The Hardest Stuff of All?

Phil Bowermaster over at The Speculist revisits the death-gives-life-meaning argument in response to having seen the film, Stranger Than Fiction. I haven't personally seen the film, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about the issues and philosophical questions Phil raises in his November 24, 2006 post, The Hard Stuff.

Phil notes:

Whether we're talking about our jobs or our relationships or our lives in their totality, commitments that can't simply be turned off and situations where there really is risk involved, where something truly is at stake, are bound to be more meaningful and more real to us than experiences lacking those qualities. So I guess I'm with the buzzkills on that point – life extension may very well take some of the immediacy and poignancy out of human life. And, yes, we really will have lost something there.

However, he goes on to say:

I just can't make the same leap the buzzkills do. Let's look at another example of the same kind of thing. When air travel substantially replaced rail travel (at least in this country) and ocean liners, travel became less romantic and glamorous. We really did lose something, there, too. Of course, what we gained in the transaction made it a good deal, and I certainly wouldn't make the boneheaded argument that air travel should be eliminated to bring the glamour and romance back.

I don't think death, specifically age-related death, is really the issue here at all. Rather, Mr. Bowermaster is simply acknowledging the fact that risk and difficulty add depth and richness to life. Whenever a particular risk is mitigated or eliminated, the structures (literary, artistic, ideological) that grew up around that risk over the years can lose their poignant luster -- in short, another piece of meaning-bolstering certainty falls away, sometimes taking something beautiful along with it.

Or at least, that's how I interpret that particular argument.

Personally, I don't think we (as in present-day sentient beings) are really in a position to worry about what happens when there isn't "enough" risk. Aging is only one risk variable -- even if longevity medicine improves to the point where most of us can make plans for our 500th birthday party with reasonable confidence that we'll be there to celebrate it, there are plenty of things left to worry about.

Simply put, I think that anyone who is worried about healthy life extension taking meaning away from existence (Leon Kass, I'm looking at you) is missing the bigger picture: the fact that there will always be accidents, the fact that we have no idea what kinds of cosmic catastrophes could be facing the earth (remember, we're a ball of rock spinning through a universe we are barely beginning to understand), and the fact that this universe could end up in heat death (or some other unimaginable end) regardless of what kinds of life extension and risk-mitigation technology are developed.

Phil seems to agree me on this:

it's safe to say that people faced with such [future] choices will still take their lives very seriously, and will find that there's plenty of hard stuff yet to go around. After all, we still consider our lives difficult and challenging, even though our hunter-gatherer ancestors might think we live in some kind of paradise. So on the question of meaning, there's good news.

Yes, mitigating any particular risk forces the sapient population into a space where, once again, we must question what exactly makes life really matter -- just as new and emerging transformative technologies can prompt a sort of existential panic in those with a little-examined self-concept. Anyone who wants to remain sane and healthy while navigating accelerating change would do well to build up a sense of meaning that does not depend on any particular construct remaining in place forever. Someone who is concerned that eliminating this or that risk is going to excise the meaning from their life should realize that finding and constructing meaning is itself an awe-inspiring and self-fueling challenge.

I would almost wager that in some ways, humans as a whole are reeling from the growing realization that meaning and significance are so subjective and malleable. Rather than being foisted upon us by gods and kings, or even by the myriad forces of untamed nature, meaning is something that exists because of minds. Because of persons. There is indeed no such thing as meaning in the absense of sentience. Certainly, there is phenomena in the absence of sentience, but not qualitative worth. And coming to terms with this may lead to a kind of nihilism at first -- I remember making a deliberate decision to "peer into the void", so to speak, when I was about twenty years old (nearly eight years ago at the time of this writing).

I read in a book that it was impossible for a person to imagine their own nonexistence, so I tried to imagine it -- and was thrust into a strange space made of amorphous threads of "source code", constituent polygons, and sweeping landscapes of time so vast that I cannot possibly quantify them with words. This was purely a meditative thought experiment; no drugs were involved (though I was in college at the time, so sleep deprivation could have been a factor in allowing this kind of thinking to take place).

I remember sitting in my physics classroom, waiting for a lecture to begin, and drawing a comic strip of a stick figure sitting at a window, outside which lay the totality of existence. The stick figure was permitted one brief illuminated glance when the shade on the window lifted briefly, but that was all. That brief illuminated glance was "life", and it was bordered on both sides by an unfathomable dark mystery. A friend of mine recently described this picture of existence as something akin to, "a short bright moment bookended by oblivion". And certainly, there is a kind of poignancy to that picture. Analogies to fireflies, fireworks, and mayflies come to mind, and therein lies the stuff of poetry.

Is it this -- this poetry of glimpses and glances amidst walls of indeterminacy and nothingness -- that come as part and parcel of "The Hard Stuff"? Perhaps. But it is my contention that in order to survive the future -- emotionally and intellectually -- sentience must move into a realm of post-nihilism, into a space where scientific materialism is not viewed as an enemy of beauty, but as the very thing that makes beauty possible.

That, perhaps, is the "hardest stuff of all": the kinds of thinking that sentience must engage in in order to keep perpetuating an existence that is, truly, wonderful. There is something on the other side of the void, teen angst notwithstanding. I will end with part of something I wrote on a mailing list a few months back:

I’m not convinced that over-arching “supergoals” are all that important in the grand scheme of things; once we’ve dealt with basic survival issues, everything on top of that is rather subjective. Perhaps this sense that everyone and everything needs a supergoal on the order of survival is merely an artifact stemming from the very powerful motivation FOR survival that we’ve needed all these years.

Why not a series of personal mini-goals? Paint a picture, write a novel, climb a tree, beat Zelda again, prove a theorem, build a supercollider, make cookies, play with kittens, tour China, create your own model of China, invent a new kind of noodle, plug your brain into a machine that lets you watch your dreams, dream, videotape penguins, search for extraterrestrials, grow your own extraterrestrials, run infinite simulations, see how high you can count, knit a blanket, knit spacetime, start your own television show, make holograms, build an entire city out of Duct tape, breed immortal dragonflies, watch stars form and wax and wane over millennia, push on galaxies…you get the idea.

Sure, there might be some sort of “ultimate meaning”. However, I don’t claim to know that there is such a meaning — and I generally operate under the assumption that there isn’t, since the individual human viewpoint is so incredibly subjective, and I don’t stake my existence or enjoyment of life on the potential of that sort of meaning.

Certainly, I’ll keep learning and exploring and delving into scientific mysteries, but this process is just as rewarding if there’s nothing but knowledge at the “end” (if such an end even exists) or if there’s some sort of unforeseeable complex prize that would keep anyone, even a superintelligence, happily occupied basically forever. The process, and what is experienced during the process, is just as important as any sort of goal, “super” or otherwise. And knowledge is no “booby prize”; lacking all that knowledge we stand to gain still, who knows what we might think of to do with it once we have it?

Evolution has granted us the capacity to enjoy things. Being able to enjoy life, regardless of whether you’re being chased by a ravenous tiger or not, is an adaptation in the sense that it motivates people to continue existing. Which, of course, allows for the perpetuation of both genes and memes — if our ancestors had all been suicidally bored between mammoth hunts, we wouldn’t be here right now....

And as far as I can tell, there is no predetermined limit to the depth one might find in art, music, or mathematics. And I’ve never found knowing how or why something works to make it any less beautiful or amazing — to suggest that understanding something means you’ve “used it up” is, frankly, incoherent to me. All I can say is: speak for yourself!

Meaning isn’t some kind of externally-sourced quantity, but a product of symbiosis. I, for one, plan to meet the universe at least halfway in that regard.