Flanagan - The really hard problem : meaning in a material world

Meaning in a Material World

Owen Flanagan

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flanagan, Owen J.

The really hard problem : meaning in a material world / Owen Flanagan.

p. cm.

A Bradford book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-06264-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Meaning (Philosophy) 2. Cognitive psychology. 3. MaterialismPsychological aspects. I. Title.

B105.M4F53 2007

121.68dc22

2007002664

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

to Gven Gzeldere and David Wong, dear friends and spiritually advanced natural philosophers

The occasion for this book was an invitation to give the Templeton Research Lectures at the University of Southern California. I was invitedwith a years preparationto talk about how things, considered in the broadest possible sense, hang together (if they do) in the broadest possible sense. Specifically, I was askedor so I interpreted the invitationto focus on the implications of mind science for our conception of ourselves. The original title of the series of lectures that became this book was Human Flourishing in the Age of Mind Science. I gave the lectures in Los Angeles over a glorious two-week period in February of 2006. I could not have felt more welcomed than by the USC group that sponsored the lectures and their wonderful support staff. Firdaus Udwadia and Nicolas Lori seemed always at my side, thankfully sharing my view that the scientific image need not be understood as disenchanting. Several graduate seminars at Duke University provided chances to try out some of the material. I am especially grateful to Joost Bosland for reading the lectures carefully and designing a wonderful PowerPoint presentation with artwork beyond my dreams. Jeremy Evans, Sahar Akthar, Russ Powell, and Robert Williams stand out for making me think very hard about some parts of my overall line of argument. Then there are David Wong and Hagop Sarkissian. I trusted them with most every word you have before you and they gave wonderful, tough critical responses.

There is also the Mind and Life crowd. We are a group of philosophers and scientists who have been involved in discussions with the Dalai Lama about science and spirituality in many meetings in India and America over the last decade. I am grateful to them all. Alan Wallace and Rob Hogendoorn stand out as especially helpful critics. Finally, as always, there are public lectures. I owe gratitude to the audiences in Los Angeles who listened to and commented on my lectures. Then there were chances at the University of Hawaii, in Santa Barbara, at Bowdoin College, at Duke University, at the Esalen Institute (thanks especially to Mike Murphy and the human potential movement), and at Columbia University to test and re-test these ideas. Thanks to Chris Kelly, Bob Pollack, and Bob Thurman for that amazing Mind and Reality conference in New York in March of 2006.

My colleagues and students at Dukenot only the ones already mentioned, but the whole departmenthave helped me to think more clearly about science and lifes meanings. Alex Rosenberg, Gven Gzeldere, and David Wong made me think especially hard about my upbeat arguments for finding meaning in a material world. I cannot, of course, satisfy myself, my critics, or my friends that I provide an answer to the really hard problem of the meaning(s) of life. I hope, out of gratitude to my ancestors, in honor of my family, my friends, and my critics, and in service to the well-being of all sentient beings, to have said something useful, something in the right direction, something that might matter to contributing to the realization of what is true, good, and beautiful.

Within mind science, the hard problem is to explain how mind is possible in a material world. How could the amazing private world of my consciousness emerge out of neuronal activity? This problem is hard. But it is even harder to explain how meaning is possible in this material world. Nearly everyone accepts that consciousness exists. Many wonder whether meaning does, even could, exist. Consciousness is. It happens, it is there. It flows like a stream while I live, and how it flows, how it connects to itself, is what makes me who I am. Meaning, if there is such a thing, is a matter of whether and how things add up in the greater scheme of things. Meaning, unlike consciousness, is not simply a puzzling feature of the way things are. Whether there is or can be such a thing as meaning is a more complicated matter than what there is. Unlike consciousness, meaning isnt a matter of what there is or isnt. Meaning, if there is such a thing, involves more than what there is. Minimally it involves a truthful assessment of what living a finite human life adds up to.

How is consciousness possible? How does subjectivity emerge from objective biological features of the nervous system? What is the function of consciousness? What does it do, and how much? How, when, and why did consciousness evolve in certain animal lineages? What does living as a self-aware social mammal mean or add up to? How does living a conscious embodied life matter, add up to anythinganything at all?

I have come to think that how to make sense of living meaningfully is the hardest question. Consciousness exists. There is no doubt that we are conscious creatures. Indeed, consciousness has the effect in the case of humans of enabling us to ask such questions as What makes life meaningful? What does my life, or any human life for that matter, add up to? and Why and how, in the greater scheme of things, does any human life matter?

Consciousness exists, and if we accept Darwins theory it probably serves a biological function. But whether meaning exists is controversial. We tell stories about what it is to live a meaningful life. But it is not clear that any of these stories give us insight, let alone an answer, to the question of what a truly meaningful life is or might be. We can imagine respectable answers to the first two questions emerging from the mind sciences and evolutionary biology, respectively. The question of meaning, if it has a good answer, seems to require more resources than these sciences. In fact, many will say that the mind sciences and evolutionary biology are part of the problem, not part of the solution to the problem of meaning. These sciences presuppose that we are finite biological beings living in a material world. If there is meaning, it must be a kind suited to us, a certain kind of conscious mammal who lives three score years and ten and then is gone. Gone forever. In order to address the really hard problem, let alone begin to answer it, I find it necessary to widen the scope of disciplines involved in the inquiry to include not only all mind sciences and evolutionary biology but also Western and Eastern philosophy, political theory, the history of religion, and what is nowadays called positive psychology. Anthropology, sociology, and economics are also major contributors to this exercise in eudaimonics, the attempt to say something naturalistic and systematic about what makes for human flourishing and that gives life meaningif, that is, anything does.

We are conscious social animals. There is little doubt about that. How consciousness emerges from our biology is puzzling. But the really hard problemin the sense that it is existentially pressingis that it might be true that we are conscious beings who seek to live meaningfully, but that there is nothing that could make this aspiration real, nothing more than a wish that comes with being a conscious social animal. Maybe worrying about real meaning is the source of the angst. Perhaps we bring to the table fantasies rather than realistic expectations about what real or genuine meaning would be. It is hard to know.