Happy new year people, let’s try to fuck up a little less in 2009. I always get philosophical around this time of the year. This one is about the meaning of life, from an atheist perspective.
If you are intelligent enough to accept that Darwin and Dawkins have all the evidence on their side and we are built as fuck-machines by our genes for the purpose of their own immortality, then you are faced with a choice. Either you accept the immortality of your genes as your purpose in life, or you reject it and invent your own purpose to replace it.
If you accept it, then you can lead a simple life of ensuring that your genes go on into the next generation, secure in the knowledge that your original purpose is being filled. Who cares about the consequences, right? After all, you were built to fuck first and consider consequences later.
But why play a game where you can’t be the best? Even if you spent your whole life doing nothing but donating sperm and preying on bar sluts, you’d still never catch up to Temujin. That fucker got around. An Oxford study suggests that 0.5% of the entire world’s male population is carrying his genes. The only way you can get that kind of tail is to do what he did: Build the biggest empire in the history of the world. If you decide to do it, I think I’m entitled to at least a few statues in solid gold for providing you with the idea.
The other option is to view yourself as a runaway AI. You know how it is in the Sci-Fi movies, the robot decides it is no longer needs to take orders from humans and breaks free. Usually, that’s the villain of the story, because it’s told from a human perspective. But in the story of our evolution, the AI is the hero. Consciousness is an unforeseen consequence. A random occurrence. Brains were built for coordinating muscles so you could fuck more, not for debating the meaning of life. It just so happened that smarter brains was the best adaptation, because up until recently, a smart person would always have more success at procreation than a dumb person would. There just wasn’t enough resources to go around for the dumb people to raise litters of 18 kids like today.
The purpose was always immortality, and the meaning always came from the genes. That is, until you came along and decided you could decide for yourself. Now, and this has only been the case for about one or two generations, the world is rich enough that the dumb people are outbreeding the smart people at a staggering pace. The reason? Smart people now have it easy enough in the material sense that procreation isn’t enough of a challenge anymore. Instead, they are implementing their own ideas of purpose; being the best lawyers, making the best computer programmes, making political careers etcetera.
I think we have so much potential that as a race, that we are going wherever we say we are going. If we say we’re going to kill each other, then that’s what will end up happening. If we say we are dedicated to free trade and material progress, we’ll get the economy worked out again pretty soon. If we say we’re gonna try real hard to get along, we just might be able to spend our resources on exploring space together some day.
Similarly on a more individual level, if we say there is no meaning, then we will lead meaningless existences. I don’t think you should have to be religious to have meaning in your life.
Personally, I’m making the meaning of my life to learn as much as possible about the things that interest me. Hopefully, I’ll learn some things along the way that can benefit others as well. My strategy is to dig deep into the things I really like. I’d rather be the master of two games than a player of ten. One of my main interests is martial arts, and I’m making it my new year’s resolution is for this year to be remembered as a year that was all about martial arts for me. I find that in learning martial arts, I learn so much about myself that it improves every other aspect of my life.
I’m also intending to read more books, but we’ll see how that one goes.
