More on the meaning of life

There was an extraordinary meeting of the Philorum Dialectic yesterday which turned out to be a 12-hour marathon with just the convener and me. I've already mentioned my feelings about Philorum in general (see below), so I'll just report that we made some progress on the meaning of life.

We broke the question down into two - what defines a self, and what gives that self value (in other words, what constitutes a well-lived life). We floated a number of candidates to answer the first question:

• biology (you are everything inside your skin)
• achievements
• values
• ancestors (this might be more important in other cultures)
• relationships (this is very prominent on the Huggies web site, where all the members identify themselves in the forum as "Kaylah's mum" or "Tyson's mum" etc.

We started with achievements, which has been on my mind lately because of my old interest in Existentialism, but followed it through to find some flaws - if you define yourself through your achievements, you have to value those achievements, and either you stick to means-ends reasoning and have to come up with a overarching end to everything so usually turn to god or somebody, or you turn inside and rely on yourself to give value to your achievements, but then there's no objective ground for your value and everything is equally valuable and you end up paralysed with nihilistic angst.

So we started on values as a better candidate. My interlocutor's claim was that the purpose of life is to clarify your values and act on them as much as possible. He defined values as whatever you like. And a background debate was whether your self was discrete or was necessarily scaffolded out into the world and other people's selves. He resisted the scaffolded view because it threatened his individualism and belief in liberty. I questioned his definition of values as whatever you like because surely values are more than just personal preferences, like taste in food. '

So to test all those things we came up with the idea of someone on a desert island, raised by coconuts. There aren't even any animals around (to keep the story uncomplicated). We agreed the person would have a limited self, what with no social interaction or books to read. We agreed the person would have a limited set of values based on their limited experience (this person probably wouldn't have a view on whether gay marriage should be allowed, for example, because in his life it would never come up and he would never have to work out what he thought about it). In fact, his life might consist mostly of the decision whether he liked the taste of berries better, or the taste of coconut.

I came around to thinking that our island guy could have a self and a set of values and the potential for a well-lived live, in a reduced way to someone embedded in a social milieu, but not different in kind. My interlocutor came around to thinking that no, to be a full self someone had to exist in a social context, there were essetial parts of being a self that you couldn't get on the island alone. So, we swapped sides over dinner.

I think what convinced me was the point he made by saying, "Say he finds out he hates the taste of berries. If he spent all his time eating berries, that would be a bad way to live his life. That would not be a well-lived life." Well, no. Knowing that he doesn't value berries (even in the trivial way of not liking the taste of them), it would be a very bad-lived life if he didn't act in accordance with that value. Finding out the things he liked, even if it was just food and activities like swimming and things, and then living in accordance with what he found out, well, that actually started to sound like a pretty good life to me.

I'm sure there will be more on this.

postscript: I told my sister about the marathon discussion and said, "We made some progress on the meaning of life," and she started laughing hysterically, and realising how it must have sounded I continued, "If we get our grant approved and can get some lab assistants in, we should have something commercial available in a few years." She laughed harder...but we'll see who's laughing in a few years! :-) Ellen Watson, CEO of Meaning of Life, Inc.