Life is a statement!

The Meaning of Life?

As the youngest of a family of six, I was a difficult and turbulent child, constantly playing pranks on anyone within reach. At twelve, I was sent to a Catholic boarding school to learn Latin, Greek and the classics as it was still fashionable back in 1946. There, I gradually rebelled against the mental conditioning forced upon us and started questioning the dogmas relentlessly fed to us. My resistance to such practices led to my loss of faith. It was traumatic and irreversible so I had to start seeking the meaning of life all by myself in my teens.

Since then, I have questioned all kinds of people in many countries about the meaning of life. I studied many religions and sects in the hope of finding one that stood up to critical analysis but was left empty handed. At that time when I would have welcomed the peace and contentment of believing in something. I kept reading about the mystical experience of "enlightenment", of "being born again", of "communion with God" and of "life in the spiritual plane" and became frustrated that it did not happen to me. I tried to fake it with drugs and various forms of self-hypnosis to be like those who had experienced "IT", but could not fool myself into believing that the altered states of consciousness that I had experienced were " communion with God". It took me a long time to accept that it was not going to happen to me and that I should rather concentrate on my mortal material life and try to make the best of it.

"Communion with God" just did not exist in the universe I had access to. I could not bring myself to label as insincere all those who wrote and talked about their mystical experiences so I deduced that their brains interpreted their sensory experience in a different way than mine did and developed the notion that there were as many percieved universes as there were observers of the outside reality. I discovered that what we know relates only to the model of the universe that we have built inside our minds and that such models could be different from the real world that is out there. Consequently, what exists in one person's "known universe" can be absent from someone else's. Thus, what seems true in my universe could be false in someone else's. I find that concept to be very satisfying for it allows me to think that I am at the centre of the universe that I know and also accept that everyone else is at the centre of their respective subjective universes.

This elegant stroke of the mind eliminates the problem of determining who has the absolute truth about the universe and opens the door to tolerance. This profoundly tolerant attitude is particularly positive when dealing with people whose percieved universe contains spirits, angels, demons and gods that are absent from mine.

Now, I can exchange views of the universe with anyone and never feel threatened by perceptions contradictory to my own. It became a hobby for me to discuss about my subjective perception with those who recognise their own views to be also subjective.

As to those who believe they hold the "unique and absolute truth", I learned to simply listen to them without bothering to offer my own view (which could be perceived as a threat to their "truth"), for I have no inclination to play the game of who is right and who is wrong.

I don't doubt the existence of a real universe but I think we only know the imperfect representation that our brains assembles in our mind from the clues provided by our senses. What really matters to me now, is to recognise those with whom I have enough in common to be able to reach an operational concensus on which we can build something together.

Trading views with open minded seekers who have no claim on "Absolute Truth" has probably been the main motivation for my travels in the last decade. I have enjoyed discovering many universes through other people's eyes. Some of them appeared reasonably probable to me because they were similar to my own. Some I found interesting but improbable for I could not find any supporting evidence for them in the universe that I know. I came to think in terms of probabilities instead of true or false, very much in the same way that weather forecasters now speak of a 70% probability of rain rather than announcing "rain tomorrow" as they did 30 years ago. Thinking in those terms allows me to put a value on all the concepts I come across that I can understand. I consider some concepts to be highly probable, such as that of my eventual death and others, as being most unlikely such as that of the eternal life of some part of me. All the concepts I play with can be exchanged for more satisfying alternative versions for I know no absolute truths. I think that what I call "my universe" is only one out of many equally imperfect approximations of reality, so I don't take it too seriously. Sometimes I call it my "toy village"

Freedom from "Absolute Truths" about our environment makes it possible to discard obsolete perceptions to replace them with the latest discoveries of science, that will in turn also be replaced by newer discoveries. I think that defining how we should react to our envionment should come after, and not before, knowing the environment that we have to react to. We will come to that later... It's a bit like the cart and the horse!

I have come to think that it's better to live with unanswered questions than to fill the void with speculations of dubious value however attractive they might appear. I still do not know the ultimate purpose of the universe and have come to doubt that it has one. I have also learned to accept that I know nothing with certainty. For me, "knowing something" means fitting some concept in its appropriate place in my "toy village" or putting it on the pile of unused bits and pieces where I store the concepts that I prefer not to use for the time being. I try to tag all the bits and pieces of information I know with a probability value between zero and one (or between 0% and 100% if you prefer), but I'm very careful never to use 0 nor 1, for I'm never that sure about anything. That means that I make an effort not to believe in anything. Not even in these words as I write them, for I wish to be free to think differently tomorrow if I find a valid reason to do so. It is in that frame of mind that I offer, for your consideration, my opinion that life does not need to have a meaning for it is nothing more, but nothing less, than a statement.

Life's Programs

In my universe, life is action. It is the expression of the instructions (or "programs"), stored inside each living being. These instructions distinguish living beings that can initiate action from inanimate matter that is passively subject to the forces of nature. Each individual living organism has its own set of instructions that determine its actions. These instructions evolve with time and exceptions are ever present.

In the most elementary forms of life, such as bacteria, exceptions are introduced by random mutations of the DNA where the organism's instructions are stored. Some mutant entities do not survive, but those that do give rise to new strains better adapted to the organism's environment. These thrive, multiply and keep mutating. Step by step, this process selects the most efficient mutations which eventually evolve into new species.

Optimum adaptation to the environment determines survival and further evolution. This fundamental mechanism applies to all forms of life in the universe that I know. In plants and in the more elementary forms of life that store their "programs" in their DNA, all the individual beings with the same genes react the same way to a given environment.

Living organisms become more and more complex with the growth of the diversity introduced by evolution. The development of complex networks of neural cells in animals was a great leap forward with respect to plants for brains provide space where each animal can store the reactions to its specific environment that it has found to be useful. Here, exceptions are the rule, for the instructions that are stored in the brain are made to measure for each individual animal according to its own experience. For example, a cat's instinct, which ultimately stems from his genes, might urge it to hunt mice, but its conditioned responses, which are stored in the brain, can be trained to nurture mice instead of killing them. Thus, individual animals have a degree of freedom not observed in lower forms of life. In all cases, however, the purpose of the existence of these living beings remains the translation of their respective programs into actions that ensure their survival and reproduction.

Man's position at the apex of the evolutionary ladder provides him with one more degree of freedom. The instructions stored in his genes are rigorously followed, but man can choose to execute or not those that he has stored in his brain. This allows him to modify his own program by persistently applying his will to execute act "B" instead of the previously programmed act "A". This individual will power sets man apart from animals that can be trained but that do not have the ability to modify their program by themselves.

I see man as an integral part of a continuum of living beings. In this perspective, the purpose of each man's existence is the same as that of any other living being, that is, to execute its specific program. In that sense, life is the actualisation or "statement" of each individual's "program", be it the life of a man, an animal, a plant, a microbe or a virus.

Life paddles upstream

These life programs determine the range of actions that living beings are likely to engage in, but more importantly they also describe how matter and energy come together to constitute each one of them. A being's "program" is like the blueprint of a building. The pure information represented by ink and paper is immaterial but it does not have an independent existence of its own any more than "whiteness" can exist separately from the objects it qualifies. The description of whiteness can exist by itself but that is is not "whiteness". Similarly, a living being's "program" could eventually be analysed and described but that description would not be "life".

One of the fundamental laws of nature says that all physical processes lead to the degradation of the energy involved in the process. The potential energy of water going over falls is transformed into heat and dissipated downstream or, if the water goes through a turbine, part of it can be transformed into electrical energy that will be dissipated over a wide area in diverse ways. No energy is lost but potential energy has been degraded because the dispersed energy has lost the ability to do work that it had when it was positioned at the top of the falls. Steam going through a steam engine produces work. The energy contained in the hot steam is degraded as it is dispersed at a lower temperature. None of the energy was lost but it has lost the capacity to do work that it had when it was still hot. Mountains crumble and are eroded by wind and rain to fill the valleys below. Hot and cold water mix and become tepid. These are one-way processes for nature dictates that time flows only in one direction, that concentration naturally leads to dispersal, that order falls into disorder and that structure naturally disintegrates into chaos.

Life processes however, move in the opposite direction. Life paddles upstream. Living beings originate from randomly moving carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen molecules that joined to form the first amino acids. These joined in turn to produce still more structured macro molecules that could produce replicas of themselves. Life was beginning to awaken. It evolved into single celled organisms like blue-green algae that could use the sun's energy to power their reproduction. Life acquired more and more structure at every step as unicellular beings joined symbiotically to form multi cellular entities that could host viruses and bacteria. Life continued paddling upstream against the law of growing disorder as it moved up the evolutionary tree during the three and a half million years it took to produce the highly organised and complex life form that man is.

Some people think that the progression of life against one of the most basic laws of nature could not have occurred without the intervention of a powerful superior being, the creator. Physicists will however explain that the contradiction is only an apparent one for the concentration of structure in one part of a given system can occur if it is compensated by increased randomness in the rest of the system.

There are other apparent exceptions to the law of growing disorder. Stars can concentrate order and structure locally by producing heavy elements from the fusion of lighter ones because there is a compensating growth of disorder arising from the expansion of the universe. The more obese of these heavy elements are unstable and begin radioactive decay as soon as they are born. Some get trapped in dead stars but many get blown out into space by stars that explode into supernovas. These heavy elements eventually find their way into younger stars and planets (like our sun and earth), and obey the law of increasing disorder thereafter. Life appears to be an exception to the rule of growing disorder but such apparent exceptions are not rare. Mere matter also seems to be paddling upstream sometimes.

The real question, as far as man is concerned, is whether this motion towards more structure and order is projected from past evolution or whether it is drawn towards a future finality. Does evolution depend only on past and present events like the ballistic motion of a cannon ball or does it seek a goal like a guided missile?

All the indications that nature provides point to the ballistic scenario of evolution but "holders-of-the-truth" insist that man's existence can only be explained by a preordained spiritual finality towards which he should strive like a guided missile tracks its target. They derive power from the guided missile scenario as they claim to have privileged information about man's finality. "Holders-of-the-truth" declare that they have the only true set of instructions how to reach man's goal and that they know with absolute certainty which are the right and the wrong roads ahead of us.

The problem is that there are many different groups of "holders-of-the-truth" and they can't agree on what this finality is nor on the God-given instructions on how to reach it. Moreover, the guidelines they promote often include discrimination and sometimes violence against other groups that promote different instructions. Historically, interpretations of the meaning of life based on the guided missile scenario have sown discord and have led to bloodshed more often than they have promoted, or even just permitted, tolerance, peace and harmony.

I have been exposed to many schools of "absolute truth" about man's eternal finality and, although some appeared intellectually stimulating, I found none of them really convincing. Neither was I impressed by the results that their influence have generally produced on the social behaviour of their adherents. I guess that I was just not destined to become a "holder-of-the-truth". That means I have no other choice but to refer to the ballistic model to guide the direction of my actions. That is why the careful observation of the road that man has travelled so far is so important to me. I think that the trend taken by man's recent evolution can provide me a better indication of what should be right or wrong than any of the various proposed paths towards a hypothetical finality.

Right and Wrong

That is the real question. The concept of "right" and "wrong" can apply only to man for, as far as we know, he is the only living being capable of actions contrary to his program. If man's purpose is to execute his program like all other living beings, then, acts contrary to this program would be wrong. Unless they represent a better adaptation to his environment than his program does at that time!

Subjective feelings of guilt or righteousness are not reliable guides. An act considered inappropriate in a given context will produce feelings of "guilt" if the doer has been conditioned to consider that act as being or "wrong" in that context. It is wrong because it represents a faulty adaptation to that specific environment. However, the same act could represent an excellent adaptation to a different environment and could eventually produce feelings of "righteousness" confirmed by social acceptance in that new environment.

For example, a well mannered westerner, "programmed" to eat noiselessly will be acutely aware of having done something "wrong" if he accidentally burps during a formal dinner. He can however modify his program and train himself to slurp his soup and to show satisfaction by burping loudly after a meal in societies where such behaviour is customary and expected. Thus, a voluntarily modified new program can improve his adaptation to his cultural environment and an embarrassing burp that was "wrong" in one context can become "right" in another.

Values change, fifty years ago when I was a boy, divorce was "wrong" and it was "right" that a woman be forced to endure an unhappy marriage throughout her life but now she would be praised for divorcing a violent husband to save herself and her children from harm. Fifty years ago, it was quite all right to leave garbage, tin cans and empty bottles in the woods when we went camping but now very few people living in developed countries would be able to do so without feeling guilty of damaging the environment. Fifty years ago, paying women less than men for the same work was widely accepted but now it is not only considered wrong, it is illegal to do so in a growing number of countries.

I have come to think of "right" and "wrong" not as absolutes but as the measure of the extent to which an individual's behaviour is judged by his peers as being compatible or not with his social environment in the context of a given moment. Societies evolve and their values change with time. I doubt that even the most fanatical Hindu fundamentalist would consider it right nowadays for a woman to throw herself into her dead husband's crematory pyre to commit "suttee" as it was her strict duty a century ago.

What is right in one society can be wrong in another and vice versa. This does not create a problem as long as the communities remain isolated from each other, but history shows that incompatible values often become cause of wars when moral prescriptions are perceived as absolute truths rather than merely different adaptations to different environments.

In spite of the widely varying environments of man, a broad consensus has been reached during past centuries to condemn certain specific acts such as murder, rape, theft, false representation and others, that are considered incorrect or "wrong" in all societies. This does not mean that these interdictions are moral absolutes of a "sacred" or religious nature, it only means that common sense and practical reasons of self preservation suffice to ban acts that no one would like to be subjected to. The Golden Rule, "do not onto others what you would not they do onto you" is a perfectly valid pearl of profane common sense that cannot be improved by considering it sacred or religious.

Dogmas

Primitive man realised that community life was better when a minimum set of rules were observed. It was easier to obtain acceptance of such rules by convincing the uninformed that they had been dictated by some fearsome invisible entities ready and willing to punish disobedience than by imposing them by physical force. The more knowledgeable could manipulate the less informed into subservience more efficiently and at lower cost with "absolute truths" than by coercion. Elites established their supremacy by reserving access to the "domain of the sacred", out of reach of human reason, for the privileged few that had been initiated to their secrets.

Religion has been a powerful tool to bind community members together and to support their leaders (the word religion comes from the Latin verb "ligere" meaning "to bind"). "Holders-of-the-truth" have had an important role to play as leaders or as the "king-makers" behind the throne. All civilisations have had their "state religion" at some time or other and all "holders-of-the-truth" have served to support the domination of some elites over the common people at some time or other. History shows that societies that coalesced with strongly held "absolute divine truths about the universe" could mobilise their members more efficiently for collective projects or for war than those with more liberal values.

The wildest flights of imagination have been used to describe the universe as a rapid overview of religious beliefs held by two dozen civilisations will demonstrate. Any explanation, no matter how far fetched, filled the void satisfactorily as long as the faithful were credulous enough to accept beliefs that could not be verified. Dogma provided the basis for religion's three main functions: explaining the universe, guiding man's behaviour and appeasing his fears.

Science and Ethics

For millennia, man believed in the myths, fables and dogmas that the "holders-of-the-truth" used to pacify his existential anxieties. With time however, he began to accumulate verifiable facts about the forces of nature. These led to generalisations or "laws" that could be accepted by enquiring minds until invalidated by some experiment where the "law" was not obeyed. Each failure of a "law" turned into a victory for it led the way to an improved understanding of nature and to more powerful "laws". The scientific method was born and man's progress, which had been linear for millions of years, became geometric in the last two or three centuries.

These "laws of nature", like the "life programs" I mentioned earlier, are like "whiteness": they have no existence of their own distinct from nature. They are only properties of nature that we attempt to describe as we could describe "whiteness". They exist only as concepts stored in my mind as part of what I call "my toy village", or published in treatises and books. The descriptions of how we think the universe functions are not absolutes. As a matter of fact, they are periodically replaced by better approximations as we learn more about nature.

Mathematics are the language of nature. Mathematics are rooted in the "laws of Nature" as all languages are rooted in the works of its users, English in Shakespeare, French in Molière, Spanish in Cervantes etc. Millions of mathematical constructions that could be assembled from the vocabulary and grammar of mathematics (that have been abstracted from the observation of nature) will never be put together any more than the millions of books could that be written but that never will be. I think mathematical constructions are like books, they are not out there, waiting to be discovered in an "universe of absolutes" as some people still claim, 24 centuries after Plato imagined it when Zeus was running things on Olympus. Nor do I think that all mathematical constructions must correspond to reality! A language is just a language.

We still do not know with certainty how the universe came to be, but most people will agree that the "big bang" theory is likely to be a closer approximation of what happened than the book of genesis or than any of the mythical creation scenarios that men accepted as the truth in the past. An ever growing proportion of people also think that the theory of evolution is more likely to represent how man came about than any of the explanations provided by past or present religions. The task of providing answers to man's queries about the universe, that used to be one of the roles of religion, is now more and more handled by science.

Religious morality still serves to control man's behaviour to some extent but it has lost a lot of ground to secular ethics. Many religious prescriptions that made sense at one time have now become pointless or frankly counterproductive because man's environment has evolved since they were introduced in the distant past. For example, the ban on eating pork made sense when man did not know how to protect himself from the parasites pork can harbour, but it is pointless now. The ban on birth control might have made sense when numbers were an asset for the survival of each community but its effects would be terribly counter productive if everyone obeyed it strictly, now that mankind numbers six billion. Today, the adaptation of man's behaviour to his environment is enhanced by his growing knowledge of himself and of the universe and not by religious prescriptions.

Morals and ethics, the dictionary says they are synonyms dealing with the distinction between right and wrong. I will go one step further by saying that they have the same purpose of preventing behaviour detrimental to the welfare of the community. In my language however, I reserve the term "morals" for behavioural guidance based on religious principles and use the term "ethics" to refer to the more general determination of what is right and wrong in a given society, at a certain time. Religious morals based on dogma are by definition rigidly unchanging since right and wrong are absolutes while secular ethics have the flexibility of evolving with the social and political maturation of each community. For that reason, secular ethics are in the process of replacing religious morals in the more developed countries where the rule of law based on reason has already replaced the arbitrary power of kings, nobles, generals and priests.

Considered objectively, acts that are compatible with a person's total environment (familial, social, political and natural) are considered good by his peers and, those that are not are judged as being wrong. Subjectively however, an act that is contrary to an individual's program is felt by him to be wrong until successive repetitions of it have modified that person's program. That same act will then feel right. Thus, an act can feel wrong but be judged right by an individual's peers when his inner program does not match the current social conventions of his environment (and vice versa).

The "objective" value of a man's acts during a given day can be seen as the measure, as evaluated by his peers, of the compatibility of those acts with his environment on that day. Looking retrospectively over that man's whole life-span, however, the value of that day's actions becomes the measure by which they have contributed positively or negatively to what he and his environment have become at the time of this second evaluation. Thus, even the objective value of an act can be evaluated differently according to the time at which the evaluation is carried out.

For example, the actions for which Torquemada, the infamous master of the Inquisition, is remembered, were indubitably seen by his peers as being righteous for they were compatible with the values of his environment at that time and place (17th century Spain). Today however, no one would dispute that Torquemada's practice of torture was a negative contribution to the evolution of mankind as it has become now, in the 21st century. History is full of such examples. Galileo's statement that the earth circled the sun was judged heretical by his peers in 1520 but everyone knows now that it marked an important milestone in the struggle of science against dogma.

Centuries ago societies evolved very slowly and one could expect the values of his or her childhood would be still valid at the time of death. This is no longer the case for major factors such as the predominance of science over myth as a source of knowledge, the rule of law, the industrial revolution, the emancipation of women and the recognition of human rights, have dramatically accelerated the rate of change of social values.

For thousands of years man has been trained to depend on his shaman, mullah, priest or guru to tell him what was right or wrong. The information revolution is changing that. It began a century ago with quaint glass tube radios, it accelerated with the advent of cheap transistors after World War II and it exploded with multichannel television and the Internet. Gurus and priests had to compete for their followers' attention. Everywhere, civil and religious authorities were tempted to impose some form of censorship when they realised that the free flow of information could threaten their influence on the values of their respective communities. It is now obvious that those who would like to impose censorship are fighting a loosing battle in their attempt to control cultural and social values (memes) that can spread all over the globe in a few minutes on the world wide web. The Internet is delivering the "coup de grâce" to censorship and soon everyone will have access to all the information, all the time, everywhere.

It was easy in the past to let the gurus and priests define right and wrong and now it is tempting to avoid responsibility by transferring it to the media, the politicians and NGOs who influence what memes are politically and socially correct for the season. No one disputes that the rate of change of our social values is becoming exponential now that we are enter the third millennium with the Internet and globalization. The secular ethics that underlie the rule of law guided by the United Nation's Charter of Human Rights that is endorsed by a growing number of countries are in the process of taking the initiative away from religious morals that are slow to adapt to today's reality. Further advances of secular ethics are also being brought about by various non governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International , Greenpeace , Médecins sans Frontières , One World Online , Oxfam International , Soros Foundations , Transparency International , etc. Memes evolve while religious morals remain mired in the past.

Memes

Everything we know, all our thoughts and all our memories can be broken down into parts that we can call ideas, concepts, or "units of culture" All forms of communication involve the transfer of these ideas, concepts or "units of culture" from one brain to another. There is nothing new about that, it has been going on ever since humans exist. There is nothing new about genes either, they have been around even longer than men. What is new, is that we have learned in that the mechanisms that govern the spread of ideas, concepts and "units of culture" are very similar to those that govern the spread of genes (mutation, natural selection and inheritance).

The term meme was coined precisely to reflect that analogy because it gives us a new insight on how we receive and transmit ideas or memes. There is no problem with memes, everything we say or hear is made up of memes. The languages we speak and the music we like are made of memes. The advertising fed to us by TV, radio and posters are all memes. Fashions are memes. All the small details that make the Japanese, Norwegian and Spanish cultures different are memes. Memes circulate in and out of our brains constantly.

Values and theories evolve because creative individuals introduce variations into the common meme pool. Some of these replicate so efficiently that they become conventional wisdom. Efficient replication however is not a guarantee of validity. Memes of wishful thinking tend to replicate more readily than brutal reality memes because they please those who emit them as well as those who receive them. For example, the idea that "everyone is born equal" has become so fashionable that it is not politically correct to deny it even though everyone knows full well that it is not so. More than ever before, the validity of current conventional wisdom needs to be re-examined constantly as memes evolve and circumstances change more and more rapidly.

Civilisation has made great strides as science displaced dogma as the prime provider of knowledge about man and the universe. Further progress has been registered in the last decades as we have been witnessing a transfer of influence over the choice of memes for right and wrong from the churches to the media. That seems to augur well for the future development of a free humanistic society but we should not rejoice prematurely.

The media manipulate public opinion just like the churches do, each for the pursuit of their own objectives. The media cannot claim divine authority but they have the advantage of being able to selectively replicate only those memes that draw and hold the attention of the most viewers. Both seek to discourage individuals from exercising the most precious human faculty of evaluating themselves, the appropriateness of everything they think and do.

The universal availability of all the news, all the time and everywhere thanks to multichannel TV and the internet, offers some protection against the planned mind rape behind closed doors that was the norm in religious schools only decades ago but the absence of censorship today leaves everyone vulnerable to fortuitous infection by unfounded rumours and urban myths carried by efficiently replicating memes.

It takes little prodding to take the easy road of adopting the values of the other members of the community as they are presented to us by the media, instead of making the effort to think things out for oneself. Unfortunately, it is not likely that the media will spontaneously adandon the strong influence that they have acquired over the memes of ethics so as to allow an increased individual awareness and responsibility. Yet, that is precisely what society needs now that the information age accelerates the circulation of memes without any control of their validity.

The major religions seem to be in recession but so called new age sects and belief systems are rushing in to fill the void. Astrology, tarot card and tea leaf reading experts are setting up shop everywhere. Nineteenth century spiritism is coming back on the market with the new name of channelling. Faith healing has branched out tremendously using new props and techniques that are too numerous to list such as, colon irrigation (enemas), reflexology (foot massage), touch healing, burning candles in your ear etc. Man's interest in space has opened the door to the circulation of memes about visitors from distant galaxies. Powerful memes about eternal life have managed to infect minds long enough for collective suicide sects to reach their macabre end!

Fortunately, these more extreme manifestations of meme infection have provoked level headed professionals of science into joining to form a number of non profit organisations such as the international "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal" (CSICOP), to publicly refute abuses of human credulity ( Here are links to similar national groups.) These associations are doing their best to generate an immune response to meme infections, but they limit their action to the most extreme abuses for they cannot match the resources of all those who exploit human credulity.

The accelerated open circulation of memes (universal availability of information) is a significant step forward because it empowers all individuals equally but it does require that each one learns how to sort the grain from the chaff. The "watch dog" associations I just mentioned are useful but in the end it is each individual's responsibility to exercise his own judgement about the memes he is bombarded with by the media.

I often have the feeling that there is much more chaff than grain in the information thrown at us by the media. Expressions like "conventional wisdom", "journalistic objectivity" and "politically correct", that were unheard of a few decades ago, frighten me for I find they reflect a growing trend towards the uncritical acceptance of whatever meme runs unchecked through our media. Our newspapers and electronic media all put the same bias on the news in the name of "journalistic objectivity". To me this is a symptom that they have all been infected by the same set of memes as if they had all caught the "I love you" computer virus at the same time. We all need a powerful general purpose anti virus that would restore our capacity for individual critical thought. I think that society needs that individual critical thought become widespread so that the adaptation to the new technologies that are coming be carried out with the least disruptions.

Technologies of the Future

The development of technology is now so rapid that many find it difficult to adapt to new ideas and processes that were science fiction only a few years ago. History has shown us that when new technology becomes available, it always ends up being used in spite of all resistance to it. Change will occur at an increased rate whatever we do and it will walk all over us unless we foresee it and manage to channel it through public exposure and debate.

For example, it is illusory to think that the genetically modified organisms that have been part of our food chain for already two decades, will be dropped because of manifestations, however violent, by activist protest groups. It would have been better to adapt to the future by involving the public twenty years ago.

Now that we have deciphered the secrets of the human genome, it is highly unlikely that we will refrain from interfering into the evolution of mankind in order to "improve" the species. Let's have public debate about it now. I don't think it will prevent recourse to human genetic engineering and cloning but it will certainly facilitate our adaptation to it. Perhaps, by retarding its application until we can envisage its consequences without anguish.

We now are beginning to develop technologies to restore vision and hearing by implanting artificial retinas and inner ears that communicate directly with the brain. The coupling of direct access to the brain with the exponentially growing computing power of our machines is likely to create an irresistible temptation to magnify our intellectual capacity by symbiosis with computers. The advent of cloned man-computer composites in the third millennium is no longer unthinkable, it is now inevitable.

Change might never reach such extremes but it could. That is why I think it's advisable to develop a dynamic approach by studying right now the eventual impact of such foreseeable technologies on our social ethics. Some universities and think tanks are timidly engaged in this direction but I think that the general public should be involved in the development of dynamic secular ethics in order to smooth over transitions as they occur so as to minimise the clash between those who will resist change and those who will welcome it.

Life is an individual statement

"Progress" is moving very fast! The great religions will be of little help as they are already way behind, mired in the past. I think that we cannot afford to transfer the responsibility of taking the right orientations to the media because their only real objective is to produce the maximum return on shareholder investment. Memes and the media are natural allies. The validity of what they disseminate is irrelevant, what matters is how efficiently they reach the most people for that is what assures their survival and growth.

If we can't count on the help of religion and we can't trust the media, to whom can we turn? I suggest that we should trust ourselves individually to be better judges of the most appropriate paths to our future than any centralised, powerful agency, sacred or profane.

In times of accelerated technological change, I think it is desirable that the largest possible number of variant memes compete to improve our chances that the new values will be the most appropriate. More individuals must bear the risk of being wrong in order to reduce the risk that the whole community be wrong.

The same logic of competition argues in favour of decentralisation at all levels to re-establish an equilibrium after the ongoing homogenisation resulting from the globalisation of markets.

In a few words,

To wrap up, here are the main points of what I think today:

1) THE PAST:

1.1 Religions have played three important historic roles,

- providing answers about the origin and nature of the universe and,

- promoting social order by supporting the domination of elites over common people.

- providing an irrational illusion that man requires to mask the raw reality of his mortal condition from his awareness.

1.2 The religious classes have carried out these roles by establishing belief, through their influence on the memes of their respective communities, in a "sacred" domain free of the rules of logic and justice that normally apply in the profane domain.

2) THE TREND:

2.1 In the last millennium, the first two of religion's three historical roles have been seriously challenged almost everywhere.

- by the scientific method of acquiring knowledge about the universe that has become widely recognised as superior to myths, legends and scriptures and,

- by the growing reliance on the rule of law , established by the people for the people, whose capacity to adapt to the evolution of civilisation justifies its predominance over the rule of elites chosen by religious classes.

2.2 New memeplexes are slowly but irresistibly spreading the perception:

- that knowledge is relative, that it evolves with time and that it can be qualified only in terms of probabilities.

- that the pursuit of world peace, law and order is best furthered by the development of forward looking secular ethics rather than by the promotion of competing religious moral codes.

- that the memes of a "sacred" domain and of "absolute truth" are fictions fabricated to manipulate the behaviour of believers.

2.5 Religions have definitely lost their role as providers of knowledge and are in the process of loosing the function of maintaining social order in developed countries but they do retain considerable influence by negating that death is definitive.

3) MY ORIENTATION

Personally, I feel that my life makes sense through the individual statement of what I am today and through my efforts to further my adaptation to my environment by seeking:

- to acquaint myself with the most recent developments of scientific knowledge and of the growth of modern ethics, so as to be able to evaluate current popular memes and,

- to take into account not only what I know of today's ethics but also the most realistic extrapolation I can generate about man's evolution in the future in the hope of contributing to that evolution rather than hindering it.