I don’t necessarily seek out philosophical thoughts or conversation. For all the angst such things induce, I might rather consider ignorance to be bliss. Despite my disregard, things kept popping up throughout the last year or so that would linger in my thoughts and challenge my conceptions of the meaning of life and morality. I suppose there is some usefulness to summarizing these things. When they do happen to come up, I can feel confident that I have given them enough thought and reached as far as I care to in those thoughts, and can quickly move onto something else. Also, as a father and atheist, I feel I should leave my daughter some amount of wisdom on these subjects since I am not leaving that age old catch-all: religion. I cannot offer her or anyone else (including myself) a solution to these problems, but instead, by stating the problems and some of their more basic considerations, hopefully the world and our fates seem like a less scary predicament.

My grandfather asked me if I believed in free will. I hadn’t thought about it much. I guessed not considering how much of our emotions are controlled by our autonomic nervous system (happiness, fear, sexual arousal, anger, etc.). R.S. Ramachandran’s book Phantoms in the Brain gives compelling evidence that our brains are like complex computers that can be manipulated and damaged to cause our personalities and experiences to change in rather predictable yet strange ways. For example, through temporal lobe stimulation or limbic seizures, people can be made to have religious experiences. Other researchers have found, by electrical stimulation of the amygdala, hormone or drug injection into the hypothalamus, or natural mutation of the forebrain, etc., that rodents can be made to compulsively self-groom. Another example, hoarding is linked to prefrontal cortex damage. And another, men with Klinefelter’s syndrome (an extra Y chromosome) are more likely to be convicted for sexual abuse, burglary, and arson. If we have control over our choices, how is it that we can so effectively predict and control those choices? Then there is the nurture part of what causes our human traits. Whole countries believe in a certain religion or certain moral principles based off the people around them, and those religions/morals are passed down for millennia as a means to keep order and share a common objective (often around the means of sourcing food). Some of these practices are mundane and possibly even healthy. While others… not so much: If you lived in a North American native tribe a few hundred years ago you might have practiced hanging yourself by skin piercings. Or if you are a Shi’ite Muslim, even in the present, you might practice self-flagellation to commemorate the Day of Ashura. And then there are the thousands of human sacrifices of: the Shang Dynasty, the Great Death Pit at the ancient city of Ur in modern-day Iraq, the ancient sacrifices of the Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, Egyptians, Isrealites, Stonehedge, and the Romans, and Greeks… If not expressed in our genes, our cultures certainly can compel us to do some pretty crazy things. Whether nature or nurture, we are obviously a product of our environment. If we believe those things outside the mind are controlled by the laws of physics, why wouldn’t those things within the mind also be? But alas, is this a satisfying way to think? Knowing others are predetermined to a certain fate, what is the point of getting mad at them (other than I am predetermined to)? It does not absolve one’s guilt or console the transgressed. How awful the world would be if we treated each other as nothing more than complex biological computers? And so I left this question as mostly solved, but myself unsatisfied.

A couple months went by when the podcast I regularly listen to, Econtalk, had an episode interviewing the physicist Alan Lightman. Alan agreed the universe and all events throughout time have been determined since the big bang. I accepted that as I did before, but another topic came up in that interview. He made the example: what if there was a colony of ants that evolved to be super smart? They grew a complex society, created works of art, felt complex emotion, had intimate relationships, etc. But, after a hundred years, there’s this heavy rain and a flood and it totally washes away the ant colony so that there are no traces left. Did that colony have any meaning? Did that colony matter? You see, us humans are in a similar boat. Eventually, all the stars in the universe will go cold and everything that mankind has created will be forgotten. We end up the same in the end, so what is the point? Is there meaning to our lives? I couldn’t help but feel a little sad thinking all our struggle, our great achievements, our stories, all will be lost. This did solve one problem though – at this point, I didn’t care if we didn’t have free will because it would all end up lost anyway.

Another month or so later, I was looking for an audiobook to listen to while running and happened upon Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Sorry for the spoiler, but in that book the main character, Billy Pilgrim, finds himself being transported through time to different moments of his life. In the end, dying was no big deal since it was a temporary situation. This felt good. What if time was like that? I guess nothing is lost in that case because that moment remains forever outside of time. The wishful thinker in me liked to come back to this thought, but since we don’t have a way to travel back in time, that glimmer of hope quickly faded.

Next, I listened to Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I should have known better that this would cause some emotional stirrings, but I thought I could use a little Zen in my life, and being an engineer who had been dealing with maintaining equipment at Intel Corporation for the last six years, maybe I would appreciate the motorcycle maintenance part. In that book, the main character’s alter ego, Phaedrus, expounds to great length the concept of quality. He reasoned that quality or value cannot be defined because it exists as a perceptual experience. At some point, it became hard to listen to. To me, it seemed more an exercise in mental gymnastics and unfamiliar terms than on scientific reason. Pirsig had some metaphysical thoughts on quality that I gave up on trying to understand. It did get me thinking though, about how we define what is good or bad. It seemed obvious to me. We define things as good or bad because things were either good or bad for our species throughout our evolution. Our social norms helped maintain order in our group and our mutual success. But again, that was not satisfying. If we think of it that way, we could dismiss morality as left over ape garbage and now that we are aware of it, we can reject it, and move beyond the emotional to more utilitarian logic based decision making where good and bad are unimportant… We are just complex organic computers after all. That doesn’t feel good… In that case, we can justify our worst atrocities if they are deemed good for the species. For example, if someone is about to die from a disease, is it alright to put them through extreme pain to test a medication or clinical procedure? Our species would benefit from the knowledge, and they weren’t adding benefit sitting there dying. Right? In this same line of reasoning, we could disregard any moral quandaries if they have no effect on society. For instance, if you are floating out in space and are slowly running out of oxygen with no hope of rescue, there would be no moral basis to disavow the torture of your crewmates. Maybe it is the evolved monkey in me, but I don’t want to accept something like that as ever being a morally ambiguous thing… but if everything is predetermined and everything will be lost eventually, then why be moral? At this point, I’ve given up and decided to go with my primitive morality and let emotion sway me over logic, but it does leave me at a disadvantage if needing to convince someone to be moral and they are not predisposed to the same feelings as me. And recall how our feelings can be wrong and so often lead us to do harm…

Next, a lighter bit of philosophizing came about while watching The Good Place. The show takes on the aforementioned philosophical issues as the characters die and: are found either worthy or not of going to the “Good Place” or “Bad Place” for all of eternity, change the rules determining what is good and bad, and in the final season, come to find out eternity is actually pretty boring. This final part hit me harder than a comedy probably should, but I found it a rather inciteful concept: When you can live out any wish any number of times, you will eventually run out of stuff to do. You could live every person’s life billions upon billions of times and there would still be an infinite amount of time waiting for you. In that case, this one temporary life I am so fortunate to have seems pretty good. Enough time, hopefully, for most people to learn and love with just the right amount of struggle and lack of time to be complacent and do nothing.

So what has this exercise achieved? Let’s do some accounting. I believe more strongly now that what we do and who we are is predetermined, but I’m going to act like it’s not because it doesn’t feel good. I still can’t prescribe a specific moral code and when I can’t find a logical reason to some moral choice, I might need to accept I’m making a judgement based on feelings. Our temporary lifespan makes more sense now, or at least an infinite lifespan no longer seems so great, but let’s not fool ourselves, the eventual death and destruction of all of mankind remains very much a daunting certainty. So, it doesn’t feel like I’m in a much better predicament than when I started… but that’s alright. My goal wasn’t to answer these questions, and now I do feel more at peace with not having them answered. With death looming at every point in our lives, after this exercise, I feel more strongly the importance to squeeze out every bit of life we can while we can. I can put these questions to bed and focus on learning how to live a good life. At my eventual demise, how can I look back on my life and be satisfied that I “seized the day”, shared as much love as I could, learned as much as I could, that I experienced life to its fullest? That seems like a more worthy and a more pleasing goal.