The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)

OVERVIEW

In most areas of our lives, naturalistic, evidence-based knowledge matters. Paul Thagard’s suggestion in The Brain and the Meaning of Life is that it matters to questions of morality and meaning too, areas that have historically been the purview of philosophy and religion. Answers to existential questions can be found through neural naturalism, without the need for supernatural sources.

To find answers to life’s biggest questions we need only look up… to the brain.

What makes things matter?

The first few chapters explain that minds are brains (that the mind is what the brain does), and how brains construct knowledge about reality. That brings us to why things matter.

In short, it’s emotions that make things matter. Emotions can be general psychological states, but set that aside and consider emotions from the perspective of goals. Emotions are primarily generated via the cognitive appraisal of goals… happiness when we’re achieving them, sadness when we’re not. If your goal is to save money, you will feel elated when you forgo that Starbucks coffee. If your goal is to get a tasty treat, you will feel angry when the customer infront of you takes forever to order. Even intellectual pursuits would lose their luster without the satisfaction we feel when we make progress or a new discovery. When we set goals, we also use our emotional imagination. When deciding what to do with our vacation days, we may imagine ourselves lying on a beach, exploring a new city, or spending the week with family – and the way we feel about each of these thought experiments is what guides our decision-making. Do you feel more joy when you imagine your wedding day, or buying your first home? Maybe graduating top of your class? Positive and negative emotions guide goal setting and they are fundamental to goal appraisal.

“In sum, goals are emotionally valued mental representations of imagined states of the world and self. . .  Neural activity that combines representation of situations and activities with embodied appraisal of them attaches value to those situations and activities. Something matters to you if your brain representation of it includes associations that generate positive emotions.”

What makes a life meaningful?

We’ve just seen how emotions help us form (and evaluate) goals, but how can this sum to a life that feels meaningful? Thagard thinks meaning is derived from pursuing the right goals – specifically, goals related to love, work, and play. Love speaks to the personal relationships that are major sources of satisfaction and well-being; work gives us flow, challenge, and the thrill of problem solving; and play is any activity that we engage in for enjoyment (rather than for a serious or practical purpose). If you want to boil the thesis of this book down into one sentence, it’s that love, work, and play are the meaning of life because they give you goals that are worthwhile. Slightly more specific would be: “People’s lives have meaning to the extent that love, work, and play provide coherent and valuable goals that they can strive for and at least partially accomplish, yielding brain-based emotional consciousness of satisfaction and happiness.”

Goals that are objectively valuable

But what makes the goals related to love, work, and play any different? Why are they the right goals for meaningfulness? Thagard says it’s because they are objectively valuable, that these goals are intrinsically worthwhile because they relate to vital needs.

To Thagard’s definition, needs are things that you are harmed by not having. If being deprived of something would cause you significant suffering, it’s a vital need. Vital needs are requirements so central that we can’t function without them. You may have a goal of going to Hawaii for vacation this year, but you wouldn’t be harmed by not going. You would be harmed without close personal relationships, feelings of purpose, or an engagement with life. Aside from the obvious physical needs, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan outlined three additional needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Needs that, experimentally, we must fulfill for our most basic well-being – that’s why they are vital needs. And so Thagard’s ultimate conclusion here is that “the most important goals people have are ones aimed at bringing about states of the world and the self that can satisfy their vital needs. Love, work, and play provide goals whose pursuit contributes centrally to the meaning of life because their achievement satisfies vital needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy.”

Vital needs are objectively worthwhile, and so satisfying those needs is also objectively valuable – and valuable goals give life meaning.

Moral truths

Thagard’s last main chapter is on morality and the biological basis for objective moral truths. Here, we circle back to vital needs, but ones that have more to do with our physical and psychological security. Brian Orend outlined five: food and shelter, equality, personal freedom, security from violence, and recognition of our worth as human beings (what I might call basic self-esteem/self-worth).

Thagard’s purpose in this chapter was to set up why morality has a neural basis, because we are hardwired to care and concern (mirror neurons and the neurological basis for empathy), but I think the better endpoint would have been to suggest that upholding the vital needs of biological and psychological security is the foundation of moral goodness, and so pursuing this kind of moral living makes life meaningful too. Said another way, the pursuit of love, work, and play, relate to vital self-interest, but the pursuit of safety and security for everyone relates to vital other-interest – to moral obligation – and all these goals can make a life meaningful. To me, this is a more unifying approach to morality in the context of this book.

Thagard said it best when he said: “the fact that the universe doesn’t care about you should not be horribly distressing as long as there are people who do.”

Conclusion

Some people value bottlecap collecting, and some value art, exploring international cuisines, researching marine mammals, etc. Valuable goals and activities are what give life meaning, but your surest bet is to anchor on the goals tied to things we all find intrinsically valuable (from a neural standpoint) – love, play, work, and moral goodness – goals that have a positive biological basis and therefore objective worthwhileness, these are what provide a solid foundation for meaning.

WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)

Find worthwhile goals

If you want to pursue purposes that are hardwired to give you meaning: nourish close personal relationships and foster belonging; engage in activities that bring you enjoyment; pursue projects that are challenging; and find ways to better the lives of others. You evolved to derive immense satisfaction from these things, and so they will give your life meaning.

Get happy

This book is not about happiness (which Thagard makes clear is different than meaning), but still, there’s a mention of Sonja Lyubomirsky’s activities that have been experimentally shown to increase happiness, and it would be a shame not to share that nugget (see her book The How of Happiness):

1.       Express gratitude

2.       Cultivate optimism

3.       Avoid overthinking and social comparison

4.       Practice acts of kindness

5.       Nurture relationships

6.       Develop strategies for coping

7.       Forgive

8.       Increase flow (see here)

9.       Savor life’s joys

10.   Commit to your goals

11.   Practice religion and spirituality (see here and here for secular spirituality recommendations)

12.   Stay physically active

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? Yes.

If I had to describe the book in one sentence? The neural mechanisms that underlie meaning, morality, and mattering.

Who should read this book? Much of this book was not well-evidenced (in my opinion), but I can see where Thagard was going and what his chain of reasoning was (even if leaps from one premise to the next were tenuous and likely wouldn’t hold up under criticism). If the topic interests you and you are comfortable with the sometimes fragile scientific reasoning, give it a read.