Four Questions That Describe The Meaning of Life

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python, Meaning of Life

I heard that someone told the Dalai Lama this joke and he didn’t get it.  Which is makes it even funnier.

I was busy trying to adjust my phone to listen to a podcast while driving and pouring coffee the other day, and it hit me like a ticket for inattentive driving:  There are only four questions that are worth asking.  I found that to be amazing, since I have hundreds of note cards with ideas for posts on them in boxes waiting for the right day for me to write them up.  So how do I condense most of those ideas as answers to four questions?

I was worried that this was too simple.  I bounced back and forth between three questions and four questions, but finally settled on four questions.  They were simple questions, and the first one that occurred to me is the first one on this list.

1. What brought us here?
2. Who are we?
3. What is this place?
4. Where are we going?

Originally I had a fifth question, but then I found my keys.  Under my hat.  Again.  Also, when I use the word “us” in this post, it’s certainly meant to include everyone.  Everyone except Johnny Depp.  He knows why.

But these are big questions.  As I thought a bit about it, these are the questions that drive me to write this blog, with the exception of the odd post here and there.

What brought us here?

This was the first question, and it hit me as I was working out the ideas for a future post in my head.  It hit me like an angry wet salmon wearing a bear suit.  At its core, this questions the all of the conditions that led to our present state.  All of them.  It questions the way that we are – as individuals, as groups, as a species.

I would have sworn that Washington had a blue lightsaber.

This is only a four word question, but it’s a really big four word question.  Thankfully, it’s simple to answer.  All you need to understand it is the answers to any questions you can think of in these subjects:

• All of human history.
• All of physics.
• How PEZ® was invented.
• All of the history of the universe.

So, the question is very short, and the answer is very long.

We still don’t know many answers to questions that are fundamental about each of these subjects.  One time I was talking to The Mrs. back around 2000.  My exact quote to her was, “The Mrs., I’m willing to bet that one day they find that we have Neanderthal ancestors.  I think that the reason why I came to that conclusion was based on me.  I’m pale.  I can sunburn under the glare from an LED computer monitor.

That sort of pale didn’t happen overnight.  Along with other physical observations I’d made, it just seemed the most logical conclusion that Neanderthal wasn’t extinct.  Neanderthal was us.

So when the DNA evidence came back and, eventually, showed that most European-descended people had Neanderthal DNA I wasn’t surprised.  And I’m not surprised now when I hear that our most basic assumptions about the way that things like physics work are subject to change – massive change.

An example:

At CERN (where they smash atoms together like a tipsy celebutant celebrating that her parents purchased her way into USC™ smashes daddy’s Mercedes© into a mom’s parked Ferrari®) they recently celebrated, with campaign(!), that they had discovered a particle symmetry violation between anti-matter and regular matter.

If Vinnie drops a car on Frank’s car, neglecting air resistance and assuming g=9.81m/s . . .

That’s a lot of words for a very basic thing – let me break it down a bit.  The Universe that we see is comprised almost entirely of normal matter, not anti-matter.  But the Big Bang® should have produced equal quantities of both, so where did the anti-matter go?  This is a pretty significant question, since anti-matter explodes with the force of a billion bipolar ex-wives (GigaX) when it comes into contact with normal matter.  It’s really good for us that we don’t have this anti-matter going around and wanting alimony payments, but there’s no real reason that the Big Bang™ didn’t produce equal quantities of both.

This discovery from CERN might explain why my ex-wife anti-matter is thankfully rare in our environment.  It appears that anti-matter doesn’t follow the same physical laws that matter does.  This is the first time we’ve figured that out, but we don’t know how it’s different.  But think just for a second – what if you could have a substance that wanted to fall up instead of down?  That was anti-magnetic?  That could coat, soothe, and protect a sore throat?

Yes.  This discovery could provide technologies that we haven’t even dreamed about, but most people have never heard about it.  Thankfully we’re all up to date on Kardashians, though.

Thankfully there’s tons of things left to discover, both about ourselves and about the Universe that we can safely ignore while we are Keepin’ up with the Kardashians.

Who are we?

I got this question down to three words.  See what a ruthless self-editor I am?  This question opens up a lot of today’s biggest mysteries:

• How the human body works.
• How the brain works.
• What consciousness is.
• If people have souls.
• Why 80% of the world is silly and watches soccer.
• What health is.
• Immortality – anything besides a great three-letter-score in Scrabble®?
• What motivates us.
• Why we do the things we do.

I’ll admit, some of these questions do have overlap – the question of “What brought us here?” overlaps some with “Who are we?”  Ancestors are crucial to both, for instance.  Protip:  since you inherit somewhere between 60% and 80% of our intelligence, the first thing you should strive to do is to convince your mom to pick a smart dad for you.

But even given thousands of researchers spending billions of dollars annually, the primary positive impacts to health in the last 150 years have been clean water, better nutrition, antiseptic surgical conditions, and antibiotics.  Newspaper stories keep showing up about the immortality around the corner, but I haven’t even seen one fifty year old mouse, and we can cure any kind of mice-cancer at this point.

No, thanks, eyes are fine.  And I’ll skip the colonoscopy, thank you.

Thankfully, medical science can all of the questions about why humans are like they are.

Except for the interesting ones.

What is this place?

Our surroundings are curious.  There is the world and cosmos we live in, but there are also the civilizations we’ve made.  How does all of it work?

• What virtue is.
• Where virtue comes from.
• What societies work well for humanity.

This is the question I could (sort of) cram back into the other three, but I felt it was important enough because of the great deal of discord in society today, and the uncertainty about the future of what we’ve made.  Understanding the ability for humans to govern themselves and live together is crucial, and we still haven’t gotten the knack yet.

Where are we going?

This is the final question, the future.  The mysteries of the future are different.  The past and present are set, the future is undecided, wrapped in probability.  What are the big questions, the big unknowns of the future?  This question is easy to answer if we just know:

• The fate of ourselves.
• The fate of our civilizations.
• The fate of humanity.
• The fate of life itself.
• Physics (all of it), again.

I’ve mentioned religion twice.  Though it’s not a constant part of posting, it’s a very important component in understanding these questions, especially the ones where I’ve listed it.  And religion is important as a philosophical construct – it has been the largest single influence on humanity in all of recorded history, and probably before that.  Beyond religion as pure philosophy, there is that possibility that deity as contemplated by religion exists, and maybe even close to what is on the label.  Science certainly hasn’t ruled that possibility out.

Does a bear answer trivia questions in the woods?

But in 2000, they had ruled out the possibility that we were part Neanderthal, or at least that was the general consensus.

So you never know what we’ll learn in the future.  And it looks like I’ve got plenty to write about, and with the amount of Neanderthal blood I have, probably some mammoth to catch and some caves to paint.