The Meaning of Death

We've talked a lot about death already... which is to be expected, that is the theme of this year's Countdown after all. But, I want to talk for a moment about Life. See, I like the memento mori--I like people coming to terms with death--specifically because life is really cool. I like being alive and I think it is important to like life for what it is, and not to take it for granted.
I'm not some emo-core gothkid who is like "we're all preparing for the grave, man..." I recognize that my last post might have sounded like that to people who weren't paying attention, but I actually find that kind of attitude annoying.

Like, this is a pet peeve of mine, but I really hate it when people say "life's too short" not only because most people say it in this self-pitying woe-is-me-I-didn't-achieve-anything way, but it's also wrong. Life is literally the longest thing you will ever do, so it makes no sense to say that it's too short. This is before we get into the fact that when people say this, by nature of the fact that they're not dead, they don't actually know how long their life is because it doesn't have two distinct ends, and thus it doesn't have a measurable length, yet.
I'm probably the only person that cares about this, but my mind goes off on this little journey whenever someone says it. It's just like the phrase "bear in mind".

...okay, it's not just like that phrase, but whenever someone says the phrase bear in mind, whilst I know they mean it in the same sense as "ring-bearer" or "the right to bear arms", my punny "dad joke" brain can't help but imagine a grizzly bear going "rarrgh" and swiping its claws, and then I giggle to myself like an idiot because I literally have a "bear in (my) mind"; but people often use this phrase to refer to something that I need to pay attention to and remember, yet I am wholeheartedly not capable of bearing that in mind because I'm too busy thinking about a bear, like an idiot. And I am sorry if I have now poisoned your minds with this dumb joke, but it's what my head does every time. I swear, it's a virulent meme. Whatever you do DO NOT "Bear in Mind".

What in the actual blazing fuck was I talking about?

Oh, right, life. So, life... I'm a fan. Not everyone is, but they just haven't met an enthusiastic biologist before. I think it's pretty fascinating. But for some people, this isn't enough, they start thinking "okay, this is fun and all, but what does it all mean?"
Right. Yes. The Meaning of Life. And I don't dislike the question because it doesn't have an answer, it has an answer. I found it and I've actually answered it before in a post on this very blog if you're interested... you may not like the answer, though.
Because whilst "the meaning" has a lot of different meanings to a lot of people, most people (when asking about life's meaning) tend to use it to mean "the purpose, and therefore value". Or, to state it another way "What is life's purpose, and how does that purpose confer value onto life?"

To which I say, well: There isn't one.

That's a bit of a downer to people, but it's true, and I will use this blog post to explain why. But also, don't fret, I'll also (hopefully) explain why it's not as depressing as most people would believe.

First thing's first, I should introduce you to the Word of the Day. Yes, I know we're almost half-way through the blog post, but we're mixing things up this Countdown, and I insist that this word is important. The Word is: 'TELEOLOGY'

Teleology /tee-lee-ol-uh-jee/ n. Philosophy. 1. The doctrine that final causes exist. 2. The study of the evidences of design or purpose in nature. 3. Such design or purpose. 4. The belief that purpose and design are a part of or are apparent in nature. 5. (in Vitalist Philosophy) The doctrine that phenomena are guided not only by mechanical forces but that they also move toward certain goals of self-realization.

As you can see, it's all about causes and design and purpose. I first learned about teleology when I was looking into the Cognitive-Theoretical Model of the Universe. Back when I was a much more evangelical atheist, the CTMU model was proposed as the best "Proof of God" written by the supposed "Smartest Man in America", a man with a purported IQ of 195 called Christopher Michael Langan. There is a whole digression about how IQ tests are biased, racist and ultimately flawed but it's not relevant as Mr Langan seems like a rather smart man. So, I checked out this CTMU. It was a clever construction, hard to parse, but I eventually cracked it...
Behind all the fancy philosophy and confuscation, the entirety of the model was balanced upon the fulcrum of teleology, which as we all know (having definitely read the definition above) teleology is the study of design & purpose in reality. The whole theory was based on it, even proposing a "telic principle" that the purpose and design must come from a being within this reality.
However, these are assumptions and they're very poor ones, because design and purpose are, by definition, subjective.

In order to have a purpose, a person must decide upon some goal, some "thing which is not done, which they believe ought be done". And in order to have design, a person must construct an object (or system, or concept) to fulfill such a particular purpose.
A rock has no design, and no inherent purpose, it exists because of the confluence of physics and chemistry that solidified certain materials together.
Of course, you can impose a purpose on a rock. If you find a particularly smooth rock, you can throw it to skim it across a lake, you (briefly) had a purpose for that rock. And if you want to build a strong building, you could design a mix of rocks and clay into a concrete to have particular qualities, for the purpose of building that building.
But, that would ultimately be your purpose. I think you could argue that certain rocks have purpose or design when we so choose, but that's just a semantic quibble, I argue that these purposes (and designs) are inherited, not inherent. Which is to say, it's a quality we give to a rock, not one we take from a rock. Because, if we remove the designer... that purpose goes away.

Just look at paleontology as an example. We dig up "pot sherds", and we try to look at their design to figure out the purpose that ancient peoples had with them. This helps us learn about ancient peoples and we study these things and put them on display. Now, (some of) these items were not made for display, at the very least they likely weren't made for the purposes of educating people about how your dead society once lived. We can even have a pretty good idea of what that purpose was, yet we don't continue to use pot sherds and ancient ruins for that purpose...
And why? That's not a rhetorical question, the answer is "because we don't want to", we have our own pots and stuff... a chamberpot which you crap in and empty out of a window, or even a clay pot for carrying water to the fireplace isn't a "thing which is not done, which we believe ought to be done". The purpose died with the designer.
But even if the designer lives on, that's still not "inherent", because just look at the marketplace. Farmers grow meat to feed people (or to make money by selling it to people who eat it, either/or) that's what they design different cuts of meat for, and people buy meat to eat it (usually, I mean, you can buy meat for whatever reason you want, just try to be hygienic, I'm not here to kinkshame). But, that doesn't mean that "being eaten" is an inherent purpose of meat, easily proven by the fact that vegetarians don't eat meat. They've decided that they don't agree with this purpose, and for them that purpose doesn't exist. But this is true even if you do eat meat, because even if you are a meat-eater (or omnivore) and believe that "meat should be eaten", whether for nutrition or flavour or whatever, that's a coincidence of purposes, not an example of purpose transcending an object. That's the beauty of design... if people share intent, then a well-designed product will not only provide potential for that but also by its very design help to make one's goals easier to accomplish. It's a design principle called "affordance", but I'm getting off topic. The point is that this exact kind of "coincidence of goals" is an example of a social construct, a subjective thing that appears objective because of consensus.

Now, whilst this may seem like an "atheistic" position, it's actually agnostic. Even if you believe in a creator that does not mean that their purpose is your purpose, even if you spell it with a capital "P". Even if they could, somehow, psychically share their intent, it is still your choice as to whether your goals coincide with theirs. Unless of course they use their magical power to force you to believe that... but even then, that's imposing their will upon an unwilling subject to enforce coinciding intent, not "creating" inherent purpose. But, that's getting into some kind of mind-control, evil god "speculative fiction" at that point, so let's move on.

But, of course, there is a much crueler answer... since we're talking about design, there is a heuristic first proposed by Stafford Beer, and its name is also its principle, that proposes an "objective" purpose: The Purpose of a System is What it Does.
In simplest terms, purpose is designer agnostic. You could think of this like "death of the author" for designers—Death of the Engineer, if you will—because the principle states that it is madness to claim that a system is "designed to do something that it fails to do".
For example, if someone claimed to have invented the freight rail network to "cure the common cold", then they definitely failed to do so, because it doesn't do that at all (if anything, it hinders it). However, some people propose that they created the railroad network to "allow people to travel great distances", but that's not really what it does either, because technically it only "allows people who can afford a train ticket to travel great distances". That is what it does, and so that's it's purpose.

So, let's look at life. What does life do "well", what does it do that nobody else can do... You may disagree, but I have a LOT of evidence to the contrary, that one thing that life does that no other system is capable of, and which it has done more than anything else, is Die.
Life is the only thing that can die, it's the one thing that, without fail, I can guarantee that every living thing will do. And I'm not just talking humans... insects, rats, vermin; animals, both prey and predator; fish, birds and bacteria. There are exponentially more dead things than living things, and even if you do other things with your life, and several people agree and help you to do it, can you honestly say that you (or any living person, or even any ideology) has achieved more of that than Life has, ultimately, achieved dead bodies?

So, if life does have a purpose, its gift to reality which would not exist without it, and the one thing it does better than anything else: It is Death.

Now, there's a reason that I front-loaded this post by saying that I like life. I don't agree with this purpose. However, you can't deny the reality that humans die.
...okay, you can, but that's what leads to religion in the first place.
But, people think that's the only alternative. They think the choices are between Religion and Nihilism. And I fully accept that what I'm proposing is a form of Nihilism, I genuinely believe that life is meaningless, pointless and purposeless.
Some people think that the best response to this is denial (religion, or some other form of self-deception); self-destruction, be that self-medication or self-harm in some form; or, they think that the best course of action is destruction, tearing down other people either as a form of Evangelical Nihilism, or simply radical selfishness... valuing their experience of pleasure over anything else.

I see all of these views as rather stupid.

I think Religion is stupid because it is wrong, and I value Truth. I think self-destruction is stupid because it causes suffering, and I value Happiness. I think Evangelical Nihilism is wrong, because it causes destruction and disunity, and I value Creativity and Community.

Admittedly, this is subjective, because it does come down to values, but as I think I've established already, all of this stuff is subjective. But, that's why it's awesome.
Objectively, life ends, and that sucks... but, subjectively, I won't ever experience my death, I will only experience my life. I don't like that my life is finite, but that doesn't mean that I like death.
Because that's the thing. Life may be Meaningless, but Death is Meaningless too. Why would I value being dead, over being alive? There's no inherent reason to do that, and I don't see the purpose of that.

Now, if you do... again, I strongly suggest you seek help. I genuinely believe that suicidality is a mental health issue that plagues young people, and it's only going to get worse without efforts against it. I am not suicidal, far from it, but I can understand how one can logically fall down an ideological rabbit-hole of believing that life is not "worth" living. If you're one of those people, I disagree, but as much as I can explain why you're wrong philosophically you should talk to a mental health professional, as that's more important than ideological debate.

Life is Meaningless... that doesn't mean you give up, it means you have to find your own. Good luck, I just hope you find yours before you run out of time.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and tomorrow, we're going to dive into a post that explains just one of the many reasons I don't want to die. Until then, I hope you found this post meaningful. I know I did.