In the Name of Meaning
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Recently, I’ve been ruminating on one big question: what’s the meaning of life? If you’d asked me this a year ago, I would’ve shrugged it off with a laugh. But thanks to my PhD, my reflections on AI, and celebrating my (re)birthday for the first time in a decade, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to really ponder it. I actually feel relieved, because I believe I’ve figured out the answer: it has no inherent meaning at all.
The ultimate question
The question both puzzled and fascinated me. Think about it: there’s absolutely nothing for billions of years before a person is born, and after we die, there is again void, most likely forever. So what’s the point of some 70 years of fleeting life? To the universe, there’s no difference between our death and the death of the chicken on our plate, the ant we accidentally crushed, or the leaves in the dust. You might argue that we matter to the world we live in, but what’s this thing we call the “world”? Isn’t it just a concept, much like the notion of “money,” “society,” and “country”? So maybe there’s no point in the first place after all.
I’m not the only one arriving at this conclusion. The philosopher Herbert Fingarette, who wrote books discussing life, came to the same realization at the end of his.[fingarette] He regretted claiming that fearing death is irrational as he went through that very fear during his final days. In the end, he still couldn’t understand this fear or explain the meaning of life, other than “just going on existing, that’s the truth of it is existing and waiting.”[being-97] So perhaps life is meaningless after all. Be that as it may, that’s precisely why we have to find meaning ourselves. Indeed, a life without it is just as insignificant as the cooked chicken, the smashed ant, and the fallen leaves. But what is meaning, and how do we find it?
Inner quest for the outside life
To find meaning in the outside world, we have to first look inside our hearts: what do we value? What makes us truly happy and brings us real joy? Two factors make answering these questions especially hard: (1) we don’t know ourselves as well as we should, and (2) we often aren’t honest with ourselves, either. More often than not, instead of looking inward, we’re tangled up in external stimulation. Instead of refining our souls, we strive to improve our appearances. Instead of caring for the ones we love and the ones who love us, we’re busy maintaining or building fleeting relationships.
Years ago, I was told that I should learn to trust others more, since “we aren’t alone in this world.” Unfortunately, the sad reality is that this flash of life is ultimately a journey with ourselves: friends come and go, family members pass away, and we also wither away as we age. To me, this world is like an archipelago where each of us lives on a single island, and each island has one theater where we perform our lives. While some of the islands are closer (like our parents’), they’re all isolated, so only we can truly understand firsthand the stories of our own performances. And in the end, we’re the only audience left. On our deathbeds, all that’s left with us are our withered bodies and the memories from our theater.
For me, the value of doing a PhD isn’t about earning a title or fame, making more money after graduation, or even pushing the frontier of scientific discovery. Rather, it’s a precious journey of self-discovery. It gives me the luxury of time and space to look inward: what am I good at, and what am I not? What brings me real joy, and what do I truly value? The process of struggling with difficult problems, getting excited, becoming frustrated, and having to hold on as well as let go, is itself a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that helps me shape my character.
Haven with pain
Memories are the bookmarks of our experiences, marking the important moments where we fought, struggled, failed, and survived. We determine what they represent and what colors these bookmarks have. As mentioned in the book Counsels and Maxims by Arthur Schopenhauer, these moments fade away easily unless we intentionally make them stand out, like through celebration and journaling. That’s why I celebrated my birthday and rebirthday this year, although the associated childhood memories weren’t terribly positive. I believe that’s going to be true for most of our memories, as struggles and hardships are an integral part of our lives.
Life is only beautiful as it is painful. I loved the book from Liu Yong (刘墉), The Paradise with Suffering (寻找一个有苦难的天堂), which pointed out that happiness only exists when there’s pain, just like Yin and Yang. I chase sunshine only when there’s a lack of it; I enjoy spending time alone in tranquility, as I’ve gone through enough chaos; I can see the bright side of people, since I’ve been in the dark. It’s the pain and struggles that help us build our character and are often the most memorable. So even if they unavoidably take something away from us in the meantime, they’re worth celebrating. It’s just like Jensen Huang once said, “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”
Are we really special?
AI has taught me more about life than I could’ve ever anticipated, giving me a massive dose of humility along the way. Plenty of computer scientists (like Yann LeCun) dismiss current AI as a mere “stochastic parrot”, arguing that it just predicts the next token without any real thinking or consciousness.[lecun][stochastic-parrots] But that begs the question: what’s consciousness, really? When I’m typing these very words, am I exercising “conscious thought,” or am I just generating the next highly probable word given my context? Regardless, I wouldn’t want to call myself a flesh-and-blood parrot made out of a giant bag of neurons.
Even if we assume for a second that AI genuinely lacks human-like thought or consciousness, it’s already surpassed human performance on many tasks. We might argue that there’re still countless things that AI can’t do, esp. those related to the physical world. But isn’t that a bit unfair? If I were trained to read and do mental math all day long, and then someone asked me to clean a room, I might well not know how to do it very well either.
PS: since I started practicing mental math, such as multiplying 2 two-digit numbers in my head within 5s, I’ve noticed how much my mind can feel like a computer. I need a small space to hold intermediate results, something like registers. Working memory can hold only a few chunks at a time.[working-memory] When another calculation demands that space, a number I was trying to keep there slips away. It can feel like a rather shabby machine…
AI’s human-level or even superhuman performance is an ironic but undeniable proof that a simple next-token-prediction mechanism can pull off most of the things that humans are capable of. Maybe our brand of “intelligence” isn’t quite as magical as we thought. Just as we eventually accepted that we aren’t the center of the universe, maybe it’s time we learned to be a bit more humble about our minds.
I believe the core mechanism behind both artificial intelligence and human intelligence is the same: complexity. As Melanie Mitchell describes in her book, our brains are composed of extremely simple and uniform parts, much like other complex systems such as army ant colonies, the internet, and global economies.[complexity] While we can thoroughly understand the function of each individual piece, their collective behavior becomes a massive mystery simply because of their sheer scale. I’m convinced that the same rule applies to AI. We might know exactly what’s happening inside a single artificial neuron, but once we scale up to millions or trillions of them, the whole system becomes incomprehensible. Ultimately, humans and AI may well derive their “intelligence” from the exact same source.
I really don’t think human uniqueness lies in whatever tasks AI still can’t pull off. Instead, our true uniqueness might just be our inherent “imperfections”: our emotion, irrationality, fear, laziness, vanity, greed, and envy. These messy but palpable traits are probably what actually separate us from the machines. Ultimately, they’re the very things we have to recognize, acknowledge, reconcile, and accept as part of our journey in the search for meaning.
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