Now, back to Frederica.

Is my aim or purpose to keep my goldfish alive, among other aims and purposes? Is my conduct instinctual, built-in design, and I only intellectualize it by superimposing on a teleological construct? Or is my aim or purpose to keep my goldfish alive the outcome of a conscious choice? Can I choose to not keep my goldfish alive? I have a choice, and I can make choices in this world, but these choices are constrained by my template and by the rules of the game.

Many theoretical choices are just that. Theoretical, inapplicable to the world, is given.

Even when I strive to change the world, the set of possible modifications is predetermined, and subject to the laws of nature, including my nature. We are limited, much more than we care to admit.

And can I alter nature? Really? I can act on nature. I can act within nature by rearranging and manipulating its ingredients and constituents and building blocks. Can I change my nature?

The answer depends on the limitations of introspection and constitution, physical and mental.

But, by and large, no.

Does the world have a choice with regards to me? Not the physical world, nature, but the human world. Do other people have choices? Do they exercise them frequently when it comes to me?

This is one of the attributes that set humans apart from nature. Humans do have choices. They exercise.

But is having a choice, is exercising a choice, a meaningful or meaning-generating feature or action? If it is, is it because it’s not natural? Maybe meaning is not natural. Maybe meaning arises only when we act but not naturally, unnaturally, supernaturally.

God endows the world with meaning, and it’s a supernatural being. Humans make choices, and this choice is apparently a conscious, you know, can go either way, and that’s not natural, because nature is hardwired, baked in.

So, when we deviate from nature, meaning arises. So, do we acquire more meaning the further we distance ourselves from nature? What in nature deprives us in our life of meaning? Is it the automatism of nature, the lack of conscious choice? Is it the valuelessness, the lack of context, nature’s indifference, lack of emotions? What in all this?

Think about the following combos, triads, combinations.

Triad number one, attachment, memory, gratitude. Triad number two, choice, values, context, emotions.

These are the attributes of God.

The secret of religion is that it purports to provide meaning.

Can we derive these two triads without resorting to a God and within human life, exclusively embedded in and struggling with nature as it is?

Is there meaning without an external source of meaning?

The ultimate privilege of certain. It’s like quantum mechanics writ large.

Can meaning be engendered internally without degenerating into circularity, tautology and self-reference? And in which ways is God not a part of the system? In which ways is God external? Is any meaningful conversation about meaning possible without a God? Looming death renders life both meaningful and meaningless. It is an engine of meaning.

As far as we are concerned, nothing we do, nothing we accomplish survives death as far as we are concerned. And therefore nothing is meaningful to us, but it may be meaningful to other people. And so it may survive our physical demise, extending our meaning of our life, the meaning of our life beyond determination of our life.

And this is only scratching the surface.

Consider the following. Can robots, indistinguishable from human beings, robots that pass the Turing test with flying colors, androids that look exactly like human beings and cannot be told apart, can these have a meaningful life?

In other words, do these robots possess the capacity to have a meaningful life?

It is conceivable that in the far future such robots will be capable of making autonomous choices.

But is this free will and necessary and sufficient condition for meaningfulness? Can someone have a meaningful life if his life is totally predetermined? Is it possible to entirely predetermined anything, let alone a life, human or machine?

Our ants take ants, not ant, ant, insect. Are ants capable of having a meaningful life?

What about bacteria? What about the COVID virus?

An uncertainty principle, if we were able to inquire this of the ant and the ant were able to respond, then her life would not be predetermined and she would not be an ant. But would her life be potentially at least meaningful?

If we endow the ant tomorrow, we implant a chip in the ant and she becomes self-aware, introspective, conscious and creative. She becomes, in other words, a human ant. She becomes purposeful. She becomes able to make choices, but does her life become meaningful?

What trend is an entity capable of having a meaningful life?

When we say entity A is capable of having a meaningful life, is it the same as saying entity A has quality B, the capacity to have a meaningful life? Or is it the same as saying entity A is capable of having quality C, a meaningful life? Or is entity A is D, capable of having a meaningful life?

You see how many variants there are.

Let me repeat this, it’s crucial.

When I say entity A is capable of having a meaningful life, one interpretation is that entity A has quality B, entity A has the capacity to have a meaningful life. Or entity A is capable of having quality C, meaningful life. Or entity A is capable of having a meaningful life.

There’s an identity here. That’s what entity A is.

What is this capacity? Is it reflexive? Is it automatic? Is it learned? Is it acquired? Is it intuitive? Is it analytic?

What is this capacity to derive meaning?

A meaningful life does not have to be happy. We know that. It doesn’t have to be fulfilling, even pleasant, rational, consequential, influential. None of these are sine qua non, necessary conditions for a meaningful life.

So, for example, can a dream state be meaningful in and of itself?

You remember the movies? The Truman Show? The Matrix? There were people there, and they were either in a dream state, or they didn’t know it, but they were inside a television show. Their life was not real. It was a television, it was a script, television script.

So, can a dream state be meaningful in and of itself? If we were never to wake up for instance, if we were trapped in a virtual reality universe, there was a technical malfunction. We couldn’t wake up. We remained trapped in the machine, in the dream state.

Would our life have meaning?

We tend to think that it wouldn’t have been.

But why? Why is such a life meaningless?

What makes such a life meaningless?

If this life is coherent, consistent, feels real, involves relationships and accomplishments, why is this life meaningless?

What makes such a life lived in a dream state within a machine less worthwhile than if it were spent in real reality?

That’s why people keep saying reality is a simulation. It’s not a simulation, or at least we can’t prove that it is a simulation, or falsify this assumption. It’s a meaningless statement.

But they feel that it’s a simulation.

What if we could direct our dreams via lucid dreaming? So, we could direct the dreams indefinitely.

So, with this directed, resulting lucid dreams in aggregate amount to a life imbued with meaning, can we disentangle morality from meaningfulness?

We can’t, because there is no such thing as an amoral or morally neutral act or existence. Morality in itself is not a form of meaning, of course.

Leading a moral life may bestow meaning, but it’s not the meaning that it bestows.

The same goes for happiness. Living a content and worthwhile life may endow such a life with meaning.

Even a hedonistic, pleasure-oriented thought can be meaningful, but it is not the same as the meaning endowed or bestowed.

We should not confuse that. The ends with the means with the end.

Is meaning dependent on the narrative quality of a life lived? The coherence of such a life, intelligibility, plotting, purpose, direction, transcendence.

Can, for example, a big Lebowski meandering life with the life of a slacker, the life of sensory deprivation, self-denied? A life in coma, spent in vegetative state. Can such a life be meaningful?

According to most religions and many philosophies, asceticism is actually a condition for a meaningful life.

Avoiding life, rejecting life, denying life, cutting down life to the bare bones is the condition for a meaningful life.

What is a monk or a nun? It’s someone who has renounced 99% of life and everything it has to offer, and yet they claim that their life, their life, their lives are meaningful, ours are not.

Is meaning in general, and life’s meaning in particular, an objective good, distinguished by its superiority, worthiness, the reactions and emotions it evokes, judgments and values it is attached to, its history?

And if so, is there a recipe for securing this objective good, for getting hold of it by making the right choices, for example, possessing the appropriate motivation, I don’t know, drive, urge, desire, something?

Where is the way to meaning?

Perhaps when we speak of meaning in life, we have in mind one or more of these related ideas, certain conditions that are worthy of great pride or admiration, values that warrant devotion and love, qualities that make a life intelligible, comprehensible, or ends apart from base pleasure that are particularly choice worthy.

That’s what we say meaning, we mean these things.

Perhaps by studying a meaningless life, we can hit upon a uniform and unifying definition of a meaningful life.

Is a meaningless life wasted, unreasonable, futile, absurd? If meaning is a good, objective good, like I don’t know, a glass of water.

So if meaning is an objective good that bestows meaningfulness, what are the properties of this good?

This object, must such a good be infinite, perfect, eternal, immutable, universal?

Is such an objective good of meaning?

Is meaning invariant? Or is it observer-dependent, subjective? Can meaning be statistically inferred? Can it be normalized, a matter of common opinion, an intersubjective agreement, an opinion poll? Or is it the exclusive domain of a sovereign individual who is solely qualified to judge if his or her life is meaningful?

Is meaning constituted by the mind almost solipsistically? Or is it imported from the outside? Is it the outcome of feedback or input? Or is it self-generate? Is it conscious or unconscious? Is it recognized out there by its beholders as a good or a property?

And if so, which kind of good or property? Does it have an autonomous existence, an intrinsic value, intrinsic value that are independent of any judgment, value or opinion?

For meaning to arise and a state of meaningfulness to be established and accomplished, is it enough to adopt a passive stance to believe in something, for example? Or is a proactive attitude called for? For example, seek something aggressively, manifestly, consistently. Do we have to do something? Or do we have to just be?

Some schools of philosophy and metaphysics and mystics, they say that the less you do, the more likely you are to come across meaning.

The misconception is that one’s life is more meaningful, the more one gets what one wants very strong, what you desire. The more you achieve your highly ranked goals, the more you do what you believe to be really important, the more meaningful your life is.

Yet many, maybe even most, accomplished professionals. People with degrees, publish papers and books, famous, I don’t know, many of these people will tell you immediately they’re unhappy, their lives are meaningless. They come, you know, they go to therapy.

The value these people place on their existence is so low that self-destructively and self-defeatingly they do drugs and sometimes even commit suicide. This and we, angst, dissatisfaction, may even be the human condition, prevents all lives from possessing meaning. That’s the pessimistic strand of nihilism.

Let’s take it.

Reductio ad absurdum.

Consider trimming your toenails. Trimming your toenails. I hope you do it regularly.

Does this activity confirm meaning? Most people say what? Trimming toenails? Meaningless.

But this would be the wrong answer. Saying that trimming your toenails is meaningless would be the wrong answer because it ultimately depends on the context.

If one is trimming one’s toenails as a part of a ritual or to uphold the belief system or to participate in a beauty contest or to appeal to and attract her lover or to provide a lesson in personal hygiene to others, then even this trivial and ostensibly pointless and repetitive activity acquires meaning, becomes meaningful.

If one is a pedicurist and takes pride in her vocation, trimming toenails becomes the foundation upon which her self-esteem, sense of self-worth, creativity, pleasure and meaningful life are constructed.

To cut a long story short, specifying the act is not enough. Context is critical. Meaning seems not to be subjective, not to be objective, but contextual.

Okay, you see, what about harming other people? Causing them pain wantonly, sadistically. What about killing someone? Can this modus operandi confirm meaning on one’s life? Yes, it can.

If one takes pride in one’s abusive bullying and regards it as a creative art form to be perfected and honed, and if one derives overwhelming pleasure in inflicting agony and anguish on other people and regards the attainment and securing of pleasure as meaningful goals, if one kills at the service of his nation state, that’s called a soldier, it’s another example.

Is it therefore possible to compile a list of invariantly meaningful activities? Must such activities always be moral, rational, creative, pleasurable, aspirational, loving, beneficial to others, help realize one’s potential, ambitions, anything?

Is there any standard, any criteria that will allow us to compile a list of activities that are always meaningful?

What? Think about this. Hitler must have regarded his career not as heinous, but as all the above. Moral, rational, creative, pleasurable, aspirational, loving, beneficial to others and realizing potential and ambitions.

Must we and can we substitute an objective list for Hitler’s subjective appraisal of his own actions?

Who is the ultimate judge? Is Hitler the ultimate judge of the meaningfulness of Hitler’s life, or are we?

What guarantees and ascertains the objectivity of any list we compile of meaningful undertakings? What is the source of this imputed objectivity?

For a life to be meaningful, should its significance be equally distributed throughout its parts? Can a life subsist of clusters of meaningfulness, separated by long stretches of meaninglessness? And such a life can it be called overall meaningful?

Can the meaningful parts arise without the meaningless ones? Don’t the meaningless stretches, these meaningless enclaves and islands, don’t they serve as incubators of meaning?

And so they yield, they birth the meaningful parts?

Should the meaningful parts be various, not repetitive? Does repetition and routine, wrote, do they detract from life’s meaningfulness?

Someone who has spent his entire life making, doing a single thing, single movement, let’s see, is life meaningless? Can we judge a life to have been meaningful before it is over? Is the whole likely to give rise to an emergent, epiphenonal meaning, not inherent in the parts, or in the sum of the parts? Is it like a narrative, a story, a plot, with an ending, or a punchline, without which the whole sequence appears pretty meaningless?

According to Schopenhauer, life acquires meaning when we deny our narcissistic will, when we continue to exist as beings devoid of will.

This would imply that normal, willful existence is automatically meaningless. But, of course, it takes an act of will to adopt this prescription and embark on such self-denial.

Nor is it clear why being possessed of a will renders one’s life meaningless.

The notion is counterintuitive, as Viktor Frankl had noted. We usually associate will-driven goal attainment with the acquisition of meaning, not with its undermining.

Kierkegaard suggests that to render life meaningful, one must find a unifying principle, an underlying narrative, and a single dedicated goal to which one is devoted.

But an equally potent argument can be made to the contrary. That plurality and diversity foster an engender meaning.

Nor is it clear why only a relationship with the infinite can bestow meaning on one’s life. Or rather, that it cannot accomplish the same goal with less exertion and implosibility and suspension of judgment.

These are the questions, and I’m going to spend the next few videos actually answering them. I encourage you to try to find your own answers, thereby imbuing your life with enhanced meaning.

Thank you for listening.