So what is the point of life?  I've spoken about the limitations of science and religion, and how the only thing you can't deny is your experience, and how ultimately it's about these abstract ideas, like feeling fulfilled, that are fundamental to the meaning of life, but where do you go from there?  How do you achieve these goals that lead to ultimate fulfilment in life?  Is there more to it than just that short last paragraph of my last blog?

Firstly, I want to restate some basic conclusions of some of my previous thinking.  The universe only exists because we are here experiencing it.  There is absolutely no question of that.  Even if it did exist without consciousness, it would not have any meaning at all without sentience to give it meaning.  It would be like a game simulation on a computer that has no monitor.  For existence, there needs to be consciousness to give it meaning.  Also, the universe is complete unto itself.  There is no necessity for anything outside of existence, like heaven in the literal sense, for example.

So, what we experience in this universe we give meaning, but without consciousness those things would have none.  For example, you look at a cup and you give it meaning to make it useful.  Your brain takes the sensory information of the glass from your eyes, and creates a three dimensional model of it so that you can use that model to pick it up and use it as a cup.  The model that is created is the most useful model the brain can create in order to benefit from the sensory information it obtains.  As analogy, a computer simulation of a game-world creates a model of that game-world and projects it on a monitor such that you can use that model to navigate and use the rules of the game-world to overcome the objectives within the game.

Ultimately, all experience we have comes from within our minds, even the cup and the experience of say, the colour red.  What we experience is the perception of these physical things through a model that has been developed within our minds through logic, rather than the actual things directly.  There are other things we experience which do not rely on our senses so much as they seemingly come from within our minds.  Moods are an example of this.   Happiness and jealousy are feelings we experience, but aren't physical in nature.  Does that mean that they don't exist?  Absolutely not.  These are as real of an experience as your experience of the colour red.  They are a part of the universe as much as the cup is, because it is your consciousness that is giving meaning to the universe, and it does this through experience and thought. 

Your brain produces models of the world using the information it receives so that it can work and progress; ultimately towards the goals we set ourselves.  A new born baby soon learns the logic of three dimensional geometry, time, and gravity, and uses this understanding to achieve simple goals such as building a block tower, for example.  Ultimately, the goals we set ourselves lead to a sense of fulfilment.  The baby will feel a certain sense of fulfilment in building a tower successfully; a person will get fulfilment from eating and appeasing hunger.  Experience helps us produce a logical model, which leads to an ability to manipulate things within the logic of that model to achieve goals, resulting in fulfilment.

Moods are part of our experience, but thinking further, on another level of abstraction, we experience a sense of what's right and what's wrong.  You could call it a sense of morality.  We go through life, and everyday are faced with moral decisions to which we know there is a right and a wrong thing to do, and I think the experience we have of right and wrong is as real as any other of our experiences, like our experiences of the cup, of the colour red, or of the emotion of jealousy. 

An interesting question that can be raised here is one of whether right and wrong are relative or absolute.  I personally believe that there is an absolute sense of right and wrong that is as intrinsically absolute to the universe as the absolute natures of the experience of a cup, the colour red or of jealousy are.  It doesn't matter your culture or upbringing, you experience the model of the cup to the same geometry, although you may not both understand what it is used for necessarily.  Relativism is an apposing view that would suggest that right and wrong are different dependent on the person and situation, so what might feel right for one person and one time might be wrong to another.  One consequence of this view, if taken in its complete form, is to accept that historical events such as slavery and the holocaust were not absolutely wrong, and it depends entirely on your point of view.  So, for example, Hitler and the Nazis were not doing wrong from within there own perspectives.

Just as the purpose of other manifestations of experience is to lead us to making logical models of the universe which aid us in our search for fulfilment, so too is the purpose of our experience of right and wrong.  But how does our experience of right and wrong aid fulfilment?

The notion of right and wrong is quite abstract.  Its even more abstract than other manifestations of our experience, like moods such as jealousy, which in themselves seem pretty abstract compared with experience of geometry and the cup.  That doesn't mean that these experiences aren't real or can't be used to create a useful logical model that leads to fulfilment.  Indeed, the only reason, I would suggest, that the experience of geometry seems more concrete than the experience of right and wrong is because you haven't experienced a sense of right and wrong from the moment you were born.  It's something that comes out of living life, and bubbles out of all the other models you have created from various other parts of your experience.

As we live longer in this reality, we can understand it better, and it helps us reach further and further fulfilment.  Geometry is a logical model created early on in our lives as babies, and obviously aids us in life.  Moods aid us in other areas of life.  Someone once told me a quote from somewhere that said that love itself is not an emotion, but arises out of a combination of all the emotions surrounding it, such as happiness, jealousy, fear, etc.  Maybe, emotions help us to relate to each others experience and lead to the desire to share intimacy, among other things, and these things lead to fulfilment.  It's difficult to see in a complete way how moods lead to fulfilment, but I don't think that it is difficult to understand that this is the purpose of the experience of mood, just as it is the purpose of all manifestations of our experience, including right and wrong.

If it's difficult to see how mood leads to useful models of existence that lead to fulfilment, then it's even more difficult to see how morality does.  I will try though.  I think a sense of right and wrong helps to override some of the actions we would take under models of just mood alone in order to lead to greater fulfilment.  For example, lying to someone may get what you want in the short term, but may ultimately cause problems in the future.  You may not understand the consequences of the wrong decision, but it's likely to affect you adversely in terms of fulfilment.  Doing what is right will likely lead to a more fulfilled consciousness in the future.

I think that a certain fulfilment can come about from a sense of contentment, and this arises out of a sense of personal unity.  What do I mean by this?  I mean a state where you agree with yourself, where you don't have conflicting ideas within your own mind, and you are happy in the present and not worried too much about the past or future, where you make decisions that are conducive to a sustainable happiness; that sort of thing.  I think the way to reach a state of personal unity is by following this sense of what is right, because ultimately, following what you feel is wrong is by definition disagreeing with yourself.

Ultimately, this is only a part of the goal to complete fulfilment.  I think ultimate fulfilment comes further from the complete unity between two people.  A perfect understanding between two conscious beings is like the ultimatum for fulfilment.  The only problem is that in order to completely understand another consciousness, both people must first completely understand themselves.  And you can't completely understand yourself without completely agreeing with yourself, and the only way to this goal is by ultimately following what you think is right in every situation.  Everything you have done that is wrong has already detracted from this sense of personal unity, and so you will never become as fulfilled as you have the potential to become.  Gutted.  We seem to have this inability to agree with ourselves and do the right thing.  It's like evil has this grasp over us.

So what is it about ultimate fulfilment that makes it part of the universe?  It doesn't seem logical to have a sense of right and wrong for the purposes of evolution, or of procreation.  Animals get on fine without a sense of right and wrong.  Why does it matter whether I feel complete unity with another person, so long as I get them pregnant?  Does the existence of the experience of right and wrong, of good and evil, point in the direction of spirituality and to things that are beyond our understanding?

Thanks for reading, please comment
BEN

Can science answer the question of the meaning of life?  I think the biggest misconception among a large portion of the population today is that spirituality and science is one and the same thing.  Sure people use science to refute various religious dogmas and scripts, that's fair enough, that's science, but as to the question of why we exist, it is futile to suggest that science will one day tell us, but yet people persist in idolising science. 

The argument goes like this.  In history, certain understandings have been held, for example, the elements are fire, water, earth and metal, or Newton's laws of motion.  These have been accepted until science suggests otherwise, and new theories are produced.  The periodic table is now understood to be a better description of elements then the fire and water description, and Einstein's theories have improved on Newton's.  It then follows that the theories we have today are far from complete, and that improvements will continuously be made.  This is known as the scientific method. 

Just as early people thought they knew the earth was flat, we think we know certain truths about reality, and just as a new revolutionary understanding of the world came about when it was discovered to be round, so too will revolutionary ideas emerge that will give us ever-deeper understandings about reality.  This has been shown in history to be true, and there is no reason for it not to be true in the future.

And we have surely only barely scratched the surface.  We are in an age, and have always been in an age, of ever increasing knowledge and rapidity in which these knew revolutionary ideas emerge.  Think about an arbitrarily long time from now.  Surely in the future at some point, knowledge and understanding will reach such a point at which even the question of the reason for our existence, of spirituality, will be answered.  This is the view people take. 

In fact, a lot of people think this has already happened.  Religion and dogma have slowly given more and more to science, with theories of creation being completely abandoned by the scientific community.  God, they say, is a god of the gaps, pushed back further and further.  Science, a lot of people say, has already disproved religion.  God is now so miniscule, he exists only at the moment of the big bang, and the rest is science.  And this will be ironed out, as science becomes an omniscient art, as knowledge rises to new knowledge, and the whole of reality, including the big bang, is utterly void of the need for a god to explain anything, as hawking has been trying to show.

The process of science is to use logic to determine relationships between manifestations of our experience.  Tests are made that can determine some truth about reality.  Newton observed the planets and deduced the law of gravitation to describe their motions.  Electromagnetism has emerged as a unifying theory that describes the relationship and action of the electric and magnetic forces, which govern the simple laws of motion we experience.  There have even deeper theories, of quantum mechanics, used to describe ever-deeper aspects of physics, and relativity, used to describe strange effects that only appear in very fast systems.  The reaches of science go further and deeper, and the consequences of these laws inform engineering and technology.  At the moment, the big problem for physicists is trying to unify the theory of gravity and relativity with theories of quantum mechanics using logical arguments that give rise to predictions about the reality we live in that are testable.

I suppose one of the biggest questions in science is how consciousness arises out of the universe.  Recent advances in technology and research has probed the workings of the brain and shown how various components work together, how memory works, how the brain functions.  More advances and further research will illuminate the answer to this question further and further.

So what is science actually doing for us?  It's telling us more and more about the universe we live in, probing deeper and more fundamental reaches of physics, and illuminating how these physical laws create consciousness.  It's providing knowledge that can be applied to technology, advancing human civilisation in this way, as it were.  That's great.  Science ultimately is trying to link fundamental logic right up through physics to chemistry to biology and to the existence of consciousness.  We are a long long way from achieving this.  We have indeed only scratched the surface, and maybe we won't ever actually reach this point.  Maybe it's impossible.  But this is the framework in which science can inform us.

There is this massive problem that we always come back to though.  No matter how close science comes to achieving this continuous and complete link between logic and consciousness, it will never explain why logic should exist in such a way that consciousness can exist in the first place. (see sidenote)

So what is the link between logic and consciousness?  Why does logic create consciousness?  Science might be able to show us how it works, but why?

To answer this question, which is really outside of the scientific realm, philosophers say that logic is itself only a construct of our minds, and is really just an illusion.  In this way, the logical problem that we ultimately reach, this problem of why logic creates consciousness, is somehow made irrelevant. 

I disagree with this though.  Logic is what the scientific method is based on, indeed it's what all our decisions and thoughts and even consciousness itself is based on.  Using logic, we have successfully understood certain things about science to the point that we can build working technology.  To say that logic is an illusion is to deny science as a way to gain a description of the universe and if you follow it through you deny your own existence.  If Descartes is wrong, then you are literally nothing.  In order to rise beyond this, to accept your experience, which is something we all do in practice, you must accept logic.  Whether it's true or not is irrelevant.

What's the point of all of this?  The point is that logically science and philosophy cannot tell you the meaning of life, and in that way there will always be room for spirituality.  God is outside of science, not because god is a god of the gaps, but logically so.  There will never be a way to know whether god exists or not.  The problem of the meaning of life is one you have to answer not by looking at science, but by other means.

Any similarity to any persons or places is purely coincidental.

This was where the inevitability of consciousness lies, and indeed he was there.  In the invariance of the deep blue void that lay directionless in his awareness, blotches and waxy smears overlapped each other as they congealed into a non-existent presence, creating out of nothing an intricate organic structure that meshed seamlessly with the unchanging deepness of the uniform blue.  The paradox of this was not considered, as the desire to consider was unimportant, and indeed, to think of consideration would simply detract from the insight and vast pleasure of the direct experience.

                The paradox thickened, the patterns richer and more intricate.  Fractional dimensions unfolded out of the void.  An appreciation of scale and time emerged as nothingness wrapped itself tightly into tangible structure, as if observing the void with ever more consciousness necessitated its organisation.  Gradually he lost sight of the void, and in its place precipitated attention only to perpetual detail. 

                As existence around him solidified, so too did his connection to his memories, and his thoughts surfaced inevitably and steadily from the deep pure emotion of wisdom to the shallow complexity of self-awareness.  He became caught in a reality, forced into a timeline, and he noticed familiarity in the experience of sound.  He recognised reverberating laughter, felt pressure on his back and the grass on the sides of his bare arms.  His palms facing up to the bright sunlit sky, he stared far into the blue, and for a moment considered the unconsiderable.