Only Godlike Technology Can Save Us from Life’s Absurdity

Transhumanism and the blind spot in John Vervaeke’s conservative take on life’s meaningfulness

The question of whether life is meaningful is usually associated with philosophy and religion. But what happens when a cognitive scientist addresses the question?

John Vervaeke’s a cognitive scientist, and he turns that existential mystery into a series of tractable problems of how the mind works, how its processes can malfunction, and how those processes can be improved. The feeling that life is meaningless, for Vervaeke, is a matter of mental and behavioural dysfunctionalities. Techniques such as mindfulness and even psychoactive drugs are available for reorienting our perspective and grounding us in real projects that have intrinsic value.

For instance, he explains how the human mind is generally intelligent because of its mimicking of the amazing process of natural selection: we make judgments of relevance by both throwing up possibilities in our imagination and winnowing them by focussing on a task at hand. This imitates how the environment selects fit genes and the organisms that carry them, and kills off the unfit ones.

But that kind of intelligence evolved to be practical in that we use our knowledge to perform our social roles. Our cognition has multiple dimensions, according to Vervaeke, since our thinking is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended in technologies to aid our bodies.

For Vervaeke, then, the late-industrial countries’ sense that life isn’t meaningful is due to a historic shift away from the practicality of cognition, towards a narrower way of thinking, one dominated by logic, objectivity, and abstraction which make it seem as though nothing we do matters.

Again, the issue for him is one of functionality: there’s a holistic way of thinking that grounds the self in life projects that have intrinsic value, in which case there’s no debilitating anxiety because the person’s thought processes are optimal. And there are more one-sided, dysfunctional ways of thinking which are liable to overwhelm a person with the problem of life’s supposed absurdity.

Functionality and troubling contents of thought

In an illuminating discussion of the matter, Alex O’Connor pushes Vervaeke to consider certain negative contents of thought, rather than just the functions or causal roles of our ways of thinking.

For instance, there’s the thought that we’re all going to die whereas we’d rather be immortal and live on in an afterlife. Vervaeke replies that those contents are meaningless, foolish, and unnecessary, in so far as they’re articulated in supernatural, theological terms. In any case, he says, what’s at the root of the fear of death is rather the fear of dying, and again there are practices that can alleviate that fear.

At one point, towards the discussion’s end, O’Connor pushes Vervaeke further on whether the “heat death” of the universe makes a mockery of life’s meaning, and Vervaeke confesses, “I don’t know what to do about that” sort of worry (1:26:15).

Vervaeke resists what he calls the “instrumentalism” of these existential fears of absurdity and death. The fear is supposed to be that life is meaningless because ultimately what we do is all for naught, given the reality of death. What’s absurd on instrumental grounds, then, is working towards an end when the end itself will inevitably be overturned, assuming we even achieve our goal. Vervaeke counters that instrumentalism by positing the intrinsic value of certain projects, such as the practice of Taoist or Buddhist mindfulness.

This dismissal of instrumentalism, though, is odd since Vervaeke’s entire approach, deriving from cognitive science, is functionalist and mechanistic. That is, the blind spot in Vervaeke’s account of life’s meaningfulness is the philosophical reflection on existential questions.

He views that philosophical approach as counterproductive, or he deems those questions to be intractable or scientifically fruitless, so he focusses on the mechanistic kinds of questions that can be practically solved. We can answer how our ways of thinking can be fixed and made more productive, but we can’t decisively answer the philosophical questions, such as whether life is meaningful, given the universe’s eventual destruction. Those existential, meta-questions are either meaningless or counterproductive, from a strictly scientific, pragmatic viewpoint.

But of course, those questions are not meaningless at all, and whether they’re counterproductive in this context is question-begging since the productivity would give life purpose, which is to say meaning. The point of these existential questions is that maybe it’s that kind of narrow-minded purpose that’s foolish, not the act of doubting what’s normal or “optimal” for animals or people.

The scientific discovery of nature’s monstrousness

Think of it this way: as Vervaeke says in his discussion with O’Connor, what his theory attempts to explain is how we can obtain “a fundamental sense of you having agency, of being a problem-solver in an arena that is intelligible to you because you have grokked what’s relevant and salient. And that is this fundamental sense of connectedness, and that’s at the core of the kind of meaning human beings are talking about.”

But here’s where his blind spot comes into play. Vervaeke thinks we lose that connectedness because of the modern narrowing of our ways of thinking: we focus on the propositional and lose touch with the practical aspects of cognition, so we lose ourselves in abstract (i.e. philosophical) thoughts that have no grounding in projects and practical purposes.

What Vervaeke misses is the modern shift not just in that functionality, but in the contents of our worldview. The shift, for instance, was towards atheism, as reflected in Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead. And science and technology vastly expanded our knowledge of nature.

Thus, the existential problem is evidently that we evolved to connect with a local, human-centered environment, whereas our minds have expanded to encompass a wholly different, inhuman one.

Bonding with nature was relatively easy when we were free to imagine that there are social spirits responsible for all natural processes. But when scientists objectified nature, addressing only the fundamental physicality of those processes — and thus their lifelessness, amorality, and indifference towards all our concerns — science, philosophy, and modernity more generally (including art, capitalism, and industry) have presented the world to us in such a way that the thought of bonding with it is grotesque.

Nature for prehistoric animists was home because the wilderness was deemed to be animated by fellow social beings. Nature for modernists is an alien, monstrous, godless wasteland, an absurd fulness of mindlessly creative experiments. We’re alienated from the wilderness not because we’re no longer thinking straight — unless Vervaeke wants to say that scientific objectification itself is dysfunctional. No, arguably we’re now closer to the summit of human thought, in the late modern period, in that we’ve disenchanted nature, freeing it from many of our parochial illusions.

Yet in the process, we’ve naturally undermined our evolved mode of living. We can no longer function as nature’s slaves, as animals confined to our adapted life cycles, feeling content in our self-centered projects. Our capacity for reasoning has taken us to the furthest reaches of the universe, from quantum mechanics to black holes to distant galaxies to the beginning and the end of time.

What life projects could possibly satisfy such drastically expanded minds?

Progressive instrumentalism

The Kardashev scale of life might supply a Vervaekian answer: godlike intelligence ought to have godlike bodies and technologies with which to pursue stupendous projects such as the transformation of solar systems, the governing of galactic empires, or perhaps even the prevention of the universe’s termination.

The sense that life is absurd, then, might be due to the mismatch between our intelligence and our societies. Science has progressed far faster than our economies and our political systems so that we’re confined to relatively trivial, unfulfilling jobs and entertainments even as our minds have expanded to encompass profoundly inhuman realities. As Nietzsche said, in a sense we’re still “all-too human.” We know the universe is inhuman and thus indifferent to small-minded pastimes, but we don’t know how to harness that knowledge in a society that empowers us in properly cosmic enterprises.

We can’t yet apply our cosmic knowledge to cosmic purposes. Hence, we feel our lives are small and pointless because we know too much, compared to how little we can do about it. Contrary to Vervaeke, it’s not that we’re no longer thinking properly. On the contrary, the narrowness of modern objectification is adequate to nature’s inhumanity. We demystified nature, freeing nature from our arbitrary personifications because the universe proved to be godless and mostly lifeless, as far as scientific modes of inquiry could tell.

No, we’re finally thinking objectively to suit the reality that the stories that used to comfort us were fantasies all along. They helped us cope and made us happy but only by facilitating ignorance and by forestalling the cosmic, existential reckoning, which is that our evolved ways of living are natural accidents in a universe of monstrous productivity.

Why expect the human to relate well to the alien? After all, they’re practically opposed to each other, except in the sense that at their root their atomic interactions are physical and therefore pointless. We prefer to pursue certain meaningful goals, but because impersonal nature doesn’t care about anything, it responds with the luck of the draw: some of us succeed and some fail because the real world works towards meaningless terrestrial or cosmic ends, sweeping us along like leaves in the wind.

As for Taoist, Buddhist, and Stoic techniques of mindfulness, they might well instill a sense of tranquility or fulfilment in the face of cosmic horror. But that doesn’t mean those modes of contentment are existentially honourable. Drugs can make us happy, but they can also make us foolish if we addict ourselves to them or if they fill our mind with palliative fantasies.

On the contrary, the mainly Eastern practitioners of these techniques mean to be realistic, and indeed their philosophies are much more naturalistic than Western religions. Still, meditating on your breathing is a far cry from the godhood of a Type III civilization on the Kardashev scale. With mindfulness techniques we can calm our nerves and ignore the discombobulating implications of scientific disenchantment, but we can’t use those techniques to be transhuman, to apply science to fix nature’s mere physicality, to tame nature’s wildness and to inject meaning or artificiality into all of nature’s headless products.

The fact that much of science fiction conflicts with Eastern philosophy shows that there’s still likely a problem of life’s absurdity, despite Vervaeke’s efforts. The problem is that Vervaeke’s Eastern approach is conservative, whereas the humanistic basis of science invites a progressive project, this being ultimately the intergalactic business of a Type III civilization that gains control not just over its members’ cognitive processes and breathing patterns but the whole galaxy.

That sci-fi scenario would indeed be instrumentalist in that its point would be to find a suitably far-reaching project for the bearers of advanced empirical knowledge.

Indeed, whether anything has intrinsic, objective value is dubious and likely question-begging. Here, Vervaeke’s account conflicts with the upshot of science itself. With Neoplatonists, he’d want to posit teleological causality or natural purposes. And whereas there are certainly functions in biology, such as the function of our body parts, they’re value-neutral so they’re not meaningful in the relevant sense. Those purposes are selected by nature, not by us, and nature’s selectivity is only figurative.

Thus, the heroic gods of Type III civilizations would still be subject to the existential fear that even their galactic civilizational enterprise of resolving nature’s absurd mode of creativity would have only subjective value. Nature still wouldn’t care what we do, or whether we succeed or fail to re-enchant the cosmos with our artifacts. There would still be no God to whom we could complain for having set us in a merely natural environment, an environment that eventually disgusted us and compelled us to build an artificial refuge from it.

Sci-fi transhuman gods would still be engaged in busy-work, especially if they’d prove in the end only to be tragic heroes, and the cosmic wilderness would swallow up the fruits of their labour so that the universe’s ending would be unobserved. But that tragic heroism would seem more honourable than Eastern quietude and retreat into games of questionable reassurances.

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