What's It All

mean? That’s like the big daddy of them all, isn’t it? But it seems like a real impossibility as the meaning of life is never revealed during life…or maybe it is, but only very rarely.

There are those that would say that the meaning of life is love. I have to admire these people because love is an extremely admirable, if incomprehensibly complex, emotion to base one’s existence on—I guess I’m thinking of the super-powerful flower in gun barrel image. To be sure, if love is what it is all about, then that is an incredible design from the almighty; however, large-scale love has never really worked. The closest we could probably come is peaceful co-existence. Yes, if everybody loved everybody the world would be a better place, but we are asking entire chunks of the world to unburden themselves of the weight of history, which is a mighty difficult task. I think the closest that this relationship could come to the meaning of it all is a love—hate thing, and while the ironic gap is pretty fitting, it only really accounts for part of something.

By this I mean that it is only a part of what the brain can do. The amydgala is small neural cluster in the brain that processes a lot of our negative emotions and the positive emotions are sort of strewn about—an interesting phenomenon in itself. What happens when we make decisions is that these sections of the brain seem to light up and duke it out letting us know how we ought to feel and therefore helping us make decisions. But I think the key here is that these are sections of the brain. The brain is more complex than love?

I don’t think anybody would forego derivatives for the whole unless you absolutely had to—thanks math—and for this reason there is good reason to believe that the first principle ruling each and every individual resides in the brain, and not somewhere specific either. The brain is as complex as life is, and is, arguably, what makes us capable of life or, more specifically, living.

The body is an amazing thing. Have you ever fasted? It’s a funny sort of thing that affects the body, and we feel it. To fast has been a part of almost every major religious or spiritual history, and for good reason because it makes us very aware of the needs of the body. I am still a big proponent of the two biological imperatives: survive and reproduce. From a purely biological standpoint, these two, fairly simple things are all that we need to survive. They are not the meaning of life because these are once again one section of imperatives. We also need to emote and cogitate and decide and do the things that make these two imperatives possible, and meaning should not be something you have to do. You find meaning, but you don’t technically have to go out looking for it—implied of course by find.

I’ve just had a disturbing thought that how I came into the world is how I’m going to go out of it: as a newborn I had colic and cried incessantly.

But if he head back into the depths of the brain, we find something else interesting going on there, and that is that something we would normally consider a positive emotion, empathy, in that it is a positive thing to be able to understand what someone is feeling, actually flares up some parts of the brain that deal with pain: pleasure and pain, a classic battle.

From this one battleground we can absolutely determine that pleasure and pain are not the meaning either because these are once again two separate feelings (opposites), and meaning does not really have an opposite. Meaning and meaninglessness would probably be the closest, but meaninglessness is determined by meaning, unlike pleasure being determined by pain in that it is entirely possible to understand the one without the other, but meaninglessness means nothing without meaning.

So, what are we getting from this? The brain, the intellect, and the question. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might say, “would you deny even spirituality?” Spirituality is a mysterious feeling, but we have already determined that feelings are derivatives of the brain’s functions and that we would not forego first principles for derivatives. Spirituality is different from love in that its mysteries involve asking the question, “What happens when the one we love is absent from our physical presence and we attribute all this power and grandeur and meaning to him or her or it?” But that’s about it. If you have ever been in a long-distance relationship, you have been close to this kind of thing. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it. It is extremely challenging, and you learn one helluva lot about yourself in the process, but I guess it’s not everything now is it?

I am beginning to think that we are overlooking the most relevant part of the question we asked at the very beginning: the fact that it is a question: a question implies an answer. Now, let’s be very clear and say that there are some questions that are more difficult to answer than others, let’s just say for kicks we were asked to discuss theoretical physics or what Joyce was really getting at. These are nearly impossible questions to answer, but by asking them we are implying that it is worthy of investigation and the closer we get to the answer of these truly difficult questions is one step closer to understanding more about ourselves.

If the one thing we can grant is that the act reveals desire, and that we generally act for what we want, and further, that the act is a question because the future is unknowable, then the boiled down first principle of the thing seems to be saying something like act with the understanding you are questioning because that’s what you can do. You don’t have to, but you can. The more you actively question, the more you are revealing you want to question in general. You are always better for having acted (I am not advocating irrational, premature actions, but even these have the potential to make us better if we learn from them).

But even an action is a question that has no words right away. Sometimes we don’t know what question we are asking until we have the benefit of hindsight, so maybe it’s the question undefined that defines us. We can investigate everything, can’t we?