People rely on religion to provide their life with tangible meaning. They also use it to allay their fear of not existing. Not just death. Death is an arbitrary thing when you believe that a piece of you may supersede it. Death is just a “transition” in that regard.

The terrifying thought that so many run from is the idea that when you die, that there is NOT a piece of you that may supersede it. That death is final.

For myself, and my interpretation of the “Meaning of Life”, there is no greater call to action than the acceptance of the strong possibility that death is final. That death means that we no longer exist.

I want to probe that last word a bit more deeply though. What does it mean to exist? I hear a lot of people discuss the nature of consciousness as some mystical, unexplainable phenomena, but I find it fairly easy to explain. We have this nervous system that is designed to facilitate the process of “perception”. Perception is simply an electrical impulse, generated by some kind of stimulus, whether that be light, a physical interaction, smell, taste or a sound wave vibrating our ear drum. Our body is a miraculous assembly of these sensory tools, but there is still one missing piece.

Memory is an interesting addition to this equation of perception. I want you to think about what your experience of life would be like without memory. The instruments of perception are active and functioning, but there’s simply no storage. I believe that the memory is where “consciousness” arises quite simply from.

As we evolved the perceptual tools, another tool developed that allowed us to actually store some of that information; to create associations between these various perceptions. Think about a predator. When visually perceive that shape, those claws, the teeth, it’s size, we associate it with the physical pain we experienced as a result of our last interaction with that thing. When we taste a particular flavor, we learned to associate that flavor with how it makes us feel. Sugars make us feel alive and energetic. Bitter might make us feel sick and lethargic. Prior to the advent of memory, none of these associations existed and so every interaction and every perception was a pure discovery destined to be lost the instant it was over.

I think we commonly underestimate the process of memory. But upon deep enough inspection, it becomes quite clear that our memory isn’t just a piece of us, it is the vessel of this thing we call our identity. Our identity is the collected set of beliefs that we’ve compiled, consisting of every interaction we’ve ever had. Every association, which again is simply a combination of multiple perceptions, stored in a reference library for us to utilize in the process of determination.

Determination is where things get really interesting. In addition to perception and memory, we are still missing the logical component necessary to create a value system. Without this final component, all perception and associations are just arbitrary reference values, but with the addition of the first “goal”, the alchemy of evolution had finally created a combination of components that gave rise to this thing we call consciousness.

That goal is “me”. That’s it. The idea of the self. The identification of experiencer. Believe it or not, in evolutionary history, there is a class of organisms that had not evolved the ability to perceive the self. When combined with the tools of perception and memory, the ego became the fulcrum of a value system that finally gave us an edge in defining a mechanism of evaluation applied to all our perceptions and associations.

Earlier when I gave the perceptual example of a predator, that may have been getting ahead of myself because think about that scenario. In the early evolution of the nervous system, there was no concept of pleasure or pain. There was only the rudimentary sensation of the most subtle perception you can imagine. Every “felt” someone staring at you without seeing them? That’s it! The faintest impulse that we could imagine being able to perceive, those were the first vestiges of the nervous system. That perceptive ability, although extremely subtle, was enough to give our primordial ancestor an edge. In it’s first iteration, there was no pleasure or pain. That’s why this ego thing is so important.

The ego finally gave us a value system to apply to our perceptions and associations. Sensing larger organisms by feel or sight indicated an organism that may be able to consume us. The organisms that were indifferent to this potential threat, and there were just very such organisms; they were consumed and removed from the gene pool. The organisms that had developed an aversion to this threat, invented the first vestiges of what we call the predator/prey relationship. It was only after some primordial organisms learned to flee, that the organisms that consume them learned to pursue.

This new, more dangerous landscape created a dynamic between various organisms that put our new value system into play, and whoever played it best. The prey organisms that were best equipped and motivated to flee, and the predatory organisms that were equipped and motivated to pursue, began to form the cutting edge of a new evolutionary mechanism that would come to shape life as we know it.

This occurs at every level imaginable in both plants and animals. Plants know, and have adapted to grow toward the light. Although we don’t think of plants as “conscious”, this still represents a system in which an organism has the ability to perceive, and it has some stored information, a memory if you will, coupled with a sense of self that combine to drive the behavior of the plant. Most plants “know” that growing toward the light is in their best interest. The plant doesn’t have to be actively cognizing this process in order for it to be considered consciousness. There just has to be an ability to perceive, an ability to collect information, and an ego that all work together to drive any action that indicates an active self-interest at any level.

Cognizance is our next question then. If consciousness is so simple that it can be applied to the behavior of a plant, then we still haven’t completely solved the greatest of human riddles, because we definitely have something that they don’t; or do we? If we can understand and accept this most rudimentary definition of the mechanism of consciousness, being the cooperation of perception, memory and ego, my impression then is that all we’ve accomplished as humans is the maximization of these components. We have *some the strongest, most advanced tools of perception. We absolutely have the strongest ability to store information in our memory. As far as our ego is concerned, I couldn’t say that ours is any stronger or weaker, or somehow more sophisticated than any other animal, except that our identity has been attached to our memory, and with a much larger, more sophisticated memory, we may have a greater sense of self, but the mechanism of the ego is the same; simply driving a continuous objective for self preservation and reproduction.

So if you ever wonder who you are; I think that’s it. You are your perceptions, collected into memories that are continually referenced and analyzed by your impulse to preserve and reproduce yourself.

The reality of these components, is that they are essentially digital components that exist and are facilitated entirely within a set of biological components. These biological components are unfortunately cursed with a maximum potential duration. Nothing lasts forever I’m afraid. Eventually the physical components that give rise to the components of our identity will cease to function. We describe this cessation of function as “death”.

Now here’s where I get to throw a curve ball. I do not know that death portends the cessation of perception. But understanding the above, I hope you it is clear to you what that may mean for your identity. Perception is not the only thing we need to be ourselves. We also need our memories and our ego. I can say with some assurance that these components completely cease to exist in the advent of death. Even if perception remains, the physical tools that facilitate perception, our nervous system, are gone, meaning any potential to receive information represents a rudimentary experience that stands outside our ability to comprehend. What is perception without sight, sound, taste, touch, smell or memory?

That question is what I see when I think of death. Even if there is some undiscovered perceptual component that lives on after we die, what that component actually experiences is a reality without any sense of self, without memory, without feeling. As far as I’m concerned there is not much difference between existing in this state, and not existing entirely.

This is where I sit on the question of meaning. When I hear people describe their beliefs in what the afterlife may be like, I hear a collection of hopes that all assume we are able to take our biological components with us, but that’s clearly not explainable. Because it is not explainable, it is probably not a good bet.

Fortunately, for me, there is a saving grace. For me, there is nothing, no idea, belief, thought or dogma that brings greater meaning to my life, or does more to guide my decisions than the realization of how temporary we are. I cannot live a pious life under the threat of some heavenly reward. Instead I will live an adventure, desperate to milk as much joy and pain and raw experience out of every last second that I can. I am desperate to do the most I possibly can in the limited time I have been given here.

P.S. – Concerning morality in a godless universe.

Fortunately, I have found that the above information is not some dismissal of morality. Morality exists for me as an objective metric of how to live as well as possible, in spite of religious implications. Most of what religion calls moral seems to be based in some archaic perception of the will of god, using things like disease, earthquakes and weather as the tools of information gathering. We know those systems to be chaotic and therefore the implications of some universal will are irrelevant. Monogamy is moral because it prevents the spread of STDs, full stop. God craves blood because the spreading of blood on a field replenishes the nutrients crops need to grow, end of story. Wonder why all the forbidden foods of the old testament are, coincidentally, the ones that are most prone to food born illness? No coincidence at all. When disease is interpreted as a curse from god, shellfish and pork start to seem pretty evil; an evil that just so happens to be easily conquered by a food handlers permit.

Religious morality is flawed in a lot of ways. There are some useful guidelines, but it should be understood that morality still stands on it’s own in a world with no god. There is still a concept of collective good that stands to increase each individuals circumstances and that’s important to understand.