Humanism and the Meaning of Life

by Bill Creasy

For many people, their primary goals in life are immediately apparent. People take care of children and family, they do the best that they can in their business or profession, or they volunteer in groups. These accomplishments give rewards that their efforts are worthwhile.

For some people, ideas about the meaning of life are connected to their expectations about the future. These ideas also depend on their attitudes about human nature.

Christians and Muslims, with their supernatural mythology, have a certain advantage over naturalistic thinkers in terms of their beliefs about the future of humanity. Their mythology tells them how the world will end, under the control of supernatural forces. As Fritz Williams, the Leader of the Baltimore Ethical Society, wrote, "One of the primary functions of traditional religion is to help people avoid facing the absurdity of life. Armed with powerful myths and ceremonies and holy scriptures, these religions support the illusion that our lives occupy a central place in God's own eternal plan. They assure believers that we're all here for a purpose.... Incredible energy goes into sustaining these illusions and holding them together...in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary." [BESpeak, newsletter of the Baltimore Ethical Society, Feb. 2008].

The myths are assurance that the end of the world will be good, for good believers. Thus they provide a meaning of life to believers, as they interpret what good behavior is, so they expect to end up benefitting from God's eventual judgement.

Humanists don't have that assurance from mythology. We care about the "overwhelming evidence to the contrary." We can only speculate about what the future may be like, without any real certainty.

Philosophy and works of fiction have been written about ideal ways of life in utopias. A utopia is a perfect society in which life is pleasant and social problems like war and crime have been eliminated. Stories of utopias date back to Plato's Republic. The problem with utopias is that they are idealized. Most of them give little indication of how they could arise.

In modern times, people seem to be aware that there are inevitable conflicts between people due to competition in economic and political matters. People are accustomed to the idea that change is a constant fact of life, and a static society is unrealistic. So perhaps it's better to think about how society will change and progress, rather than what a perfect, utopian one is like.

The future that we prefer has a lot to do with our ideas about human nature, and how much we trust that everyone will collectively act in their long-term best interests. That kind of trust, in turn, helps to determine what we think is the meaning of life. By choosing a vision of the future, we make a decision about what we are going to do, or not do, to progress toward the future.

We can think about three general classes of future scenarios that can be found in literature or popular movies and culture:

1) The disaster scenario. This pessimistic scenario assumes that a disaster will end human civilization, human life, or potentially even all life on the planet. It had prominence during the Cold War era, when it seemed that human civilization might be destroyed by nuclear war. But it still survives now. A recent movie, I am Legend, suggests a biological extermination of humans. The Terminator series of movies and current TV series proposes that civilization will be destroyed when intelligent, hostile machines take over. There are many other disaster scenarios, unified by the idea that humanity will end in a disaster. If this is the outcome, the best effort that a current individual can do is to store provisions to survive in a subsistence fashion after the crisis. Any other work is basically futile. The assumption is that we cannot trust other people at all to think about their long-term best interests. Ultimately, thoughtlessness and short-term goals will cause mistakes that will bring about the distruction of civilization.

2) The gradual improvement scenario. This moderate view is that humans will survive and gradually improve for a long time into the future. There will be better technology and more humane culture, and more equity and fairness. Popular science fiction series that use this scenario are Star Trek and Babylon 5. Well-known books include Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, among many others. In these stories, the human race develops space travel and may take a prominent place among extraterrestrial races. But individual human characteristics don't change much, and the gradual improvement continues indefinitely into the future. Disasters become less important, because humanity is spread over many planets. A modern person can contribute to this kind of future by contributions to scientific research or humanistic culture, and by helping to avoid disasters.

3) The singularity scenario. In this alternative, evolution continues and even accelerates into the future. At some point, artificial technology becomes advanced enough to evolve by itself. Then evolutionary progress doesn't come from biological or cultural natural selection of humans, but rather from artificial technology. Computers advance to the extent that intelligent machines replace humans as the dominant intelligent species on earth. Humans may add technological improvements to their brains and bodies to allow incredible new abilities. These abilities include a capability to save information in brains into another storage medium and then restore the information into a new body, providing immortality over death of a physical brain.

The science fiction author Vernor Vinge popularized the term "singularity" to describe the point in time when artificial brains are more advanced than natural human brains. At that time, evolution could proceed so rapidly that humans would be out of control of technological progress. A proponent of this view is WASH member Greg Paul in his book with Earl D. Cox, Beyond Humanity: Cyber Evolution and Future Minds (Charles River Press, 1996).

It is interesting that the singularity scenario has analogies to a religious apocalypse. In both cases, there is a point in the future at which a more advanced entity takes over, and it is functionally impossible for "mere mortal" humans to anticipate what will happen. In the singularity scenario, it is conceivable that humans could be "upgraded" to an extent that humans are involved in future advances, but it would still be hard for us natural humans to predict the course of events. Indeed, we may not even be able to understand what is happening around us. The fate of people who refuse to upgrade is hard to say.

For a person who agrees with this scenario, the best goal is to help move humanity toward the singularity as fast as possible. It will be the greatest adventure of the human race. Such people want to minimize the chance that they will die of natural causes before it happens. The best field to work in would be computer hardware and software, although studies of human biology and neurology might be important.

A secular meaning of life depends on which of these scenarios a person accepts. The disaster scenario takes a dismal view of human reason for being unable to foresee or prevent potential crises, and for human nature as unable to maintain a civilization. The gradual improvement scenario is the middle-of-the-road choice, since it assumes that people can coexist peacefully and safely, but it also assumes that human cultural evolution is the only important kind of evolution. But the singularity scenario is an unsettling idea, since it implies that people may create a technological "monster" that will be beyond their control, even if it may turn out to be benign. Can humans cope with a crisis that is of our own creation?

These alternatives are valid replacements for the religious end-of-world myths. Unfortunately, we have no certainty about which one may come to pass.

This article was originally published in the May 2008 issue of WASHline, the newsletter of the Washington Area Secular Humanists.