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Deliberate Existence
by Sven Nilsen, 2022
In Continental Philosophy, philosophers study ways of being. A way of being is a combination of personal experience of the world and world view.
One of the most difficult questions about the meaning of life, is whether life has an intrinsic meaning, or, the meaning is created by us.
Either way, there is also a problem whether life has multiple meanings or a singular coherent one.
Humans are messy and a lot of things we do happen by coincidence.
This is because we are not actually in control of ourselves. If you think about control as making a conscious decision, then scientists can show that the decisions we make are influenced by many seemingly arbitrary properties of the environment.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. If we had to make conscious decisions about everything, then we would get nowhere.
Still, there is something that most people look for when asking “what is the meaning of life”. It is as if they expect something more, something deeper and more profound. A solution to some riddle, or, perhaps a bit of a mystery or excitement.
This is why philosophers try to come up with ways of relating to life in various sense of meaning. They call this “beings” and use different terminology, depending on topics, to elaborate on what they mean.
One way of being I have been thinking about, I call “deliberate existence”.
For example, when I read a book, there are often many reasons I started doing so, without all of these reasons being conscious or by me being in control of my body.
Sometimes, I get the feeling of being in control and this gives me an experience of “deliberate reading”.
However, although the activity of reading a book might be varying in personal experience, it takes place in an environment which is structured around my own higher sense of being.
When we talk about “existence”, we talk about this higher sense of being, where the particular activities or details of everyday life do not matter.
Humans like to think about their existence and what other people think about it.
The problem is that when you have a picture in your head of what your existence ought to be like, for example from some way you view others and others view you, it can get in the way of your path, since you are not entirely in control of yourself.
A lot of life is about these autonomous or semi-autonomous states of being, that flow from one place to another.
When you realise that you are not in entirely in control, but you are moving on the waves of the river in your life, it can feel like there is no other way to be, so you might as well keep continuing following the stream.
This is what many people do, but there is a kind of “magic trick” that happens here: The flow easily becomes the path of least resistance.
Going back to the environment that is structured around us, I often think about how “deliberate” many things are.
For example, when I was a child, my parents taught me how to use a spoon. A spoon is designed carefully, “deliberately”. Although using a spoon might feel natural and I do it without thinking about it, there is no coincidence, or path of least resistance, in how the spoon I use relates to my life.
I believe that many people just follow the path of least resistance on many important matters. It might feel like this causes less trouble and sometimes they are probably right.
However, the path of least resistance does not mean necessarily that it is the easiest path.
Imagine that there were no spoons and you just ate using your fingers. Have you ever thought about that?
We use spoons when the food is liquid, to bring it from a bowl to the mouth. The entire bowl can be lifted instead.
Maybe lifting the entire bowl is easier than getting a spoon.
So, you can imagine that when you follow the path of least resistance, that there might be easier ways of doing things, but they do not appear to you because your decisions are dominated by semi-autonomous behaviour.
The problem here, is that people might think they ought to do easy things, instead of difficult things, when they have given up on resisting against the stream of life as a river of flow.
However, at the same time, they can ignore easier things or smarter things to do, just because they have a kind of “undeliberate” mindset.
What I mean by “deliberate existence” is not necessarily to put yourself up for hard challenges. Although, I recommend this to people, as a way of achieving happiness.
Happiness is actually very easy to achieve. For example, you do not need to become rich in order to be happy.
Happiness has many formulas, but they are all simple.
Doing something hard, is one way to become happy.
Another way is to buy an ice cream and sit in the sun.
When you realise that there are many easy ways of being, that works well with your own semi-autonomous nature, you do not have to follow the path of least resistance.
Instead, you can go a path that is cheap, good and environment friendly.
You do not need to accomplish much in life. Sometimes it is sufficient to “exist”, but it is also better to do it “deliberately”.
This is what I mean by “deliberate existence”.
One reason I think a lot about “deliberate existence” is because in Naive Zen Logic, a zen-consistent agent is one that believes what it believes a smarter version of itself believes:
(X ? .x) ? x => X ? x
Translated into an idea about a zen-consistent society, it ought to form a “higher sense of society”. Just like people make semi-autonomous decisions in everyday life, they ought to have a higher sense of self. To me, this “higher sense of society” takes the mental form of a galactic civilization.
A galactic civilization has more resources and time to think about problems. If a such civilization comes up with a solution, then it is probably being smarter about it than our civilization.
Although a galactic civilization might seem implausible to you now, imagine that this point in time is when people on Earth start to think about it.
The galactic civilization is not something we have to travel to other solar systems to build. We can build it virtually, today, with current technology.
When you travel to other solar systems, you do it to realize the ideas that have already been thought through. With other words, one does not just travel by coincidence to other solar systems, but “deliberately”.
The galactic civilization “exists deliberately” as a characteristic property of its being.
It is possible to learn from “deliberate existence” as an idea, socially and technologically.