Ten Existential Questions Answered by a Scientist

Science is compatible with external meaning and free will

Peaches in the wilderness, surrounded by poison oak

I recently read a great article by Massimo Pigliucci, a Stoic philosopher who writes on Medium with the penname of Figs in Winter:

Ten existential questions for empirical naturalists

Pigliucci asked the Claude AI “to list the ten most consequential existential philosophical questions it could think of,” and then proceeded to answer them. I enjoyed this exercise so much that I thought I should try it myself.

Although we are both empirical naturalists, few of my answers agree with those of Pigliucci, and some of them are completely opposite. However, I just wrote my answers here without debating his.

I have changed the order of the questions because some answers are built on the answers to other questions. The sequence in which the questions were asked by Claude seems random, when in fact there is a logical order to answer them.

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Because if there was nothing, you wouldn’t be asking the question.

This may not seem like a rational answer.

But neither is the question.

Both the answer and the question assume that nothing exists.

And nothing cannot exist because then it would be something, not nothing.

So, either way, something exists.

2. What is authentic existence?

This question is not clear because it can be interpreted two ways:

1. What do we mean when we say that something exists?

2. How do we live authentically?

The first is an ontological question similar to the previous one. I lean towards the interpretation of Heraclitus and Buddhism: things exist as constant becoming. Change is woven into the fundaments of reality, so things exist as movement and transformation. Things are what they do. There is no difference between nouns and verbs, between objects and actions. As Einstein demonstrated, matter (things) and energy (actions) can be turned into each other.

The answer to the second question is that, first, we need to find out what we are, what is our true nature. Second, we need to align our life so we act according to our true nature.

To discover who I am, I practice meditation and mindfulness. This leads to the development of meta-attention, which helps me catch myself in the moment of acting through life. With radical honesty, I can unveil my unconscious and unravel my hidden motivations and my deepest feelings.

To act according to who I am, I struggle to free myself of my inner social and cultural conditioning, which forms the ego. By cultivating flow, I create the habit of acting from my whole being and not from the ego.

3. What is the meaning of life?

I don’t believe in a god, so obeying and worshipping it cannot be a source of meaning for my life. That would be rather depressing, anyway, since it would mean that humans are just vassals of a tyrannical and narcissistic deity.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, either, so any meaning to my life has to be found in the limited time I have to live, and not in the hope of a better existence when it is over.

The rational conclusion from these two statements is that I have to find meaning in the way I live my life.

What does meaning mean? I would define it as an overall feeling of happiness, satisfaction and purpose in my life.

Existentialists and Buddhists believe that meaning can be found internally, in a state of mind that provides happiness and satisfaction. I agree with the essential teaching of Buddhism that true happiness requires a transformation of our mind that reduces craving and suffering, and maximizes happiness. This can be achieved through a path of spiritual discipline involving meditation, mindfulness and achieving flow in my daily activities.

However, even if I am able to achieve a life well lived according to these parameters, this leaves me with a sense of despair knowing that it will all disappear when I die. I yearn for a sense of purpose, something larger than myself in which to frame my life.

I believe that meaning can be found also outside ourselves—what I call external meaning.

Striving to alleviate suffering in my fellow human beings, create a society that is more fair and more free, increasing our understanding of the world, leaving the world a better place that I found it… These are goals that can give purpose to my life, providing a source of external meaning to it. History shows that we are indeed making the world a better place, something we call Progress. That is why I consider myself a progressive.

Still, Humanity may disappear one day, just like I will die. Then Progress loses its meaning, just like death makes living a better life ultimately meaningless.

However, I believe that human progress is part of a cosmic progress. We see evidence of this in how the Universe has evolved from shapeless radiation to hydrogen atoms, then complex matter, then life, then intelligence. It makes sense to hope that this process will continue and that Humanity and I are part of it.

I discussed this cosmic meaning in my article We Are Stardust - Finding Meaning in the Universe.

4. What is the nature of the self?

I am the entirety of my mind and my body. Believing that I am a being that resides inside my mind is a dangerous illusion.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett called that hypothetical self that lives inside the mind as a spectator of the senses and an operator of our actions the “homunculus.” He argued that this is not how the mind works. His criticism is supported by neuroscience.

The most frequent misconception of ourselves as a part of our mind is the idea that we are our consciousness, and that our unconscious is not part of us. This alienates a fundamental part of who we are, leading us to think our unconscious is some “other” that we often need to fight. This leads us to live our lives as a constant struggle of a part of the mind trying to impose its will on the rest of the mind. That’s why the idea of a self living inside the mind is a dangerous illusion.

I discussed this issue in my article You Are You Unconscious.

What we truly are is the entirety of our mind, conscious and unconscious.

5. Do we have free will?

Yes, we do have free will.

By “we” in that statement I mean the entirety of our mind and body, as I explained in my previous answer.

The argument against free will states that everything that happens to us is part of a chain of causes and effects that is imposed on us by the world. However, this presupposes that there is a “me” that is independent of the chain of causes and effects. This is not true. There is no “I” or “self” that exists independently of the chain of causes and effects. Since I am my mind and my body, which are part of the causal world, what I am is a subset of that chain of causes and effects.

Since my conception, I have been incorporating matter and information from the world and building myself with them. That part of the world that is me is able to make decisions. Like all living beings, I display agency to struggle to stay alive and reproduce. And like all human beings, part that agency is conscious, and that is what we call free will.

This would make a compatibilist regarding the issue of free will. However, strictly speaking, compatibilists say that free will is compatible with determinism. I do not believe in determinism, so I am not a compatibilist in the strict sense. Like many scientists, I believe that the world is not strictly deterministic but only probabilistically deterministic. Randomness is a fundamental part of reality. This is not only because of the unpredictability of quantum events, but because chaotic behavior is what gives rise to the arrow of time and entropy, which are essential properties of the universe. This was explained by Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine in his book The End of Certainty, based on his groundbreaking work on dissipative structures and the nature of life.

However, the fact that the world is non-deterministic, by itself, does not solve the problem of free will, because randomness inside our brains does not make us free, only unpredictable. Still, that element of randomness inside my mind is part of what I am, so that does not invalidate my overall argument.

6. How do we find meaning in the face of suffering and death?

These are two separate questions.

As Epicurus pointed out, death should not bother us because we will not feel anything after we die. So we will not suffer after we die.

As I pointed out above, the problem with death is that it makes everything we do in our lives seem pointless. However, we can mitigate this problem by connecting with a source of external meaning.

Another problem with death is the prospect of losing everything when we die, especially ourselves. We should cultivate detachment so that the idea stops bothering us so much.

Suffering is a tougher problem. It can be mitigated, but not completely avoided.

Here I found some help in Buddhism, a philosophy of life (I discard the religious bits) that reflects on suffering and how to remedy it.

Much of the suffering in our lives is created by ourselves and can be avoided by doing the inner work of self-discovery and trimming our cravings, attachments and negative emotions.

Some suffering is inevitable. However, the same inner work that trims our cravings and attachments can help us develop an equanimity towards suffering that helps us endure it better.

7. Can we live meaningfully without certainty?

We need some certainty in our lives. Knowledge about the world, other people and ourselves is essential for living a good life. This is why, beyond its technological accomplishments, science has improved human lives so much. It has provided an all-encompassing and internally consistent model of the world, albeit incomplete and still under development.

But science has also shown us that absolute certainty is impossible. Science itself is based on systematic doubt.

There are fundamental limits on how much information we can extract from the world. As I stated in my previous answer, the world is non-deterministic, so it is a physical impossibility to predict the future. Our knowledge about the past is similarly limited because certain effects could have multiple causes.

In fact, absolute certainty would harm us.

Doubt and the search for truth give purpose to our lives. 

8. How should we live?

The answer to this question is implicit in my previous answers.

Since there is no God or afterlife, we should live our lives as fully as possible.

A life well lived should balance two things:

1. Hedonism, understood as pursuing happiness. We should enjoy pleasure as much as we can without harming ourselves or others. Inner work to truly know ourselves should turn us towards the sophisticated pleasures of beauty, music, art, love, friendship, learning, exercising and creativity. Still, we should not despise the more mundane pleasures of good food and good sex.

2. Eudaimonia, understood as working towards worthy goals—the sources of external meaning I described above. This encompasses things like doing science, teaching, creating art, charity work and helping worthy political causes. Believing in Progress means helping it along.

9. What is our relationship to others and to society?

That is included in my answer above.

Of course, we should avoid harming others and exploiting them for our goals.

One of the sources of external meaning and eudaimonia is to improve the lives of others and the fate of Humanity. We should involve ourselves in social and political change, being careful to avoid this turning into an ego trap that makes us forget our inner compass.

10. Is there objective moral truth?

There is no overarching objective moral truth. All ethical principles are deduced from some fundamental moral principles, which are themselves dependent on theories about human nature and the world. If this deduction is done in a rational and unbiased way, the resulting ethical system can be deemed to have some objectivity. But since the fundamental moral principles and the ideas they are based on can be questioned, there is no ultimate moral truth. 

For example, here are some moral principles that cannot be easily reduced to more fundamental ones, so reasonable people cannot find a way to agree if they should be followed or not:

1. Human embryos and fetuses have a right to life.

2. Animals have a right to life.

3. Animals have a right to be free.

4. The existence of an animal or plant species has intrinsic moral value.

5. Sexual intercourse has an intrinsic moral value that makes casual sex immoral.

6. Some objects, places, images or words are sacred and should be treated with special respect.

7. Knowledge has intrinsic moral value, so erasing it is unethical.

8. Having certain beliefs makes you an immoral person.

You may entertain yourself trying to find a fundamental moral justification for these principles, but other people may still question your reasoning.

Also, some of these ideas are tricky, because accepting them may have unforeseen consequences.

I guess this makes me a moral relativist. However, I don’t believe that all moral systems are equally valid. Some can be anchored by logic on human nature and reality, while other are illogical or at odds with human nature.

Ultimately, morality did not exist before Humanity. This means that is an emergent set of ideas based on our human nature that is constantly evolving.