Doctors cannot solve the riddle of existence for us

I think about death a lot.  Not because I am pathologically obsessed with dark thoughts; far from that.  Death being inevitable is not an existential crisis either.  Thinking about the coming death--of parents,family, friends, myself--provides clarity about the life that I want to live.  In many ways, death gives meaning to life, which otherwise is absurd!

Thus, the blog-posts in plenty about death.  Read them carefully, and you will find that the posts are not about death per se, but are my thoughts on how to live one's life. Whether it is about visiting with parents or not burdening the children, that clarity results from an understanding that we all have expiration dates that we carry; thankfully, those dates are hidden from us.

Of course, most of us do not want to die.  If only we can live a little bit longer.  Extending life has been a quest, I suppose, ever since humans started thinking.  Like the Tom Cruise character in Vanilla Sky, we have all been mumbling or yelling "ellie", by which he is referring to LE--Life Extension.  Over the past 200 years,  we have dramatically increased the average life expectancy at birth, and reduced the chances of dying from ailments that easily killed our ancestors.  We even defeated small pox, and rounded up the last of the virus into test tubes that are in secure locations!

Yuval Noah Harari writes about all these and more in the context of the novel coronavirus.  Harari raises an important question:

When the vaccine is indeed ready and the pandemic is over, what will be humanity’s main takeaway?

That question is practically a Rorschach Test.  How you answer it says a lot about how you think about life and death, and the meaning of your existence.

Harari writes:

In all likelihood, it will be that we need to invest even more efforts in protecting human lives. We need to have more hospitals, more doctors, more nurses. We need to stockpile more respiratory machines, more protective gear, more testing kits. We need to invest more money in researching unknown pathogens and developing novel treatments. We should not be caught off guard again.

We will, of course, do all that.  Maybe we will even reduce our military by a couple of stealth bombers and instead use that money to stockpile on medical masks.  We will throw as much resources that we can into LE.

But, shouldn't we also spend some to help us all deal with the mystery of our existence?  The puzzle that haunts us?  As Harari notes: "We have to own up to our transience."

Neither Harari nor I imagine that humans will take up that question of our fleeting existence.

The present crisis might indeed make many individuals more aware of the impermanent nature of human life and human achievements. Nevertheless, our modern civilisation as a whole will most probably go in the opposite direction. Reminded of its fragility, it will react by building stronger defences. When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.

We will waste yet another opportunity that presents itself as a crisis.  Colleges will further decimate the humanities, and instead invest more in science and technology!

Harari ends his essay with this:

Doctors cannot solve the riddle of existence for us. But they can buy us some more time to grapple with it. What we do with that time is up to us.

Up to us.

I know what we will do with the time: Watch sports, porn, baking shows, ... everything other than owning up to our transience and making sense of this absurd life!

"constant change; no enduring essence; the inevitability of suffering"

The New Yorker has an essay profiling Yuval Noah Harari.  Helps me understand him as a person, and not merely as an author/thinker.  The author probes about the Buddhist way of thinking permeating through Harari's interpretations:

 I asked if it was fair to think of “Sapiens” as an attempt to transmit Buddhist principles, not just through its references to meditation—and to the possibility of finding serenity in self-knowledge—but through its narrative shape. The story of “Sapiens” echoes the Buddha’s “basic realities”: constant change; no enduring essence; the inevitability of suffering.
“Yes, to some extent,” Harari said. “It’s definitely not a conscious project. It’s not ‘O.K.! Now I believe in these three principles, and now I need to convince the world, but I can’t state it directly, because this would be a missionary thing.’ ” Rather, he said, the experience of meditation “imbues your entire thinking.”
He added, “I definitely don’t think that the solution to all the world’s problems is to convert everybody to Buddhism, or to have everybody meditating. I meditate, I know how difficult it is. There’s no chance you can get eight billion people to meditate, and, even if they try, in many cases it could backfire in a terrible way. It’s very easy to become self-absorbed, to become megalomaniacal.” He referred to Ashin Wirathu, an ultranationalist Buddhist monk in Myanmar, who has incited violence against Rohingya Muslims.
In “Sapiens,” Harari went on, part of the task had been “to show how everything is impermanent, and what we think of as eternal social structures—even family, money, religion, nations—everything is changing, nothing is eternal, everything came out of some historical process.” These were Buddhist thoughts, he said, but they were easy enough to access without Buddhism. “Maybe biology is permanent, but in society nothing is permanent,” he said. “There’s no essence, no essence to any nation. You don’t need to meditate for two hours a day to realize that.”

Go ahead and read the entire essay.

********

I have blogged before referring to Harari.  This was the earliest one, from March 2017.

My favorite, however, is this one, which I blogged in May 2017. It is my favorite because of a very unique perspective that Harari provides about religion.

Read them all.  Even if you disagree with Harari, he does provide you plenty to meditate about ;)

In your head

Consider the following paragraph:

Some time ago I went with my six-year-old nephew Matan to hunt for Pokémon. As we walked down the street, Matan kept looking at his smartphone, which enabled him to spot Pokémon all around us. I didn’t see any Pokémon at all, because I didn’t carry a smartphone. Then we saw two others kids on the street who were hunting the same Pokémon, and we almost got into a fight with them. It struck me how similar the situation was to the conflict between Jews and Muslims about the holy city of Jerusalem. When you look at the objective reality of Jerusalem, all you see are stones and buildings. There is no holiness anywhere. But when you look through the medium of smartbooks (such as the Bible and the Qur’an), you see holy places and angels everywhere.

What a wonderful analogy!  No wonder the author is a celebrated thinker, futurist!

I have quoted the author, Yuval Noah Harari, in a previous blog-post.  I am now all the more convinced that Harari is now my go-to-guy to think about the future.

So, yes, those strange critters are invisible to me because I don't play that game, even though I carry a smartphone.  A technological approach to understanding maya too?  Nah, I don't want to digress.

If it were not for those religious "smartbooks" the stones of Jerusalem will be mere stone and nobody would fight over them.  Of course, this fight over the stones is not a new insight.  What is awesome about Harari's essay--read it in full because I am doing injustice to it by excerpting to tell my own stories--is how he compares religions to multiplayer virtual reality computer games:

What is a religion if not a big virtual reality game played by millions of people together? Religions such as Islam and Christianity invent imaginary laws, such as “don’t eat pork”, “repeat the same prayers a set number of times each day”, “don’t have sex with somebody from your own gender” and so forth. These laws exist only in the human imagination. No natural law requires the repetition of magical formulas, and no natural law forbids homosexuality or eating pork. Muslims and Christians go through life trying to gain points in their favorite virtual reality game. If you pray every day, you get points. If you forget to pray, you lose points. If by the end of your life you gain enough points, then after you die you go to the next level of the game (aka heaven).

Can one get addicted to such a virtual reality game that religion is?  Harari has thought this through:

n Israel, a significant percentage of ultra-orthodox Jewish men never work. They spend their entire lives studying holy scriptures and performing religion rituals.

Talk about game addicts!

Harari's essay is awesome.  Lemme say it again--read the entire essay.  Do not base your thoughts on whatever I have excerpted for my own selfish reasons.

Harari's point is that in the near future, when computers/AI will make more and more among us unemployable--the useless class, as he calls them--sophisticated video games will keep them busy and entertained, just like how religions have forever kept humans busy and addicted.

Harari ends the essay with quite a flourish:

In any case, the end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working. Work is essential for meaning only according to some ideologies and lifestyles. Eighteenth-century English country squires, present-day ultra-orthodox Jews, and children in all cultures and eras have found a lot of interest and meaning in life even without working. People in 2050 will probably be able to play deeper games and to construct more complex virtual worlds than in any previous time in history.
But what about truth? What about reality? Do we really want to live in a world in which billions of people are immersed in fantasies, pursuing make-believe goals and obeying imaginary laws? Well, like it or not, that’s the world we have been living in for thousands of years already.

It is all in our imagination!  It is maya!