SETI and the Meaning of Life

A recent post by Harvard professor, Avi Loeb, Finding a Meaning to Our Existence from Extraterrestrial Siblings, unfurled a flurry of (non-Marxist) red flags chez moi. The title alone is enough to put one off. If we are so far unable to find meaning for our existence, why would we expect meeting ET to change things? 

Here’s Avi…

“Dr. Rolf Dobelli… asked me what future event might endow humans with a deeper meaning for their existence? I suggested that an encounter with alien intelligence could deliver…”

First Reaction: Why should I await & expect some contingent ‘future event’ (Godot) to ‘endow’ my life with meaning? Either my life is meaningful, or it isn’t.  Either way, meaning cannot be contingent on an event that has not happened yet and may never happen at all. Finally, even if there is such an event, how and why would meeting ET be that event?

Second Reaction: In the Judeo-Christian tradition there is a class of events that do ‘endow’ human life with meaning. Events in this class have a common actor, i.e. God, a unique, universal and eternal entity that utterly transcends the phenomenal world.

Likewise, in many pagan cosmologies, where celestial phenomena are regularly regarded as ‘transcendent’, the two realms touch at certain extreme points, e.g. May Day, Halloween, the equinoxes and/or the solstices, dawn and/or dusk (Yeats), the edge of the World (Synge). Often, the Milky Way is understood as a permanent ‘path’ connecting ontological realms.

Depending on your preferred flavor of Judeo-Christianity, there may be null, one, several, or innumerable events in this special class:

1. YHWH: “I am who I am.” St. Dallan “Naught is all else to me, save that Thou art!”   

2. Creation (ex nihilo), the 7 days of Genesis. 

3. Incarnation, Transfiguration, Transubstantiation, Resurrection, Ascension, Ekklesia (Church), Parousia (Apocalypse): One event, many manifestations? Or many events?  

4. Salvation, Redemption, and a ‘personal relationship with Jesus Christ’.

Third Reaction: Avi Loeb is confusing the exotic with the transcendent. ET is exotic but certainly not transcendent. Dr. Loeb is not alone in this error. The accumulation of quantity in the vain pursuit of quality is an ongoing theme across much of human civilization:

• Pharos buried with hordes of gold to fund their afterlives (the ultimate 401k).

• “Living well is the best revenge.” (The Great Gatsby)

• “Climb every mountain.” – the accumulation of experiences. (Sound of Music)

• Seeking God in extremis – across the sea, on mountain tops, in forests or in space.

• Seeking God in extremis – sacrifice, self-denial, fasting, mystical experiences, etc.

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works ye mighty and despair!” (Shelley), “Nothing beside remains.”

Expecting ET to confer meaning on our sad little lives falls under this umbrella. Whitehead might say this acquisitiveness is a special example of the more general fallacy of misplaced concreteness that occurs whenever we misjudge the ontological status of some existent.

The paradigmatic example of misplaced concreteness is idolatry. We fashion an idol out of inanimate materials (marble, wealth, comfort, security, gratification, intoxication) and we call it ‘God’, i.e. we invest it with the power to create, and we grant it ultimate importance in our lives.  

150 years ago, Nietzsche confronted and demolished this artifact of intellectual sloth with a single sentence: “One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…but nothing exists apart from the whole!” (Twilight of the Idols) 

Nietzsche was among the first to point out that a relationship of ‘meaning’ cannot exist between ontologically parallel entities. ‘To mean (or be meant)’ is to enter into an asymmetrical relationship according to which events of one ontological order confer ‘meaning’ on events of another order.

Dr. Loeb: “Finding extraterrestrial siblings would inspire us to reach out beyond the limited experiences we had so far on our home planet. There are richer opportunities in our cosmic street than available at home.” 

This last line is probably true. Reciprocal cultural exchanges with a near-by exo-civilization would undoubtedly add additional variety to the inventory of experiences available to us.  But does variety per se create meaning or is it just our old friend ‘quantity’ in a new guise?  

What would it mean for our lives to have meaning, with or without ET? The events that make up our lives already have significant order among themselves. But significance is not meaning. According to the theory of Causality, for example, events relate to one another as causes and effects.  They have ‘significance’ inter se…but that is not meaning!

All events (or almost all) function both as causes and as effects. They form a potentially endless daisy chain. But no such event gives any other such event its meaning. These events cannot confer meaning on one another because they exist on an ontological plain. There is no hint of hierarchy. 

When we ‘judge, measure, compare, (or) condemn’, we consider not the value neutral event itself but the value rich meaning of that event. We implicitly acknowledge that the object of our valuation has meaning. We execute judgement from an external, i.e. transcendent, vantage point. 

However, there is no reason to suppose that such experiences would be of a different ontological order; in fact, it’s hard to imagine what an experience of a different ontological order would be like. And if the promise of SETI is nothing more than greater quantity and variety of ontologically parallel experiences, how does that help us find meaning?

My friend and I got ‘day labor’ jobs catching ball bearings as they came off the assembly line. Within the limits of engineering, any two balls are identical. The foreman allows my friend and me to keep one ball each as a souvenir of our day in the salt mines; but my ball does not give meaning to my friend’s, nor his, mine.

If ‘ball bearings’ have meaning, that meaning must come from something that transcends them per se, e.g. the machines into which they will be inserted and for which they perform an essential task. You bristle at the hierarchical implications of this model, but it is not hierarchy per se that is required here. What’s required is transcendence. 

For example, it is not impossible that ‘parts’ might organize themselves into a ‘whole’ whose coordinated behavior ‘transcends’ the contributions made by each, e.g. they could form a body…like yours! In that case, it’s not a matter of hierarchy because there is only the ‘cells’ themselves, but they appear in two or more aspects: separately as individuals and collectively as an organism. 

The whole transcends its parts; the body transcends its cells; the machine transcends its ball bearings. They do what they are designed to do with presumably no understanding of the role they play in the final, machined product. Their essential function in the operation of the machine and in the manufacture of its product is their meaning. It is what they are, not in themselves (en soi) or for themselves (pour soi) or even for each other, but what they are for the machine and its products that transcend them.

Under one aspect, each cell is its ‘own man’ (sic), doing its ‘own thing’; but under another aspect, all cells are ‘working as one’ in service of functions none of them understands or even intuits. That too is transcendence…but without politically incorrect hierarchies.

Avi Loeb concludes: “For example, those worried about the cold death of the Universe would find solace in the opportunity to join a camping site of intelligent beings around an artificial source of heat. This would allow humanity to survive the future cosmic winter for potentially more than ten trillion years, the longest lifespan of stars.” We could all sing Kumbaya. 

Again, the fallacy of quality as accumulated quantity. In fact, the reassurance of a 10 trillion year camp fire would have zero impact on someone truly worried about the evaporation of Being. At best, and even this is a stretch, it’s a band aid and the patient is bleeding out!

There is only one camp fire that could possibly console someone confronting the ontological abyss and that’s the perpetually burning bush of Exodus 3. 

***

La vie est touchée (oil on canvas, 144.8 × 204.5 cm) by Roberto Matta places a network of alien-totemic figures and sinuous, almost skeletal forms across a cosmic “inscape,” suggesting contact between enigmatic beings and a larger existential field. Technological devices and abstract shapes, depicted as if in motion across space, —forces moving through a psychic as well as cosmic dimension. The work fuses the organic and the mechanical, evoking a liminal zone where life is “touched” by unseen energies and unexpected encounters.