The Meaning of Life and Science Fiction

Finding purpose in a post-scarcity utopia

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I love science fiction's ability to act as philosophical thought experiments. Philosophers love to come up with tiny vignettes that take our concepts to an extreme to illustrate philosophical points, but with science fiction you can tell a whole story with these stretched concepts.

While the shorter, more direct thought experiments of philosophers might be better for making clear a specific contentious point, longer stories can help us explore less well defined concepts and distinctions. That makes science fiction perfect for talking about the meaning of life.

While dystopian science fiction is common, I find utopian fiction much more interesting. In a dystopian world, it isn't hard to find meaningful stuff to do: often, survival itself is at the forefront, or bringing down the big brother boogieman.

More interesting to me is the exploration of what to do when you have everything. In a post-scarcity world, what would we do with ourselves?

Star Trek: The Next Generation gives us one vision of such a future. Technology has made energy abundant and anything material, even food, can be created instantly with replicators. Everyone's material needs are met. So what do people do?

One option, of course, is to hop in a spaceship and explore the galaxy. As Picard states in the opening credits of the show:

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.

Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds.

To seek out new life and new civilizations.

To boldly go where no one has gone before.

Going around and meeting new alien species (and Commander Riker or Counselor Troi banging them) forms the plot of many episodes.

But what about the general population who aren't going on big space sex-adventures? In one episode, the crew comes across a capitalist, Ralph Offenhouse, who was cryogenically frozen in the 1990s. Offenhouse has trouble wrapping his head around the new age he's woken up to. Captain Picard explains to him: "A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy."

This is explained further in Star Trek: First Contact, where Captain Picard gives more detail about the economics of the future: "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity".

This is a trite critique of our current time and a rosy, naive vision of our future. But I admire the optimism and the attempt to articulate meaning beyond our material wants or needs.

A Meaningful Life

While the meaning of life is often thought of as belonging to the realm of philosophy and art, we can also look at it as an empirical question: what kind of life do people tend to find meaningful? This is the realm of Positive Psychology.

One framework researchers have proposed is three aspects of a meaningful life: 1) Purpose, working towards some life goals. 2) Significance, feeling like your life is important—this can be more retrospective and doesn't require an explicit goal like purpose. 3) Coherence, the ability to make sense of your life. If life is a bunch of random disconnected events, it's harder for it to feel meaningful. If they seem to add up to a comprehensible story, it feels more meaningful.

When we think about a post-scarcity society, it undercuts the places many of us find meaning in the current world. Material scarcity naturally generates goals with significance: feeding your family, securing shelter, improving comfort. As long as someone is wanting for something, it's easy to come up with goals to give us purpose. And it's easy to feel like there is some significance to what we're doing, since it's fulfilling some want or need someone has. These goals and the significance of our actions easily give us a coherent narrative to our lives.

But without scarcity, what are we to do? What goal can be seen as significant if anything can be achieved without lifting a finger?

Star Trek sees us as replacing these material motivations with a more lofty goal of bettering oneself and humanity as a whole. In other words, it removes the scarcity of material stuff and moves it elsewhere—to scarce "goods" like personal virtues.

What happens when even those goods aren't scarce? Greg Egan writes stories about transhuman beings that are software, capable of altering themselves on a whim. Not only do they lack any substantial material needs, if they want to better themselves in some way (say, be more compassionate or have a particular skill), they can simply do it. Alter the code, and boom, they have it. For these digitally immortal beings, even time isn't scarce.

Different characters deal with the lack of scarcity in different ways. One character in Egan’s book Permutation City engineers his digital environment and his own mind into an endless loop performing his favorite activity: climbing a (digitally simulated) skyscraper. Forever.

Other characters flinch away from the idea of altering themselves, worried about draining their lives of meaning by doing so:

He could modify himself to lose his usual urge to turn over repeatedly as he slept, but the prospect of needing to do that only made him feel claustrophobic in a deeper sense. You could whittle away a hundred little things like that, and not miss any of them individually, but then you woke one day to find that half your memories no longer range true, every minor joy and hardship drained of its flavor and significance

—Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan

In Greg Egan's worlds, the most common way these sorts of beings find meaning is by seeking out novelty. Much like the characters in Star Trek, they're scientists and explorers, finding purpose in seeking out new things—new knowledge itself being a scarce good.

Positional and Social Goods

The Culture series is another post-scarcity series, certainly depicting utopian conditions but with less of the starry-eyed idealism of Star Trek. The Culture is an incredibly advanced society, spanning vast swathes of the galaxy. They are governed largely by Minds, superintelligent AIs that can take care of just about anything with their super-advanced technology.

So what do people do? Most of the substance of the novels deal with how The Culture interacts with other civilizations—usually, subtly influencing them in one way or another to try to make them more stable.

But it's only a small number of Culture citizens who do this sort of thing. Most of them just live happily, throwing parties and playing games.

In Player of Games, one character (the titular player of the titular games), Jernau, is widely regarded as one of the best game players in the civilization. When he comes close to losing a game, he accepts an offer from an observer to cheat.

Why does he care so much that he's willing to cheat? Because being good at game playing is about reputation. Being good at game playing has the properties of what economists call positional goods—it only has value relative to how much others have. Classic positional goods are luxuries like diamond rings, which are only valued because they signal your wealth and status. If everyone had gigantic diamond rings, no one would care about them—our ability to create bigger diamond rings doesn't actually make more good in the world. Similarly, if Jernau remained just as good as he is, but everyone else was suddenly twice as good as him, his skill would lose its value.

Some things are always scarce just by the social nature of them. Status seeking that leads to cheating is a negative example of it. But not all socially scarce goods are zero-sum. Relationships and love are "scarce" because they're made out of other people. The more people we make, the more demand there is for them. There will always be a need for them.

At least, until we make AI robots to fulfill all our social needs without having any needs of their own. But that's a different science fiction story.

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