The meaningfulnes of life

I recently finished teaching a class called "Human Nature."  There are various ways of approaching the content for this class.  What I chose to do is to make this class about the "big" questions.  In particular, the class was about perhaps the biggest question of all:  What is the meaning of life?

I used this book as a textbook for the class.  As the title suggests, the book covered twelve theories, which gave their own answers to the above questions.  In case you're curious, here are the twelve theories:

1. Confucianism
2. Hinduism
3. Buddhism
4. Plato
5. Aristotle
6. Judaism/Christianity
7. Islam
8. Immanuel Kant
9. Karl Marx
10. Sigmund Freud
11. Jean Paul Sartre
12. Neo-darwinism

Each theory is broken down into four components:  the metaphysical assumptions of the theory, the claims made about the nature of human beings, its diagnosis of the human condition, its prescription for human flourishing.

Teaching the class got me thinking about the question of life's meaningfulness.  I've been getting progressively sadder over time because I've been getting more and more doubtful as to whether or not there is any meaning to life at all.  So, as a kind of therapeutic exercise, I figure I'd do reflection on what it means for life to be meaningful.

I don't have a definition for "meaningfulness."  I'll have to start with some examples and try to extract some necessary or sufficient conditions.  Let's go over some cases.

A lot people think that individual death and the ultimate "death" of the universe makes life meaningless.  Why strive after things if we're all ultimately going to die?

Supposing that the eventual death of all living things eliminates life's meaningfulness, we can draw at least two conclusions.

First, the meaningfulness of life depends on temporality.  What I mean by this is that whether or not you think your life is meaningful now will depend on states of affairs in the future.  This is what I infer when people say “What does it all matter? We’re all just going to die anyway.”  This is what you can also interpret from the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.

Second, the meaningfulness of life depends on consciousness.  I get this from the claim that death erases the meaningfulness of life.  I’m assuming that consciousness is extinguished upon death.  The idea, then, is that in order for life to be meaningful, that meaningfulness, whatever it may be, must be recognized.  Recognition, of course, requires a conscious perceiver.  Therefore, meaningfulness requires there be some conscious entity that is capable of recognizing the notion of meaningfulness.

It seems plausible to think that these two conditions are necessary conditions for meaningfulness, but we are still miles away from any kind of well developed theory of meaningfulness.  I’ll come back to this when I have more thoughts.

Math and reality

It's hard to imagine science without any kind of math.  It gets even harder as you move down to the more fundamental sciences, such as physics.  So many concepts in physics are mathematical, such as mass, velocity, speed, force, energy, etc.  From physics and upwards to the special sciences, so many laws are stated as mathematical equations.  E=mc^2, F=ma, etc.

Now, the sciences are investigations into reality.  What does it signify when we conclude that math is an inextricable part of science?

We take it for granted that so much of what we observe in the world is describable in terms of quantities and relations between quantities.  But, the world needn't have turned out that way.  The physical universe could have had no discernible pattern, thus resisting the formulation of mathematical laws describing the behavior of objects.

So why is it that math so effectively describes the world?  One possible explanation is simply that math is just as much a part of reality as atoms and molecules are.  Ontology is the study of existence, as well as what exists.  We often think of reality in ontological terms, i.e. giving an inventory of what exists.  However, this isn't all there is to reality.  Reality is not just about listing things that exists.  There is also the structure of reality, i.e. the way in which existing things are related.  Structure matters just as much in understanding reality as ontology does.  For example, just listing a bunch of wooden planks isn't enough to understand why something is a boat.  A pile of wood doesn't get you said boat.  You need something more.  You need to know how those planks are related, i.e. how they're put together.  Likewise a full understanding of reality means acknowledging that reality includes both things and structure.

So, we can say that math is a part of reality in that it is the structure of reality.

We could say the same thing about logic.  Math is to physics as logic is to metaphysics, although perhaps to a lesser degree in the case of metaphysics.  One can think of physics as a way of applying mathematics.  Similarly, one can think of metaphysics as a way of applying logic.  If logic plays a role that is similar to the role that mathematics plays in physics, then one can infer by analogy that logic is also part of the structure of reality.  This shouldn't be surprising, given the close association between mathematics and logic.

One consequence of the view that numbers and logical concepts are just as much a part of reality as tables and planets are is that there is more than one way to gain knowledge about objective reality.  Scientific knowledge is knowledge gained primarily via observation, i.e. through sense perception.  Logic and mathematical knowledge is knowledge gained through what I call "rational insight."  I don't use the word "intuition" because of its connotation with the kind of snap judgment thinking that you read about in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.  Rational insight is the faculty through which we come to know that claims in math and logic are true.  It is distinct from sense perception, in that it does not involve the use of our eyes, ears, etc.

So, if we accept that mathematical and logical entities are part of the physical universe, then it turns out that perhaps philosophy, metaphysics in particular, might tell us just as much about the universe as physics does.

Privacy and the asymmetry of information

People often consider privacy to be a right, similar to having the right to move around, say whatever you want, and buy whatever you want.  It's what some would call a "negative" right, meaning that it's something that people can't impede you from having.  If I have the negative right of movement, that means that people can't keep me from moving from one city to another city.  Contrast this with a "positive" right.  A positive right is a right to something that imposes a cost to other people.  For example, having the positive right to an education means that you are entitled to something that costs other people money, namely an education.

So, privacy is a negative right.  It doesn't cost anyone any money to give you privacy.

What I wonder about is why people think that this is so important.  There are familiar cases in which society faces a trade off between privacy and security.  Having more privacy across the board may make it more difficult for law enforcement officials to acquire relevant information regarding criminal activity.

Also there are familiar issues associated with social networking.  People raise a fuss about their privacy potentially being compromised on sites like Facebook.  But why does it matter so much?  Again, why do people place what seems to me a disproportionate amount of value on their privacy?

The explanation that makes most sense to me is grounded in the idea that information is a form of social currency.  Having more information gives you a kind of power, and being exposed (i.e. having people gain information about you) somehow diminishes your power.

So maybe privacy is a form of empowerment.  The less people know about you, the more "powerful" you are, perhaps.  It's like a game of poker, where the person who has the most information about their opponent is most likely to win.

Suppose that all information was freely available.  You could find anything you wanted about anybody, including classified government information.  Likewise, anybody could find out anything they wanted about you.  Nobody could hide any information at all.  Would this be a better society?  I'm inclined to think that it would be, but that's just a knee jerk response.

Basically, my gut response is that privacy is an issue only when it's asymmetric.  What I mean is that I'd get upset about my privacy being violated if I didn't have equal information access to the individual getting my information.  If had the same kind of access, i.e. if there was symmetry of information access between myself and some other individual, then I'd be okay with that.  I figure other people wouldn't be, and I wonder why.