Why do we exist?

Why do we exist? Strange as it may seem, the answer to why we exist has always been available to us, but it has been an answer that we didn’t want to accept because it confronted us with our apparently flawed state.

There is a law of physics known as negative entropy, which says that in an open system, where energy can be drawn from outside the system—such as in the relationship between the Earth and the sun—matter will integrate into ever greater, more complex arrangements. This is what has happened on Earth and accounts for the complex arrangements of matter we know as ‘life’. Put simply, we exist because we are the result of matter integrating.

Development of Order or Integration of Matter on Earth
A similar chart appears in Arthur Koestler’s 1978 book Janus: A Summing Up

When Christ said, ‘And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them together in perfect unity’, he was making clear how integral love is to the process of integration. However the problem with admitting that we exist because of matter integrating is that it implies that we should be cooperative, selfless and loving, when obviously we are competitive, selfish and aggressive—the very opposite.

Therefore in order to admit that we exist because of matter integrating, and that the meaning of life is to be cooperative, selfless and loving, we needed first to be able to understand the human condition—namely human’s extraordinary capacity for ‘good and evil’, and in particular the origin of our divisive or uncooperative state.

Most wonderfully, biology is now able to provide the full explanation of our contradictory behaviour. This comprehensive explanation of the origin of our divisive behaviour is available in this Introductory Video Series and Part 3 of Freedom: Expanded Book 1, by Jeremy Griffith.

With this first principle, biological explanation of our condition now available, we are able to see that our competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour is the result of a two million year old, unavoidable clash between our gene-based instincts and our emerging nerve-based consciousness.

It turns out that our divisive behaviour emerged when humans became fully conscious and had to set out in search of knowledge in the presence of unjustly condemning instincts.

So the reason why we exist, despite our divisive behaviour, is not because of some accident or mistake: in fact we can now see that being competitive, selfish and aggressive was actually a heroic state that we humans have had to endure in order to fulfill the potential of developing from instinctively driven animals into conscious human beings—it turns out we weren’t truly at odds with negative entropy, or integration at all!

This is a fabulously exciting, and indeed a longed for breakthrough; we can now rest securely in the knowledge of our goodness, and admit that negative entropy is why we exist, along with all it implies about being loving and selfless.

This Blog Post was written by Damon on December 22, 2012