

The Meaning of Life

An Examination of Purpose

Copyright © Magnus Vinding 2014

Small parts of this book have previously been published in other writings by the author.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Part I: What is the Place of Purpose in the Universe?

Part II: What is Worth Having as Our Ultimate Purpose?

Conclusion

Bibliography

Notes

Introduction

"What is the meaning of life?"

This is perhaps one of the biggest and most important questions to ask and answer, not least because the life we live inevitably reflects our answer to it, or lack thereof. But can we answer such a monumental question with the limited knowledge we have, and does the question even have an answer in the first place? The answer to both questions is "yes". There are certain and universal answers to the question, and we can provide these answers based on what we know about the world. This is my claim in this book, the goal of which is to answer this fundamental question, what is the meaning of life?

What is the Meaning of the Question?

In order to answer the question, the first thing we must do is to make clear what is being asked by it, as its meaning is anything but unequivocal. It may be claimed that this is a hopeless endeavor, as the question is meaningless in the first place, yet this is clearly untrue. Because even though the question is a confused one that lacks a single definite meaning, people nonetheless do ask something – perhaps for something – with this question, and this something is evidently of fundamental importance, which makes it worth uncovering this something, or rather "somethings". For what we commonly ask by the meaning-of-life question is not a single, clear question, but, I would argue, rather two completely different questions that are mixed, confused and stirred into this one catchy question. Fortunately, these two separate questions are both clear and unambiguous, and by splitting the question into these two questions and answering them separately, we will, I submit, have answered what people ask for when they ask the meaning-of-life question.

In order to find out what the question means, one could make a thorough analysis of the relevant terms of the question. For instance, just the word 'meaning' itself has many different meanings, such as meaning in the semantic sense, meaning as intention or will, meaning as value, etc. The same is true of the word 'life'. For instance, life in the biological sense, life as existence, life as a period, etc. While these different meanings are worth keeping in mind, a detailed analysis of the individual words that compose the question will not be helpful for the purpose of finding out what people usually are asking for when they ask what the meaning of life is. Such an analysis would instead just reveal a multitude of meanings of the question that have nothing to do with what people commonly mean by it. For example, one could interpret the question to ask for how we should define life in the biological sense of the word, but this is obviously not what people commonly mean by the question. The goal of this book is to answer what most people ask for when they ask what the meaning of life is – not to answer avant-garde interpretations of it.

What is it we want to know when we ask this question, then?

As mentioned, I think there are two different questions that together exhaustively cover what we commonly ask with this question. The first question can be expressed in the following way: what is the place of purpose in the universe? Expressed in greater detail: does purpose exist in the universe, and if so, in what way? Is there a purpose behind the existence of the universe and our being here? Does purpose exist at the fundamental level of the universe, or is it something non-fundamental, a higher-order phenomenon?

The second question can be expressed in the following way: what is ultimately worth living and striving for – what has value ultimately?

To relate these two questions back to the different meanings of the word 'meaning', the first question relates to what is true about meaning in the sense of purpose, or intention, while the second question is about what is true about meaning in the sense of value. In fact, both questions relate to purpose, but in different ways: the first question is about what the place of purpose is in the universe, while the second question asks for what is worth having as our ultimate purpose. In this way, one could also say that the goal of this book is to answer what is true about purpose in this world. Since the two questions posed above are of so distinct character, they will be addressed in two separate parts in this book; the first part is dedicated to the first question, the second part to the other.

Unfortunately, the meaning-of-life question has largely been put outside of rational inquiry. The reason for this seems to be the widespread belief that there are no truths to be known about purpose and value, and the belief that it is completely impossible to find such truths based on the little we know about the world today. As I hope to show in this book, these are false beliefs. We can provide the most basic of truths concerning meaning in the universe with the greatest of certainty, and this can be done simply by coupling reason with our experience of the world. And it is indeed long overdue that we do so.
> Part I: What is the Place of Purpose in the Universe?

In this first part we shall examine, and try to provide certain answers to, whether purpose exists in the universe, and, if it does, at what level it exists. Some would say that we cannot give certain answers to questions like these based on our present knowledge; here is for instance astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:

" _Does the universe have a purpose? I'm not sure, but anyone who expresses a more definitive response to the question is claiming access to knowledge not based [on] empirical foundations._ "

As we shall see, this is not true. We can, exactly based on "empirical foundations" and simple logical reasoning, give a far more definitive response to this question than "I'm not sure". We simply know far too much to be agnostic with regard to what is true about purpose in the universe.

What Do We Understand by Purpose?

In order to be able to answer what the place of purpose is in the universe, we should first clarify what we mean by purpose. The term 'purpose' is synonymous with the words 'will', 'intention', 'goal', 'want' and 'desire'. While we often use these different words to refer to different kinds of intentions, different kinds of purposes, we shall not make such distinctions here, though there surely are different kinds of intentions. Instead, these words will here refer to purposes in general – any kind of conscious intention, will, want or desire – as this examination aims to look for the most general truths concerning purpose, or conscious intention, which the concept of purpose cannot meaningfully be separated from.

Generally, one can distinguish between two different kinds of purpose. The first kind is what someone who acts according to her or his own intended goal has, while the other kind is the purpose that something has when it is created or used with an intended goal. One could call these different kinds of purposes internal purposes and instrumental purposes respectively. For instance, all intentional beings have internal purposes, while all things created with a purpose – for example, trains created and used for the purpose of transporting people – merely have an instrumental purpose. The difference between these two kinds of purpose is worth keeping in mind, but it should be noted that the second kind of purpose ultimately depends on purpose in the first sense, because if something has an instrumental purpose, it is only by virtue of an intentionally acting being who has given it that purpose. Otherwise, if something has a purpose that it does not merely have by virtue of some other being giving it that purpose, it must be that this something itself has an internal purpose.

So all kinds of purpose ultimately come down to purposefully acting beings, beings who can act on their own intentions, and, therefore, we shall here focus on these purposeful beings – the ultimate seat of all purposes.

The Questions in the Question

Now that we have clarified what we mean by purpose, we can begin searching for the most basic and general truths about it. And in order to know the most basic and general truths about purpose, what we must do is answer the most basic and general questions about it:

Does purpose exist, and if so, in what way? Behind the existence of the universe? At the fundamental level of the universe? Or is it something non-fundamental – a higher-order phenomenon?

Whether purpose exists in the first place seems almost a redundant question, since we all know from our own experience that purpose indeed is real and does exist. We are ourselves purposefully acting beings – we can have intentions, for instance, to read a book or to make a hundred push-ups, and act on these. And since we are a part of the universe, purpose clearly does exist in the universe. This obvious conclusion will of course neither surprise nor enlighten anyone, but it does make it clear to us that the question about the place of purpose in the universe is not a question about whether it exists or not, but about _in what way_ purpose exists in the universe. The questions we need to answer, then, are the remaining questions above, and we will have to do a little more than just refer to obvious facts in order to answer these. We need to take a closer look at what we know about the world.

Is There a Purpose Behind the Existence of this World?

Let us first take a look at whether the most basic of facts about the world we observe suggest that there is a purpose behind its existence. What we know about the observable universe is that most of it is cold and practically empty space. The average temperature of the visible universe is about -270 degrees Celsius, and the average density of ordinary matter is estimated to be about 0.2 atom per cubic meter. More than 90 percent of the total number of atoms are hydrogen atoms, and almost all of the other atoms are the non-reactive atom helium; together, hydrogen and helium make up about 99.9 percent of the number of atoms in the observable universe. In terms of the history of the world we observe, our best models suggest that the entire observable universe began expanding from a small and dense state about 13.8 billion years ago, and that it has been expanding ever since. And in terms of "how the world works", all the matter we have observed in the universe acts, at the fundamental level, in simple and lawful ways – according to simple mechanical laws, and where these laws allow for some degrees of freedom, matter acts randomly within the boundaries of these laws. For instance, we have been able to formulate well-tested and accurate "laws" of quantum mechanics, but these only predict certain probabilities of how matter behaves, and what we observe is that matter seems to behave randomly within these described probable ways.

We must admit that nothing about these most basic facts about the visible universe immediately suggests that there is a purpose behind its existence. The events we observe in the universe seem to follow laws rather than purposes, seemingly for no purpose at all.

Is the Existence of Life the Purpose of the Universe?

Although nothing immediately suggests the presence of any purpose behind the world we live in, we cannot yet exclude that there might be one. It would be much easier to answer whether some specific purpose lies behind the world we are living in or not, since that would allow us to look directly for signs of this purpose. This is what we shall now do by examining the specific suggestion that "the" purpose of the universe is the existence of life in the biological sense of the word.

First, we should briefly clarify what is here meant by life. Life, in the context of this examination, simply means any kind of complex and ordered structure of molecules that can reproduce itself quite accurately, or that had ancestors who could. Let us examine whether the existence of such complex structures of molecules seem to be the purpose of the universe.

As mentioned above, the atoms of the universe, which are the building blocks of any kind of life, and any kind of molecule, are almost exclusively hydrogen and helium. These two elements alone cannot make up life, since helium is non-reactive, and since hydrogen alone would not form any stable molecules more complex than ordinary hydrogen gas. It therefore takes more complex atoms than this to build life, probably carbon and heavier elements, yet these heavy elements are all rare in the observable universe, and they were in fact once non-existent; they have all formed through fusion processes within stars over the course of a long process of cosmic evolution. In fact, even stable hydrogen and helium atoms did not exist in the early universe, as they did not appear until about 380.000 years after the cosmic expansion began.

Already in light of the few facts presented so far, we must admit that much speaks against the claim that the existence of life is "the" purpose of the universe. If it were, should we not expect life to be possible in it throughout its entire existence rather than it once being a complete impossibility? Yet the complete opposite is true. Life was not possible in the universe before countless processes had happened: first, the formation of the simplest atoms, and then the slow process of these atoms "melting" together into heavier elements. We would also expect the composition of chemical elements in a world that has life as its purpose to be appropriate for life, but we do not see that either. As mentioned, the most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and helium, which, in the larger picture, make up virtually all the atoms in the universe. And, again, given the emptiness of the universe, even hydrogen itself is extremely rare in the universe at large.

The universe looks equally indifferent when one looks at the conditions necessary for the arising and sustainment of life. Life requires a relatively stable environment where there is a flow of energy running through in order for it to arise and persist, because, otherwise, complex molecules cannot be formed and sustained, and such stable environments are also rare throughout the universe. If we look at the solar system, then far less than a billionth of a billionth of the space of the solar system can provide such a stable environment, and yet the percentage of the space of the solar system where life can be sustained is still far greater than the percentage of the entire visible universe where life could be sustained, since the universe at large is far more empty than the solar system.

We also know that life must be rare in the universe in a cosmic perspective from the basic facts that 1) there only is about 0.2 atom per cubic meter in the universe, 2) the kinds of atoms that must make up the majority of any life form make up less than 0.1 percent of the number of atoms in the universe, and 3) even the simplest of life forms consist of millions of atoms. By combining these facts, we see that even if life exists on every single planet and every single moon in the universe, it is still exceptionally rare, simply because atoms are rare, and because planets and moons are far rarer still; only a tiny fraction of the atoms in the universe make up planets and moons. The vast majority of the atoms in the universe are found in stars and giant gas clouds, places that almost everywhere are either far too cold, far too hot or otherwise too unstable to sustain life.

If the existence of life were the purpose of the universe, should we not expect that it could be sustained in more than just the tiniest fraction of it? Should we not expect life to be something that would exist, or at least could exist, during the entire existence of the cosmos, rather than something that could only arise eons after it began expanding? Should we not expect it to look well-adapted for life rather than the opposite – looking completely indifferent to it? We should indeed, yet this is not what we find. We must admit that nothing we know about the universe at large seems to imply that it has the existence of life as its purpose. In fact, we must admit that what we observe seems to strongly imply quite the opposite: that the existence of life is not "the" purpose of the universe.

An objection to this conclusion is the claim that the universe seems fine-tuned for life. More specifically, the claim is that the fundamental physical constants of the universe are finely tuned for life, because if they had been just the tiniest bit different, then it would have been impossible for life to exist. This seems an interesting objection, yet also a rather peculiar one given the facts about the universe we have just reviewed, which indeed seem to imply that the universe is anything but fine-tuned for life. Let us, however, examine this claim that the fundamental constants of nature are fine-tuned for life.

What is important to note when it comes to the so-called fundamental physical constants of the universe is that they are expressions that we derive based on the dynamics of the world. It is not that the fundamental physical constants determine how the universe behaves, but rather that they _describe_ it. It is the constants that are derived from the dynamics of the world, not vice versa. Hence, saying something like: "if the fundamental physical constants of the universe had been just a little bit different, then life could not have existed" is in fact merely to say that had the world acted a bit differently on certain levels, then life could not have existed, which is simply to state the obvious. Likewise, to say that the fundamental constants of the universe have exactly the values that allow for the existence of life in the universe is also just to state the obvious, since this merely amounts to saying that the properties of the universe are in such a way that life can exist in it, which should hardly be necessary to point out. What is not obvious, however, is whether the fundamental properties of the universe could have been different at all. The truth is that we do not know whether they could, and therefore we do not know whether it even makes sense to speak of any "tuning" in the first place. In fact, the idea of tuning could well be no more than that: an idea – one that is common to us because of our ability to think in terms of alternative possibilities and "settings". Second, if we assume that the world we observe could have spawned with other fundamental properties – perhaps together with many other worlds that all have different fundamental traits as some theories of inflation suggest – then what we would be forced to conclude is that we happen to live in a world where the fundamental physical traits result in a stable world wherein life can arise and be sustained. No more and no less. Because, either way, no matter whether we believe that the fundamental properties of the universe could have been different or not, the universe does not seem particularly fine-tuned for life in any way. Indeed, considering what we know about the universe at large, we must admit that it in fact seems overwhelmingly _un_ -fine-tuned for life. Again, it takes innumerable fusion processes and chemical processes in order for life to arise, and it can only be sustained in the tiniest fraction – less than a billionth of a billionth – of the visible universe. The argument that because the universe can sustain life, it must have life as its purpose is a fallacy, because it does not follow from the fact that something can exist in the universe, no matter how improbable and rare its existence, that it is the purpose of the universe. After all, if we look at the universe at large, it seems far more fine-tuned for being a vast sea of space filled with hydrogen gas clouds than it seems fine-tuned for life, and it is also true to say that had the dynamics of the world been just a tiny bit different on certain levels, there would be no gas clouds. Does that suggest that hydrogen gas clouds are the purpose of the universe? Hardly. Again, the mere fact that something exists or happens in the world we observe in no way suggests that it is the purpose of the universe, be it space, hydrogen, life or the destruction of life.

It may here be objected that life is something special compared to everything else we see in the universe; that life is so complex that, unlike everything else we see, it could not have arisen through natural processes, but only through nothing less than a miracle, and that this then implies that the existence of life is the purpose of the universe after all. This objection does not hold up to scrutiny, however. First, there are many things and phenomena that can be claimed rare and special compared to anything else in the universe, for instance, snow rollers and death by lightning strike, and the mere fact that something is special compared to anything else in the universe does not in any way suggests that it is the purpose of the universe. Second, while it is true that there is much we do not yet understand about how life came about, nothing about this fact suggests that life arose through anything but physical processes, and neither does anything about the actual chemistry of life suggest this. Furthermore, the fact that it is difficult to work out how some of the complex molecules and chemical processes that we see in the life forms around us today could first have arisen is only to be expected. If we look at the history of life on earth, which began about four billion years ago, our observations suggest that it took about two billion years before single-celled life arose. So it took thousands of millions of years for the complex biochemistry we observe today to arise, and we should therefore not be surprised by the fact that it is hard to work out the pieces of this puzzle, for instance, how DNA arose from the first simple, self-replicating molecules, which presumably happened through innumerable minute steps that gradually led to greater complexity over millions of years. And not only is it hard to figure out exactly how such a gradual process happened, but it is in fact impossible, both due to the complexity of the process, and because of the limited information we can uncover about how it happened. When it comes to the origin of life, and indeed any complex historical event, all we can hope to get is a rough picture of how it probably happened, and to describe some of the most significant events in this process.

In short, the fact that life is special and the fact that we do not know how life arose in no way suggests that the existence of life is "the" purpose of the universe, and neither does anything suggest that life arose through a miracle. Besides, if the existence of life indeed were the purpose of the universe, why should it take something like ten billion years and a miracle for it to appear?

Only with a narrow view of the world, a view that only focuses on this earth – actually just a fraction of the surface of this earth – could one suggest that the existence of life is the purpose of the universe. We are easily fooled by our relatively safe and stable earth, which is nicely tempered and where there is matter in abundance. If we only focus on this comparably hospitable place, we keep ourselves from realizing the truth about how cold and empty the universe is at large. And when we look at such facts, and the rest of what we know about the visible universe, we have to admit that nothing seems to suggest that the existence of life is "the" purpose of the universe. Indeed, we must admit that pretty much everything we know about the observable universe speaks strongly against this conjecture.

Is the Existence of Humans the Purpose of the Universe?

Let us move on and examine another common suggestion regarding a specific purpose behind the existence of the world we live in, perhaps the most common and most humanly intuitive suggestion, namely that the existence of humans is the purpose behind the existence of our world. In relation to this suggestion, it is worth noting that we humans of course are a kind of life, and hence that the conclusions we made above concerning cosmic purpose and the existence of life also apply to human existence. However, since this suggestion is so popular, let us take a closer look at the suggestion that the existence of human life in particular is the purpose of the universe.

As mentioned above, no form of life can be sustained in more than a billionth of a billionth of the space of the universe, yet we humans, at least without the aid of technology, can only survive and be sustained in a far smaller fraction still; surely in far less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of the space in the visible universe. This is because we humans are a relatively fragile kind of life. We are warm-blooded animals whose bodies must keep a stable temperature in order to function, and it is only in a tiny fraction of the universe that the temperature remains stable within our comfort zone. Furthermore, even on earth, even just on the surface of the earth, it is only on a small fraction that we can live and sustain ourselves without technology that takes many generations to develop, like warm clothes and ships. In comparison, many other life forms, such as bacteria, can live almost everywhere on earth, and some can even survive a limited amount of time in outer space. We must admit that the amount of the universe, and even the amount of the earth, where we humans can survive unaided, provides a strong case against the suggestion that the existence of human life, or anything related to or dependent on our existence, is "the" or "a" purpose behind the existence of the world we inhabit.

In light of the fact that the visible universe looks so hostile toward human life, it can seem miraculous that we ever arose in the first place, and one could perhaps even take it to suggest that the universe does have the existence of humans as its purpose after all. To examine that suggestion closer, it is worth taking a look at how human life arose.

Like all other known life forms on earth, we humans are descendants of the common ancestor of all known life on earth, and like any other known species, the human species arose through the process of biological evolution – by means of random changes in genetic information, and the non-random survival and reproduction of organisms that had genes that enabled them to survive and reproduce under the circumstances they lived. The central thing to understand about this evolutionary process, and about life in general, is that it is a process without any purpose per se. This can be hard to understand for us, as we so easily see intentions in everything, and it is probably for this reason that the misunderstanding that evolution and life have a purpose is so relatively widespread. Especially common is the notion that the purpose of life and evolution is for organisms to reproduce, a notion even found among biologists, as the following quote from the zoologist David Attenborough exemplifies:

"[...] individual animals strive to reach this one ultimate goal: to pass on their genes, and to ensure the survival of the next generation. Ultimately, in nature, that is what life is all about."

This is simply not true. The biological phenomenon of life is not _about_ anything per se – neither reproduction, survival, increasing complexity, nor anything else, and the same is true of evolution, which is true no matter whether one looks at life from a 'biological point of view', a 'genes point of view', an 'evolutionary point of view' or any other point of view. Even though such expressions serve a practical purpose, they are ultimately wrong. It is more accurate to say that reproduction is an integral part of what life _is_ , and something that is necessary for life to exist. To say that life in general is _about_ this is merely to project a goal out where none exists. The same is true of Attenborough's claim that individual animals strive to pass on their genes, as if animals, including humans, necessarily aim to do this. This is again to project intentions out where they are not, because many animals are completely unable to aim and strive toward anything. A jellyfish does not strive toward passing on its genes any more than the water in a waterfall strives to fall. All that is going on is just aimless, natural processes, and the same is true of the apparent striving of all non-animal organisms on earth. Evolution, the continual natural process of the survival and reproduction of the organisms that were able to do this, has led to that life in general seems, at least to us, like something that is striving, something that has an aim. Yet this is an illusion. The idea that there is an aim to life per se is only one we humans, who indeed can aim and strive to survive and reproduce, project out on life. To understand evolution is to understand that it is a purposeless process per se.

Hereby we have in fact dispelled the first common misconception in relation to the meaning-of-life question: it is not true to say that the meaning of life 'from a biological point of view' is to reproduce, survive or anything else, as both the process of evolution and the biological phenomenon of life in general are without purpose per se.

Another thing about the origin, evolution and sustainment of life that may make it appear miraculous is that, at a glance, it can seem that it contradicts a certain physical law, namely the so-called second law of thermodynamics. In technical terms, this law says that the entropy of an isolated system always remains constant or increases, and in less technical terms, it basically just states that an isolated system always goes toward its most likely, most random state. There seems to be a contradiction because a living organism is not a likely state for a system of atoms to be in, but a highly specific and, therefore, unlikely state, which becomes more and more unlikely as organisms become increasingly complex through the process of evolution. The truth is, however, that there is no contradiction, and the reason is simple: living beings are not isolated systems, and the origin and evolution of life has taken place inside systems that are not remotely isolated. As mentioned, life can only originate where there is a flow of energy, as it takes energy for complex organic molecules to form and for metabolism to function. Living organisms are open systems far from equilibrium, and that is why life forms can become increasingly complex, and why the second law does not apply to any living organism in itself. The arising and evolution of life therefore does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics, and neither is it in conflict with any other physical law. Nothing seems to suggest that the origin or evolution of life on earth was anything but the result of matter acting in lawful ways, or, rather, the result of matter acting randomly within the boundaries of physical law.

We should also keep the brutal history of life in mind. It is estimated that 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct. As David Raup has noted, this implies that: "[...] the total of species originations has been virtually the same as species extinctions." This is yet another fact that points toward the conclusion we made earlier, namely that nothing implies that life is the purpose of the universe, while a lot suggests that it is not. However, one can ask whether the fact that the human species is among the lucky 0.1 percent of species that have survived does not suggest that the existence of humans is the purpose of the universe after all? The simple answer to this question is "no". There are millions of other species living on the planet right now, and we humans have no special place among these. Nothing about the history of life suggests that the existence of the human species is "the" purpose of the universe any more than it suggests that the existence of crocodiles, mosquitoes or the lethally poisonous oleander plant is. To consider the unlikely arising of the human species to be special compared to any other unlikely event, such as the evolution of any other presently living species on earth, is therefore merely an anthropocentric supposition. Nothing about the fact that the arising of the human species is fantastically rare and unlikely even remotely suggests that this event, or anything related to it, is "the" purpose of the universe. Like all other species, the success of the human species is owed to the early death of innumerable individuals among our ancestors, and this rather brutal fact also speaks rather strongly against the suggestion that the existence of humans, or any other kind of living organism, is "the" purpose of the universe. We are just one species among many that have arisen through a merciless mechanistic process.

When we think deeper about it, it is not hard to realize that there is nothing miraculous about the fact that we humans arose in a world that is inhospitable to us practically everywhere. Humans arose on earth, and earth is a rare place in the universe. Indeed, one might think that this rare planet looks too good to merely be a rare place in the universe, as it seems so well-adapted for human life. However, just like thinking that one's feet are perfectly adapted for one's shoes, this is to get it the wrong way around, for it is through the process of evolution that human life, and life in general, has adapted to the conditions of our earth, not the other way around. Furthermore, we actually cannot claim that earth looks particularly well-adapted for life, and least of all for human life. First, we humans can, as mentioned, only live on a small fraction of the surface of the earth without the aid of technology, and, second, natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, droughts etc., happen frequently, and these have killed countless human and non-human beings over the ages.

And it is not only the past that fails to give the impression that the world was invented for our sake, but also the present human condition, which includes an untold amount of suffering and death. For instance, every single day, people die because of diseases that could easily have been cured or prevented. Millions of children die like this every year. It is hard to see how these facts about the present human condition are in any way consistent with the idea that the existence of humans should be "the" purpose of the universe.

To sum up this examination of whether the existence of our own species is "the" purpose of the universe, we must admit that nothing suggests that this is the case. Neither the history of the universe at large, nor the origin of humanity, nor our present condition remotely support that conjecture. As mentioned, what is perhaps most characteristic and consistent about the world is that it acts in lawful ways, and the truth is that these laws are completely indifferent to human life and happiness. Gravity, for instance, pulls on humans just as well as it does on all other stuff, and it often kills people as a result. The very natural laws that made the arising and existence of humans possible are the same laws that make humans suffer and die every day. Nothing about this fact, or any other fact we know about the universe at large, seems to suggest that the existence of humans is "the" purpose of the universe. On the contrary, what we know about the universe in fact strongly suggests that it is not.

What is the Place of Purpose in the Universe?

So far we have established that purpose obviously does exist in the universe, since we humans surely can have purposes and act on these. We have also seen that, when looking at what we know about the world at large, nothing immediately suggests that there is a purpose behind its existence. The question then stands: at what level of the universe _does_ purpose exist? What is the place of purpose in the universe? This is the question we shall now try to answer.

As mentioned in the beginning of our examination, all kinds of purpose ultimately come down to an intentionally acting being. The main question in relation to finding out what purpose is, is therefore what an intentionally acting being is – what enables such a being to have intentions and to act on these? We all know what an intention, or purpose, is and what a purposeful action is from a first-person perspective; we know what it feels like to have an intention and to carry out an intended action, but this is not what we shall examine closer here. Instead, what we shall try to clarify is whether we can say something about what purposes and purposeful actions are _in physical terms_. Since we know that humans are intentionally acting beings, it seems that finding out what this ability of ours is in physical terms is a good place to start in order to understand the place of purpose in the universe.

It is well known, at least in the most basic of terms, what enables us to have intentions, or purposes, and to act on these, and the basic answer is: our brain. This is obvious from the fact that brain-dead people do not possess or act on purposes, but also from countless other examples from neurology, such as cases where patients, due to a brain injury or a tumor, either lose or see changes in their ability to have intentions and act on them. That our intentions and our ability to act on intentions is a product of the function of our brains is also well-documented by neuroscientific experiments that reveal how direct stimuli to the brain can change people's ability to have intentions, and even prompt people to have certain intentions. In one study, for instance, experimenters used electrical stimulation in the brains of patients undergoing brain surgery to trigger these to have strong intentions to move their limbs and to talk, and they were also caused to make unintended movements by stimulation to other parts of their brains. In other experiments, stimulation to the brain has been used to influence subjects to make certain intentional actions, while the subjects felt they themselves had chosen their actions. Another example of alterations of a person's intentions by means of stimulation to the brain was the accident that happened to a patient during a treatment of her Parkinson's disease. The treatment, which consisted of electrical stimulation in certain parts of the patient's brain, caused the patient to have a serious but shortly lasting depression, which reportedly made her cry, feel hopeless and express that she did not want to live anymore.

What these different examples show, and what our knowledge of the brain in general tells us, is that our intentions reside in the brain. They are a product of certain processes in the brain, and our intentional actions are ones that are caused by these processes. There are of course different kinds of intentions and intentional actions, yet no matter which kind of intention or want we refer to, be it a sudden intention to move a limb or the more fundamental want to keep on living rather than dying, it is clear that all our intentions, purposes and desires, and our ability to act on these, emerge from, indeed in some sense _are_ , physical processes in our brains.

That intentions and intentional actions are higher-order phenomena that result from underlying physical processes is not only a conclusion we can make when it comes to human intentional actions, but one we can assert must apply to all intentions and intentional actions. One way we can do this is by referring to the perhaps most general truth we know about how conscious states relate to physical states, namely that conscious states, such as intentions or the experience of color, in some sense are the product of certain kinds of organized, higher-order physical structures or processes – a truth that is obvious from simple reasoning. For instance, we could take the exact amount of atoms that the human body is made of and pour them into a container, and we can be reasonably sure that the soup of elements we would have in this container would not give rise to a human mind. The character of conscious experience must therefore in some way depend on _higher-order physical structures and processes_ , as that is the only difference between such a soup and us.

The fact that conscious states are a product of, or perhaps rather identical to, certain kinds of organized higher-order processes reveals that any intention, any purpose, that causes any purposeful action also must be a product of such a higher-order process, since a purposeful action by definition is caused by a _conscious_ intention. Thereby, as claimed above, the identity between conscious states and certain complex physical states leads us to the conclusion that any kind of purpose behind any purposeful action must be a certain kind of higher-order process, and that any purposeful action must be caused by such a process in some way.

Another way to see that all purposes and purposeful actions must be higher-order phenomena is by recalling the perhaps most basic finding of physics, namely that all matter at bottom always acts in simple and lawful mechanical ways. What this fact implies is that purposeful actions – actions that happen according to purposes rather than simple mechanical laws – only can be found on a higher level, as a product of the interplay of a multitude of such simple, in themselves purposeless, mechanical parts and movements organized in certain ways. That is simply the only way a complex and ordered process like a purposeful action can come about in an at bottom mechanical world, and a significant conclusion follows from this: purposes are not phenomena found at the fundamental level of the universe. They must be emergent, higher-order phenomena. A single atom or molecule cannot act intentionally or have intentions, but a complex system of molecules, such as ourselves, clearly can.

A significant conclusion follows from this, which is that events caused by an intention or a reason are not, as we seem to intuitively believe, fundamentally different from other kinds of events; not something distinct from physical events. Rather, they are the result of _certain kinds_ of physical processes that take place in certain organized systems like ourselves, and hence the strict dichotomy often drawn between 1) events caused by intentions and reasons, and 2) events caused by physical causes is ultimately a false one.

It can seem that there is an inconsistency in this naturalization of purpose, as the existence of intentionally acting systems can seem in direct conflict with what we know about nature, more specifically, it may seem incompatible with the earlier mentioned second law of thermodynamics. As mentioned, this law basically states that isolated systems go toward their most likely state, and this may seem in conflict with the existence of purposefully acting systems, since these are characterized by approaching, not likely states, but specific purposes. However, as in the case of the apparent conflict between this law and the existence and evolution of life, this apparent incompatibility is no more than apparent, and for the same reason: the second law does not apply to all kinds of systems. None of the purposefully acting beings or simple goal-seeking systems we know of are isolated systems, nor could they be, and therefore the existence of such purposefully acting systems is not in conflict with the second law of thermodynamics.

Another reason that the second law of thermodynamics does not imply that purposefully acting systems cannot arise, and in fact also the reason that it does not imply that organized systems in general, such as life, cannot arise even within isolated systems that the second law indeed does apply to, is the fact that random dynamics, which is basically what underlies the second law of thermodynamics, is not all there is to the action of matter. As mentioned, the actions of matter at the most fundamental level are random _within_ _the boundaries of certain_ _mechanical laws_ , and it is exactly the lawful aspect of the actions of matter that has made it possible for purposefully acting systems – and any organized system – to arise and be sustained. Chemical bonds, for instance, are a result of the lawful mechanics of matter in action, and they are what made the formation and sustainment of life possible in the first place. In fact, this aspect of the dynamics of matter _must_ be what makes any kind of organization and purposeful action possible, as the completely random motion of matter alone could not result in any kind of organization or purposeful action. The non-random and lawful actions of matter must be the underlying basis of all kinds of organization, including intentions and intentional actions, as we indeed observe it to be.

So there is no incompatibility between the existence of purposefully acting systems – or, rather, beings – and the second law of thermodynamics, nor with any other physical law. However, the fact that a purposeful action is not in principle incompatible with any physical law, but in fact rather a product of such laws, does not reveal much about how purposes and purposeful actions actually came about in the universe. Let us therefore examine this closer, and see what we can say about how it must have happened.

As mentioned earlier, humans, like all other known forms of life on earth, arose through the process of biological evolution, and the same is true of our ability to have purposes and to act purposefully. This is for instance obvious from the fact that this ability, as we have seen, is a product of the activity of the human brain, and the fact that our brain evolved over the course of evolution, which means that this ability must also have evolved over the course of evolution. The same reasoning obviously also applies to all other animals we know of who can have purposes, or desires, and act based on these: the ability to act purposefully arose through evolution. In other words, purposes and purposeful actions evolved through a purposeless process. The reason this ability evolved in some species is beyond doubt that it was an adaptive feature. For instance, an organism that can act directly toward places where there is food to be found will, given that the underlying mechanism that gives rise to this ability is efficient, be able to spend a lot less energy on finding food than one that can only move around randomly. So, basically, the ability to act purposefully that we see in some living beings arose because it was an effective survival tool.

That the ability to act purposefully arose through evolution is actually a conclusion that we can generalize: every purpose and purposeful action found throughout our world _must_ ultimately be the product of an evolutionary process. This we can again say because any purpose must be the product of a certain organized physical structure, and the only way such an organized structure could have arisen in a world where there was no organization originally – again, there were no atoms until 380.000 years after the cosmic expansion began – is through evolution, through an increase in complexity in many small steps. Furthermore, since such a stepwise increase in complexity only can happen in an environment that is sufficiently stable over a long time, and since such an environment is rare throughout the visible universe, we can also conclude that the origination of purposefully acting beings must be a relatively rare phenomenon throughout the visible universe.

There is an even stronger sense in which purposes are not fundamental, however, namely in the sense that a purpose, or intention, could not possibly have given rise to existence, which is in fact obvious from pure logic. An easy way to see this is by considering the fact that an intention, in order to give rise to anything, itself must exist in the first place. Existence itself, the existence of the universe defined as everything – everything that is, was and ever will be – can therefore not have arisen from an intention, and must indeed ultimately be unintended, must be without a purpose behind it. This conclusion holds true no matter whether existence is causally infinite or not, because if it is not, and there was a first cause that was not itself caused, then a purpose obviously did not cause it. And if existence is causally infinite and nothing gave rise to it, then an intention obviously did not give rise to it either. If there is a purpose, there must be existence, and therefore it follows that there cannot be a purpose behind existence. Indeed, there cannot be anything behind existence. Behind and beyond existence lies exactly that which does not exist.

It may be suggested that there nonetheless could be a purpose behind the existence of the visible universe, since existence could have preceded the existence of the visible universe, and that there therefore, at least in principle, could be a proximate purpose behind the existence of the visible universe. While it is true that such a proximate purpose is possible in principle – and we shall examine this claim further below – it remains true that there could not _ultimately_ have been a purpose behind it, as the existence of whatever purpose there could be behind the existence of the visible universe could not itself be intended ultimately. And this point applies to everything in the universe, again because the existence of any intention that could determine anything in the world itself must be unintended ultimately. The conclusion remains that there cannot ultimately be a purpose behind existence, including the existence of anything _in_ existence.

" _But if there were no purpose behind existence, how did it come about? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where do we come from? Why are we here?_ "

First, since there could not be a purpose or reason behind existence ultimately, it is clear that the why-question is the wrong question to ask. Strictly speaking, there is no "why" – no reason – behind our being here ultimately. What explains existence, then? One way to answer this question is to point out that nothing, in the sense of non-existence, could not possibly _be_ or _have been_ , as that would be a contradiction in terms; it would amount to claiming that non-existence could have existed, that non-being could have been. The negation of the fact of existence itself is simply not a logical possibility.

When talking about what can be the case, we are already way past conceding the inescapable existence of existence – the truism that non-existence is exactly that which cannot and could not possibly be. Indeed, the only sense in which we can meaningfully talk about non-existence is when it comes to particular properties of existence, why certain states or properties of existence do not exist, which is also the only sense in which the broader question about existence, or something over nothing, can be made sense of: why does existence have the particular properties it has as opposed to different ones, or none? (i.e. none apart from the inescapable one: the property of existence.)

Thus, the problem with the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" is that the meaning of "nothing" is by no means self-evident. As alluded to above, it makes no sense to ask why non-existence doesn't exist, yet a little less (or rather more) than nothing in this sense can perhaps reasonably go for being nothing too. For instance, couldn't there be a state of existence that has no other properties than its own being – a state of being with absolutely no tangible properties, not even a void? If we suppose for a minute that there could be such a state, it seems we can meaningfully ask why there is something – a world that does possess a multitude of tangible properties – as opposed to there being nothing in this qualified sense? A good question; some might even consider it a mystery. Yet it should be noted that, if such a state of nothing had been the case, this would be no less mysterious than our present state of "something". After all, why should there be nothing rather than something? We would seem to have a mystery either way. As philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser put it: "Even if there were nothing, you'd still be complaining!"

Yet the truth is that it would actually be far _more_ mysterious if such a state of "propertyless" existence had been the case, as such a state – a state of existence about which the only thing that can be said is that it exists and nothing more – turns out to also be self-contradictory in nature, and thus meaningless and impossible. Because if we say that we have a state of existence that has no other properties than existing, the inescapable and self-contradictory implication that follows from this is that it must have more properties than this. One way to see this is by considering the numerical properties of such a state of supposedly "propertyless" existence. Because if we say, hypothetically, that there were such a state of existence, this would imply that one such reality exists – not two, as it contains no separation, nor zero, since it (notionally) _does_ exist. In other words, such a state of existence cannot escape having the numerical property of being one, and thus, in effect, possessing more properties than just "it exists". Another property such a state of existence would also have to possess is internal consistency, as it would have to be free of contradictions too – after all, genuine contradictions could not possibly exist in _any_ possible state of existence, much less one that is purportedly empty. As is clear from these considerations, the conclusion we inevitably arrive at is that we can say more about the characteristics of such a state of notional "nothing" than that it exists. Existence inevitably _has_ other characteristics, other properties, than its mere existence. For while the properties mentioned above are abstract ones for sure, they are still properties nonetheless. They are by no means "nothing" in any conventional sense of the term, but rather "something".

So, in this unexpectedly abstract way, we actually seem to have found our answer to the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" As we have seen, it turns out that "nothing" – both in the sense of non-existence and in the sense of "propertyless" existence – could not possibly exist, indeed its existence is as nonsensical as the existence of square circles. Only "something" – a state of existence that has more properties than merely "it is" – could possibly exist. There simply are no other conceivable possibilities. This of course does not provide us with any explanation as to why the world, i.e. existence, looks the way we observe it to be, but it does make clear _that_ the world must _be_ in the first place, and that it must possess _some_ properties, which must be considered rather significant conclusions.

We have now made some clear conclusions about purpose, and these conclusions actually provide the most basic answers to the question we wanted to answer in this first part: what is the place of purpose in the universe? The answers we have given to this question are obviously quite general ones. For example, we have concluded that purposes and purposeful actions must be a kind of higher-order phenomenon, but not exactly what kind, one reason being that there are still many things we do not know about it. It is an open question, for instance, just what kind of interplay of physical processes that must take place in order for a purpose and a purposeful action to arise, and a difficult question for sure. Another reason that we will not provide more specific conclusions than we have done so far, even if we could, is that the conclusions made thus far suffice to reveal the most fundamental answers we set out to uncover. We can for instance answer the question that we met in a quote earlier: does the universe have a purpose? The answer to this question, as we have seen, is that there could not be a purpose behind the universe or anything about it ultimately, and, furthermore, that nothing we know about the visible universe immediately suggests that there is a proximate purpose behind the existence of the visible universe either. It is, however, true to say that the universe in a sense does have purpose, although not _a_ purpose, but rather lots of purposes, since beings like ourselves indeed can and do have purposes, and we are obviously all part of the universe. So, in this sense, the universe undoubtedly does have purposes, although there is not a purpose behind the existence of these ultimately. Put in another way: we know that there is not ultimately a purpose _behind_ the existence of the universe, but that there is purpose _in_ the universe, and we can say both these things with complete certainty.

Another question we often ask concerning what is true about purpose is the question: why are we here? Or, expressed in another way: Why am _I_ here? And like the meaning-of-life question, this question is also rather ambiguous. Yet if we interpret it to ask for whether any purpose lies behind our existence, we can indeed answer the question. As we have seen, there is not any purpose behind our being here ultimately, which of course does not rule out that there could be a proximate purpose, or proximate purpos _es_ , behind the existence of humanity. However, as our examination of whether the existence of humanity is the purpose of the universe showed, and as we shall see below, nothing seems to suggest that there is.

So while much is still unknown concerning the details about what purposes and purposeful actions are in physical terms, and while our conclusions, partly for the same reason, are not very specific, we can assert _something_ about the place of purpose in the universe, that something being the most general and significant truths about it: that purposes are not something fundamental, nor something fundamentally different from other physical processes, and, not least, not something that could ultimately be behind the existence of the universe. These general conclusions indeed make the yet unknown and interesting details concerning which specific physical processes that give rise to purposes and purposeful actions seem like little more than boring details in comparison.

Our Illusory Perception of Purpose

So far in our examination we have said nothing about our own intuitive perception of purpose, or about why we humans tend to see purpose in almost everything. It is indeed peculiar that we can believe that there is a purpose behind existence when this is not even a logical possibility. Almost as strange is it that we see purpose in and behind practically everything, and that we seem to perceive it to be something fundamentally different from ordinary physical processes in the world. It is, however, not so strange that we have these illusions in light of the evolutionary history of our species. We humans evolved in social groups where the ability to effortlessly understand and read the intentions of others was extremely useful, and hence this ability evolved. We became excellent intention projectors. And it is exactly because we are so good intention projectors that we not only project intentions out on our fellow humans, who indeed do have intentions and act on them, but also out on inanimate objects and events. In fact, we are so good at projecting intentions that we usually do not even know that we are doing it. In the same way that we need not consciously try to understand the meaning of every single word when we read a book, projecting intentions is not something we need to think about in order to do – we do it automatically and unconsciously.

Aside from our tendency to project intentions out on things in the world, it is clear that we also have a natural propensity for thinking in terms of intentions. This is for instance clear from the fact that we tend to explain things we know are devoid of intentions in terms of intentions, for example, when we say that trees _want_ water and sunlight, that atoms _want_ to have their outer electron shell full, that oil and water do not _want_ to mix, etc. Our language here seems to reveal how thinking in terms of intentions is an underlying predisposition of ours – a way of thinking that is not second, but first nature to us. Another observation that reveals the same thing is that young children tend to explain most of what they see in the world in terms of intentions. This tendency generally decreases as children get older, which suggests that explaining things in terms of intentions is more natural to us than explaining things in terms of unintended causes, as this latter way of explaining things seems to require more experience and learning for the human mind to do.

Another cognitive limitation of ours is that we seem to have difficulties even understanding the meaning of propositions that claim the absence of intentions, such as, "the laws of nature are indifferent to human life" and "there is no purpose behind our origin". We easily project some mind out on this indifference, a mind that is _being_ indifferent, and perhaps could care, but chooses not to, rather than understanding it to be, as it is, a mindless indifference, and that our being here is due to mindless purposelessness, not an accident, which would imply an outcome that goes against some intention. The absence of intentions seems inherently difficult for the human mind to grasp. We are ill-equipped to understand, and think in terms of, purposeless processes. For the same reason, we ask: " _What_ is the purpose behind all of this? _What_ is the meaning of life?" instead of wondering, less presumptuously, whether there even is such a thing as a purpose behind it, which, again, there in fact could not be ultimately.

Our illusion of seeing intentions everywhere is much like our tendency to see faces where they are not – a natural illusion effortlessly created by our minds, which makes perfect sense in light of our social nature. However, whereas our illusory perception of faces usually can be corrected by taking a closer look, it is much harder to take such a closer, sobering look when it comes to intentions. There seems no other way to get beyond this illusion than to become aware that we, because of our social and intentional nature, have this tendency to easily project intentions out on the world, and that we therefore easily risk misfiring with such projections.

Is There a Proximate Purpose Behind the Visible Universe?

There is still an important question that stands unanswered at this point, which is whether there is a proximate purpose behind the existence of the visible universe. Can we, based on what we now know, give an answer to this question that we can be reasonably sure of? Can we conclude that there is not a proximate purpose behind the existence of the visible universe? In the earliest part of our examination we found that the facts we know about the observable universe do not seem to imply that there is a purpose behind its existence, yet we could still reasonably claim to be unsure in light of the facts we had. We do, however, have more facts on the table at this point – facts about what intentions and intentional actions are, and about our perception of purpose, and, as we shall now see, these facts change the game entirely. In order to see how, an analogy to cheese might be helpful.

To seriously claim that the moon is made of cheese is, as we all know, absurd. But how do we know this? Have we examined the moon closely and drilled deep holes in it in order to exclude that there might be oceans of cheese beneath the surface? No. It is not that we have examined the moon closely, but rather that we know what cheese is in the first place that gives us our confidence. If cheese were a common mineral in the universe, it would not be unreasonable to suspect it to be prevalent on, or inside, the moon. But we know it is not. Cheese is the product of a process – an extremely immoral, cruel and exploitive process to be sure – where milk is taken from a lactating mammal and made into cheese through a multi-step process. The moment we know this, along with the most basic of facts about the origin and historical age of the moon and lactating mammals, we know enough to be sure that the moon is not made of cheese, and we know too much to allow ourselves to claim to not be sure. The same is true in relation to the question about whether there is a proximate purpose behind the existence of the visible universe.

The moment we know what purpose is, we are a lot more qualified to answer whether there is a proximate purpose behind the existence of our world – in fact, it is the single most important thing to know in order to answer this question. What we have established about purpose at this point is that, like cheese, it is in no way a "common mineral". As we have seen, the ability to have purposes and to act on these is a rare one that has evolved in certain animals over the course of evolution, basically because it was a good survival tool. So the question we are asking is really: does such a survival tool lie behind the existence of the visible universe?

It may be objected that this is not the question we are asking, because who is to say that purposes and purposeful actions need necessarily be the product of complex physical processes? To make such an objection is, however, to talk about a phenomenon we understand something about in a way that completely dismisses our very understanding of it. Purposes, or conscious intentions, are natural phenomena that we know depend on certain physical mechanisms – more specifically, in our case, on certain mechanisms in our brain. To claim that conscious intentions need not depend on underlying physical processes is like claiming that temperatures need not have anything to do with thermal energy. We have come to understand that they in fact do, and, again, denying this is to deny our very understanding of the natural phenomenon that is conscious intentions, or purposes. But how can we say that the purpose we know from our visible universe and the facts we know about it here also apply to any proximate purpose that could be behind, and beyond, the visible universe? Indeed, who is to say that the cheese inside the moon is anything like the cheese here on earth? A double standard is lurking here. If one seriously wants to suggest that a certain phenomenon we observe in this world lies behind this world, one must also take that phenomenon seriously, which amounts to including in one's suggestion what we in fact understand this phenomenon to be; otherwise, one is not talking about the phenomenon we know in the first place. The suggestion that a purpose might be the proximate cause of the existence of the visible universe is the very move that in the first place takes something from the world we know and then suggests that it lies behind this world, and if one insists on making this move, one must also make it fully.

The problem is that we have an intuitive understanding of what a purpose is – it is just something we effortlessly have and act according to – and this intuitive understanding completely misses the underlying physical complexity that we know a purpose results from. In terms of our own direct experience, we are completely ignorant about the underlying physical basis of our minds, including our intentions, and this is the ignorant sin we commit when we suggest that a purpose does not require any underlying physical complexity: we take our intuitive understanding of purpose and claim this to be all that there is to it. But we know too much to allow ourselves to commit this sin of denying the fact of the place of purpose in the world: it is a complex physical process that has arisen through the process of evolution. This is how the cheese was made. It is what the cheese is.

The claim that a purpose might be behind the existence of the world we see is not a surprising claim coming from a social being who has a powerful bias toward seeing purposes everywhere. One could say it is the claim we were born to make – after all, we understand virtually everything in terms of intentions from we are small children, so it is not so weird that we make the claim that maybe the entire world we see has a purpose behind it. However, the fact that we are strongly predisposed to make such a claim in spite of an absence of evidence for it obviously does not imply that it is necessarily false – merely that we should be aware of this common pitfall of our minds. Let us therefore examine the claim that there is a proximate purpose, or purposeful creation, behind the existence of the world we see.

We shall here narrow our focus down to examine what appears to be the most plausible hypothesis ever presented for the claim that a proximate purpose lies behind the world we see, namely the so-called simulation hypothesis. The rationale for this narrow focus is that this appears to be the most defensible of all hypotheses that postulate that a proximate purpose lies behind the existence of the world we see, as we know of no other way that a "world" can be created purposefully than by virtue of simulation. And, as we shall see, it is not even clear that "world creation" by means of simulation is possible either.

The simulation hypothesis was put forth by philosopher Nick Bostrom, and it states that the world we live in may be a simulation in a computer constructed by an advanced human civilization, which is to say that the world we live in is purposefully created. The simulation argument, not to be confused with the specific simulation hypothesis, states that if we are not very likely living in a simulation, it must either be likely that humanity goes extinct before we become technologically advanced enough to make such simulations, or it must be true that we will choose not to make such simulations. The argument rests upon the assumption that it will become possible to create simulated worlds with simulated, conscious people, and if such simulations will ever be made, the number of simulated worlds and people might easily outnumber the number of real, non-simulated worlds and people, and it will therefore, given that we make such simulations, be likely that we live in such a simulated world according to the argument.

The first thing to note about this argument is that its premises are based on the world we observe. It does not refer to a magical notion of purpose that is detached from what we know about it, and, furthermore, it is based on premises that can perhaps reasonably be considered plausible given what we know about the world. While this is a strength of the argument – basing our arguments on the data we have available to us is ultimately the only reasonable thing to do – it is also one of its greatest weaknesses given what the argument is about. For if the world we live in indeed is a simulation, then how can we know that the conclusions and worldview we may be able to reasonably draw based on what we see in this world, including conclusions about simulations, all of which is pure simulation according to the argument, have any validity beyond our own simulation? If we are living in a simulation created by simulators, what we think we can reasonably say about our simulators can easily be wrong to an unimaginable degree. What the simulation hypothesis secretly assumes is an enormous degree of similarity between the simulated world and the simulating world. This assumption is sought justified with the suggestion that a technologically advanced human civilization likely will want to simulate a world close to its own, a so-called ancestor simulation, and hence the great similarity. This is, however, merely to make the same assumption again: that the simulators resemble us in the first place. If we really live in a simulation, how likely is it, given how many different kinds of "worlds" that can be created in a simulation, that the world in which our world is run as a simulation is anything like our own?

As a general matter, speculations about a world beyond, or behind, our own are bound to be highly speculative. Because, first, we do not know whether such a world exists, and, second, even if it does, many things we know from the world we observe cannot necessarily be applied to say anything about other worlds. This is one reason to seriously doubt the simulation hypothesis: it rests on the assumption that the world in which the simulation is supposed to take place is much like our own, and given the vast space of possible simulations, this seems fantastically unlikely. So, strangely, if we accept the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation, the purported basis of the simulation hypothesis itself seems of questionable validity, and that is rarely a good sign for a hypothesis – when it seems to pull the rug under its own feet.

There are better reasons to doubt that we should be living in a simulation, though. For the simulation hypothesis also rests upon the assumption that we will one day be running realistic simulations of our past. Yet just how likely is it that we, ourselves and our descendants, will run such functional, conscious copies of our own past? This is finally a question that does not borderline on the extremely esoteric, as it relates directly, and exclusively, to the world we know and can know, and we should therefore – unlike when it comes to answering the question about whether a world wherein our world is simulated would resemble our world the slightest – at least be able to provide some sort of hint as to what the answer to this question might be.

Whether we will ever run such simulations first of all depends on whether it is even possible to reliably simulate conscious minds as our own on a computer, and it is not at all clear that it is. Even if our minds are so-called substrate independent, meaning that they need not necessarily be implemented in neurons or any other specific material, we do not know at what level our mind emerges, or whether speaking about a single level, or just any number of levels, even makes much sense in relation to how our minds emerge. We do not know what physical processes, or "information processes", that are necessary in order to accurately emulate our conscious minds, and it is not clear how we can come to know this in the future. Furthermore, even if we overcome epistemological challenges of this sort and somehow manage to acquire knowledge about the specific physical processes that are sufficient in order for a conscious mind like our own to arise, this does not imply that we will ever be able to actually simulate such a mind. Even our potential future brilliance considered, there could easily be insurmountable practical and theoretical problems. For instance, some functions of conscious minds may be impossible to simulate, just like some mathematical equations, in fact most real-world related ones, have proven impossible to solve analytically. Or, to make a much closer analogy: just like computer simulations of certain continuous functions cannot be exact simulations of these, but only discretized approximations of them. Might our conscious mind not be such a continuous phenomenon – or at least a phenomenon that depends upon underlying, ultimately "unsimulatable", continuous phenomena? It is not easy to see how we can gain certainty on this question.

Another objection to the simulation hypothesis concerns our technological and moral future. When we consider what running a functional and conscious simulation of our own past in fact entails, and when we consider the likely future of our own species, it seems incredibly unlikely that our descendants or future selves will ever run such a simulation. A fully conscious simulation of our own past up until this point entails an unspeakable amount of horror and suffering: wars, famines, torture, etc. – an ocean of suffering in which the horrors brought to the world by Hitler and Stalin are mere droplets. Any individual or civilization that would intentionally create all this suffering – holocaust upon holocaust of suffering – for the mere sake of curiosity would be evil to an extent that is unmatched in human history. Given our technological and moral progress up until this point in history, it seems very unlikely that we will ever create such an atrocity that dwarfs all other humanly created suffering by recreating it all, and far more on top of it. It does not seem remotely consistent with our history of moral progress, or even with our embarrassingly primitive moral stance of today, that we would decide to unleash such horror.

But who is to say that a lone madman could not create this unedited copy of the world with all its unspeakable horrors? This question relates to the future of technology, more specifically, the technological power of our civilization to prevent lone madmen from creating and proliferating suffering. Unfortunately, it is not guaranteed that we will be able to effectively prevent people from being bad in the future, yet given the trend of our moral and technological advance, it does not seem entirely unlikely that we actually will be able to prevent people from bringing about immense amounts of suffering. This trend seems to converge toward a morally and technologically advanced civilization, and such a civilization seems, and hopefully will be, increasingly competent at stopping bad agents from being really bad (and, again, we are talking really, incomprehensibly bad, as this deed of simulating our past would be worse than any genocide; it would be the recreation of all genocides in the world to date, and they would still only comprise a tiny fraction of all the suffering unleashed). And in the case that we will not manage to prevent madmen from being mad, simulations of our entire history full of suffering actually do not seem likely either, because if we will not be able to prevent madmen from creating such moral atrocities in the future, it does not seem improbable that we will also be unable to prevent them from destroying civilization – an atrocity that one could actually argue is less bad than recreating all the past horrors of the world. The same level of moral scrupulousness and technological skill seems required. In fact, it may even take less of both in order to destroy civilization, since, again, one can argue that the destruction of civilization is the more merciful action, and since the destruction of the world as we know it might well be an easier task than the functional recreation of it.

So given that some people will be able, both morally and technologically, to make simulations of the original world with all its suffering, the fall of civilization could also be dangerously likely, and perhaps far more likely, which would in turn render such simulations rather unlikely themselves, as they require civilization to exist – at least highly advanced computers provided with massive amounts of energy. Either way, whether civilization persists or not, simulations of worlds with great amounts of suffering, as ours indeed contains, do not seem likely to be performed, at least not for long, and therefore a world full of suffering does not seem likely to be a world created by a human civilization like our own that wanted to simulate their past, but rather the original one itself.

The final blow to the simulation hypothesis is provided by the impossibility of simulating anything in the world to total precision. The world is chaotic and contains far more information than what can ever be included in any simulation contained within the world, and all its information is crucial if one is to make an exact copy of the universe and its past. Bostrom argues that this does not undermine the simulation hypothesis, as one need only simulate the minds of our ancestors, not the entire world, or at least not the entire world to any great precision. This is wrong, however, as this defense undermines the very premise of the argument: that we will run ancestor simulations. Because if one only simulates a simplified model of our past, then one is not in any meaningful sense running an ancestor simulation, but instead something completely different. Even if one had near-perfect information about a given state of the entire world, which we do not have, and cannot possibly attain, a simulation based on such incomplete information would not result in a functional simulation of our past. It would result in something completely different, and it would be increasingly different for each iteration. One small deviation, and the world falls out in a completely different way – one small change 2000 years ago, and a Caesar is not born; one small change a million years ago, and the entire human species never arises; one small change in the early universe, and the Milky Way Galaxy, including our sun and earth, never forms. Those who run the simulation could then continually try to realign the simulation with what they know about documented history, but that information would still get them nowhere in terms of making an accurate simulation of our past. First, because they will have limited information to correct the simulation with – they may know the historical name of Julius Caesar (or maybe not?), but that will hardly get them far in simulating his mind, much less all the other people who lived in his time, most of whom we have effectively no information about – and this is an example from recorded human history; good luck with assembling our galaxy in the first place. Second, even if the simulation could be continually edited to get back on track, the problem would reappear as soon as the simulation runs again: because it is not an exact copy of our actual past, it will quickly unfold differently from our own. It would be a never-ending editing job that would lead to nowhere. And it would certainly not be a simulation of our past or anything close to it. More objections can be, and have been, leveled at the simulation hypothesis, but we have put enough forth at this point.

The objections to the simulation hypothesis brought forth here of course do not definitively disprove that we may live in a simulation, in the same way that facts about the origin of the moon and cheese do not definitively disprove that the moon could contain significant amounts of cheese; it is just an incredibly unlikely hypothesis that is too unlikely for it to be taken seriously. Each of the objections above seriously question the truth of the simulation hypothesis, and, collectively, these objections do make a strong case that the simulation hypothesis is almost certainly false.

So, aside from the fact that there could not be a purpose behind existence ultimately, the claim that there is a proximate purpose behind the existence of our own world is most likely also false – almost certainly so. We could be wrong in principle, of course, but, again, the same thing can be said about our belief that the moon is not made of cheese, and that obviously does not render the moon-cheese hypothesis anything short of silly. This appears to be the final conclusion in relation to the suggestion that there is a proximate purpose behind the existence of the visible universe: there could in principle be one, but given what we know, it is not reasonable to believe that there is. We simply have no good reason to believe that something similar to a rare survival tool that has arisen _in_ the visible universe has also given rise to it.

Hereby we have established the most basic of truths concerning the place of purpose in the universe. Sure, much is still uncertain and unknown about the specifics of purpose in light of this examination – almost everything, one is tempted to say, as we have only made the most basic of conclusions about it. Yet the openness of the more specific questions about purpose, such as what kinds of physical processes that give rise to purposes, does not invalidate the basic conclusions we have drawn, which are certain beyond dispute. There could not possibly be a purpose _behind_ the existence of the world ultimately, while purpose, or rather purposes, surely have evolved through purposeless processes and do exist _in_ the world. The existence of purpose, and of us, could not be due to any purpose ultimately, which obviously does not imply that there is not an ultimate purpose worth living and striving for.

> Part II: What is Worth Having as Our Ultimate Purpose?

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> Having clarified the most basic truths concerning the place of purpose in the world, we can now move on to ask the other question in the question. This second question seems to be what we ask for the most and want to know most deeply when we ask the meaning-of-life question. And it is undoubtedly also the most important one; in my view, it is the most important question of all. It is the question about value: Is there anything of value in the world? If so, what is it? Is there an ultimate purpose worth striving for? What should we spend our time and lives on in this world?

> These questions about value is what this second part is concerned with, and they are, as mentioned, entirely different questions from the ones we examined in the first part. They do not ask what purpose is, but instead what, if anything, is worth having as our purpose.

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> So, is there anything that is truly valuable in this world? Is there something ultimately worth striving for? The answer, I maintain, is "yes". Value is real. There is something that matters in the world, something truly good, important and valuable, and that something is found in the realm of consciousness. What matters ultimately is the quality of consciousness – the well-being of conscious beings.

> This is a fact, not an assumption or a mere humanly constructed notion, and it is obvious from the experience of all of us. If we look sincerely at our own experience, or contemplate the experience of other sentient beings, it is easy to see that value is real, and that something truly does matter; it really matters where consciousness falls on the continuum of more or less pleasant states. The higher on this continuum consciousness falls – the further away from the worst suffering – the better. This is what all value, all good and bad, comes down to in the end.

> Again, this is not a fact we have invented or created, but a fact about the world that we can merely observe and notice, and as a matter of Cartesian doubt, it is among the very last of facts we can sincerely doubt. The fact that positive states of consciousness are better than negative ones, and hence that the difference truly matters, is as certain as can be. However, as with many other assertions that are certain beyond dispute, like the fact that pi is an irrational number, or the fact that earth is billions of years old, it can take some careful observation and contemplation to fully realize it, or at least to make it explicit. For it seems to me that we in fact all do recognize this fact, although most often only implicitly; we all _feel_

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> There is of course nothing new or unusual about the explicit statement of this fact concerning value, or about asserting that it is the answer to the gist of the question concerning the meaning of life. On the contrary, few things could be more ordinary, as all cultures arguably have realized and expressed the same thing in some way. This is not immediately obvious, yet at a closer look, it is undeniable that virtually all the different ideologies, philosophies and religions throughout the ages have been inspired by this same ultimate value: avoiding suffering and attaining happiness. Eudaimonia, hedonism, utilitarianism, ataraxia, nirvana and pious efforts toward paradise are just a few examples. These theories, efforts and states all relate to the exact same ultimate value: to be as high on the continuum of more or less pleasant states as possible. This convergence is not surprising, since this underlying value after all is what is truly valuable, and because we all know it, if not at the level of our expressed convictions, then at least in our direct experience.

> The fact that it is obvious that where consciousness falls on the continuum of suffering and happiness is what ultimately matters does not, however, make this fundamental fact of value insignificant. Surely, it is anything but. For while we all realize the reality of this core value implicitly, and while all cultures arguably have expressed specific ideas inspired by it, we have, as mentioned, largely failed to make the realization of this fact explicit, and therefore failed to derive its true implications. We have failed to act and live rationally in accordance with this ultimate value. Yet this can also change. And it should.

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> The Ultimate Purpose: Bettering Consciousness

> What, then, are the implications of the fact that it matters where sentient beings fall on the continuum of more or less well-being? The most basic implication is obvious, as this ultimate value provides us with nothing less than the answer to the question _what should we do?_ _should_ do

> This purpose may sound rather pale, and one may object that the continuum of more or less ill- and well-being does not capture all that matters, yet the purpose is anything but pale, and the objection that this continuum does not capture all that is of value merely arises from two failures. The first one is the mistake of defining this continuum too narrowly, namely in a way that excludes anything of value. For the continuum of more or less well-being referred to here is not merely a continuum of pleasure and pain in any narrow sense, but one that includes all possible degrees of well- and ill-being. It includes everything that is part of, or contributes to, the happiness or suffering of sentient beings, from justice and fairness to spiritual selflessness, love and play. In short, all that matters.

> The second failure is a failure of language, as language simply fails to capture the breadth of this continuum; it fails to capture what the extremes, or even the moderate highs and lows, of this continuum of more or less pleasant experiences amount to. We all have but a limited experience with the possibilities along this continuum, and most of us do not visit its powerful extremes most of the time. And to the extent we have approached these extremes in the past, what we can recall, and hence what words can remind us about these experiences, is weak at best. Consequently, the words " _we should move consciousness as high on the continuum of more or less pleasant states as possible — we should avoid suffering and attain happiness_

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> The pertinent question in light of the clarification of this all-important truth and purpose is what bringing consciousness as far away from the depths of suffering and toward the peaks of happiness amounts to in more specific terms and how to act toward it. In other words, what exactly should we do in order to move toward this goal? This is indeed the question, and it is largely an open one. The well-being of conscious beings depends upon countless complex processes and factors that we have but a limited understanding of, and because of this enormous complexity, we do not know, and in fact cannot know,

> In order to provide such basic answers, it is worth first clarifying what moving consciousness higher along the aforementioned continuum in fact means. Is it only our own personal well-being that matters in this world, or is it the well-being of all sentient beings that is valuable and important? The answer, quite simply, is the latter, since, again, this simply is what ultimately matters: the quality of consciousness, irrespective of which being has the conscious experience. To focus only on one's personal well-being, or the well-being of a certain group of conscious beings, is just arbitrary and senseless ultimately.

> This broad aim obviously does not imply that we should not take good care of ourselves personally, which we indeed should, especially in light of this ultimate goal of maximizing the collective well-being of all conscious beings. For the truth is that being healthy and happy ourselves is vital in order for us to be able to help others; we are far better able to help others if we thrive ourselves, and far less able to do so if we are miserable. Hence, this ultimate goal is not in conflict with the goal of attaining personal happiness, but rather an appealing cause for attaining and securing it: we should be as healthy and happy as we can so that we can help others be as free from suffering and as happy as possible. And, conveniently, being motivated by this deeper goal of maximizing our collective well-being, and acting toward it, may in turn also be one of the best ways to attain happiness on a personal level. It would seem, then, that we have no excuse for not adopting and striving for this ultimate purpose of maximizing the well-being of sentient beings.

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> So what are the basic implications of adopting this purpose? How do we approach it? The most basic implication is obvious, namely that we actually adopt this goal and become deeply dedicated toward it, as that simply is the best way to achieve a goal. _how do we better the condition of sentient beings?_ _should_

> Another basic implication, or consequence, of embracing the purpose of maximizing the well-being of sentient beings is that we urgently need to know who these beings in fact are, and to then take their well-being seriously. Who are the sentient beings, and what are the ethical implications? It is certain beyond any reasonable doubt that sentience is not uniquely human, but something found throughout large parts of the animal kingdom.

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> Accepting the ultimately normative and truly valuable purpose of maximizing the well-being of sentient beings surely has more implications than the few ones mentioned above, yet in this context I find it sufficient, and most relevant, to underscore and re-emphasize the main one, namely that we become deeply dedicated and purpose-driven toward this ultimate purpose. After all, such persistent dedication should itself lead us to discover the other important implications that follow from this goal.

> So while the details concerning what is valuable – what is better and worse in this world – remain open, the fundamentals do not. Even though it can be difficult to say which states of experience that fall higher than others on the continuum of more or less pleasant experiences, the fact that there is a continuum in the first place – that there is a genuine value difference between states of torture and states of sublime bliss – is indisputable, and so is the fact that it truly matters where the experience of sentient beings falls on this continuum. And while the details concerning what we should do in order to move sentient beings as high as possible on this continuum are also uncertain, the basics are not. We should help rather than harm sentient beings. We should be dedicated and purpose-driven toward minimizing suffering and maximizing happiness in the world.

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> Meaning Evolved

> The fact that there is something of value in this world, a purpose truly worth striving for, may seem to question the conclusion we made in the first part of this book. For does the fact that there is something that matters in this world not suggest that there likely was a purpose – a proximate purpose, that would have to be – behind its existence after all? In short, no. Again, the fact that something exists, no matter how rare, complex or even valuable, does not in itself imply that there was a purpose behind its existence. And this includes the very phenomenon of value itself, which, it is worth remembering, is not all roses, or anything close. For what is valuable in this world is not only a matter of the positive, both in the sense of the presence of something and in the sense of positive experiences, but also a matter of the negative: the absence of something, namely the absence of negative experiences. It may be tempting to think, and perhaps feel, that the existence of something truly good in this world – the existence of wonderful conscious experiences, of happiness, love and joy – implies that the existence of consciousness and the goodness that can appear in it is "the" purpose behind the existence of the world. However, this is a selective focus that overlooks the fact that the bad – misery, pain and suffering – also exists in this world, which is easily far more horrible than the good can be wonderful.

> Like meaning in the sense of the ability to have intentions and purposes, meaning in the sense of value has evolved. More and less pleasant experiences are not intrinsic features of the world at its fundamental level, but something that has evolved gradually in certain animals through the process of biological evolution. Like other traits that have evolved over the course of evolution, such as teeth and ears, the mechanism of pain and pleasure has no doubt evolved because it was somehow adaptive – because it somehow served as a good survival mechanism, which the grosser character of our experience attests to. The things that please us, such as food, social relations and sex, are all things that are important for survival and procreation, while those that tend to make us suffer – to hurt the body, starve and be all alone in the world – are the things we generally need to avoid in order to survive and procreate.

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> " _But even though value has arisen through purposeless processes over the course of billions of years of cosmic evolution and is not found at its fundamental level, it is undeniable that the world, at least in its present condition, inherently has the potential for value to arise, a potential that the universe has then tapped into through the process of evolution. Does the fact that this potential exists inherently in the world in the first place not give us reason to suspect that there is a proximate purpose behind its existence after all?"_

> Again, the answer is "no". The universe also has the "inherent potential" for lungs and awkward talk shows to arise and exist in it, and the universe has clearly also "tapped into this potential", yet the fact that such a potential is found in the universe, meaning that these things can arise and exist, obviously does not imply that there is a purpose behind their existence, much less that they are "the" purpose behind the existence of our world. The same holds true in the case of the potential for the existence of pleasant and unpleasant conscious experiences. The fact that the world has the potential for these to arise does not remotely suggest that there is a purpose behind their existence.

> That purpose evolved out of purposelessness may appear miraculous, yet this is only until we grasp the "miracle" that is evolution, which is undoubtedly the most important process to understand in order to understand the origin and place of purpose and meaning in the world. Through the process of evolution, purpose can indeed arise out of purposelessness, and it did.

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> The Great Non Sequitur

> Much confusion, including this notion that the existence of something valuable should imply an underlying purpose, springs from a tendency to suppose a close connection between the two different senses of the term 'meaning' we have distinguished between here: 1) meaning as a purpose, or intention, and 2) meaning in the sense of value – that which is worth having as our purpose. But the truth is that there is no such connection; the one does not require nor imply the other.

> The most common misconception is that the absence of a purpose behind existence should imply nihilism and an absence of value in the world. As should be clear at this point, this widespread notion is as false as can be. It is the great non sequitur concerning purpose. For the fact that our existence is not significant, both in the sense that there is no purpose behind it ultimately, and in the sense that we are small compared to the vastness of the cosmos, in no way implies that our lives and actions are not significant in the sense of being valuable. They indeed are, and indescribably so. The confusion of these two completely different senses of the term 'significance' – the failure to distinguish between "purpose behind" and "value in" existence – is surely widespread, but that does not make it less wrong. The absence of a purpose behind existence does not imply that there exists no purpose worth striving for. Value simply does not require an underlying purpose, and there is no law of logic that dictates that it cannot arise through purposeless processes, as it indeed has.

> Again, the existence of value is indisputable. It really matters whether sentient beings experience the worst of misery or the greatest of happiness, and this fact requires no other fact or condition to stand upon – its truth is completely independent of whatever is true of the presence or absence of a purpose behind our existence. For even if the existence of the world had been due to a purpose, such a fact about our origin would not change the fact that the well-being of conscious beings is what ultimately matters in the world and that we should strive to maximize it. Any purpose that would suggest another ultimate goal, no matter where it came from, would simply not be a normative one. It would be misguided about what matters in the world.

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> At one level, there is a connection between purpose and value, however, and that is at the level of our minds. Our feeling of being motivated and purpose-driven is clearly related to how happy or depressed we are, as exemplified well by the woman mentioned in the first part who accidentally had a depression induced, which made her feel hopeless and without the want to live anymore. _what is the meaning of life?_ _behind_ _in_

Another non sequitur worth addressing is the related notion that if value is related to, or rather _is_ , physical states, as we indeed have every reason to believe, then it is not truly valuable, and that it is even less so if we begin to understand these states in great detail. This certainly does not follow. For consciousness is as valuable as it is regardless of what we say or know about it. It can be sublimely sacred and it can be the complete opposite, and the difference matters regardless of both its origin, physical basis, and anything else. There is therefore nothing to fear about knowing the physical basis of consciousness, as it will not, contrary to what is often claimed, "rob life of its meaning". On the contrary, we should actively seek such knowledge, with urgency even, since understanding the physical basis of suffering and happiness can help improve our lives greatly – help us raise ourselves away from suffering and toward the sublime.

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Creating One's Own Meaning?

> There is no shortage of answers that have been proposed to the catchy but ambiguous meaning-of-life question. Some respond that there is no meaning, and that nothing matters, a proposition that many of those who claim to hold this view will admit they find deeply frightening and horrible. Yet with this reaction, they actually inadvertently expose the falsity of their own belief. For if it is the case that nothing matters, then it must also be true that it does not matter that nothing matters. Whether they realize it or not, this is clearly not the case for despairing nihilists, nor for anyone else.

> The perhaps most popular answer to the question is that the meaning of life is to create our own meaning. _Since life has no meaning, each of us must create it ourselves_ _life has no meaning_ _behind_ _life has no meaning, hence we must create it ourselves_

> A relevant question in light of this interpretation of the statement is why we should pick a purpose and strive for it if there is nothing truly valuable in the world? Much more relevant, however, is it to simply point out that it is wrong. Again, there is something valuable in the world, namely the well-being of sentient beings, and from this, an ultimate purpose worth striving for does follow: minimizing the suffering and maximizing the well-being of sentient beings.

> Again, this fact, the fact that something matters in the world, is not one we have created. We simply cannot decide that suffering is not worse than happiness. This is not to say that we cannot frame our experience differently so as to enjoy, or suffer less from, whatever we experience, which we surely can. However, such a change in framing would itself amount to a transformation of our experience, and the normativity of such framing only proves the central point: it is truly worth enjoying life rather than suffering it. Neither does the fact that the well-being of sentient beings matters – and hence that the ultimate purpose of maximizing well-being stands as truly normative for all of us – imply that there are no individual differences in terms of what makes different beings happy and in terms of how different individuals can contribute to the betterment of the condition of sentience. There surely are such differences, yet no matter how great these differences are, the underlying value holds true in all cases: the well-being of sentient beings is what matters in the world and what we should help maximize.

> Another way in which the sentiment that _since life has no meaning, each of us must create it ourselves_ _all_ 49 _all_

> There is one thing the sentiment above gets right, however, which is that it indeed is up to us. For while it is not up to us to decide what ultimately matters in the world, it is up to us to _realize_

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> There are of course also common answers to the meaning-of-life question that go contrary to this notion that we can just invent our own valid purpose, answers that propose something deeper and truly valuable as the answer. Being kind, helping others and being happy are common answers of this kind, and they are undoubtedly all true, in the sense that these are surely all integral to, perhaps in some sense even synonymous with, that which ultimately matters in the world: the well-being of conscious beings. The same is also true of most other common answers, such as living up to our potential, seeking knowledge, and being purpose-driven and authentic. These goals and virtues all contribute to making the world a better place in various ways, and they are therefore undoubtedly all part of the answer to our great open question, _what moves sentient beings as far as possible away from the worst suffering and toward the greatest happiness?_

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Death and the Meaning of Life

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> " _Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits_

  * > Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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> The question concerning the meaning of life often leads to questions concerning death and its significance, and a close connection is often supposed to exist between the two topics. The most common, and apparently most troubling, question related to the juncture of these two topics is how our lives can have any value if they end? To this question, two opposite answers are usually provided. The one is that death robs life of its meaning; that if our conscious lives end, they ultimately do not matter at all. The other is that death is what makes life valuable; that if life goes on forever, it has no value, as the finitude of life is the source of its value.

> So does death ultimately make life worthless, or is death what gives life value in the end? The answer is, indeed must be, neither. For what is death, after all? Death simply refers to the end of our conscious experience – the complete absence of consciousness, as anything else would amount to an afterlife of sorts, not death. Therefore, when we talk about death, we are, at least from the point of view of the being who dies, essentially talking about nothing; in terms of experience, life is something, while death is nothing. And being nothing at all, it is clear that death in itself is also nothing to fear, which is obviously not to say that we should not do our best to avoid it if we enjoy life and can help alleviate suffering and improve the world. But since death refers to nothing in experiential terms, it is clear that it can neither add nor subtract value to or from life, since adding or subtracting nothing simply leaves us with the same something. Value, as well as disvalue, is not found in nothing – after all, nothing is – but rather in something. It is not found in death, but in life.

> The notion that death should add or subtract value to or from our lives is indeed a peculiar one, for how is it not obvious that whatever value life has must be found _in_ _in_

> It may be objected that if life ends, then life, and hence the value of life, will disappear, yet it is important to be careful with words here. What will disappear if death occurs is conscious experience, and since this is the seat of value, there will obviously be no more value or disvalue in a life _after_
Conclusion

We have hereby answered the question, _what is the meaning of life?_ As we have seen, there could not be a purpose _behind_ existence, whereas purposes undoubtedly have arisen and do exist _in_ the realm of existence. In us, purpose arose, not for any purpose, but because it made our ancestors better survivors. The same is true of value, which could not have given rise to existence either, while its presence _in_ existence is indisputable: it is truly worth avoiding negative states of consciousness and to instead attain positive ones. It really matters that consciousness finds itself as high as possible on the continuum of more or less pleasant experiences, of more or less value, which reveals that there is an ultimate purpose worth striving for, namely to maximize this value, the well-being of sentient beings.

These answers are of course very basic ones that leave almost all the details open. We have not examined what purposes are more specifically – for instance, which physical processes in the brain that give rise to our conscious intentions – and neither have we said much about what maximizing the well-being of sentient beings entails in more specific terms. This is partly because these specific questions, unlike the fundamental ones, indeed are open and in need of further exploration, although we certainly can say much more than what we have said here, both concerning the physical basis of our intentions and about what maximizing well-being entails. Yet the main reason we have not probed into these specific questions is not our limited knowledge, but rather our limited scope. The aim of this book was simply to provide the most fundamental answers to this most fundamental question, and to clarify that the question relates to these two distinct things – purpose and value – in the first place; not to uncover every single detail about purpose and value. All we have settled here are the fundamentals, and while these fundamentals are, I maintain, final and certain, they do beg for elaboration. They are not the end, but rather the humble beginning that reveals where we are and where we should be headed in the most basic of terms.

Sadly, one may feel unsatisfied and disappointed at this point. For even if one accepts that there is something truly valuable in the world, one may nonetheless find it hard to actually _feel_ this – to _feel_ meaningfulness and happiness. This does not contradict the fact that something truly matters, however. For just as realizing that our health matters does not automatically make us healthy, realizing that there is something of value and something that matters in the world – minimizing suffering and maximizing well-being – unfortunately does not guarantee that we will immediately be free from suffering and feel blissful. As in the case of our health, realizing that our well-being matters is merely the first step toward betterment, a step that must then be followed by informed action. It does not alleviate our suffering and bring us all to a state of enjoyment right away, unfortunately.

This is where we are now. The universe, with neither purpose nor value behind it or in it originally, has twirled in on itself. Gradually, through countless purposeless processes, purpose and value have arisen in an otherwise purposeless and valueless world. However poetic it may sound, this is our condition, and this is who we are. As Carl Sagan noted, we are indeed the local embodiment of a cosmos grown to self-awareness. In human garments, we are now staring deeply into the abyss that is ourselves, pondering our own mysteries, and wondering where we should go from here.

The road to this state of self-awareness has surely not been a pretty one. The cosmos has brought harm upon itself beyond the thinkable throughout the history of life, and it continues to do so today. This should not surprise us, of course, since the universe at large does not care, and has just unfolded with neither foresight nor insight. Yet this is where we are special. We _do_ care, or at least we can, and we do have the ability to act purposefully. We do have foresight, and now also insight.

Thus not only are we a way for the cosmos to know itself, we are also a way for the cosmos to care for itself, and, potentially anyway, to cure itself – ourselves – from suffering. We have finally realized that there was no purpose behind our existence, yet that there is value _in_ us, and the obvious conclusion that follows from this must be that we take this value seriously and act on it – that we make life free from suffering and as free, exquisite and joyous as possible for all sentient beings. It is now up to us to act on this realization and do our utmost toward this ultimate purpose. To make the world as good a place as possible. _That_ is "the meaning of life".
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Notes

Quoted from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pL5vzIMAhs. As we shall see, this common and seemingly rational response is both wrong and far too weak at the same time. It is worth noting, however, that in light of certain other remarks from Tyson, it seems that he may not be entirely sincere in the video above, as he quite clearly contradicts the "I'm not sure" statement in the following talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcTbGsUWzuw For instance, when he, about 35 minutes into the video, says: "[...] put that in context and realize, of course, the universe is not here for us, [or] for any singular purpose."

 A purposeful action is, by definition, one that is caused by and happens according to a _conscious_ intention. In fact, the only thing we could reasonably mean by the word 'intention' is a conscious intention. We may say that our actions are caused by 'unconscious intentions', or 'unconscious desires', but these are nonsensical oxymorons, at least when it comes to intentions that cause actions, which is obvious when we think about it. If someone acts in a way that s/he is not in any way or to any degree consciously intending, her or his actions cannot be claimed to be intended. What we usually mean by 'unconscious intentions' is either 1) causes we are not conscious of that impact our intentions or actions, and these cannot in themselves meaningfully be called intentions, or 2) intentions that we are only dimly consciously aware of, like the urge to eat when we are hungry or the desire to sleep when we are tired, but these intentions, or subtle drives, are still conscious nonetheless.

The fact that people can have conflicting desires that force them to act on either one of them does not change the fact that intentional actions always are based on conscious intentions. For instance, people can want to smoke a cigarette and also want to stop smoking at the same time, but regardless of what they choose to do in any given moment, it must be true that if they make an intended action, this action must be based on a conscious desire, even if that desire is the opposite of what one intends most deeply most of the time. So, regardless of whether we have conflicting desires or not, intentional actions are actions that are caused by, and happen according to, a conscious intention.

 Rees, 2000, p. 78.

 Arnett, 1996, p. 11.

 This most recent estimate, that the universe began expanding about 13.8 billion years ago, was presented by the Planck Collaboration. See: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.5062v1.pdf>.

 The reason that we will examine this particular claim is that it seems one of the two most common claims about what a supposed purpose behind the universe might be, the other one being that the existence of humans is the purpose of the universe. So, even though nothing immediately seems to suggest that there is purpose in the universe at large, it makes good sense to take a closer look at these two popular claims, as we shall now do.

 Hinshaw, et al., 2009. Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0732.

 The emptiness of the universe seems to be something that is very hard for our minds to appreciate. One reason we fail to understand it is that the earth is a rare exception. Our atmosphere, for instance, contains more than 2×1025 atoms per cubic meter. We therefore need to remind ourselves that earth, and clumps of matter in general, are rare exceptions compared to the almost completely empty space that to an overwhelming degree is the norm of the universe.

 That far less than a billionth of a billionth of the space of the solar system can sustain life is based on the estimate that life cannot be sustained in the solar system in a volume larger than 100.000 times the volume of all the planets in the solar system, and we take the radius of the solar system to be one light year (that is the radius of the Hill Sphere of the sun). This is an estimate that, to me at least, seems an overly safe one. By sustaining life, I do not merely mean that some forms of life can exist there in short periods, but that some form of life can actually live there and reproduce, i.e. be sustained, which life cannot be in the virtually empty space that the vast majority of the universe is, one reason being that it is too unstable. Cosmic rays, for instance, which earth is largely protected from by its atmosphere, make it impossible for life to be sustained in outer space, which is not to say that some life forms cannot exist there for short periods of time.

 It may seem weird to state that life is rare in the universe even if it exists on every moon and planet, but this is because it is hard to appreciate how small moons and planets are compared to other clumps of matter such as gas clouds and stars, and compared to the enormous space there is between matter in the universe at large – it seems that we are simply unable to grasp so much, so empty space. People's ideas about the scale of the solar system are generally terribly wrong because they have seen models where the size of the planets is scaled up enormously compared to the distance between them, which makes sense because otherwise it is impossible to make a model of the solar system where one can actually see the planets. The article in the following link tries to give an impression of the actual scale of the solar system: <http://www.ngawhetu.com/Resources/SenseofScale/index02.html>.

 It is worth noting that the claim that a universe described by other fundamental constants could not give rise to life has been disputed, for instance by Victor Stenger in his book, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, which also provides other criticisms of the notion of fine-tuning.

 Quoted from about 47 minutes into the first episode of the documentary series _Life_ by BBC.

 For a book that dispels many misconceptions about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, see _Entropy and the Second Law: Interpretation and Misss-Interpretationsss_ by Arieh Ben-Naim. Especially the last chapter is worth reading in relation to the implications the second law has, and, as importantly, the implications it does not have.

 Raup, 1992, pp. 10-11.

  http://www.apromiserenewed.org/files/UNICEF_2012_child_mortality_for_web_0904.pdf "Still, in 2011, 6.9 (6.8, 7.4) million children died before reaching their fifth birthday. Almost two-thirds of them—4.4 million—died of infectious diseases, nearly all of which were preventable."

 One example of a neurological disorder where there is an alternation of the ability to act intentionally is the so-called alien-hand-syndrome, a disorder usually caused by an acquired brain-damage. People with this disorder feel that one of their hands is controlled by someone else, and as a result they are often unable to intentionally control this hand. Other examples of disorders that show that intentions depend upon processes taking place in the brain are Tourette's syndrome, intention tremor and schizophrenia. While a lot is still not understood about these various disorders, it is clear that they are all caused by some kind of abnormality in the brain. More examples where changes in the brain have caused severe changes in people's intentions and ability to act on these can be found in the following article by David Eagleman:  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/07/the-brain-on-trial/308520/.

 Desmurget et al., 2009. Link: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/811.abstract.

 In one study (Ammon & Gandevia, 1990, Link: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC488179/>), subjects were asked to move a hand of their own choosing many times, and by using so-called transcranial magnetic stimulation on certain parts of the brains of these subjects, experimenters were able to significantly impact which hand the subjects chose. The subjects did not notice that they had been stimulated, and felt that they themselves had chosen which hand they moved.

 Bejjani et al., 1999. Link: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199905133401905.

 That our intentions cause our intentional actions may seem disputed by some, for instance by Daniel Wegner, who in his book _The Illusion of Conscious Will_ showed that the feeling of having intended an action sometimes only arises after the action has been performed.

In reality, however, there is no dispute, for the reason that intentional actions by definition are caused by intentions, and they must therefore also be so in physical terms, which means that if intentional actions indeed exist, they are at least partly caused by the processes in our brains that give rise to intentions. One could then suggest that intentional actions actually do not exist, and that, as the title of Wegner's book can be taken to suggest, conscious will is never more than an illusion.

This is not true, however. As neuroscientific experiments clearly show, and as we all know from our own experience, it is not always the case that conscious intentions arise after actions, or that they never cause actions. A study carried out by neuroscientist Mikkel Vinding (my brother) for instance showed that intentions in some cases do seem to play a distinct causal role even in actions that follow shortly after an intention has arisen, and that it is not the case that "...] the experience of conscious intention in general is a post hoc inference based on outcome." (Vinding, 2013. Link: [ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381001300069X).

Wegner's book generally focuses narrowly on our feeling of intention, or perhaps rather our feeling of ownership over actions, since it only focuses on it in relation to what may be called "short-term action intentions", or proximal intentions, and it thereby does not describe conscious intentions in cases where reportedly intended actions do not follow the reported intention immediately, so-called distal intentions, and this is a crucial omission. Because even if it is true that we do not intend even most of the moment-to-moment actions that we do and feel that we have intended, like picking our nose or clicking on a computer mouse, the same thing simply cannot be true about more complex actions that we have intended to do far in advance of doing them and then do, like intending to go shopping and then doing it, or intending to climb a mountain and then doing it. In such cases, intentions clearly do come before the actions, and they do cause the actions; we never see such actions happen without there being an intention to do them. Therefore, such actions are intentional actions, and, as we all recognize, intentional actions surely do exist, which means that we at least can say that our feeling of conscious will is not always an illusion.

 It may seem controversial to claim that some of the activity going on in our brain while we are having an intention actually _is_ the intention, but this is, however, a claim that our experience from neuroscience strongly supports. Every aspect of our conscious experience seems to depend completely on the processes going on in our brain, and the fact that we can cause people to have certain intentions by stimulating their brain in certain ways, as was done in Desmurget et al., 2009, and the fact that people can completely lose their ability to have certain intentions due to damages to their brain, strongly implies that there in some sense is an actual identity between our experience and the activity in our brain. A commonly held view, and a compelling and simple way to think about it, is that our experience is what it is like to _be_ certain activity or states in our brain.

 Cf. endnote 2.

 One could of course suggest that intentional actions do not necessarily function according to mechanical physical laws, but instead according to wholly different principles. This is an interesting suggestion to say the least, because if it is true, it should be discoverable in intentional systems, and if we made such a discovery, it would surely be one of the most unexpected results and one of the greatest revolutions in physics of all time. However, nothing at all implies that it is the case. Instead, what we observe is that intentional actions such as our own in every way seem to be the product of underlying mechanical processes that function according to mechanical laws. All that we have observed in the universe suggests that all processes at bottom happen according to simple, mechanical laws, and we have no reason to believe that the processes involved in intentional actions are an exception to this.

 The same holds true of individual nerve cells in our brain: they are not purposeful in themselves, but when they are organized in certain ways, intentional actions can emerge from their collective activity. Daniel Dennett has made a similar point about the relationship between our single neurons and our cognitive abilities in general. For instance: "[...] not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares." (Dennett, 2006, p. 2).

 Thereby not said that randomness is not involved in the creation and sustainment of organized systems – it indeed must be, since all fundamental processes involve randomness in some sense. Organization can, however, only arise and be sustained if matter acts in mechanical, non-random ways – that must be the backbone of any organization, as total randomness, by definition, cannot be.

 This simple reasoning provides a good hint as to why the organisms we observe that have the ability to act purposefully also are those that are dependent on being mobile. Such organisms have an advantage from such an ability, while those that do not move, or only move very slowly, generally would have little or no benefit from an ability to act or regulate themselves based on an intended goal.

 Much criticism has been leveled against such inferences about why given traits have evolved, and for good reasons, as many such inferences have been little more than silly. However, this should not keep us from making such inferences when they are clearly true, as in this case. We know that traits that make species better able to survive evolve over the course of evolution, and the ability to act purposefully rather than merely being able to act randomly that we see in some species clearly is such an adaptive trait. It is of course not always the case that a trait we see universally present in a species necessarily is such an adaptive trait, as many traits may just be byproducts of more fundamental traits that indeed were adaptive. For example, being able to learn to play the piano, at least at a basic level, seems pretty much as universal as the ability to learn to walk, so can we then say that being able to learn to play piano evolved because it made humans better survivors just as much as walking did? Perhaps we could infer that it evolved because being able to play music on a piano attracted mates? Clearly, we can not, and that is why it is important to distinguish between primary and secondary traits. The ability to play the piano is obviously a trait that we have because of more primary traits we have, especially fine motor hands and the ability to recognize different pitches of sound, and these primary traits no doubt did evolve because they were adaptive, just like our ability to walk upright and our ability to act purposefully.

 The only alternative to a step-wise build-up in organization from simple organization toward greater complexity is a spontaneous self-assembly, and, to put it in the words of Arthur Eddington: "That would involve something much worse than a violation of an ordinary law of Nature, namely, an improbable coincidence." (Eddington, 1928, p. 74).

What Eddington refers to in this quote is a decrease in entropy, which is exactly what a spontaneous self-assembly of a human being, or any other complex organized system, would be – an _extremely_ improbable coincidence. Organization cannot happen like that, but it can, however, happen in small, simple steps that are not extremely improbable, and given enough time in a sufficiently stable environment with a flow of energy, many such small steps can happen, and in that way, complex organized systems can arise, and have arisen.

 This is basically the same point commonly made on the subject of free will: while we do have intentions and do act based on these, it is logically impossible for us to ultimately intend what we intend, as that would lead to an infinite regress of intentions that intend intentions. One can say that we have just made the same point about the universe, and pointed out that since having free will, in the sense of ultimately choosing one's own intentions, is a logical impossibility, then existence in its entirety obviously cannot "have it" either, and therefore existence cannot ultimately be intended. Nothing can.

 That this tendency seems to decrease with age is for instance documented in Okita & Schwartz, 2006 (link: <http://aaalab.stanford.edu/papers/Children_and_robots.pdf>), which shows that children at a younger age tend to project human features, such as intentions, out on entertainment robots to a greater degree than older children do.

 See Why We Should Go Vegan.

 This is a short summary of the argument. For the full argument, see Bostrom, 2003. Link: <http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html>.

 This is not to say that we will not be able to know a lot about how physical states relate to conscious states – it seems clear to me that the ultimate goal for a science of consciousness must be to make such correlations and to establish the relationship as accurately as possible. However, when it comes to what the physical processes, or perhaps information processes, that are _necessary_ and _sufficient_ for conscious minds to arise – which aspects can be left out and which cannot in relation to maintaining the same, or just any, conscious experience – the problem of other minds becomes more than just an annoying mind game.

 The same point is made in Pearce, 1995/2007, pp. 85-90.

 This point is also found in Pearce, 1995/2007, pp. 85-90.

 An examination of the simulation argument that also seriously questions its likelihood, partly based on some of the same points made here along with others, can be found in Pearce, 1995/2007, pp85-90.

 And, contrary to what one might expect, the arising of purposes and of our own species in spite of the difficult odds does not in the least suggest otherwise. For a world without purpose behind it obviously does not have a purpose _against_ the arising of life, humanity or purpose either. Hence the fact that life and purposes can arise rarely in the visible universe through the in itself purposeless process of evolution is actually in perfect alignment with the absence of a proximate purpose behind its existence.

 It is worth noting that these questions are all ethical questions – in fact, they are all versions of the core question of ethics: what is valuable and what should we do? So, surprisingly, this second and most important meaning of the meaning-of-life question actually reduces to ethics.

 It may be objected that this ignores the gap claimed to exist between 'is' and 'ought'? As I have argued in Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics, there is no such gap, and an 'ought' cannot follow from anything but an 'is'. It is uncontroversial to say that 'oughts' follow from values – if we have a certain value, or goal, it is true and uncontroversial to say that we ought to do certain things in order to achieve that goal. It is as true, and should be as uncontroversial, to say that when we have a truly valuable, ultimate value, as the well-being of conscious beings indeed is, then true, ultimate 'oughts' do follow. Again, see Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics for elaboration.

 See the essay 'Uncertainty: Our Inescapable Condition' in Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics.

 For elaboration on why this is senseless, see the essay 'Who Are We?', and for elaboration on what maximizing well-being means, see the essay 'The Meaning of Being as High as Possible', both found in Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics.

 For a defense of this claim, see the essays 'We Should Examine the Question and Strive for the Goal' and 'In Defense of the Goal-Oriented Approach', both found in Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics.

 See A Copernican Revolution in Ethics.

 Ibid.

 For an examination of the general implications of taking non-human beings seriously in ethical terms, see A Copernican Revolution in Ethics. For a concise case for veganism, see Why We Should Go Vegan.

 Again, see Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics for a defense of, and greater elaboration on, these claims.

 This is not to say that every quirk common to the human experience has been adaptive (cf. the point made about our ability to play the piano in endnote 27). However, it can hardly be doubted that our experience and its basic "structure" – that pain accompanies harm, while pleasure accompanies sustainment and reproduction – has been an adaptive feature, and one that is not only universal in all humans, but in all sentient animals.

 Bejjani et al., 1999. Link: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199905133401905.

 For elaboration on why this is senseless, see the essay 'Who Are We?' found in Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics.

 Saying more about the latter question is what I attempt to do in my book Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics.

 Sagan, 1980, p. 345.
