Eureka! I think I’ve just found the answer to three questions in one and the same insight:
1. What constitutes identity?
2. What motivates people’s actions?
3. What is the meaning of life?
Here’s the insight itself:
Humans need a coherent and continuous self-image.
Our experience of identity is a story. When the story becomes incoherent or inconsistent with itself, we have a hard time coping. Enter the state of identity crisis. This crisis can be solved either by adjusting the self-image (e.g. through afterconstruction of motivations) or through changing behavioural patterns (the latter requires more work and is thus less likely to occur).
This must be the reason why many have problems with the thought of identifying themselves with a hypothetical copy of themselves, or with sudden changes in general. The continuity is broken, and it takes a while to reconstruct the narrative so that the transition from one state to another becomes less noticeable.
We have a hard time admitting that we can be reduced to a configuration, one which changes all the time. The atoms in our bodies are exchanged, new experiences, impressions and circumstances change our personalities. Negligibly so from one second to another, but palpably over long spans of time. When the change is abrupt it hurts, but even slow changes can be painful if we afterwards fail to see a logical explanation behind them.
The motivations behind our actions simply stem from our need for a coherent self-image, and the justification of them is about upholding the narrative constituting our life as continuous. That’s why there are so many different moral systems and religious doctrines. None of them are necessarily more true than others; they’re just different stories. Stories about the world for us to fit ourselves into.
That’s also where the question of the meaning of life comes into existence. It is probably impossible to determine whether it has an objective answer, but the root to the longing for meaning is simply the wish that Life, the Universe and Everything shall be a continuous story. That’s why we’re prone to seeing cause and effect where there is none; to fill all the plotholes in the narrative of existence. The sense of each event serving a purpose grants peace of mind.
All this is because we handle information most effectively by constructing narratives. The world isn’t a coherent story, because it contains quantum mechanical randomness and chaotic systems. But we remember it better if we tell it as such. From mythological campfire stories to scientific articles.
Does it have something to do with the development of language, or just biological prerequisites? Would an artificial intelligence necessarily be constrained by the same needs? Is it possible to free oneself from narrativistic thinking, to some degree, or does the emotional need for existence to make sense run too deep?
I don’t know. What do you think? Am I onto something here, or am I out on a bicycle ride (as we say in Sweden)?
Love and philosophy,
Winterdragon
