So instead, like I did before to keep your attention, here's one of my philosophy papers. I did not want to write this paper because it deals with a question that (a) I think the answer to is plainly true, (b) is depressing, and (c) brings to mind a lot of the terrible arguments I had with those close to me when I was super depressed.
Consequently, I procrastinated writing this paper and wasn't able to get started on it before I found a way to make it funny. But I did manage to conceive of a fairly novel (to me) argument while writing it, which is kind of the point, so that's good. Unfortunately, in the first draft (which I turned in), that novel argument was kind of muddled. I cleaned things up a bit for this post. So here's hoping my TA tries to find out whether or not I plagiarized anybody and ends up stumbling onto my second draft.
Before writing a
paper, one should always figure out why one is writing it. However, to save
time, I have decided to answer this question while writing it. More broadly
put, the question I’m considering here is whether writing this paper is in some
sense a meaningful thing to do. In asking this question, I will also be forced to
wonder whether anything at all—up to and including being alive—is meaningful. A
cursory examination of my thoughts reveals three potential reasons why I might
want to write this paper: to get a good grade, to have some sort of positive
impact on the world, and to give my life value. A detailed exploration will
reveal that none of these are sufficient reasons for paper-writing and that
it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that completing this assignment could be
considered at all meaningful. And yet there is no possible way for me to reach this
conclusion without analytically contemplating the question itself—without
writing the paper. I could have come to a different conclusion, so it would
appear that any necessary first step in finding meaning in life is looking for
it.
The most
compelling reason for writing this paper is that I want to get a good grade on
it. When we ask whether something is meaningful in this sense, we’re inquiring
as to the point or purpose of doing it. Here I am asking to what ends
paper-writing is a means. While it may not always be easy to elucidate the
motivation for any particular action, it seems clear that anything we end up
doing was motivated by something. Thus the motivation for writing this
paper—the meaning in doing so—is that I wish to excel academically. Within the
context of academic excellence, it is easy to find meaning in paper-writing.
Where trouble arises
is that the goal of getting good grades is itself embedded in broader contexts.
So we might be tempted to ask why doing well in school is a meaningful
activity. After all, if maintaining my GPA is not meaningful, it’s hard to
argue that any task geared toward GPA maintenance is also meaningful in a deep
sense. So we can follow a causal chain up from paper-writing that goes
something like this: I’m writing this paper to get a good grade; I want good
grades so that I can get a degree; I want a degree so that I can find a
satisfying, well-paying job; I want a satisfying, well-paying job so that I can
live a happy, moral life; I want a happy, moral life so that… well… here’s
where our chain runs into some problems.
Why do I want to
live a happy, moral life? It might be so that I can raise happy, moral children
who will raise happy, moral children, and so on. There’s no escape from the
chain in that direction. I might want to live this kind of life because I am
motivated to do so psychologically. If I am merely a machine in a clockwork
universe, then my desire to live such a life can be understood as a tool of
biological evolution for producing viable offspring, like the kind of animal
life described by Taylor in “The Meaning of Human Existence.” Happiness is
meaningful only insofar as I am a more efficient tool when happy; morality is
meaningful because social cohesion provides a better environment for rearing
children.
We might be
tempted to stop here and find meaning in being happiness-generating biological
machines, but doing so forces us to admit other features of the natural world
we find less palatable. We are also motivated to kill competitors, to steal
mates, and to enslave our inferiors. In fact, any action we take can be
rationalized as psychologically-motivated and thus ultimately stemming from
biological urges. Not only does this seem to grant legitimacy to terrible actions,
but it also doesn’t leave room for degrees of meaningfulness. If writing this
paper is just as meaningful as binge-watching House of Cards (consuming popular media signals to others that I am
a member of the group, increasing my social status and apparent reproductive
fitness, or something), then there’s no positive reason to perform any
particular action at all.
If we continue on
down the causal chain, we must engage in some reductionism. Biology is nothing
more than the chemistry of self-replicating, homeostatic, organic molecules.
Chemistry is nothing more than the physics of very large chunks of atoms. And
physics is nothing more than a fundamental description of reality. From this
vantage, why we engage in any particular action such as paper-writing can be
summed up rather neatly: because thermodynamics, or because the fine-structure
constant is 0.0072973525698.
While these might
be accurate descriptions of why we do what we do, they are not altogether
satisfying as explanations. The reason is that there doesn’t appear to be any
deeper significance to the laws of physics. It’s difficult to say that the
purpose of writing a paper is to conserve angular momentum. In fact, such a
statement hardly even seems intelligible, which casts doubt on it being
meaningful. At the end of this causal chain, we’re left not with motivations
for actions but abstract descriptions of them.
The way out that
many take here is to suppose that the underlying rules do exist for a reason,
and that reason is God. If there is a transcendent entity who makes all the
rules, including the rules that govern what is meaningful or moral, then acting
in accordance with the purpose laid out by this being would be a meaningful way
to spend one’s life, as Wolf alludes to in “The Meanings of Lives.” In that
case, all I have to do is figure out whether or not me writing this paper is
part of God’s plan.
Ah, but which God?
Throughout the span of human history, we have described (either via revelation
or invention) a great many possible gods. It’s unlikely that I’m going to be
able to settle on the correct one before completing this paper. In fact, it’s
not even clear how one might go about proving that a particular god is the
correct one, because many who profess such knowledge claim that it is a
subjective matter of faith. I might be tempted to find one specifically devoted
to paper-writing, but that seems somewhat self-serving.
In the absence of
any definitive proof about which gods are real, I am forced to abandon my
search for meaning down the path of purposes and points. While there is
certainly meaning within limited contexts, there is not a clear way toward
objective meaning by focusing on the reasons for acting a particular way.
Perhaps the
meaning of a thing is not found in the reason for it but in the significance of
it. Perhaps me writing this paper will have an impact on the world or be felt
in some way. This sense of meaningfulness is divorced from notions of what is
good about paper-writing and instead focuses on the lasting effects of paper-writing.
Something is meaningful if its creation adds to the world, changes the course
of things, or leaves a mark. Here, meaning is found in the positive features of
a thing—its extent and shape.
From this
perspective, it’s easy to see how my paper will be meaningful. It will have a
significant impact on the way its grader spends a half hour. Rather than
binge-watching House of Cards, the
person deciding my grade will read my paper, mark it up, complain about its
inanity to sympathetic ears, and be forced to wrestle with ELMS in order to
record my grade for all time. There are two possible objections one might make
to this conception of meaning: it’s rather permissive, and our intuitive sense
of meaning is of something grander.
Meaning as impact
is permissive in that significance is lacking qualification. Everything I do
has an impact on the world. Every breath I take rearranges the positions of
billions and billions of air molecules. Given the sheer number of states that
can be occupied by the atoms around me, everything I do ensures a permanent
change. That is, after I act, nothing will ever be exactly the way it was
before. Every tap of the keyboard makes microscopic changes in the structure of
the keys themselves. These are all lasting changes to the world brought about
by my direct intervention, but few would describe any of it as meaningful. Yes,
from this perspective, writing papers is meaningful, but so is scratching my
head or yawning.
So then we must be
discerning about what qualifies as significant if we wish to exclude the
trivial. One possible criterion is that actions must be noticed for them to be
significant and meaningful. Because I have no direct awareness of how my
actions change the molecules around me, my breathing is not noticeable and thus
not significant. This qualification still permits my paper to be meaningful
because someone else will be forced to read it, which might okay. We can say
that my paper would be more
meaningful if it were read by more people, if its brilliant philosophical
insights changed the way millions thought, if it were referenced in Wikipedia
articles, if undergraduate students taking introductory philosophy courses a
thousand years from now were required to read it. This sense of meaning gets at
the grandeur lacking from simply capturing the attention of a grader for a
short while.
We can object to
this notion of meaning in two ways. First, meaning as a noticeable impact on
the world is grounded concretely in the limitations of human awareness. These
limitations can be overcome by advances in observational tools. For example, we
could imagine a world in which robots with exquisite sensors monitor the
microstates of air molecules in my house and broadcast that information across
the internet for all to consume. Under such a scenario, my breathing has once
again become meaningful. But in the opposite direction, that which too few of
us are aware of is not meaningful. We can imagine another world in which the
prosperity of our civilization rests on slave labor that is hidden from us. We
would all find it to be very significant indeed if the weight of our world were
carried on the backs of the impoverished, and it seems incongruous to believe
that the meaningfulness of this notion depends on our being aware of it. It’s
also reasonable to believe a hidden slave population should be meaningful to
more than just the slaves, especially because it is easy to conceive of a world
in which they are unaware of why they labor.
The second
objection picks away at the seeming grandness of what we are capable of doing.
Having my paper appear on the reading list of future generations is about as
significant as paper-writing can get. We can move up in scope and ask what
possible significance my life in general could have. History is certainly
peppered with great men and women who have done awesome and terrible things
that echo in the present. Many historians might quibble with the idea that
great people are ultimately responsible for the changes we see, but it’s probably
possible to have a lasting impact on human civilization.
Yet here we are
faced with the inevitable absurdity of human life. History is doubtless
populated by countless significant figures we remain forever unaware of. But
beyond that, the extent of our possible significance is quite literally
infinitesimal. Virtually every human event in history has taken place inside a
sphere with a radius under 6,400 km. The distance to the nearest star is 6
billion times that; the distance to the nearby Andromeda galaxy is half a
million times that; the known size of
the universe is a hundred thousand times as large as that; and the universe in all its unknown extent may be infinite. Geological
records indicate that most species don’t persist longer than a few million
years. Even if we beat the odds, in five billion years the Sun will swallow the
Earth. If we somehow manage to escape that, the heat death of the universe will
eventually erase any contribution we make. And long after we are gone, the
universe will continue to exist for a span that is possibly trillions of times
longer than its current age.
In “The Absurd,” Nagel
objects to this notion of absurdity by pointing out that if nothing we do now
will matter in a million years, then it doesn’t matter now that nothing we do
will matter in a million years. But this misses the importance of meaning as
significance. What’s important about this conception of meaning is persistence,
whether through time or space. Binge-watching television isn’t meaningless
because it happens not to be important years from now, but because its effects
don’t persist through those years. It captures my attention while I am engaged
in it but has no effect beyond its limited scope. So if the condition for
meaningfulness is persistent significance on a large scale, then everything we
could do ultimately fails.
Finally, we are
left with a definition of meaning that most closely resembles more traditional meanings
of the word meaning. It is possible that writing a philosophy paper could give
my life value. That is, writing this paper may be an expression of who I am, a
tool that others could use to gain knowledge about me. This is what it means
for something to have meaning. The dictionary definition of a word tells you
what a word is about; similarly, this paper may tell you what I am about and
consequently be meaningful. In this sense, something is meaningful if it builds
up some representation of an object that lets us understand something about
that object.
From this notion
alone, we can again naively conclude that paper-writing is clearly a meaningful
activity. Anyone who reads this paper will gain some measure of insight into
how my mind works. Similarly, anything I end up doing with my life can be
meaningful if the events of my life create a narrative which tells you about
me. Yet that presents us with a problem, because our intuition tells us that
some lives might be more meaningful than others and that this should depend on
what you end up doing with your life. It shouldn’t depend on the quality of the
representation that can be built up based on your life.
As an example of
why not all representations we can construct about a thing are meaningful,
consider lightning. We could image a picture of lightning as being a
manifestation of Zeus’ anger over the fact that we build skyscrapers. You
could even argue that Zeus has reason to be mad at trees and sometimes even
people. This is a description of lightning which may match what we observe, but
we would not say that it is a meaningful description of lightning. It does not
correspond to what we now know
lightning to really be about—electricity, ions, and the like. So what we might
say is that some things you do with your life—such as going to the bathroom or
watching television—might not be meaningful because they don’t correspond to
what we really know life is about.
Once again we are
confronted with our sense of what is meaningful. That is, if we sense that some
life activity is meaningful, our belief is that the activity accurately maps on
to the person. If we follow the sense analogy, we can consider two ways in
which we can sense what is out there in the world. On the one hand, our eyes
see in color. It might seem obvious to believe that color inheres in objects,
but the mechanism by which eyes work suggests something else. Rather, our eyes
detect the intensity of light around three wavelength bands and then construct
colors based on that information and a variety of other contextual clues. Color
is not something that really exists but something our minds make a posteriori because it is useful for
distinguishing between objects.
On the other hand,
we also sometimes see objects that resemble triangles. Triangles, rather than
being something we experience, are things we can construct a priori based on the formal rules of geometry. When we see a
triangle in the world, we are comparing it to the Platonic triangle that is a
product of our reason.
The parallel with
our sense of meaning is this: is meaning a useful tool we build up from
experiences, or is it an abstract entity that we see reflected in the world? If
I write a philosophy paper and others see something meaningful in it, does that
meaning arise from a psychologically-motivated heuristic about what’s important
in life, or from a formal system that deductively defines human experience? If
it is the former, then that meaning may not necessarily connect to what’s out
there in the world—namely me. If the latter, then perhaps my paper is a true
reflection of me and the sense of meaningfulness accurately signals this.
Unfortunately,
there are no problem-free theories about what humans really are. Are we invested
with souls? Are we rational agents or just animals possessing the illusion of
control? What is the essence of being a human? What is consciousness? Does
personal identity persist over time? Many of the questions regarding what it
means to be human come down to what Nagel calls the subjective character of
experience, a problem some consider unsolvable. We can never really know what
is going on inside another person’s head because qualia are simply not
objective. This leads us to the conclusion that it is very unlikely our haphazardly
constructed brains have stumbled upon a sense of meaningfulness that is
logically sound, so our sense is not a reliable indicator of whether what
someone does with their life reflects who they really are. This does not rule
out the possibility that people can do meaningful things, but it does rule out
our knowing about it. And it might not make sense to say that something can be
meaningful if no one gets the meaning, in which case nothing is meaningful.
From all this I
can conclude that there is no point to writing this paper, that doing so will
have no lasting impact on the world, and that it does not say anything
meaningful about who I am. I clearly shouldn’t have wasted any time on it.
However, it cannot be ignored that I could not have reached this conclusion
without carefully considering what it means to be meaningful. While the
arguments I present show that life does not appear to be meaningful, they do
not prove that life could not be meaningful. This leaves open the possibility
that we may discover some meaning in the future, and the only path toward that
meaning is through thinking about it. So writing papers about meaning is not
meaningful, but it might be a prerequisite for meaning.
