The Meaning of Life: Self-Expression
The meaning of life has been a riddle for philosophy for millennia. Theology’s answer is to practice a religion. While it is true that you can define your purpose in life to be whatever you decide, such as practicing a religion, I’m going to present a more fundamental explanation of the purpose and meaning of life that will hold true for every human being. The answer lies with the purpose of DNA and that purpose is self-expression.
The Purpose of Knowing
Life is a lot like a game. There are players, rules and goals. The players being people, the rules being physical and social laws, and the goals vary but for example some people want to have successful careers. If one can understand a universal goal or purpose, one that everyone has include oneself, then it can help one understand how to win the game. It can also help one to understand the motives, actions, and intentions of other players or people in the game. This can be helpful whether they are friends or adversaries.
Consider this analogy. There are four players ready to start a Monopoly game. Player 1 is told that there is no purpose and just to do what he feels is right. Player 2 is told that the purpose is to accumulate as much Monopoly money as possible and as quickly as possible. Player 3 is told that if you believe that you are a winner, then you will win. Player 4 is correctly told that the purpose of the game is to bankrupt the other players and that he needs to purchase property to do this.
Player 1 tries to land on Free Parking because it feels safe, Player 2 tries desperately to pass GO as many times as possible, Player 3 prays that he will win, and Player 4 purchases property and wins the game. If there was another player, Player 5 who also knew the purpose and rules of the game, Player 4 could adjust his strategy accordingly because he knows what Player 5’s motives and intentions are. Life is not about bankrupting other people and does not necessarily have to be adversarial, but conflicts do arise when interests are not compatible.
The Life and the Mind
First, we need to understand what life is. Life is a vehicle for the mind. They are separate entities and you do not have to believe in something supernatural to understand this. Take for example someone who is in a coma or has lost consciousness but is still alive. Their body is alive, but their mind is not there. In the foreseeable future, it will be possible to have a mind without a live body, using computers and artificial intelligence. The body is a vehicle for a life and a life is a vehicle for the mind.
Since life and mind are separate entities, it is plausible that they have different purposes. The purpose of the mind is to gain knowledge. This is because all that the mind does and can do is think and the purpose of thinking is to gain knowledge. The purpose of the life is self-expression, because the purpose of DNA is to express itself. These complex molecules evolved to form chains that are instructions for life. Any set of instructions are meant to express itself. Imagine you have blueprints to build a house. The blueprints are expressed and then you have a house. Is the house meant to express itself? Yes, if it has a green door, like the blueprint says it should have, then it is meant to express a green door. What about being shelter? It is expressing itself as shelter by having a roof. It is normally not thought of this way because the house does not have mind and is not conscious.
When the mind is seeking knowledge from a belief, it looks for justification, through testimony or first-person observation. Otherwise it is just a belief. When justification is from first person observation, the life expresses sensory input to the mind and then the mind decides whether to accept the justification or not. When justification is from testimony, the life expresses itself and then receives justification from others. This can be in the form of a question but also an action. If you believe you a great dancer, you do not know until you dance in front of an audience. If the mind has a belief whose truth value is subjective, such as “I am a great dancer”, it must receive testimonial justification or it is just a belief, not knowledge. All evaluations of the self are subjective and therefore any beliefs about oneself must receive testimonial justification from others.
Science
Science has defined the meaning of life to be reproduction.
Hank Green, SciShow — World’s Most Asked Questions, “The meaning of life biologically is to pass on the instructions for creating more life.”
Many people claim that this is their purpose in life, but what if I do not want to have children? Is my life meaningless? Of course not. I can still find meaning and purpose in other ways. But what do we find meaningful? Some people find conversation with friends meaningful, some people find meaning through singing, art, writing, sports, fashion, purchasing property, having and raising children. The list goes on. The one thing in common, between all activities people find meaningful, is the act of self-expression.
What is Self-Expression?
Google defines self-expression to be the expression of one’s thoughts, feeling or ideas and expression is defined as the process of making known one’s thoughts or feelings. This can be accomplished through our words or actions and we can even express ourselves to ourselves. However, we need confirmation (justification) from others that our expressions are meaningful if the value of the expression is subjective. If value can be determined by measurement, we can assign meaning to our expressions ourselves.
Take for example watching movies or sightseeing. Some people say that they find these activities meaningful even though ostensibly they are only observers, not expressing themselves. Their mind may find meaning in gaining knowledge from the observation. However, the life finds meaning in expressing its feelings about what it is observing to others, either during the observation or after. Simple gestures such as smiling and laughing are forms of self-expression as well as conversation.
Consider this thought experiment. A human born on a desolate planet, devoid of life, has an environment most of us would consider stupendous. It is full of snow-capped mountains, colorful rock valleys, and white sandy beaches. Could this person find sightseeing meaningful? If the thought of what he is seeing is stupendous enters his mind, he cannot confirm what he is seeing is stupendous to himself because the feeling of stupendous is completely subjective. Imagine what Facebook would be without “Likes” or any social media platform without the meaningful expression confirmation button.
Religion
Self-expression and confirmation is the reason so many people find believing in a god gives them meaning in life. If the person born on a desolate planet believes his expressions are expressed to a deity and he has a book that has a decree on what the deity wants you to express in action and words. He can express the messages from the book and believe that he will eventually get confirmation that what he is expressing is meaningful.
Enjoyment vs. Meaningfulness
Some people may enjoy sightseeing by themselves and have no desire to share their experiences with anyone else. We should highlight the difference between enjoyment and meaningfulness. Enjoyment simply starves off boredom, whereas meaning gives us a sense purpose. This is exemplified with sex. Sex with oneself can be enjoyable, but I do not believe that anyone finds it meaningful because the value of the expression is subjective. Sex with someone you love can be deeply meaningful if your partner confirms that it was meaningful.
Subjective vs. Measurable Self-Expression
We need confirmation from others that what we express is meaningful for subjective types of self-expression to be meaningful. However, we can assign meaning to measurable types of self-expression without confirmation from others. A person may find running a 5k meaningful, even if he has no desire to express this action to anyone else. It is still a type of self-expression. He may find that running five thousand kilometers in under thirty minutes gives him purpose in life because he can confirm to himself that what he did was true and that it gave him meaning.
The Life Applies Knowledge from the Mind
What about learning? Some people say that they find reading, going to school, and learning new things meaningful. The mind seeks knowledge and therefore learning, but the meaning to life comes from applying what they learned to a form of expression. When I was in college, I did not feel fulfillment until I expressed what I learned through a paper, exam, conversation or speech and received confirmation that what I learned was correct and meaningful.
The Purpose of Life
As explained earlier, the purpose of life is self-expression because that is the purpose of DNA. Does a rock have a purpose? No, because it was randomly created when the Earth formed and the Earth formed randomly. DNA evolved over time and evolution is not random. DNA are the instructions for all known life to exist and it is code in nucleic acid form much like computer code. The purpose of code being in a program is to expresses itself within the program or the outside world. Computer code in a program that is not expressed has no meaning in the context of that program. The same can be said for DNA within our universe. The analogy continues as the universe is the program and DNA are snippets of code.
Computer code can be expressed within a program and still not have a purposeful meaning in the program. It can simply waste CPU cycles. If that code is conscious, I believe it would not feel fulfilled unless it was intentionally being malicious. Similarly, we need confirmation that our acts of expressions are meaningful, or we may just be wasting CPU cycles.
