Reasonings in Life

Why do we exist?

Is it a case of “We think, therefore we are?”

Or may be “We are of god, and god is of us?”

But it could be “We just are.”

There are as many more answers to the question of why mankind exists than there are ways of asking the question.

But in order to even attempt to answer it leads us into asking certain other questions. This includes needing to know what mankind is in order to argue why it exist. But to do this we need tools. Not necessarily the physical tools that you may use in day-to-day life (although scientific tools have their part to play), but tools of the mind.

Philosophy is literally the love of wisdom and has been the traditional way of exploring the question of why we exist since the dawn of recorded history. It is also an activity and an enterprise that largely consists in the seeking of wisdom through exploration, both physical and intellectual. But why mankind exists is no longer confined to the traditional realm of philosophy. Instead, in searching for the answers to why, many disciplines contribute. Philosophy, of course remains the cornerstone, but biology factors in our evolution and possible future paths. Plus, my favourite topic, metaphysics. Metaphysics is what exists beyond physics. What we are just beginning to realise is possible but have no real proof of yet. What has physics got to do with it I hear you ask? Well, physics was an out growth of philosophy that explored the nature of existence using trial and error and executable logic to progress knowledge.

More trouble arises in that in order to explore the reason why we exist, you tend to have to subscribe to a theory on ‘what’ we actually are.
After all, how can you say WHY mankind exists if you have no solid idea WHAT mankind actually is. I will clarify...

There are currently two schools of thought as to what mankind is. The first is that we are all essentially little more than biomechanical constructs. This is the current view held by a majority of the scientific population of the western world, and this theory grew out of studies done by – believe it or not - grave robbers. Early anatomists were often reduced to digging up the recently deceased in order to dissect and study the human body. These morbid pioners were the ones who discovered that the human body is little more than a collection of parts that can be repaired and replaced like any other machine. Incidentally, it was these people that revolutionised medicine and led to the pioneering early surgery that was focused on scientific knowledge and observation and not the hitherto used arcane teachings of the ancient Romans and Greeks. They discussed the special stuff called élan vital. This was the animation of ordinary matter with a ‘life-force’.

The other way of looking at mankind is the more elusive of the two theories, but the more important of the two in a moral and ethical sense, and deals with the élan vital mentioned above. Suppose the following; a human fetus is human, and all humans have the right not to be killed. It is only reasonable to say that the fetus, therefore, has a right not to be killed. Such an argument trades on the equivocation between different senses of ‘human’. A human fetus is unquestionably humanoid, but you have to doubt whether it is actually ‘human’ as it lacks some fundamental psychological properties of fully developed humans. This essentially means that the second method of characterising humans is as moral beings. If you posses morals, you are human, and hence a member of mankind. This is also called life, and life is what enables plants and animals to consume food, derive energy from it, grow, adapt themselves to their surroundings and reproduce. This a somewhat ostensive definition as it says that life is what underlies or gives rise to these features.

To share my opinion on this matter, i would say that i predominantly subscribe to the biomecanhical construct view, yet i can also not deny that there is some, as yet unidentified, spark that seperates mankind from the other animals on this planet.

Yet what about sentience? It surely has a part to play in how we exist, if not in why we do? Sentience is the ability to be aware of sensory input and might be necessary for ‘humanity’ in the moral sense according to prominent phsycologists and metaphysicists, but according to them is unlikely to be sufficient. After all, a chicken is sentient but I doubt many would spare as much thought over the death of a chicken compared to the death of a fellow human. A better term, and one that philosophers use, is ‘person’. But this leads into the question, what is personhood?

Feel like you are going in circles yet?

Person hood is what we are. It has to be a living being with certain aspects that many consider to be the prerequisits of life. It cant get more simple than that, yet is still amazingly complex in theory asto determine whether or not something is a form of life, one needs a working conception of just what life is, as mentioned above.

Here is a list of feature often given to people (persons).

Free will
Creativity
Emotions
Feelings (sensations)
Original or independent thought
Intuition or instinct
Values (morality)
Self-awareness
Consciousness
Ability to grasp meaning
A soul
Wisdom
Understanding
The ability to command
The ‘spark of life’
The ability to exceed the sum of their parts
Intentions
The inability to be switched off (essentialy die) without the loss of something fundamental to life.

None of these tell us WHY we exist they only show facets of HOW we exist so the core question of the topic still goes unanswered. But consider this; a product often has properties that are not inherent in the manufacturer. Were it not so, then we could not make anything transparent like glass. It is argued that intelligence can only be created by intelligence. If this were true, then we humans must have been created by intelligence, and this is the first step on the road to arguing for the existence of god (or gods), and would provide us with an easy way out to say that we exist because God made us to exist.

However, I do not subscribe to this theory, and I firmly believe that intelligence could be obtained from non-intelligence and personhood can be obtained from non-personhood. We just haven’t seen it happen yet, but it is likely to have occurred at least once when, according to Darwinist theories, humans rose above our nearest primate cousins.

What about the soul? It is often described as part of god, or that spark that makes us other than mere animals. Indeed, a core of religious beliefs around the world is the presence of a soul. But what is it? Surely we don’t know. Is it the élan vital that the ancient Romans and Greeks described to such vage extent? Different people believe in different things and there is no scientific way we can measure the soul or if it exists, so it remains a sore point in meta-physics as no one can come up with a working theory. A soul could be part of our brains we simply dont understand yet or it could be an energy from god that infuses our bodies. It could be anything!

Where have I gotten to so far?

I have discussed on a base level what mankind and life is. I have discussed different aspects that mankind has been imbued with. But I STILL have not discussed why we are alive!

So, looking back at the statments of WHAT we are, has it gotten us any closer to WHY we are?
The basic answer is not really.

I can all but hear you tearing your hair out about now as to why you get this far and i tell you it was a wasted journey. However, the arguments presented so far are all the cornerstones of meta-physics and phiolosphy and all are considered when attempting to answer the question of WHY we exist.

A bit of a disappointment getting this far and me telling you this now isn’t it?

The trouble is, is that we are as we are for unknown reasons. Why do we live? Some say to reproduce. Yet what is the point of that? Why only live to create more life? Why die in the first place then? Why not just live forever and not need to reproduce? Other theories on why we exist are of course related to religion. “And on the sixth day god created mankind,” says the bible in Genesis. But WHY? Did god create us for a reason, or did he just want something to do with his spare time before he took Sunday off?

My personal belief is that we are alive. I question why we are alive of course; otherwise I would never have turned my brain to paste scribbling down philosophy and metaphysics in this work and pushing you to the point of annoyance. But I honestly believe that we have no defined purpose beyond the fact that we live to seek our own purpose. Some are content to raise a family, others live to worship their god, some live for fun and yet more never find a purpose and wonder from activity to activity all through their life looking for what they should be doing. The basic solution, which for all I know is totally wrong and may be disproven years down the line by someone more intelligent than I - however implausible that sounds ;)- is we live to live.