Having had a few interesting conversations over the past week I felt it important that I note down my recent thoughts on the subjects we had discussed. I then promptly forgot what I wanted to say. This post then forms the jigsaw pieces that I can still remember from the original post I had envisaged.
The debates, at least the ones I want to discuss revolved around the idea of the scope of science. This is something that has also just crept up in the book I am currently reading, The Dawkins Delusion. While the debate on the meaning of life itself is not the same debate as whether science has a scope or not but is often hauled up as an example of a question that is best left to philosophy because it is outside of the scope of science.
This proposal relies on how you define the meaning of life however. Do you take the scientific meaning of life (why we exist from a Darwinian perspective) or do we look for something, and I use the term loosely, deeper, something that cannot be found in science but requires us to look somewhere else, for example philosophy.
If you take the former approach then the question is fairly simple to answer. Life seems to be created to reproduce and continue it’s own existence, this is certainly true on a genetic level. The purpose of life is to create more life. Of course it would be, otherwise life would not be so successful and would eventually die off.
If you take the latter approach to the question then perhaps it would be out the scope of science. How can what most people would describe as the cold touch of empiricism and rationalism provide an answer to such question as what is the purpose of my life? Therefore if this is true, a case can easily be made to suggest such questions are indeed outside of the scope of science.
However, this position has a problem. Because of course, there is no meaning of life. Such questions cannot stand up to attacks from common sense because there clearly isn’t a universal meaning of life. We’re not going to get to the end of the game and find out that we achieved or failed to achieve the stated goals (unless you expect your death to consist of you waking up in some kind of Back to Reality senario to find you only scored 4%).
After all, how could such a universal constant be applied? Any such meaning of life must be subjective, even if on a society level it would still be human created. After all, if not it would have to be applied to all living things. How is a plant supposed to achieve it’s full potential? How are dophins with their conscious minds but lack of schools of philosophy supposed to work out what it is?
If it is subjective then obviously it has to real meaning because we can change it as we see fit and has only the significance we grant it (and may choose to grant it none).
There is of course one exception to the rule here, and that concerns theology. If indeed a religion is right (or even the idea of theism is right even if all major religions are wrong in their own special way) and there is a God who created human beings for a purpose then there could well be an objective, universal, meaning of life.
Such an idea however is purely a theological question and not a philosophical one. Therefore it would seem unjust to have such a connection develop between philosophy and the meaning of life. It would also seem a waste. Surely the time of philosophers could be used to develop our knowledge about, and I again use the term slightly loosely, real things. Then again, perhaps they do, and like most of society I have simply been impressioned with a pattern of philosophy trying to answer the meaning of life when in fact no philosopher is actually concerning themself with such a question. I suspect however that this is not the case.
I also suspect that this is the area that has made me feel a gap between philsophy and the real world. I have always felt the two are somewhat detached and this is a senario that demonstraits why fairly well. Presuming that the theologians are wrong, there is no meaning of life, it has no connection to the real world, no practical applications and ultimately no meaning.
But of course this is not true of philosophy of as a whole. It has great value in the subjects of how we reason and the trust we place in our methodologies (though I would be reluctant to add metaphysics to this list as most questions arising in this subject seem to be, like the meaning of life, either a question that is actually under the domain of a different subject or simply a non-existent topic).
To summarise what I think I’ve said in this post, the question of the meaning of life is either a question for theology or a question for science. Presuming the latter is true, it’s importance is greately over-valued in that the answer only serves to aid our understanding of biology slightly better.
Don't have time to check my blog? Get a weekly email with all the new posts. This is my personal blog, so obviously it is 100% spam free.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.