You there! Yes, you! Do you find yourself thinking about your pathetic, sad existence,
and wonder what it’s all about? Do you feel upset that your consciousness was ripped from
the void and imprisoned inside a mortal being in a universe with no apparent meaning? Do you find
yourself asking questions like, ‘Why am I a thing? in a place? with subjective conscious experience?’
If any of this sounds familiar, then you my friend are in luck! With a revolutionary new
idea called neuroscience, you will never have to worry about the meaning of your life ever again!
We generally think that as we expand our scientific knowledge about the world,
human lives will be improved. In the beginning of the 20th century, we had no idea that atoms had
their own substructure, or how we inherited traits from our parents, or that there were
objects in the universe that existed outside our galaxy. Newton’s theory of gravity had not yet
been superseded by Einstein’s, and concepts such as dark matter were still waiting to be discovered
decades into the future. Not only have these discoveries been crucial in understanding the
world we find ourselves living in, but they have also made possible certain technologies
that are now essential to our everyday lives. The first computers in the 1940s paved the way
for space exploration and advancements in the medical sciences. Further down the line, the
computer would enable the invention of video-game consoles, laptops, digital cameras, and eventually
smartphones. It’s likely that you are watching this video on one of those devices, possibly
even holding it in the palm of your hand. Yet devices this compact would not be possible without
the invention of the transistor, the integrated circuit, and the microprocessor. Without these,
the computer would still weigh in at a respectable 30 tonnes. Of course, the other major achievement
was the creation of the internet, and without each of these steps, it would be impossible for you to
watch this video right now. How about celebrating these incredible technologies by hitting
the subscribe button and liking this video! It can hardly be said that humanity hasn’t made
some stellar strides in learning about the world. Indeed, in this scientific golden age, it was
promised that the more we discovered, the better our lives would become. There would be no need
to feel lost or confused, as we would have all the answers we would ever need, and indeed most of our
knowledge can be accessed almost instantly online. However, there has been one area of science that
has proven to have the opposite effect - the more we learn about this particular area,
the more anxious we, as a species, have become. This field, my friends, is that of neuroscience.
Existentialisms in general have certain characteristics. Firstly, they recognize
an anxiety and attempt to examine its cause. This typically involves some edgy philosophers
sitting in Parisian cafes and chaining fifty cigarettes while writing novels that nobody
can understand. The anxiety here is that there are no answers that could possibly satisfy the
big questions we have about our existence, and the worry that there are no secure foundations
for the meaning of our lives, our ethics, and our purpose as human beings. Secondly,
existentialisms also involve positive steps towards regaining our sense of being human,
and an attempt to eradicate the deep-set anguish being felt at the time.
There have been three major waves of existentialism throughout history. The
first wave, which included philosophers such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, responded to growing
secularization in society, and the subsequent anxiety that God and religion could no longer
guarantee the security of our ethical systems. Traditionally, our morals were secured by the
fact that God was all-knowing and all-good, so we could be safe in the knowledge that we were doing
the right thing. This all changed around the time of Charles ‘big dick’ Darwin, which introduced a
full scientific explanation for the origin of species without the need for divine creation,
so perhaps God didn’t actually exist. With nothing to secure our morals, we became anxious
over what exactly was the right thing to do, and the first wave of existentialism was born.
But things progressed, and after an analysis of this anxiety, we took the steps towards defeating
it by creating our own ethical systems. We decided that there could be moral good in a
secular society, as well as a religious one. The second wave, which included philosophers
like Camus and Sartre, was born in response to the Second World War, and more specifically to
the atrocities that humans were capable of creating. Before the war we relied upon our
self-made ethical systems as a source of goodness, but after the events of the Holocaust, confidence
was shaken in the belief in a secular common good, and this caused a second wave of anxiety.
Since we clearly can’t trust people as a source of goodness to combat this anxiety - I mean,
seeing as people can become literal Nazis - we instead placed our faith in science.
What is neuroexistentialism? Essentially, it’s the same message that Darwin wrote about, just being
shouted at us through the megaphone of modern scientific detail. Humans are simply animals,
science tells us. Not some fraction animal, but animal through and through, and we actually
share vast quantities of our DNA with the other animals on the Earth. We share about 99% of our
DNA with chimpanzees, about 90% with cats, and 85% with mice. Even more shocking than this,
we share about 60% of our DNA with fruit flies and about 40% with bananas. So next time you’re lying
awake thinking about that awkward conversation you had seven years ago, just blame the 40% of
you that is shared with a bendy yellow fruit. In discovering more and more about the brain,
neuroscience removes the last remnants of thought that we are somehow different,
and that we have an immaterial soul or mind. If we can explain our entire subjective experience in
terms of brain processes, as modern neuroscience suggests that we can, then neuroscience simply
has no need for such things. Neuroscience then becomes an existential anxiety machine, where the
input is mystery and the output is dread. The mind is just the brain, there’s no such thing
as non-physical consciousness, and when brain function ceases, so do all conscious processes,
so death really is the end of everything. All we are is the result of physical matter organizing
itself in a particular way that happens to bring about chemical processes that we
perceive consciously. In other words, this is my average stream of thought on a Thursday afternoon.
One result of neuroexistentialism is that our conceptions of free will have to be rejected as
well. Philosophers from every age have written about free will and human autonomy. It has been
central to both religious debates and debates over the moral responsibility for our actions
for centuries. Interestingly, free will was also central to second-wave existentialists
like Sartre, so much so that he thought we are ‘condemned’ to be free. Sartre accepted that human
beings are part matter, a physical thing, and this was something that was out of our control. But
importantly, we are also conscious and fluid, and this consciousness is the source of our radical
freedom. We are free in every action that we make, and it is our responsibility under this freedom
to create a meaning for ourselves. Even though there was no religious authority for Sartre,
our anxiety can be settled if we freely choose what kind of person we want to be. There might
not be any meaning guaranteed by God, but that didn’t matter, as we could make our own.
However, recent findings of neuroscience suggest that no such thing as free will even exists, so
for us stuck in the third wave of existentialism, the complete opposite is true - our anxiety is
caused by the fact that free will might not exist at all. As neuroscience progresses, and we become
better at figuring out the complex chemical and physiological processes that cause our behaviour,
the more it becomes obvious that free will is just an illusion, and our behaviour is actually
extremely deterministic. If you hit a snooker ball at the exact same angle and with the exact
same velocity, the ball will land in the same place on the table no matter how many times
you hit it. Neuroscience tells us that the same thing happens inside our brains. Theoretically,
if we can discover a complete chemical picture of the brain, then we could predict every action
that a person will make over the course of their lifetimes. I might think I chose to write these
words that you’re hearing now, but in reality it might be the case that my brain processes
have already decided these words for me, perhaps seconds or even minutes before I think I did.
The more we learn about the brain, the fewer reasons there are to believe in a non-physical
mind, one that freely controls all our actions and is set apart from the deterministic laws of
physics. The existential anxiety machine still rumbles on, creating more and more dread until
we can resolve the anxiety that it creates in a meaningful way, as we have done before.
So where does all this leave us? We ’ve gone pretty in depth with the anxieties
that the third wave has caused, but what about that important second aspect of
existentialism - the positive steps taken to regain our sense of being human again? Well,
there’s an important question that we all need to ask ourselves before we can give an answer.
How can we use the discoveries of neuroscience in combination with our concern over the meaning of
our lives, and from this make a completely new picture of humanity? One that is true,
and one that frees us from the problems we face under the current picture. Most
importantly, this picture needs to accommodate humans as meaning-makers.
You might have noticed that ‘make your meaning’ is the tagline for this channel,
and that’s because it’s something I think is central to all of our lives. It’s the acceptance
that even though there might not be a transcendent meaning to life on this little dot in space,
that doesn’t mean that we can’t create our own anyway. We can take the wreckage that previous
generations have left us, and fashion something new out of it, something completely different,
something that doesn’t borrow from anything else that we’ve ever seen. What threat remains when
we’ve banished meaninglessness into the dark, and taken responsibility for creating meaning
ourselves? It’s something you can start today, in every little thing that you do,
and that person who succeeds may well be the most powerful thing in the universe.
Yes, the modern sciences might seem like an existential anxiety machine,
constantly manufacturing new things for us to be concerned about. But always remember,
the power to switch off the machine and start making meaning for yourself is in your hands.
Thank you very much for watching, peace and love, and I’ll see you in the next video.