Meaning of life: Humans and other animals
I was looking out of the window today and watching two Cabbage White butterflies fluttering about in the jolting aerial dance that they go through in their almost random-looking ritual of sex selection. Of course, it is not random, but tried and tested over generations, embedded by the machinations of evolution.
I had a sudden realization—no, not a realization in and of itself, but a recognition of an exemplification. These butterflies had no consciousness, one would surmise, no self-awareness, no access to meaning or purpose. Here they were, fluttering about in their deterministic dance, situation-action machines responding automatically to stimuli. And why? Reproduction and the sustenance of their genes. Evolution has created this massive diversity of life that swims, flies, crawls, grows, takes root, sways, and slithers around us (and whatever verbs suffice for amoebas and viruses). And, almost universally, it does this with no understanding as to why it does this. In most cases, it will have no meaningful consciousness at all. But it does this ritual regardless.
We are butterflies flitting through life, often waiting for our paths to cross with another butterfly and reproducing.
It seems bizarre that so many religious people feel the need to attach such highfalutin visions of meaning and purpose to God's creation yet accept that this only applies to a minuscule proportion of that creation. They are happy that almost the entire history, geography, and biomass of life on Earth have robotically gone about the business of surviving and reproducing for millions of years, yet there is no thinking less of these (vastly more numerous) living things for not having meaning in the sense that humans do. It's a human exceptionalism that I think is full of double standards and delusions of grandeur.
We still go through life broadly behaving in a way that has its ends in either survival or sex selection, and thus reproduction. We are butterflies flitting through life, often waiting for our paths to cross with another butterfly and reproducing. We add an awful lot more to this, of course, but much of it is window dressing. We construct all sorts of narratives concerning meaning and purpose, some may be religious, others may be of a different nature (perhaps writing sonnets about love and the fate of star-crossed lovers) and it becomes very important to us. But, essentially, we are butterflies flitting about, carrying out our biological programming. Some may see this as reductionist and nihilistic. But butterflies can be incredibly beautiful; and nature, in all of its manifestations, and in our full understanding of it, can be awe-inspiring.