive, evolvable, dissipate subsystems that Nature alone (as system) selects for. We are the environment (system). Perhaps they have the answer (e.g. ants, redwoods, corvids) who do not ask the question.
COOS BAY (A-P) — Perhaps we ponder the meaning of life because as modern techno-industrial humans of NIMH we are not biota of place.
Is the nature of the Earth system in which we find ourselves, at its very core, a good place or a bad place? Is it fundamentally friendly or hostile, orderly or chaotic, controllable or uncontrollable, rational or irrational or and/both? And where should we look for an answer? Philosophy? Religion? Ancestors? Spiritual teachers? Holy Books? Echo chambers? Pundits? Political leaders? The one certainty is any source will do, but not science. The answers we seekers of the Red Pill crave cannot be known by listening to Nature who alone has all the answers, therefore we can but believe what we want.
Traditionally, philosophers have tended to emphasize the rational, human-friendly side of the world, arguing that there is a good reason for why the world is as it is, and that part of that reason is that it needs to suit our desires and needs. The world has a purpose, and we are (in one way or another in a rather good way) at the center of it all. Human centrism is presumed. There is someone or something out there that makes sure of this, some kind of cosmic director or playbook that intends us to be the heroes of the story that is the history of the universe. A god perhaps, mostly likely the One True God or an Spiritus Mundi wills it, or our own pure and transcendental world-building Self or 'I' as Individual titan of our own life, alone or as a member of the one true tribe, scripts the ascendancy of Me, Myself and I, of We the People.
Yet if that is so, why do we have to encounter so much adversity and suffer so much? Why are there so many horrible diseases, epidemics, and natural disasters that blight so many, by all accounts, innocent baby's, children's, people’s lives? Why do we keep fighting wars that maim and kill millions? Why can we not stop taking from, using, hurting each other? And why do we have to age and die? In short, why is there so much evil in the world, physical and moral, and how does all that fit into the alleged Greater purpose?
Why do humans of NIMH who live in, are products of, overcomplex societies suffer? Our overdensity ways of living select for psycho-social pathologies that accumulate from generation to generation such that we live dysfunctional lives of quite desperation or manic striving. We are storytelling animals and there are no true stories that serve our political agendas. Unless the Cosmos is a simulation, some student's higher school science project, then there is the What-is 'out there' apart from our stories about what we think, feel, perceive, assume, conceive, believe to be out there.
Perhaps corvids or cetaceans tell stories, but unlike humans, they do not believe them. Without our cherished beliefs, what would come of our motley drama, of our 'hour upon the stage... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...and much of Madness, more of Sin, and Horror the soul of the plot'? What if we lost our belief in belief? Could our certitudes falter? Could our hubris stand down?
In many societies drinking alcohol occurs in a competitive spirit as drinkers try to outdo each other. Staying sober is understood as an expression of power over self and the world, of mind over matter: my willpower versus the bottle. This becomes the consensus story and every time an alcoholic gets drunk, family and friends invite him to show more self-control to redress his failure to hold his liquor. He stops drinking for a while, but at a certain point he seeks to demonstrate his control and recover his pride by drinking just a little. The return to drink pathology then is an attempt to correct. The alcoholic arrives at a crisis situation where to live in the sober state is miserable, while to drink is a form of slow suicide.
The immediate effect of the alcohol, however, corrects the illusory story that one is separate from and opposed to the world. Initially the drinker feels more integrated and relaxed, a better person. He then goes on to drink too much, which leads to further humiliation and suffering. All moderns suffer various pathologies that arise from our storytelling ways.
One way out, for some, is to join an alternative tribe having contrary beliefs, e.g. those of Alcoholics Anonymous: belief that you have no control over the bottle, no power, no name, that you can only escape the misery of sobriety by helping others submit to a higher authority. Belief in 'challenging' the bottle thereby becomes unthinkable to the true AA believer. Rather than controlling the world/self, however, we could learn to adapt to and understand it.
Richard Feynman tells of walking along one afternoon and getting the thought that a drink would be nice. He recognized this as an early sign of addiction and foresaw it would lead down the path so many others follow who fail to foresee, to question beliefs. He was having too much fun with his brain and stopped drinking. Understanding the dynamic he was becoming part of was his deliverance from it. No belief, for or against, was involved as addiction provides no long-term benefit, is life denying whether you believe it is or not, and so he had no choice but to stop drinking. I had relatives who became alchoholics, one a professor, and so I assumed I was not different in kind and stopped at no more than tasting several forms of alcholic drinks as the decades passed. Even if one set of beliefs can delivery you from another (if the alt beliefs can be maintained), not believing anything, letting the what-is stand clear before you, is saner.
'If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.' —Gregory Bateson.
