While you're busy staring at the vastness of the night sky, marvelling at how big the universe is and how much bigger your brain is in comparison, you'll almost inevitably find yourself asking "What's it all about? Why am I alive? What's the purpose of existence? What's the meaning of life?" Common questions indeed.
Questions to which I have no answers.
The truth is that at our present level of knowledge it's impossible to know what the meaning of life may be, if indeed it has one at all. It's just too difficult a question to answer: so much so that pursuing it almost seems like a pointless and doomed exercise.
Or perhaps it's just too meaningless a question to answer. Which would definitely make pursuing it a pointless and doomed exercise.
However, there is a different question that we certainly can ask - one with which we might make some headway. It's a question that I first mentioned at the very beginning of this book: "Why do we want to know what the meaning of life is anyway?" After all, you can't expect to find an answer until you know why you're asking the question in the first place (as I also mentioned at the beginning of the book).
Well, needless to say, I don't know why you're asking the question in the first place either, but here's a theory. This theory has the advantage of being very simple, which is always a good sign.
We ask because we're innately, chronically dissatisfied.
That's basically all that there is to it. A one line answer.
The usual reasons that are put forward to explain our urge to quest, to probe and to ask questions are our high intelligence and inherent sense of curiosity, but personally I think that's an inadequate response (In fact I could say, rather appropriately, that I'm rather dissatisfied with it).
We need to ask where those two traits, our high intelligence and inherent curiosity, came from to begin with. The theory that I'll elaborate on in the following pages is that they developed primarily as a result of our aforementioned innate feeling of dissatisfaction.
Intelligence and curiosity aren't fundamental mental traits - they are built on a foundation of more basic qualities. Think of intelligence and curiosity as being a bit like the protons and neutrons in an atom - they are composed of something more fundamental. With protons and neutrons it's quarks (or whatever): here I'll explain how intelligence and curiosity are perhaps founded on "quarks" of dissatisfaction.
I'll delve into this topic soon, but before it's possible to talk about our feelings of dissatisfaction and where they come from it's a good idea to have an understanding of where any of our feelings or emotions come from.
Emotions can be defined essentially as mental states that emerge from an awareness of what's going on in the world around us.
Okay - but then you have to ask, what is this thing that I've just referred to as awareness? (Do you detect a strong current of regression here? If you do, you're absolutely correct.) Let's look much more closely at what awareness might be.
We tend to think of awareness as being a form of mental state or cognitive process itself (such as when you say such things as "I'm aware that I'm thinking about this issue at the moment") but at it's most basic level awareness is simply an ability to respond to a stimulus in the environment by automatically reacting to it, with no mental input involved in the process whatsoever. This is the level of awareness that is possessed by life-forms that are totally lacking in mental faculties, such as, say, a blob of slime mould. Even the possession of mental faculties, however, doesn't necessarily turn awareness into a cognitive process, as we shall see soon.
On your walk you may see a sunflower for instance, and notice that it turns its head to face the Sun (As do many types of flower, so quite why sunflowers were given the name and the reputation I'm not sure. Size I suppose). This shows that the sunflower is aware of the position of the Sun in the sky. But this is a particularly basic form of awareness, almost a sort of pseudo-awareness if you like: the plant is simply turning because of biochemical changes in its structure caused by the Sun shining on it. It's somewhat analogous to the way that a weather vane turns to point into the wind - and you'd never suggest for a moment that a weather vane was actually "aware" of the direction of the wind (I hope).
Sunflowers and other plants, being rooted to one spot, possess a rather limited repertoire of movements, and thus need to possess relatively limited amounts of awareness of what's going on around them.
Life-forms such as animals and birds - ones that are not anchored to the ground but that move around - tend to exhibit much more awareness. They need this awareness so that they can avoid bumping into things and so that they can chase food (as they can't simply sit in one spot absorbing energy from sunlight in the way that plants do). Equally, they may need to possess a degree of awareness so that they can escape when they themselves are being chased by other mobile life-forms that are seeking food.
However, in the more simple varieties of mobile life-form the level of awareness is still manifestly basic.
On your neighbourhood nature ramble you should be able to find examples of such simple mobile life-forms in a local pond, in the shape of the single-celled organisms with which it will hopefully be teaming (unless it's polluted).
These protozoans don't seem to be aware of much, although they are capable of movement. They probably propel themselves around in their aquatic environment simply by reacting to changes in their immediate surroundings. They would do this, for instance, in order to stay in a layer of water that's at the right temperature for them to survive in. Their awareness may simply be at the level that allows them to push themselves off in the appropriate direction whenever they detect something like an undesirable temperature change approaching, somewhat like animated thermostats.
There's more about this particular level of awareness later, in Chapter 13, but because unicellular pond life is quite tricky to observe (due to it being so small and living in a rather wet and smelly environment), let's move on for now and have a look at a more convenient life-form that's somewhat higher up the awareness scale. Let's look at houseflies.
You can't deny that houseflies are aware.
A housefly is very good at dodging a rolled up newspaper that's bearing down on it for instance, so it seems to be aware of the existence of newspapers and of the threat that they pose.
However, this reaction to the descending journal is very much at the knee-jerk level. The fly doesn't in any way think, "Newspaper alert - take evasive action!" The departure of the fly from the surface on which it was settled is simply an automatic response triggered by the glimpsing of a disturbance out of the corner of its compound eye.
A fly may escape a hostile newspaper because of this automatic reaction, but this doesn't mean that the fly is aware of all dangers, as can be deduced from the following drama that can be observed on the insides of windows around the world.
You may have observed a housefly spending many hours banging its head on a closed window in a futile attempt to drill its way through it. This isn't actually the drama that I have in mind, but is often the prelude to it. (The fact that the fly gets nowhere by the action of banging against the window may indeed be evidence that the fly has rather limited awareness, due to the pointlessness of the activity, but let's be generous and put this behaviour down to the fact that a fly isn't mentally equipped to deal with new-fangled things such as glass that don't exist in the natural world, so that as a result the fly just doesn't know what to do when it comes across it.) The drama to which I refer is the one in which the head-banging fly on the windowpane blunders into a spider's web that's slung across part of the window. Having stumbled into the web the fly will buzz around frantically in a desperate and determined bid to break free of the web's sticky strands of silk. And sometimes it'll succeed, escaping the approaching eight-legged jaws of death by a whisker. What does the fly do next? Fly off in the opposite direction to get as far away as possible from the site of its near-death experience? No. More often than not it wanders straight back into the web within seconds, and the whole drama starts over again.
The fly doesn't seem to realise that the web is a trap - all it seems to notice is that when it's in the web its movement is impaired. Thus the fly is doomed to repeat its mistake of blundering into spiders' webs for all eternity. Or until it's eaten.
The fly's awareness doesn't extend as far as traps, and indeed seems to be restricted to a very few key subjects, of which the whereabouts of its next meal and the whereabouts of its next mate seem to be high on the list. So (other than an awareness of fast moving newspapers) a fly's awareness seems to be very much on the positive things in life - food and sex. Lucky fly.
A fly's awareness of food and its motivation to eat it is probably based on the fact that the food smells and tastes really nice (The food's possibly emitting the irresistible aroma of putrefying flesh). The fly is motivated by the sensory stimulus rather than by having specific thoughts of a dietary nature - in very much the same way that people are with chocolate (Of course the fly probably "feels hungry" as well, whatever that manifests itself as in fly physiology, but it's its senses that direct it towards eating its chosen foodstuff - ensuring that it doesn't find itself trying to eat, say, grains of sand or stone in preference to the rotting innards of a dead hedgehog).
The fly's lack of awareness of the true nature of spiders' webs hasn't stopped houseflies being incredibly successful creatures however, surviving as they have done for millions of years. They have probably been so successful because their lack of awareness of spiders' webs is more than compensated for by their awareness of the whereabouts of their next meal and their next mate - enough flies manage to mate and produce offspring before they get trapped in spiders' webs to ensure the survival of the species.
Let's move on from flies and look further up the hierarchy of species to try to find something that has a more advanced sense of awareness than that possessed by the average musca domestica.
Let's look at birds.
Birds definitely seem to be much more aware than the run of the mill housefly I think you'll agree. But even birds can seem to do things in rather automatic, unconsidered ways a lot of the time. Why, for instance, do birds that are sitting in the top of trees in my local park fly away when I walk underneath? Haven't they noticed that humans are slow, lumbering creatures that are practically glued to the ground? Why do these birds expend all of that energy on flight - for nothing? They seem to be simply aware of a disturbance on the ground, so they've just flown away in default mode, without having bothered to think things through.
Birds probably fly off in this automatic mode because, as some people may say, "It works for them." For birds, caution is the watchword: it's held them in good stead since they evolved from the dinosaurs.
Birds don't seem to bother wrestling with the difficult concept of "Should I fly off or should I stay?" They generally seem to be untroubled by the notion of alternatives (As a human you may well know how stressful the awareness of too many alternatives can be. More on this later. Much more).
Let's continue our ramble and try to find a creature that seems to have some sort of grasp of alternatives, that doesn't just do things in automatic mode - that seems to be closer to what we'd really call aware in a considered/cognitive sort of way.
And there's such a creature in that tree over there! A chimpanzee! You can tell that a chimpanzee has quite a highly developed awareness of the world around it because it can use a stick to knock inaccessible fruit off a branch.
Tool use! Very important.
Tool use very probably indicates that a chimp has enough awareness of the world around it to allow it to think in terms of consequences.
I'm not crediting the chimp with too much power of logical deduction here though. When the chimpanzee invented "the stick" it probably didn't actually look at a bunch of fruit that was out of reach and then by a leap of imagination conceive of the idea of using a wooden arm extension to reach it. The whole business was probably purely empirical, with the chimp simply noticing that sometimes when it waved a stick around the consequence was falling fruit (the stick having been accidentally "manufactured" in the first place as the consequence of breaking a branch off a tree when it was being grasped while climbing). The chimp didn't deduce that this would work as a way of obtaining fruit: it just found that it did so by chance. It didn't imagine what would happen - it just noted the effect once it had.
As a result of this lack of imagination the chimp seems to be capable of only conceiving of the world very much as it is, not as it might be. Because the chimp lacks imagination it can't conceive of things being different. Critically, it can't conceive of things being better. This sounds like a bit of a drawback, but in fact it means that the chimp is perfectly happy with its stick invention, basic as it may be. It does the job. It gets the fruit.
The ancestors of today's chimps came up with the idea of using sticks as tools, but further chimp generations never bothered to develop the concept of tools to the point where a chimp could construct a rocket and travel to the Moon.
Why was it that when the ancestors of we humans invented tools we didn't call it a day with the invention of the stick, but we just kept right on going, in a scarily relentless manner, to the point where we've now invented so many things that we're on the verge of destroying the planet with them? (To be truthful, once we'd invented the stick, the spear and the axe we had a break from inventing things for an extremely long period of time. The reason for this invention interlude is unknown. However, once it was over we certainly made up for lost time.) To answer the question of why we just kept on inventing things we need to look deeper into the nature of awareness.
In this chapter I've described a few examples of different degrees of awareness as possessed by various life-forms - the biomechanical rotation of the sunflower as it follows the Sun, the knee-jerk reaction of a fly to an approaching newspaper, the automatic flight of a bird in response to a passing pedestrian, and the more considered use of a stick by a chimp. These examples show various levels at which awareness manifests itself - but where did any of these levels of awareness come from in the first place? I realise that I haven't explained what awareness actually is yet.
To try to find out we need to go right back to the very, very beginning of life on earth.
