A Comment on the Meaning of the Life Problem

As I have recently been solving all kind of open problems, naturally I have also given some thought to the famous Meaning of the Life question. After all, it is more relevant than the Clay Millennium Prize Problems, or the problems in the Relativity Theory, or the death toll of the Holocaust, or any such matters of merely passing interest for any of us, who – as the Proverbs say – reach 70 or 80 years and then die.

            In some earlier post I mentioned a simple and sort of elegant solution to the Meaning of Life Problem. It solves the injustice question by proposing that all living creatures have a copy of the same soul and this original soul, somewhere in another world, does not change. As this original soul is not born to the material world, it cannot have done anything that it could be punished or rewarded for. It has not sinned and is not judged according to any imaginable moral norm system, while all of the copy souls in any case die when the body dies. All copy souls all have the same judgment, annihilation, but that does not matter as they are simply copies of the original soul. But also, every soul is saved in the form it was before it was born. It does not matter that one copy soul had a better life and another had worse, as they are instances of the same soul. I is seen that this metaphysical system is perfectly just between souls, has the capital punishment for even the smallest sin (fulfills the strictest moral judgment principle) and still every soul is saved (fulfills the ultimate mercy principle). Naturally, you may not like this solution: the souls, saved in the state before they were born, do not have any memories or personal characteristics, which come from the brain and the environment. You also cannot save your self in this system. The best you could do is to realize that you actually are identical with the single eternal soul and stop complaining.

            This, I thought, was a pretty nice solution, and it did not take me so long to find it (which is always good with problems, there are time constraints), but very recently I found a minor problem in it. Usually, if there appears any minor problem in a solution to an old and difficult open question, it is almost always fatal. People, like me, who try to solve such old problems, try to patch their solutions, but soon another minor issue appears and finally they have to admit that the solution fails.

            But in this particular case I am a bit more optimistic. Namely, this minor problem opens a new view to the whole question and this time I may have hit to something essential. Let us look at the solution what I mentioned, why I ended up to that one, and where is the minor problem.

            The starting point is that something like a soul seems to exist. That is, we have consciousness and the feeling of free will. Our will may not be that free, but consciousness is certainly there. We also feel something. These observations can be extended by similarity to other people and many animals, minimum to women (though how can one know what goes on in a woman’s mind, Descartes did not dare to speculate so far), but I would go much further, at least to mammals and most probably to birds. So, consciousness and feelings cannot be denied even if we drop the free will. It is quite sure that computers to not have any of these, and there is no place for these elements in particle physics. (Though, there are chaotic systems, like weather and throwing dice. If you think spirits may influence chaotic systems, it is fine mathematically, but there is no evidence that there are such effects.) Consciousness and feelings must come from some other space or entity. Then I simply looked for an easiest acceptable solution that would fulfill the requirement of being just and good, as it would be a very negative view to assume that the reality is unjust and bad. And that’s it, a few minutes work.

            The problem in this solution is that I moved feelings to the external space or entity, to the realm of a soul. Where else they could be moved? Automatons do not have feelings, there is no Jesus jumping between elementary particles. So, it is correct to move them to the realm of a soul, but the problem is that the behavior patterns of animals (and humans) match perfectly with these feelings. That is, assume that an animal behaves as if it was scared. We can program an automaton to imitate the animal. The automaton will not feel anything: it just behaves as it was programmed to do. But the animal also feels scared, so the feeling matches with the behavior pattern.

            This seems to imply that the souls residing in another world have similar feelings as we do here, so their world must be very similar to ours and they must also have similar behavior patterns in their world. Otherwise, why should they have the same feelings? Feelings must correspond to something, like behavior. This observation I did not much like, as it implies that this world is a copy of some other world. The problem of the meaning of life is only moved from this our world to another world. Our world is as it is because of the way it has developed and it is material. Another world cannot be so similar to it, unless it is also material and has developed in a similar way. This is not reasonable.

            Yet, I found a kind of a solution. The feelings, that a soul has, need not be exactly the same as what we have here. We only need to assume that feelings have some dimensions and our feelings here are some points in the feeling space. (For making a theory, impose a new space, works nicely in mathematics.) In the other world the points could be in different places, if they are concentrated in points at all. Thus, I tried to find the dimensions of feelings. I am sure some animal psychologist has done this already, but let’s just make it from scratch.

            There is the aggression-fear axis. Even snakes show behavior patterns of aggression and fear, I am not sure if they have the feelings associated with these behaviors, but probably they do. This axis could be closely related to the dominance-servitude axis, which appears in social animals. There is love and hate axis. At least dogs love their masters, so animals have the love feeling. The opposite is hate, so it must also exist. In general, if one in a pair of concepts exists, the other one must exist by logical necessity as it is the other end of a range. There is happiness-unhappiness axis, which corresponds to well-being: a hungry and ill animal is unhappy. Possibly there are no more concept pairs. Other feelings can be understood as transitions between these concept pairs. Transitions can succeed or not, and it could evoke a feeling. Thus, jealousy could be a feeling response to having been loved, moved away from being loved, and a failure to move back to being loved, or something like this. Precise classification of human feelings is of course not in my main area of competence, but based on cheap novels and other highly relevant literature on the topic, humans have all types of such complicated feeling combinations.

            From three basic concept pairs: dominance/servitude (appearing also as aggression/fear), love/hate, and happy/unhappy, we may be able to make other feelings. This would make a six-pointed star. (In case you dislike the hexagram, you can identify two extreme points, say happy=love or hate=unhappy, and reduce it to a pentagram, and assuming you prefer the NATO star, the Mercedes sign, or the compass needle, you have to make more identifications, but I think three concept pairs is a good start.)

            Just assuming a more precise psychological analysis would end up with three concept pairs (or any number), can we say something of the structure of the other world? This is valid speculation from a metaphysical system: if there are such concept pairs, they should correspond to something real in the other world. So, let us see.

            If there is dominance/servitude, we can conclude that the other word has a hierarchy. If there is happy/unhappy division, all are not happy in the other world. If there is love/hate concept pair, there is the enemy. We derive to a more traditional concept of the other world: there is something like the Heaven and the Hell (must exist, if there is hate and unhappiness).

            This speculation can be continued a bit further. Assuming that there is no movement in the other space, souls – even if they are originally copies of the same soul – end up in different positions and cannot move from them in the eternity. Therefore they need the material world so that there is movement and souls can move to a better position. This comes fairly close to the reincarnation idea in Hinduism/Buddhism. Or maybe it resembles some kind of a checker game.

            I did not get further this time, but considering the difficulty of this ancient problem, I feel having made some progress. I found a problem in my earlier solution and noticed that one can study the structure of the other world by analyzing and classifying feelings. That is already something, a nice dissertation topic in metaphysics. In any case, better than the J-problem that haunts The Unz Review. That is getting so B-ring.