Search for Meaning

What is it that makes humans different from all other animals?

It isn't the size of our brains. Many marine mammals have brains larger than ours, and some animals have brain-to-body mass ratios comparable to humans.

It isn't the ability to manipulate our environment. Other primates are often observed doing all sorts of sophisticated stuff, and even crows have been observed making and using tools.

It isn't our command of language. Chimps can be taught to use human sign language (though at about the level of a 3-year-old), and dolphins and whales appear to have a highly sophisticated communication system which we so far don't understand.

One might argue that it is our abstract reasoning and problem solving. But other animals have been observed doing fairly sophisticated problem solving, and who's to say they're not thinking abstractly?

But I was struck yesterday (while listening to a documentary about a hindu pilgrimage) that humans seem to have an innate and powerful need to seek meaning in our lives. It is though we are driven to always ask the existential questions: why am I here, what is my purpose in life, what will become of me when my life is over?

This has been going on for millennia, and it seems to be unique (though we may discover otherwise when we learn to speak cetacean).

What's more, this quest for meaning seems to confer no obvious evolutionary advantage. Quite the opposite, in fact: energy spent pondering philosophy and the meaning of life could have been spent on building more efficient tools and machines, or harvesting more grain. Priests and philosophers are essentially non-productive in a biological sense, since they don't hunt, grow food, or build houses; in fact, they have to live off the efforts of other people to do those things for them.

One could argue (correctly) that this penchant for deep thought has led to our modern understanding of science and technology--in fact, until the beginning of the 20th century "science" and "natural philosophy" were synonymous. But that doesn't explain why farmers 10,000 years ago built temples and gave context to their lives by postulating heavens filled with gods and demons.

And so I, too, am driven to ask what my purpose in life is. To that question, I'm adding one more: Why do I need to ask?