The Power of Meaning: The Quest for an Existential Roadmap

well thank you it is great to be back here at the Academy and a huge thanks to to the New York Academy and the newer Foundation for making this series possible and we are delighted to be kicking off our new series the will - meaning seeking the why of our existence now when I first told my wife that this evening we'd be talking about the nature of meaning she had an interesting response she thought this was a really dumb idea she said meaning is a shoddy fatuous word used by sloppy thinkers that is so flabby it really doesn't mean anything at all and and then she said I hope you're not going to be asking that question what is the meaning of life which she says is truly the most ridiculous question of all to which I replied well you have just dismissed a large piece of what I have been working on for the last decade so then we had a rather lively and playful argument over a bottle of wine for the rest of the evening now I don't know what kinds of questions that you have with your spouse but this is actually one of our marital quarrels that pops up every so often whether it is worth trying to unpack words like meaning and purpose is there anything to be learned in in the deeper cosmic sense by asking the question why or is the search for meaning a private matter to be figured out on a case-by-case basis and there are other questions as well does science have anything to say about these matters or as Stephen Jay Gould once claimed do these questions about value and meaning fall outside the realm of science I've already laid my cards on the table I love talking about this stuff and it really goes back to my college days when I was obsessed with reading existential writers like Dostoevsky and Camus and Kafka but my sense is that some of these questions questions about meaning and happiness and purpose those questions I think have evolved in recent decades as we've learned more from psychology from neuroscience from evolutionary biology and these are huge questions and lucky for us we have a terrific panel to help sort them out so let me introduce our speakers Jay Lombard is the chief scientific officer at Geno mind and is in private practice as the clinical director of Neuroscience at lifespan medicine previously he was chief of neurology at both West Chester Square Medical Center and Brock Bronx Lebanon Hospital and was a clinical assistant professor at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Albert Einstein College of Medicine he's published in medical textbooks peer-reviewed papers and medical journals his non-fiction books include the brain wellness plan and his new book is the mind of God which explores the relationship between neuroscience and faith Massimo Pigliucci is a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York Lehman College his research is concerned with the philosophy of science the relationship between science and philosophy and the relationship between science and religion he received a doctorate in genetics from the University of Ferrara and Italy a PhD in botany from the University of Connecticut and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Tennessee he writes the rationally speaking blog and has authored the popular science book denying evolution and his latest book is how to be a stoic using ancient philosophy to live a modern life Michael ruse is director of the history and philosophy of science program at Florida State University before coming to Florida State in 2000 he taught at the university of guelph for 35 years and before that he received his PhD from the University of Bristol is a philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and the relationship between science and religion the creation/evolution controversy and the demarcation problem within science he founded the journal biology and philosophy and has published numerous books and articles and his latest books are on faith and science co-authored with Edward Larson and on purpose MLAs vahana Smith is an instructor in positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania she is also a columnist for the New Criterion as well as an editor at Stanford University's Hoover Institution where she the Ben Franklin circles project working to build meaning in local communities born in Zurich Switzerland she grew up in Montreal and she has a master's degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and she's written for The Atlantic The Wall Street Journal the New York Times and she is the author of the recent book the power of meaning finding fulfillment in a world obsessed with happiness so welcome all of you so just a brief word about our format we will be talking for close to an hour hopefully having a lively conversation and we'll open it up to questions and we're gonna have fun tonight that so Emily let me start with you meaning is a word that has a long history has a lot of baggage what what does this word mean to you right well it's like your wife says it kind of sounds fat fatuous and vague so we use the word meaning in everyday language in two senses the first sense is it means it really means a lot to me that all of you are here in other words meaning in that sense is about kind of the value of something or the worth of something in the second sense it has more to do with kind of coherence and understanding so the meaning of Bon Apetit is you know enjoy this meal or you know have a good meal and if you're talking about a meaningful life I think both of those senses apply so when people tell psychologists that their lives are meaningful it's because they believe that their lives have purpose and Worth or significance and that they believe that their lives are coherent which means that they understand who they are they understand where they came from why they are the way that they are and they kind of have this this narrative that helps them explain their identity so I think significance and coherence are kind of the two pillars of meaning and in both psychology and philosophy you see a lot of thinkers say things like a meaningful life is defined by connecting and contributing to something beyond yourself so there's something kind of big than you that you're working towards contributing to that helps give your life that sense of significance and coherence so it Massa but let me bring you into this conversation to have a bit of historical perspective it are those is that kind of definition that Emily just laid out if you go back in the history philosophy is that what people have agreed on over the centuries to some extent although there's a large variety of opinions but I have actually would like to start by giving you two answers to the question that your wife doesn't want okay you know what is the meaning of life the two answers that come to mind are one from a Gary Larson cartoon many years ago it has one of these evolutionary progressions then no evolution biologist actually believes in you know the starts we're gonna need by then there is a fish and then there is a reptile and then all the sudden and then aleander is the human being right each one of these animals and creatures has the little balloon over their head and the first one says eat sleep or reproduce the segment says easily reproduce the third one says Jews who are all the way to end and the human one says what is the meaning of life that's the biological answer dude that's what you want to do but I do think that a better answer actually comes from Garrison Keillor who used to and I think is is show their very own companion by saying be good do good and keep in touch which means that it locates the meaning locally if it's a human construct it doesn't apply to anything anything else as far as we can tell and it has we with society it has to do interactions with other people be good do good and keep in touch all three of them so your messages listen to public radio P that's right forget about the history of philosophy records and occasionally indulge in Gary Larson continues but in terms of serviced Oracle from a historical perspective yes philosophers have in fact they'll quite a bit with questions and meaning all the way back to Socrates impossibly the pre-socratics but they have come up with very different answers you know the Greek Romans had a certain set of answers the Christians during the Middle Ages had of course a very very different kind of answer and then you come to you know modern existential which says that there is no answer is just you smoke a cigarette and and have a good time and let's go and then look cool that's right and then you're gonna die so so the the history is complicated you would take probably the rest of you need to just go through it but let us just say that yes there is a lot of opinions and they are completed out with each other so you can pick and choose whatever resonates best with you and you're fine you can you can find the Philosopher's they will back you up okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna turn to our other philosopher on the panel Michael I'm sure you're gonna have things to say about meaning but I want to throw I want to put another word on the table here because you have just written a book about it purpose which is which has its own complicated history right well Steve I'm still in a state of shock about your personal life I don't like kind of a relationship you and your wife have that you sit there I look across the table and talk about meaning in this sort of way my wife is sitting there we've been married for 30 years I don't think we've ever had that short that if I said Lizzie let's talk about meaning I'm sure she'd say well yes there but would you mind walking the dogs first by the way just one little addendum here right before this I mentioned to my wife and I said you know I'm gonna say a few she knew I was gonna say and she says I give you permission and I said oh you know I'm gonna you know I'm gonna make this sort of the the entree to our discussion and she said oh my god yeah your wife and my wife have a lot in common but but seriously and getting into purpose I don't think that my wife and your wife are quite as unfill Asafa colazione rather making them out to where rather making them out to be because I worry about people like Emily who are looking for meaning you know meaning I got a feeling that meaning is something a purpose is and I'm using these interchangeably is something which emerges from the lived life rather I mean I don't mean that there aren't times when you just have to sit down and say am i doing the right thing with we were talking about I said just before and he he changed from doing biology to and took a PhD and philosophy now obviously that required conscious thought about what you're going to do and is is this the most meaningful thing but at another level I know him well enough to know he's not spending his time worrying about meaning he's getting on with it and at some level I think meaning and purpose are things which emerge from the fully lived life and one more job not just at you who I see that the meaningful or the purposeful life has to be one which does involve others I mean I always say to my students the truly happy person is the person who's giving to others but at the same time I'm enough of a philosopher to listen to the Greeks who say the intellectual life is the supreme at some level and I'm not sure that that's giving to others I think that when Mozart was writing his incandescent operas he wasn't thinking about Michael ruse how much play off Bellini I'm going we're going to Norma tomorrow and I don't think Bellini was thinking about the pleasure he was giving me I think Bellini was saying you know I've got this aria I've got to do and it's going to be a hell of a lot better than Donizetti's I don't see that as either bad or lack of purpose or lack of meaning so I want to integrate meaning purpose with others but also with self so so one of the questions this on the table is do we need to worry about meaning or is it just something that happens I mean do we need do it frankly do we need to be having this conversation that we're having right now Jay do you want to jump in here so first I think what Emily said is extremely profound and and worth echoing from a neurobiological since I talk mainly from what I know which is the brain and neuroscience because - or is it you used Rx very much synonymous with what we know about how the brain functions and that is that the brain especially our limbic system brain which is our emotional brain primarily functions on this concept of balance right so we we all are assessing the emotional significance of our experiences what does this experience have for us or not have for us and the second aspect of life or meaning is coherence meaning that does does the narrative that one tells himself actually is it concordant with experience or is it discordant with one's experience and this Nate this this concept that we have of a soul which unfortunately I think has been discarded by psychology and the word mind which has been also a substitute for the word soul in psychology has also been discarded and I think that the the point of a discussion like this in my opinion is to ask that question is there a soul do we have minds and if we have a mind what is our mind and how do Minds actually achieve a state of meaning which is valence and coherence okay so let me let me turn that back to you do we have a soul 100% yeah define your terms what absolutely no doubt that we have a soul what is and I find it just so I hate to say it but I find arrogant that any scientist are worried I've been accused of worse well good because it's as a neurologist I'm the you know one of the explorations I took into this concept of faith was really personal for myself and what I realized is that I know a lot about the brain and yet I know almost nothing about the brain and that's a very humbling place to be so when people say that there's nothing the soul doesn't exist I think we really need to have roll up our sleeves and talk about first of all how we define the soul what terms are we using and is there a biological framework that we can actually rest upon to assess not the essence of a soul but how the soul behaves within right but you mention the term now several times and I don't know what you're talking about so can you do anything sure I'll do my best to find it to you let me start with the fact that it's anatomically we are able to localize to a certain extent because neurologists love to localize things right we want to find out where things exist so the challenge obviously is how do you localize something that's immaterial that's a paradox you can't find a physical place for something that's non-physical souls are by definition non-physical they're phenomenological right they're experiential but we've done a good job looking at imaging studies of the brain we can actually see something called Auto noetic consciousness and for the listeners what that means is the dialogue that we have with ourselves like is am i enjoying this conversation is this guy nobody's talking about what's for dinner tomorrow night is it gonna rain you know who do I love who do I don't like how much money am I gonna make next year all these things are the conversations we have with ourselves well who who we talking to but are you using the word soul as just another word for the self using the word yes okay so I am using the word soul and self interchangeably yes but I think that when I say it does exist of course it exists right but then I call it soul okay so let's let's call it self then okay good so if we don't want to called Saul we'll call it self / so what what is self then is self a material reduce quantitative biological neurotransmitter firings of experience that create the illusion that there's something that's that's non material or is something non material real because or neither I mean the philosopher David Hume for instance famously said that whenever he was looking inside himself and looking for thyself he didn't find it what he found was a bundle of sensations that is when you introspect you say oh I'm feeling this I'm I'm hearing that I'm thinking that and so on and so forth and so one reasonable way to construct this an idea of a self of the self is that the self is simply a dynamic way in which we think about what's happening to us we experience what's happening to us and we are changed by what happens to us so it's a dynamic I wouldn't even call it an entity it's a dynamic representation of what it is that we do even feel and think I was feeling I went a break feeling nobody I want to bring Emily back in the discussion here so you've just written a book about meaning we've been talking about the self the the biological roots of some of these questions and the question is do we do we need to kind of do this deep dive into what meaning is based on what some of these people have been saying and where do you go with that you know I think I I think that we're all here because we acknowledge that we do and that probably most of the people in this room and I would certainly think that the people on this panel given our discussion in the green room have a certain element of being seekers within us and that in particular they're you know one of the things that inspired me to write my book was the fact that you know for decades now for I mean if you take for hundreds of years like life is objectively gotten better so rates of violence are down people are less likely to you know die of starvation and disease that thousands of people each day are being lifted out of poverty and yet more people feel hopeless depressed alone the suicide rate has been rising for decades it reached a 30-year high in the u.s. just last spring and when you look at what's driving this what's driving it according to the research is a feeling among people that their lives are not meaningful that that that kind of religious grounding that spiritual grounding that for thousands of years gave people clear answers to both what the meaning of life is and how can I lead a meaningful life is no longer there for people as the default path to meaning and so we're left on our own to figure out the answer to this question and I think that's why we see a lot of people turning to stoicism as kind of a source of of spiritual fulfillment it's this non-religious kind of spiritual path I think it's why we see a lot of people turning to kind of neuroscience and psychology as a answer to this question another secular answer and so I think it's essential I mean Frank Viktor Frankl the Holocaust survivor was right that we have this will to meaning and that if we don't experience our lives is meaningful we suffer and whether that means kind of experiencing boredom and angst on a day to day basis or feeling like we need to end our lives and I think it's pretty clear it according to the research shows that the only way to find that sense of satisfaction and that sense of grounding is to have things in your life that give it meaning for a lot of people those things already exist and you just have to open your eyes to them whether it's your family your job realizing your talents as you were saying so is this is this sort of a subtle way of debating whether we believe in a religion or not is that is that kind of the subtext here of what we're talking about because you were just saying for instance that people in the material sense are better off than they ever were before but you know religion has been receding and seen people seem happy you could say that if you live in Madison Wisconsin if you live in Tallahassee Florida I don't see religion receiving at all I've been on sunders you know you can't get outside the house because they're pulling into the mega churches or the many churches and everything like that question I want to ask you is you talk you give me suicide statistics for instance do we find that amongst Southern Baptists suicide is practically unknown but amongst Unitarians it's pretty high and amongst the secular humanists its way out of sight I mean odd is that what we're finding you know I don't I haven't seen studies that that breaks it down by religion but to your point about this this decline in religion I mean it's pretty clear that rates of kind of religious involvement however you measure it whether it's religious identification going to church how many times a week people pray any measure that you look at if kind of religiosity and day to day life has been decreasing and so maybe not where you live yeah well I'm going to see a bit more on these things and of course the other thing I want to say is if you know avoiding suicide means hating gays being against abortion and putting that bloody wall between us and Mexico then there's something almost to be said for it you know a little reflection of young Verto type and maybe I should end it all because it seems to me and that the cost is no cost if it means believing in some of the horrible manifestations of religion that we have in this country and incidentally folks despite my accent my wife and I became American citizens precisely so we could identify and I could criticize so it's not just a blip doing it on you but I know I feel very strongly about this but I am appalled I'm absolutely appalled for instance by what pence did the other day the most anti black thing I've seen an apology and this is the man who was so religious he won't have supper with another woman if his wife's not there no but we could go into the direction of politics but I'm gonna I'm going to try to take it in a different direction here so you're just too nice why don't you you should work for Fox and then you have a real [Laughter] interest actually Michael because I don't know either about statistics that would be interesting to find out if different religious groups have different just because I thought of it I mean I'm emile durkheim in the 19th century studied suicide rates across Europe and he found that they tend to be higher among Protestants and lower among Catholics and Jews and the reason wasn't so much like the dogma beliefs but because Catholics and Jews had stronger sense of community and that among Protestants that there was kind of this the individualism the drive to go and kind of pursue education pursue career led to this alienation so tangent oh that's interesting point the the statistic that the true piece of statistics that I was going to bring up a little interesting from a different perspective but they do speak to what Michael was worse was referring to the divorce rate is higher among Southern Baptists and lowest among secular humanists and so is the use of internet porn highest among Southern Baptists lowest among secular humanists now what does that tell you so it tells you that religion may or may not provide a answer to question a meaning purpose and cetera et cetera but some some people don't seem to like that answer and so they look for other things like internet porn or like multiple wives so so the the idea that religion is in fact the answer or the default answer for issues of meaning I think it's questionable well Jay you have just written a book called the mind of God and really the the the the intersection that you were exploring is neurobiology and and faith how do you see this well I think that we have to separate this stereotype that we have of religion verse the sort of conceptualization of when we say religiosity because I think we all understand that formalized religions have mostly been ideologically bent on separating people of different faiths and have hurt us more than they've given us the gift of what religion should have given us in its pure form which in my mind is the recognition that we're more than just physical beings that there's something beyond just our physicality and I think that as a neuroscientist my concern is that when we if we look at society and the trends both in science and also in technology where we believe that such a thing is called artificial intelligence that completely does not exist by the way it's a it's the whole thing is a giant scam it really is there's no such thing as artificial intelligence at all and I'd be happy to debate any AI people in the room to tell them why do you agree but what do I mean by that is is is a couple of issues one is that I think that you know we are in a slippery slope to define ourselves purely as biological beings and that has very profound social implications as Emily brought up I think that even if we ourselves think of ourselves as being only biological and there's no value beyond our physicality then the the rates of nihilism go up not only personally but actually sociologically as well we missile goes off we only kill 5 million people it's only 5 million people I mean we think about these numbers as if there's not lies behind each person and I think that's my concern as a as a you know pseudo philosophers I'm not a philosopher but I'm a scientist that we have to be very careful when we talk about these terms about what it means to be human and having a soul and when we when we if we dismiss these outright without really understanding what we're dismissing and what we're dismissing is the sense the debate is between materialism and is there something other than materialism that characterizes life and I personally believe that that life is not purely material that there are phenomenological aspects of life that are immaterial thought is we've not able to can't quantify thought we can't quantify emotion we try but we can't do it and when we talk about the self we don't know we even what that self is we say well the self is the interoception of feelings and thoughts well what is feeling what is thinking well ok so I want to make a couple of distinctions here first of all I don't think of myself for instance as just a biological thing I I think of myself as a biological and especially a social being as I said earlier I think that meaning and purpose come out of social interactions with other people not not just from our basic biology but of course we're social in part because we're a particular type of biological organism where social primate species of primate to begin with and then we invented is all really complicated things that we call culture that basically no other animal has even remotely close to what what you have I think that is is all fine and it goes already well beyond basic biology right when I get to get a little bit nervous and when people talk about known physical stuff and so on and so forth now you can say but isn't that arrogant to say that it doesn't exist I don't say it it doesn't exist I say how do you know that it exists to me as a scientist first and then a philosopher next is you know whenever somebody makes a ontological claim claim about existence my basic question is how do you know why you think that right so I my position is not that the soul however you want to define it doesn't exist or that the supernatural doesn't exist or that the inter corporate doesn't exist the my position is simply that I have whipped with come up with pretty good view of how things work incomplete as it is and partly ignorant as it is without invoking any of that and when you do invoke any of that then I think the burden of proof is on you to say well here's why I think there is something beyond the corporeal something beyond the social something beyond you know something material that may or may not be I just don't see the reason to invoke it it I'm basically using Occam's razor here cut to the 2d to the minimum number of entities and minimum number of hypotheses necessary to explain things you're right that we still don't know a lot about feelings we don't know a lot about the self and so on and so forth but that is what in philosophy is called an anger management from ignorance right so just because we don't know that doesn't mean that were not licensed to just start making up explanations that don't really explain anything when I went to catechism as a Catholic for instance this young little Catholic you know my priest kept explaining to me that things come you know if things exist because God is is loving and because God wanted to do is in matter the other and then I asked him at one point the question and how do you know that and his answer was mystery of faith I said no that's not an answer that's not an explanation that's just that's just that I me believe what I say because I said I'm gonna jump in here because I don't think of it we're going to resolve the materialism debate this evening but but it's good to put it on the table I want to throw out another word that we've barely talked about at all which is happiness we've been talking about the pursuit of meaning a lot of people would say actually what they want is to be happy that is their goal to be happy not I mean a meaning would be nice but happiness is really where is that Emily is that a mistake I think it is a mistake and I take my cues here from Viktor Frankl who I mentioned earlier the Holocaust survivor so I if for those of you don't know much about Frankel he 75 years ago in 1942 he was transported to a Nazi concentration camp and he worked as a therapist in the can one of the things that he observed and that he ended up writing about in his book meant search for meaning is how so many of the people in the camps had kind of given up the will to live and understandably so they had lost everything they had lost their identities they'd lost their loved ones all these things that make our lives worth living in their case were gone and so so many of them gave up on life but others held on they still continue to believe that their lives were meaningful and those that did he found ended up being more resilient to suffering and even he argued more apt to survive and you know that that sounds controversial to some people but there's actually modern research studies of longevity that showed that people who have purpose who have some kind of reason who think that they have a role to play in society end up living longer than those who don't and one of the things that Frankel said especially could in criticizing American culture was that we are so obsessed with happiness and we think that happiness this pursuit of kind of positive feelings and comfort and leisure will bring us fulfillment but actually happiness he said can't be pursued it must ensue from leaving a meaningful life so I do think that the pursuit of happiness is is misguided and I mentioned some of the research earlier about what's predicting this rise of despair and the researchers specifically looked at whether it was you know whether what predicted it was a lack of happiness or a lack of meaning and it was a lack of meaning happiness to be predicted at all so I think this existential vacuum that many people are living with they think that happiness can satisfy it but it's not happiness is that it's actually meaning Michael well you want to weigh in unhappiness well yes I want to say two things that towards the end I found myself in great agreement with you because when I made the joke about Lizzie saying take the dogs out to walk it's not the pursuit of happiness in the sense of laying it out like that but that happiness emerges from having a well balanced life from having a family life and sharing your life with animals and these sorts of things so that's the one thing I want to say the second thing I want to say is as philosophers particularly John Stuart Mill pointed out you're gonna be awfully careful with this word happiness I know if we philosophers spoil everything my immediate is saying it depends what you mean by but it really does if happiness is just going out and getting drunk or yeah as happens at Tallahassee every other weekend during the fall getting absolutely blind drunk and watching young black men knock their brains out for our entertainment if that's happiness I'm not big on it on the other hand surely as Mills said there's happiness that Shirley Mozart got a supreme sense of self-worth or Emily Dickinson writing one of her exquisite poems must have had at some level a kick if you like real happiness now whether she sat down to write the poem and said I want to make myself happy this afternoon I feel pretty blue you know my sister was mean to me and I'm worried about the Civil War so I'll write a poem no but I think that the happiness in the John Stuart Mill sense emerges and I certainly heard that coming from you although as I say I'm not against happiness I think happiness is a good word but I think we must talk about what we mean at the same time one final thing it's very difficult for folks like me not to condescend to everybody particularly to sociologists um our philosophy you know I mean it's part of my stock in trade to look down on everybody but starting with what am I saying I've got my ten thousand dollar honorarium yet be careful rules be careful happiness is one of these things as I say it's got to emerge and I don't think there's anything wrong with happiness but I think you should understand what it is I recognize that happiness for one person is not happiness my daughter's going to a music festival this weekend I would hate to go to it but i you know i'm going to norma am I better than she is well yes but not beautiful but another level not really there's a couple of things like that about you the issue one is philosophical but before we get to the philosophical one is actually evidenced from psychological research so I mean Michael talked about how Mozart or I mean Dickinson would feel most of us are not in that kind of situation but most of us are in the kind of situations that psychologists actually look at in the field and one classical study was this idea of asking people if they were happy in the moment one of they had children or not people that had children people that done have children turns out that having children makes you miserable in the moment it's like you know you're dripping Buzzy's and the psychologist says how you happy now and if you happen to have children and the answer is hell no I'm not but then you ask the same people you know do you find your life meaningful you defined you know a purpose in what you're doing and then most of the people who have children say yeah of course I do and that is a big part of it I have to say I have a different take because I've heard those surveys of you know if you have children you're less happy than if you don't doesn't it depend on how old the children are yeah I mean yeah so if they're five years old maybe if they're fifteen years old or yeah maybe your level of happiness is you know if they're grown you know actually aren't the children then the source of great happiness doesn't it I mean I know I've never understood that they're grown they're long so they're there that makes you happy my it's called empty nest syndrome it's wonderful it's also called you you finish pay for college but the point I was getting at a voice is that the philosophical one however so all the way back to ancient Greece and now in modern positive psychology people were making a distinction between happiness and what they call eudaimonia eudaimonia is in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is the life that is worth living now as Michael pointed out there are there's more than one reason why for different people why a certain life may or may not be worth living but that's not happiness in the sense of a happy feeling you can have a life that is worth living the kind of life that you get to the end of it and you look back and say yeah that was actually pretty well done you know that was I'm pretty good about that with that stuff that doesn't necessarily correlate with moment to moment happiness lots of people can be you know drunk all the time and feel happy so to speak you can hook people to drugs and they feel happy all the time but then you get to the end of that kind of life is it no wait a minute what did I do and what did you do you didn't do much that had a social dimension or that involved other people so again we come back to this thing that for human beings meaning and purpose come out of interaction positive interactions with other human beings I'm not talking you know because they're negative interactions a psychopath I don't think that's a good I mean isn't another way of putting this I mean it's it's what you were saying earlier Emily it's if you're just sort of trying to get all of this meaning or happiness just yourself without regard to other people it's it's it's probably gonna feel a little empty but if you are incorporating a larger community or larger family if you're if your sense of self recedes you were more likely to find that meaning right and I and and and I do want to say something that I think kind of deepens the point that you're making and goes back to something that you said as well Michael about a meaningful life is emergent so psychologists have kind of picked up this distinction that philosophers have been making for thousands of years between eudaimonia which I kind of understand this meaning a meaningful life and happiness or hey Joan yet and so in one study they told people to go out and pursue either eudaimonia or meaning and or to go out and pursue happiness or hey Dona and I think what's really interesting about the study is the things that the people chose to do in these different categories because it showed how they themselves conceived these two different terms so the people in the happiness group did things like sleep in they played games they ate sweets they you know did things that kind of brought them pleasure and and positive feelings in the moment and the people in the meaning group did things like study extra hard for a test you know visit a relative in a hospital who was sick cheer up a friend things that were more difficult and effortful but that engage with their community or with their talent to kind of be you know be better become their best selves so that so the first point is that people Seve of these two things is different and that they behave differently when they're pursuing one versus the other are you suggesting there's actually an inverse relationship that sometimes if you are less happy you are likely to feel more meaning I don't know about I don't know if the cause of causality works in that direction but I do think that when you're doing things that are meaningful to you like raising children or you know working on a radio show that might be difficult that it's it can be stressful and it can make you feel bad but that it leaves you with this kind of deeper sense of satisfaction down the road so meaning I think meaning has a more complicated you can you can have a happy life and a meaningful life at the same time but you can also have a meaningful life that isn't happy all the time whereas with happiness you know that that's just a feeling and your life may or may not be meaningful but that kind of brings me to the second point about this study which is that when the psychologists followed up with the people three months later to see how doing these different things affected their well-being what they found was that the ones in the meaning condition actually felt this deeper sense of well-being down the road whereas those in the happiness group there was no difference to their well-being so there's something about meaning that kind of lasts and that that really does involve kind of being good and doing good and connecting or however you put it jr. I'm going to bring in the neuroscience perspective here I mean these words like meaning or happiness is there is there kind of a neurobiology explanation hundred percent so for both and in terms of pure hedonism we know that that's biologically driven by the various neuro chemicals particularly dopamine which has a lot of effect on increasing the perceptual emotional valence of an experience so if everyone would drink a large cup of coffee or take ritalin before this conference they probably would think that what I'm talking about would be more interesting that it actually is because it would raise their dopamine and say wow this is really a fascinating topic and by the way you know we we actually course children in a certain way to focus on information and the educate system and I think all neurologists are guilty this to a certain extent where we are apt to label kids as being a DD who are just simply bored and they go to the health care provider and they get a medication that increases their dopamine so that they go back to school and now they attend because the brains has been tricked into thinking that this has more emotional value than the experience actually does so we do know that that things like happiness do have a biological substrate we also know that that our brains as much as we like to think that we could figure all this out our brains are purely operating on belief system everything that that we do is a belief and I know that's it's scary to confront that but the absolute truth is that you cognition and belief are synonymous and there's many examples of how one could point out that connection but even if you don't believe you are still believing something so there's always an affirmation process and science quite frankly is that is the idea of actually confirming something that is definitive and we know that we've sort of taken away sort of the ability of science to to objectify things we know that we that science can never fully objectify experience and most scientists who really understand science realize that that science is is subjective it's it's reality by consensus which is good because then you have consensual behavior but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that what we believe or we don't believe we can validate through science because we can't but wait a minute there are something I mean to some extent I'm with you but but only up to a point certainly there are think certain things that are objectively demonstrable scientifically repeatable and so on and so forth like for instance most of us I assume tonight will leave this auditorium using the elevator not jumping after window and that's because we accept the the existence of gravity and and that it works in a certain way right no that's objective that's not that's got nothing to do with my belief for not believing sure I don't believe it I can jump off the window and then I'm gonna splash under and at the bottom of the of the building so some things are certainly can be objectified as you say when when it comes to first-person experience that's then I agree with you that for sure so my the expense and I'm aiming in this much particular moment of these these audience of you guys and and of talking and so on and so forth that is my own experience and nobody else can ever get into my mind and have the same exact experience the science can do certain things with that experience you can do a brain scan in this moment and you can show which areas to my brain are lining up and which more not you can take my pulse my pressure and so on you can come up with a number of quantitative measures of what's gap but happening to my body but certainly my first-person experience remains my first personal experience but the only caveat and that is that I worry when people say no you didn't you didn't say but there are some philosophers even like Thomas Nagel for instance Michael who say well see your first-person experience is yours and nobody else can get into it it cannot be put into a third-person description therefore that's the limitation of science that's a failure of science and I look at and I said that it what people like that are doing is what in philosophy is called a category mistake right right a category mistake is when you try to apply a category or a description to something that actually doesn't bear it so if I were to say you know I were to ask you guys you know what is the color of triangles you might think for a second that I'm being deep here this like wow what do you what does he mean by that but no I'm just making a category mistake mistake because triangles are not characterized by colors they're characterized by angles and by sides but not colors right so when somebody says well science is limited or it fails because it does not objectify first-person experience I think they're making a category mistake science is simply not in the business of doing that sort of stuff right right yeah well I want it we've been talking to some degree at a fairly abstract level about these questions of meaning and happiness and fulfillment and I'm wondering if there are some practical takeaways for for us for our audience and I know I want to ask to go around the panel and ask each of you individually me you've all been studying these issues in one way or another I mean through your your scholarship through your science and I'm wondering if this hits home for you personally I mean if you if you have changed anything in your own life in in your search for meaning or your search for well-being because of what you've learned Michael it's a good question I think not but I think I was very fortunate when I was in my twenties I went to graduate school and it was the sixties when there were lots of jobs for philosophers for for professors as there aren't now and I slid into becoming a professor and I was very lucky because it was it was made for me I had colleagues who retired after 35 years or 30 years who basically weren't that happy I thought some of them were very conscientious but they you know basically it wasn't the right fit at some level they didn't feel as I do going in front of an audience like a vampire in front of a virgin yeah I want a suck blood out of all of you starting with you dear I mean you know I mean this I mean I am so lucky in that respect so you ask me it sounds almost arrogant well it does sound but it's very fortunate I am so lucky to have done what I do do through my life i I don't refer to although I'm a philosopher Assad I don't regret not being a scientist for me the thrill of finding an idea or something like this or and certainly passing it on to young people and the joy of young minds like this I'm very bullish on them very bullish so the answer to your question is I'm not sure that but that you know I would have don't know so what you're saying is that this notion of struggle that you're sort of you're trying to find more meaning in your life that's that's kind of irrelevant to you you you the way your life is turned out it's it's true it certainly has never been a struggle for me about being a philosopher or being a college prof it has always been tremendously meaning for me um one other thing I am so glad that I came to North America I spent most of my time in Canada because at some level I was able to get away from the wretched class system in England and that for me was really like Christian at the cross suddenly as I got to the cross it didn't mean to say I didn't have a lot a long way still to go but I didn't have that one on my back Emily well how does this affect you personally these questions so I I do think perhaps unlike you that I I do kind of feel that I am searching have always since really as long as I can remember I felt that I I grew up in kind of a spiritual household my parents were Sufis we lived in a Sufi meeting house so people were coming to our home to meditate and you know we eventually moved out and you know when we did and that daily grounding of Sufism and spirituality weren't there I began to wonder you know what is this all about can you leave a meaningful life outside of a religious and spiritual system and and I think writing you know doing this research for my book writing my book which involved you know digging into philosophy in psychology which we've talked about but also interviewing people around the world around the country about their own stories has taught me a number of things one of them is that you know we I think we tend to think that this search for meaning is this difficult quest that you have to have travel to the mountaintop find your one capital B purpose your one capital M meaning and once you do then you'll you'll be set but that actually meaning emerges as Michael was saying and it emerges I found in my research and I would argue from four specific dimensions of life at least for I mean these are the four that kind of to mean in my research one was belonging so having relationships where you feel at home communities where you feel at home to is purpose having something worthwhile to do three is storytelling so this narrative that we talked about about your life how you understand the world and then finally transcendence so this idea that there's something more beyond just the physical that you can connect to and that kind of endowed your life with meaning so those four things you know after I realized that are things that I kind of I I worked to build in my life and I work to find you know I think they all exists in all of our lives so it's a matter of not just building them but opening our eyes to the fact that they're there Massimo is was gonna be knowing yes meaning that for the first part of my life I was actually just it's like you're comparably likely to to Michael I wanted to be a scientist since I was like a little kid I was lucky enough that I could pursue that career it just fit right in and and it was very meaningful for several decades I think that that's not something just that happens to academics in this particular case we have two academics that have gone through that experience but if you're you're a musician if you're an artist if you're a writer if you do a lot of other things you probably want to do that from very early on in your life and if you are lucky enough that you get to do them you feel like that's it you don't you don't really need any you don't ask you yourself big questions about meaning and purpose because you already have meaning and purpose but then midlife crises hit right and so I had to decide do I buy a Lamborghini or do I study philosophy study philosophy was cheaper so that's the way I went and once you start studying philosophy you know I study philosophy because I had a great high school teacher in Italy in Rome that thought philosophy as a living you know breathing subject once I said studying philosophy and the first course that I took in graduate school was on Plato and the second was on ethics even though my interest is in philosophy science and once you start doing that it's it's inevitable that you start asking yourself you know really what is it all about and what of what what am I doing here and so on and so forth that got me into onto a path that lasted a number of years until I discovered completely by chance stoicism and so why did the Stoics resonate so much for you it happened on Twitter of all places I saw this thing one day several years ago that said help us celebrate stoical week and I said what the hell is stoical week and why would anybody want to celebrate it and I looked into it and it turns out to be a yearly project by a group of philosophers and psychologists and psychotherapists as a cognitive behavioral therapists who are interested in the greek-roman philosophy updating into the 21st century and and see how it can contribute to meaningful life and basically what it is it's it's actually coming out of a stoic week is next week as it turns out now you know in a couple weeks and you sign up you download our am book and you start doing meditations and reading exercises and things like that and I did I did it for a week and I thought huh well that's interesting let me do it for another couple of months and I did it for another couple of months and I said ha that's really interesting let me do it for out of the year so here we are so can you can you just get I know you've written the whole book on this bit can you give us a very thumbnail version of what the stoic philosophy is yes I'll try but the thumbnail version is that there are two fundamental issues the the chief good for in life for a stoic is to be a moral person to be a good person and the way you do that is by practicing constantly four fundamental virtues which are practical wisdom the ability to navigate complex situations in the most effective way courage meaning not just physical but also moral especially moral courage justice a sense of treating other people as human beings the way in which you want to be treated and then temperance so doing things in the right measure not not too much not too little if you practice this on a day to day basis you gradually the ideas you gradually become a better person you're more integrated with society you have more meaning out of your life that's the first idea the second idea crucial idea is what historic is called the dichotomy of control certain things and your control and other things are not under your control the things under your control are your opinions your judgements your values the things that you can reflect on and change over time through reflection and practice everything else pretty much is outside of your control so whether I promoted my job or not when I find a job or not whether some nutcase is gonna push a button and start World War 3 or not that's an outside of my control so the idea then is once you realize and you internalize that you focus more and more your energy on what is under your control and you and the rest you start reading it as well it's there and I'll deal with it in the best way I can but it isn't gonna affect my happiness in the sense of juda mania it's not gonna affect the way in which I look at my life and what I find meaningful in my life okay Jay let me let me turn to you these questions that we've been talking about have you changed anything in your own life because of things that you've learned absolutely and first of all I think you know being a physician you're lucky because you know for many of us doctors it's a calling and you're able to you know be in situations where people are very dependent on you know your professionalism to help usher them into a better physical place than they were before they saw you so every day is a purposeful day as a physician when you understand your your role being like that so it's not hard to find purpose as a physician but what I found through writing my book is that I'm now spending time educating other doctors on essentially asking making sure that that question the question that we're asking here right now about those life of purpose what is the meaning to make that a question that physicians ask patients because we do know from work like Viktor Frankl that survival rates for all sorts of diseases are affected by one's existential state whether they feel they have purpose or not have purpose the point where I just gave a talk with Mark Hyman who's a very big well renowned integrative medicine doctor suggesting that that should be really our fifth vital sign that when we see patients no matter what their condition maybe we take their temperature that pulls their blood pressure and ask them you know does your life have purpose and if we find that patients don't have purpose either we have to help them to rediscover it in whatever way they discovered for themselves or understand the consequences that we give the best medications in the world for them and we're not gonna be able to undo the the profound effects of existential nihilism not just you know globally but actually in each individual level as well so for me the the book writing the book and the process of asking the question for myself does life have purpose first of all the answer is yes but I don't think it's debatable that life has purpose because life and purpose are synonymous there's no there you can't have purpose without life I mean it's just it's it's there whether you semantics or not they bought biology is purpose if you think about what biology is all the things about connectivity about growth about emergence these processes are all about relationship between self and other whether it's self and other or biological self and other so I think that we we shouldn't get too bogged down on trying to define if purpose exists because purpose 100% exists life is purpose I think we can't we should get bogged down on defining what that purpose is for each person individually and understand the impact that that has if we don't answer that question for ourselves that helps not only to achieve life satisfaction but really to truthfully for happiness as well okay we have put out a lot of ideas here a lot of questions still still to be wrestled with it is time to turn to our audience and your questions so one of the so as Massimo was kind of talking about in philosophy this distinction between meaning or eudaimonia and and he Donia our happiness his kind of for thousands of year has been been part of the discussion and in recent years it's been picked up by psychologists who are trying to study it empirically and so they've created kind of scales and measures that you know TVs are imperfect tools but to the best of their ability these academics are trying to measure these things and determine how you know pursuing one versus pursuing the other affects our well-being affects our you know physical states and they they define happiness as a state of comfort and ease kind of feeling good in the moment and you know Michael was saying that when we talk about happiness we really need to be clear that we're defining our terms and you know there are a lot of different ways that you can define happiness you can define it as meaning but happy like it's a meaningful life but I think that in a popular culture when you think about what happiness is when you look at magazine articles about happiness it's that you know yellow smiley face and it's what psychologists are really defining as that kind of positive state meaning they define as something bigger so if you if your life is meaningful in these surveys it's because you believe that your life has a sense of significance and worth so you feel like you're contributing something beyond yourself you feel like your life is driven by sense of purpose or some goal that you value and then finally you believe your life is coherent so that's kind of a distinction I hope I answered your question that's a great question I'm fortunate to say as somebody who's been waiting for this ad program to produce something for since I was born basically I doubt it like that's gonna happen anytime soon but let's say let's assume that it will so let's say that you we do encounter another civilization another another life-form intelligent life-form capable of communication very likely their philosophy their religion if they have won their science it's gonna be very different and I'm not sure that we'll be able to even communicate mindfully meaningfully with them the idea that meaning is universal I think is questionable meaning is personal is social is species specific in this case as far as we can tell we are the only species on earth that actually has these kinds of gatherings and things about this kind of stuff right if there is a Martian who does that there probably do it in a very different way which will be affected by their evolutionary history their biology their our neuroscience their neurobiology their philosophy their religion support so they may be able we may be able to learn something interesting from them but I doubt that they're gonna give us answers you know I I'm going to interject here because I'm much more of a Kantian on this I'm inclined to think that there are certain constraints which if you're going to have anything resembling intelligence you're going to have to have like some notion of causality and if you've got social animals some notion of reciprocity now I'm not saying it's going to be understanding the categorical imperative and I'm not saying it's going to be easy to talk to them but I've got a feeling if in any sense we think of it as intelligence there's going to have to be some similarities somewhere that said I'm not at all sanguine that we're going to find through the universe super brains popping out because my feeling is we're a very unstable species we're very clever we've got a long way but anybody who thinks in this day and age we're going to last another 20,000 years without bombing the hell out of ourselves I mean if North Korea can do it one time an America put somebody like Trump in charge we got another 20,000 years to go or more I really truly think that intelligent life is at some level unstable which of course is a good Darwinian position even though you don't expect it to work all the time so I'm not at all sure that there's those mega brains out there waiting to put us right ok the voice of pessimism here I go first I guess I think I think the way I'm understanding your question anyways is how these different kind of status markers or markers of success determine how meaningful our lives are and you know when I was researching my book I talked to a lot of young people especially young people and kind of high-pressure environments who are being told by their parents to aspire to be doctors or to go to graduate school and and it's not just their parents it's like it's the entire culture that kind of tells them that to live a meaningful life you have to have you have to accrue these external rewards and what I found is that it creates a real crisis of identity for them as they get older because they define their identity so much in terms of their success so that you know if I become a doctor if I get into medical school if I buy that house then my life is going well and I have a sense of worth but then as soon as they start to fail as we all do inevitably then there's a real existential crisis because that thing in my life that gave me so much value is no longer there and you know I don't know if you guys follow the story about the suicides at the Palo Alto High School where these students in this pressure-cooker environment they started killing themselves because they weren't succeeding in the way that they thought they should and they thought that their you know they decided that their lives weren't worth living because of that so I I would be really hesitant to kind of bundle external rewards with meaning and would encourage people to think of a meaningful life as a kind of life for you you know do good things for others in your local community regardless of what rewards come your way I'd like to give you the the stoic answer to that question which is actually very similar to what you just heard but it's even more sort of direct the Stoics refer to those externals with a delightfully oxymoronic phrase of preferred indifference and you say whoa wait if it's preferred how can it be indifferent but what they mean by that is that their preferred meaning you know a career recognition and you know reputation honors money all that sort of health education all of those things are preferred meaning that other things being equal you certainly rather be healthy than than sick or wealthier than poor and so on and so forth but they're indifferent meaning that day by themselves do not define who you are as a moral person you can be in regardless of the situation you find yourself in life throws yourself in you can still exercise the full virtues you can still be courageous just temperate and and and wise as much as it is possible and so in that sense your life does not depend on externals it's only marginally improved or not by them but it at a core you can actually live a good life meaning in the sense of eudaimonia in the sense of a life worth living under almost any circumstances well I think that people pursue happiness thinking that that's the answer to the good life I don't think people pursue anger thinking that's the answer to the good life so I think it's just it's it's what people people think that they should be pursuing happiness and I guess what I'm saying and what maybe some of the people on this panel are saying is that happiness is an emotion that's ephemeral so maybe that shouldn't be what we're pursuing but I mean to put a Buddhist spin on them I mean I mean they certainly do address anger and would say that often that is something that you have to be able to harness you have to be able to you know sometimes put it at a distance so it doesn't take over your life and that would be perhaps a condition for being happy right that's right so we're going to say yeah the Buddhists for sure but sanika for instance wrote an entire book on on anger cult and I checked recently the APA diem the American Psychological Association has a section on anger management and 80% of it is basically Seneca without acknowledging it unfortunately but so what Seneca said was that anger is a temporary madness that you don't want to do anything when you're angry even if you're if your anger is justified even if it is a righteous anger you don't want to act on it because very likely you're gonna you're gonna regret it and so he actually does tells you very simple things like are you angry okay great go for a walk around the block come back or they'll count until 20 and then when you come down then you assess the situation you know more reasonably more rationally so anger is definitely a disruptive emotion that does not contribute to happiness or to eudaimonia I don't think that that purpose you're right that different people may find purpose and meaning doing things that are diametrically opposed to what other people think is meaningful but I don't think it anything goes and I think there are constraints in that sense I guess I'm gonna use Michaels phrase although I certainly wouldn't call myself a Content but I do think that there are not notice that how I said in thanking but but I certainly think there are constraints so to begin with there are biological constraints there are social constraints meaning that we are a social species and a lot of discussions we have in society today is about the right balance between altruism and and selfish interests and things like that but in fact at a bottom we are a species that dramatically depends as you know every individual depends dramatically on the interaction some positive interactions with other individuals so that this distinction between selfish interests and an altruistic is in interest is actually artificial it's a result of certain kinds of ideologies in reality we're all here together on the same boat and we better you know navigate it together so I do think that there is a variety of ways to cash out the the idea of meaning and they are so there's no single answer to the question there and variety of meaningful lives but there is also a variety of lives that appear to be meaningful but if at the people that are living those lives are in fact mistaken I mean you've given examples are more difficult to parse because they're complex there's a lot of variety there but you know sorry but the Nazi life is not a is not a meaningful life now the Nazi may disagree but they're just wrong and right so and if then if they don't accept it then we just wage war against them to make them accept it so I don't think that one can go full relativist on these things there are certain forms of life that are clearly destructive to human society there are clearly not on average bringing flourishing to individual members of that society and therefore I think they are mistaken and in fact a lot of the efforts of philosophers since the Greeks and Romans was precisely to try to figure out the best ways to achieve a you morning life and then to teach others that might be under mistaken impressions about it so I mean the answer is complicated it's there's not a single answer it's not true that anybody wants to see daddy is the way to live your life then that and anything else is unacceptable I think is a fool but but the same token it's simply not the case that anything goes a lot of things just don't go or shouldn't go and we should oppose them but I think we can bring Canton again here because Kant said you know there are two things the starry heavens above on the moral law within and I hear what you're saying and I'm very glad you brought up the word value because that's what we're talking about what is the valuable life now yeah there are things that you do on a day to day basis which a value you go to college to get a degree to to earn money and all of these things but if we're talking about you know the big question the sort of thing I want to say that I don't want us all to be mother to raise us I think there's got to be a place for Aristotle to other words what I want to say is I think the meaningful the valuable life is surely one for me as a teacher interacting with my students but it's also been for me very much the life of scholarship which at a certain level and anybody who's a scholar or creative knows that ultimately this is ultimately totally selfish you do it for yourself if you have to do it for yourself if you you may say you're doing it for others and to the granting agency you say you're doing it for others but that's BS and you're doing it for yourself and that's okay so I really want to say that yeah meaningful life but I want to see two poles the starry heavens above and the moral law within can't [Laughter] well I can give you the stoic answer to that one which actually is is shared by a number of other philosophies and regions including Buddhism Buddhist nice come up a couple of times before there's a lot of similarities between the two in fact I tend to think of Stoicism as the Western equivalent of Buddhism ascension so from a story perspective there is no universal meaning from tragedies like the one you're talking about there is no nothing big that comes out no progress that comes out it what it does is you reflect on them and you say okay those those those things are inevitable aspects of life that just happen and what you derive from it is therefore by contrast increased appreciation for the fact that that there are still people out there they're good that in trying to do good you derive increased appreciation for the fact that you are still alive and you can do good to other people right so it's a question I mean the Stoics in general tend to reflect a lot and death especially their own death but now in in a sort of morbid fashion death is simply a natural process it happens unfortunately sometimes it happens way before it should happen probably because a human action but it is a part of life as such you accept it as a natural part of life and what you do instead is so you that is a way to set it aside okay it's going to happen at some point it could be today it could be next year it could be in ten years sonica says live your life every day as if it were your last meaning that you appreciate whatever you have you wake up in the morning and say oh god I got another day and I can do something useful with that with that day and that may take an infinite number of forms including help you painting helping to avoid or forestall tragedies like the one you're talking about you may or may not succeed but even the attempt even the fact that you're trying to do something about it that is what makes it meaningful yeah and I think another way to make meaning from these senseless tragedies is to memorialize them you know the Civil War is something that we as a country are constantly creating you know it's part of our myth like that the story of America we have this myth about the Civil War the role that it played the fact that these lives weren't lost in vain this good was produced from that terrible loss and so what story are you trying to tell Dan McAdams a psychologist at Northwestern University looks at stories and how stories can kind of help people create meaning and he's found that the most meaningful stories that people tell in other words the stories that that people tell who rate their lives is the most meaningful tend to be redemptive story so stories that move from bad things happening to good things happening and there are a lot of classic examples of redemptive stories in our popular culture you know the rags to riches story the you know that the the civil rights movement is a redemptive story from like you know you know suffering and bondage to liberation and so what what are the stories that we're telling are they redemptive stories is that one way that we can make sense of them I think another way is to maybe broaden our understanding of the kind of meaning that we are making so maybe there isn't legislative progress made right now if that's your definition of meaning for this but maybe there are other ways that meaning is being made so that those people who died does not die in vain maybe their stories get shared and inspire others things like that so to think of meaning in in broader terms than just kind of political progress maybe well what's interesting is in some of the countries that are the happiest like the Scandinavian countries and I think even Bhutan are countries that have some of the highest rates of suicide and that some of the countries that are the unhappiest like countries and sub sub-saharan Africa and South America Central America poorer countries they tend to have lower rates of happiness but also lower rates of suicide so I think that you know it it raises the question of what it means living in the modern world and how modernity has brought us so many things that have enhanced our happiness but maybe has left us with that kind of spiritual and spiritual emptiness so I I guess I would I wouldn't necessarily complete complete happiness and meaning at the societal level either because we see that they're kind of two distinct ideas that play themselves out separately in cultures that said I think that if you look at you know places that are really kind of trying to instill cultures as meaning you know in other words they're not just concerned about you know like a profit motive or gross domestic product but with how each individual can lead a meaningful life and I studied some of them in my book from you know schools to corporations what they really do is they they're trying to build up those four things that I mentioned earlier within their cultures to help the people in them live meaningful life so belonging purpose storytelling and transcendence now you mentioned earlier that there is no life without I think you put it there is no life without meaning in no life without purpose you sorry without purpose I would say there is no purpose without life the only things that can be purposeful are living things right but not all living beings are proposal in fact the majority of living beings are not proposed well they're just the result of mechanistic processes such as natural selection mutation and so on and so forth then it comes to complex intelligent conscious beings like us and maybe the aliens that we may or may not meet one of these days and all of a sudden the concept of purpose and meaning and eudaimonia and all that sort of stuff comes about that's because conscious beings are characterized like us are characterized by a couple of things first of all we're conscious of our mortality among other things right we have no reason to believe that I'm a bus' are conscious of their mortality they just are they just do what they do but we on the other hand reflect on the fact that one of these days our consciousness is going to be gone we're going to be dead and and that triggers a lot of questions about well then what am I doing here why am i doing in and so on and so forth and then we also have a complex language that allows us to articulate to produce and articulate a lot of interesting sometimes false or sometimes true sometimes neither thoughts about what it is that we're doing and why we're doing it so I think that meaning is a human on planet earth at least meaning is a human phenomenon purpose is a human phenomenon everything else just is and it does what it does any last words we are almost out of time well I'm just appalled now at this Cartesian position but my fellow philosopher is taking a meager I just I'm very uncomfortable with saying that my dogs don't at some level have an independent purpose or meaning or something like that I you know there's an arrogance there that is the second time that be told you guys and you're hoping for third and then you've got your bonus what do you find arrogant cocky I mean I'm really puzzled by this thing of arrogance all I'm saying here is that there is something different about human beings that is not shared by any birds and things yes me you know that there are some of our esteemed colleagues even sat down in a nearby at NYU who have embraced something called Pan psychism according to which not only amoebas and dogs have you know consciousness and all that body fat specks of dust and and and box and things so I think that's just crazy there's no reason to believe that at all well you just trivializing Pan psychism now if you don't mind my saying here we go the subject for another panel thank you so much you've been a wonderful audience [Applause]

Channel: NourFoundation

Views: 11,104

Rating: 4.7635469 out of 5

Keywords: meaning, purpose, happiness, philosophy, kant

Id: 54YFiMrQ_do

Length: 81min 24sec (4884 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2017