In my book I deal right away with the meaning
of meaning because I knew I would be attacked
like a disturbed nest of hornets by philosophers
if I did not.
And of course meaning has a number of meanings,
but generally speaking after you've gone past
the basic religious definition of meaning,
which is of course: "The divine creator is
responsible for the design and nature of humanity
and what else do you want to know?"
After you get past that particular response
then the subject moves to meaning as history,
that is essentially: What are we and why?
Where do we come from?"
And this is part of meaning too: "Where are
we most likely to be headed?"
And I like to suggest that in order to answer
those questions we cannot do it with religion
because every religion has, or every religious
faith, rather, has a different creation story,
a story of how the universe and the Earth
and people came into being.
And every faith has its own special accounts
of supernatural events, and they differ one
from the other.
And they are in competition.
And in any case they cannot be boiled down
to any kind of a coherent explanation because
religious faith is very much a product of
human culture.
And we can't really figure out just what we
are or what our meaning is by introspection.
I'm reminded of the statement that Darwin
made in one of his notebooks, which was that
the mind, consciousness, cannot be taken by
direct assault.
We cannot imagine what we are inside by thinking
about it alone.
And it hadn't been really dented very well
by philosophy.
I like to say that most of philosophy, which
is a declining and highly endangered academic
species, incidentally, consists of failed
models of how the brain works.
So students going into philosophy have to
learn what Descartes thought and then after
a long while why that's wrong and what Schopenhauer
might have thought and what Kant might of
thought or did think.
But they cannot go on from that position and
historical examination of the nature of humanity
to what it really is and how we might define
it.
So by default the explanation of meaning,
of humanity, falls to science and we are making
progress, if I might speak for science.
And it’s from five disciplines, and I'll
take just a moment to tell you what they are
and it will make sense as to why, not all
of science is whole by any means, which is
developing exponentially in the creation of
knowledge faster and faster, but from a particular
set of the disciplines within science, and
I'm going to name them.
As I approach that I'll say you cannot get
the answer from astrophysicists.
There are astrophysicists glad to try to explain
to you rhetorically in some way or other what
the meaning of humanity is and what their
studies of astrophysics tells us about the
significance of humanity.
Forget it.
They can't possibly tell you, nor just astronomers,
nor just chemists, nor just my own colleagues,
molecular biologists.
They're too far removed from the subject to
make any sensible thing about the meaning
of human existence.
Well, what are the disciplines?
And if you look at these disciplines as I've
done, and I've actually worked as a researcher
in a couple, you have to know what the contributions
are of evolutionary biology.
That is biology seen in a historical context
going all the way back millions of years to
the origin of the human species.
And then another one, another science of course
is paleontology, which segues as we come closer
to modern humanity and the invention of agriculture
and the birth of the Neolithic period turns
into archaeology.
So archaeology and paleontology, which are
on a different time scale, is the other discipline,
a second discipline.
And a third, of course, and everybody would
know about this now because it's progressing
so rapidly in so many ways is brain science.
And then coming out of brain science or running
parallel to it and trading with it and depending
upon it and driving from it we turn now to
a more technology subject, and that is artificial
intelligence.
And with artificial intelligence is the fifth,
robotics.
Robotics is so important, as Hollywood has
now glommed onto, knowing a good story when
they see one, robotics includes, of course,
the notion of studying the mind in perfecting
artificial intelligence, and more than that;
creating what the artificial intelligence
and robotics people call whole brain emulation.
That is using robots as avatars and creating
robots that are by design an imitation of
what we know about the brain more and more
like humans.
All those five disciplines together making
bridges here and there are beginning to tell
us what the meaning of humanity is.
It's the product of a grand epic.
And it's the full story of humanity.
And we're just beginning to draw it in clarity.
And let me just add to that why leaving out
history of the whole human species, genetic
as well as cultural, you have no chance whatsoever
in defining the meaning of human existence
because history, that goes back essentially
to the origin of literacy, history makes no
sense without prehistory.
That is to say the biological evolution that's
led up to the human condition at the beginning
of history.
And prehistory in turn, is a study of our
ancestors going right back into the animal
kingdom, makes no sense without biology.
So we have to have a constant building of
concatenation of ideas and information discipline
to discipline across scales of the totality
of the human population and scales of time
going back actually millions of years to our
early pre-human ancestors and then forward
it to the era of cultural evolution.
And then we will have the story of humanity.
And then we will not ask in a quizzical manner,
"What is the meaning of life?
What is the meaning of human existence?"
We will have our answers.
