Rationalist Spirituality

by Bernardo Kastrup

  First published by O-Books, 2011

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  Text copyright Bernardo Kastrup 2009

  ISBN: 978 1 84694 407 9

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  To all conscious entities who have already contributed to the

  unfinished set of subjective experiences I call my life...

  ...particularly my wife Natalia.

  Chapter 1

  The hypothesis of meaning

  The intuitive notion of meaning as an ultimate purpose for existence and life is deeply ingrained in the minds of most individuals. “Why am I here?” we ask ourselves. But a more fundamental question may be whether it makes any sense to ask about meaning in the first place. Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman once said: “There are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean.”1 Perhaps the very concept of meaning is fallacious; an illusion engendered by our brains, maybe as a consequence of a survival advantage in our evolution as a species.

  As this book was being written, Matthew Hurley, Reginald Adams Jr., and Daniel Dennett were working on an evolutionary explanation for, of all things, our sense of humor. Humor seems to be such an abstract feeling, so removed from the framework of survival of the fittest, that any attempt to explain it through evolutionary biology may appear futile. Yet, in a talk, Daniel Dennett has suggested that humor is merely “a neural system wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job.”2 If that is true, then it is not unreasonable that natural selection could have favored the survival of individuals with a more developed sense of humor. The validity of this theory aside, the fact is that serious and respected philosophers can rationally argue that some of the most abstract of our feelings and motivations actually may have had very practical, survival-oriented applications during our evolutionary history. This alone should make us treat the question of meaning with caution.

  Even if meaning is not merely an illusion, even if it truly exists in nature and it is a valid line of rational inquiry to search for it, there is no guarantee that we are intellectually equipped to grasp it. Logically, it is a possibility that the limitations of our own perception and comprehension may inherently prevent us from ever understanding the ultimate purpose of existence. In this case, as far as we are concerned, searching for meaning would be as futile as if the concept of meaning itself were fallacious.

  Since you are reading this book, it is relatively safe to assume that you feel an intuitive and strong drive for the search of meaning, or ultimate purpose, in your life. Nonetheless, the two scenarios described above may make you feel insecure about the validity of your own motivations. I wish I could give you sound logical arguments right here to convince you that meaning must be real, and that it must be within the scope of our comprehension to grasp it. However, I cannot. What I can tell you is this: having meditated intensely on this for many years, from both sides of the argument, I have intuitively concluded, to my own satisfaction, that there is indeed meaning to existence.

  So my invitation to you is this: assume, as starting hypotheses, that there is indeed a meaning for existence and that it can be at least partially understood; what might that meaning then actually be? This book tries to sketch a rational answer to this question. Notice that I am not asking you to believe in these hypotheses blindly, but simply to keep an open mind about the possibility of their being true, so that we can pursue certain avenues of rational exploration. Then, after having read this book, you will be able to consider the answers we will arrive at and judge whether they make sense. Informed by that judgment, you will be able to look back and reconsider whether the concept of meaning is real or merely an illusion concocted by our brains.

  Chapter 2

  A search for ultimate purpose

  “What happens but once […] might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”1 So does world-renowned author Milan Kundera capture the apparent futility of existence and its ephemeral character. If, as indicated by the second law of thermodynamics, all dynamic and organized structures in the universe, amongst which galaxies, stars, and living creatures like you and me, will eventually expire without a trace, existence appears devoid of meaning. From the point of view of orthodox materialistic science, all choices we make and experiences we live throughout our lives will, in time, be of no consequence. As such, our lives are “light” in their insignificance. Such “unbearable lightness of being”, captured so powerfully in Kundera’s work, is an agonizing and profoundly counter-intuitive perspective for many of us.

  As rich and satisfying as our lives may sometimes be, most of us are marked by past or present experiences of profound pain and suffering. Loss, disappointment, frustration, anxiety, regret are or have been familiar concepts to most of us. Is there anything we suffer for? And even when everything seems to go well in our lives, we sometimes cannot help but wonder whether there is any meaning in that either. What can be the meaning of our success, our material wealth, of our fleeting moments of happiness, and even of our most profound rejoicing when, given enough time, not a trace or even a memory of our existence will be left behind? From a rational perspective, can there be anything that survives our participation in the universe, adding something to its very essence in a way that transcends time? Without it, there can be no true meaning to the dance of existence.

  There are no obvious answers to this question. Yes, our children survive us. The work we carry out during our lives often survives us too, be it through material entities like the buildings of an architect, or more abstract entities like the ideas of a philosopher. But notice, the common thread behind all these tentative answers is the same: whatever outcome of our lives survives us only has meaning through the lives of other people like ourselves. The achievement of meaning is merely postponed in a self-similar way. Your children are people like you. The house built by the architect is only meaningful through the people who will live in it. The ideas and concepts left behind by the philosopher are only meaningful through the people who will read his books. But what, then, is the meaning of the lives of those people? If their lives are meaningless, so has the life of the philosopher been, for the meaning of his life seems to be conditional to that of theirs. This is an endless recursion. If the meaning of your life is the lives of your children, and the meaning of their lives are the lives of their children, and so on, where is the final meaning of it all that confers ultimate purpose to the lives of all previous generations of men, and of men’s ancestors, all the way back to the beginning of time? In mathematics, a recursion cannot complete until a base-case, or termination condition, is reached. Recursions without a base-case continue on forever and are poin
tless, just like a computer program that does nothing but call itself repeatedly, never producing a result.

  It could be that meaning is only realized at the base-case of one such a recursive process. In this case, the meaning of our lives would operate solely through the contributions we make to the lives of the people who survive our own existence, up until a point where the existence of a generation of living beings, perhaps in an unimaginably distant future, will serve an ultimate purpose in itself. Alternatively, or complementarily, it could be that our lives, ephemeral as they may be, somehow have meaning in and by themselves, grounded on the present of our existence.

  In the coming chapters, we will explore both alternatives. If, at the end of this exploration, we find no sound base-case for a recursive process of meaning, nor any anchor to ground meaning to the present of our existence, we may be left with the possibility that meaning is either merely an illusion or an unknowable truth. If instead, as I hope to show, there are reasonable ideas and lines of reasoning to substantiate the notion that there is indeed meaning to existence, and that such meaning can be at least intuited, then perhaps the lightness of our being is not at all unbearable. Perhaps the existence of the universe, and of our lives within it, is rich in meaning, significance, and purpose. Perhaps it is precisely the perception of futility and inconsequence that has all along been an illusion of our minds. In this latter case, we will also need to suggest logical and rational mechanisms for the emergence of such an illusion in a universe that is, as postulated, rich in meaning. This is the journey of this book.

  As a final note in this chapter, it should be clear that, when I talk of meaning, I refer to an ultimate purpose for the very existence of the universe, defined as the collection of all existing aspects of nature, known and unknown. I do not mean to imply an anthropomorphic purpose to particular, local processes taking place within the universe, such as, for instance, evolution by natural selection. This way, the ideas in this book are agnostic of whether the evolution of the species has an intelligent causal agency or is driven by unintelligent, purely algorithmic processes. Even if we assume the latter viewpoint, there is still a valid question regarding the ultimate existential purpose of the underlying vehicles of the evolutionary process. In other words, even if evolution is the result of mechanical, algorithmic processes operating on a bio-molecular medium, why does that medium, and the natural laws operating on it, exist in the first place?

  Chapter 3

  A process of universal enrichment

  Most religions are grounded on the concept of a Supreme Being that is perfect in Itself. Because there is a natural tendency in many of us to associate the idea of completeness to that of perfection, we then automatically envision a perfect Supreme Being as something that is also complete, that is, a Being to which nothing can be added. Although such an association between perfection and completeness is natural for most of us, depending on how it is interpreted it may seem to preempt the possibility of there being ultimate purpose to the universe’s very existence. An entity that is complete, in the sense that nothing could possibly be added to it that was not already in it, could not possibly have any purpose. Think about this last statement for a moment, for the physical space it occupies on this page is overwhelmingly out of proportion with its importance. Completeness is incompatible with purpose.

  A universe that comprises a complete entity is itself complete.1 Indeed, the existence of a complete entity, as part of nature or as nature itself, logically implies the completeness of the whole of existence. And in a complete universe, the drama of our lives could not possibly add anything to the universe that were not already somewhere in it. The collection of human experience would be inconsequential.

  If the universe were complete, wherever it “needed to go”, it would already be there; whatever it “needed to do”, it would have already done it; whatever it “needed to be”, it would have already become it. Existence in a complete universe would be pure static being, if such a thing can even be conceived of. Completeness is incompatible with movement, yet it is beyond doubt that the universe is dynamic; the universe is certainly “doing something”, “going somewhere”, and all of our empirical observations as conscious beings tell us that. Therefore, at some level, in some way, the universe must not be complete.

  Notice that, above, I deliberately separated the concept of completeness from that of perfection. Indeed, perhaps counter-intuitively, universal perfection is a relative concept conditional to subjective criteria; what is perfect for me might not be perfect for you. On the other hand, universal completeness can be defined as an absolute concept. Indeed, we can define completeness by saying that the universe will be complete when its inherent potential is fully realized. Such statement does not depend on subjective criteria. Let us elaborate on why this is a reasonable statement to make.

  We can logically conceive of things, properties, or concepts that exist in the universe even if we do not know them. These are already realized potentials of the universe that we may simply not have encountered yet. We can also logically conceive of things, properties, or concepts that could potentially exist in the universe, but currently do not. These are then the unrealized potentials of the universe that render it incomplete. Indeed, it would be inconsistent to consider the universe complete when aspects of its own inherent potential are not realized. Finally, “things”, “properties”, or “concepts” that do not exist even in potentiality are semantic voids. So the definition of universal completeness above is reasonable and semantically consistent, albeit broad to the point of not being very useful. In subsequent chapters, I will attempt to define the notion of inherent potential more specifically, so to narrow down the scope of our definition of universal completeness.

  For now, the point I want to make is that the universe can conceivably be perfect and incomplete concurrently. This would be the case if only a yet non-realized aspect of its own potential can, in principle, be brought into full realization through the operation of a process of enrichment. In this hypothetical case, the universe is subjectively seen as perfect precisely for the fact that it is in complete. It is that very incompleteness that “leaves room” for a dynamic process of enrichment, the dynamics of which may embody a subjective set of values associated to the idea of perfection. In other words, if a perfect universe is one that is dynamic in nature, one where there is movement, then such a perfect universe is necessarily incomplete.

  It is intuitively appealing to think of the ultimate purpose of existence as the enrichment of the universe itself. In fact, during meditation, this idea may feel like the only possible truth regarding meaning. However, it is impossible to even begin thinking about this idea rationally before we specify more strictly what is meant with “enrichment”, that is, until we say what enrichment is and, even more importantly, what it is not. And even once that is achieved, we will still be left with the burden to show that there is room for such an enrichment process in the universe without violating logic, reason, or our current scientific knowledge of nature’s laws.

  Chapter 4

  The unrealized potential of consciousness

  Your own consciousness is the most basic and familiar thing in your life. In fact, it is the only thing you ever experience in your life, everything else being just subjective objects in your consciousness. There are different definitions for consciousness but, in this book, I will consistently use the one philosophers call “phenomenal consciousness”: consciousness as subjective experience itself; the subjective experience of hearing a sound, of seeing the “redness” of the color red, of feeling sad, etc. If an entity is conscious, it means that there is something, anything, it is like to be that entity. In other words, a conscious entity is capable of subjective experience. From this point on, every time I use the word “consciousness” I will mean “phenomenal consciousness”, as defined above.

  Notice that I make a distinction between a subjective experience and the neural correlates of such experience in the bra
in. For instance, our eyes are capable of detecting certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation and of sending associated electrochemical signals for processing in the brain. Our subjective experience of that process in consciousness might be described as “seeing the color red”. However, all processes involved in detecting the corresponding electromagnetic radiation and processing the associated neural signals could, in principle, happen without any subjective experience accompanying them. As a matter of fact, much of the brain’s neural activity is not associated to subjective experience at all, thus happening “in the dark”, outside of consciousness.1 Why not all of it? After all, we could conceivably explain all form, structure, and function in the universe, including human beings and their behavior, without any need for the existence of subjective experience.

  Nothing that we know scientifically today satisfactorily explains why or how subjective experience arises. This is often called the “explanatory gap”. In his book “The Conscious Mind” philosopher David Chalmers has elaborated extensively on this notion.2 Joseph Levine has also constructed elaborate arguments powerfully illustrating this gap.3 Technical discussions about the explanatory gap still go on today in philosophical circles. However, for our discussion in this book, the important message to take from it is this: insofar as consciousness, science provides an incomplete model of nature. In fact, all we have determined scientifically is that there are neural correlates of objects in consciousness.4 In other words, we know that the perceptions and thoughts that we are aware of occur “together” with specific excitations of associated brain structures.

  The explanatory gap, and the definition of consciousness given above, will become clearer if we contrast them with a common intuition we have about the lack of consciousness. I am agnostic of whether the intuition itself is correct, but it exists and is strong, so I will use it. Consider your personal computer. It is capable of highly sophisticated and adaptive behavior. It performs complex and varied functions. It responds to your commands and to data it receives from other means, like the Internet. However, most people would assume that there is nothing it is like to be a computer. In other words, most people do not believe that a computer feels anything, in the broadest sense of the word; that a computer is capable of subjective experience or inner life; that the calculations it performs are somehow objects of inner experience. For most people, a computer performs all of its tasks “in the dark”, in a mechanical manner, not very different in nature, but only in scale and complexity, from an old abacus. While we can make an analogy between the calculations taking place inside the computer and the neural correlates of consciousness taking place inside the brain, it seems clear that the computer does not experience those calculations the way we experience the neural processing in our brain. In fact, even if we imagine computers becoming increasingly more sophisticated, and performing increasingly more complicated tasks that eventually become comparable in complexity to our own brain processing, there appears to be something very fundamental and intrinsic about the “mechanical” nature of computers that renders them incapable of subjective experience. It is that intuited difference between you and a computer that characterizes consciousness.