Except that we're not. We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA. There are some ancillary effects of this (like sex and eating and the internet) but it's not like life doesn't have a purpose at all. It's just not a particularly hifallutin' one.
If we're here to make copies of our DNA, then one has to ask what the DNA is here for, and we're back in the same place.
The point someone like Watts is making is that even if we're just DNA replicators, that which is being replicated holds this capacity for playfulness and the enjoyment of play, which confers some broader notion of playfulness to the conditions that brought about our DNA.
I recently watched "My Octopus Teacher" (worth a watch), and watching the behaviors of the featured octopus as it goes about it's daily life doing octopus things, even including what appears to be literal playtime with schools of fish, it's easy to see the point Watts was trying to make.
DNA is not here "for" anything, DNA is a Thing That Happens. Given the right combination of atoms, a source of energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over.
> that which is being replicated holds this capacity for playfulness and the enjoyment of play
Sure, but that's just a side-effect of the process. It's not the reason we exist.
I agree, and my point was that saying:
> We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA.
Just kicks the can down the road. We're not here to make copies of our DNA any more than DNA is here to make copies of us.
> Sure, but that's just a side-effect of the process. It's not the purpose of our existence.
So, too, are we, as is replication itself. It happens to be the only reason the process continues, but it has no inherent purpose any more than playfulness does. It just is. This could also be framed as: we are the process.
> Given the right combination of atoms, a source of energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over.
All of these things happened before Darwin was involved, and while I understand the point you're making, I'm calling this out because Natural Selection is again just a language and labeling game that maps the process relative to our experience of it and our understanding of various scientific disciplines.
None of this brings us closer to a "purpose", per se.
The statement that "existence is fundamentally playful" is not a claim about purpose either. But rather, an observation about how things appear to be, based on our ability to understand them.
Some people would also say that existence is fundamentally mathematical.
Existence can be fundamentally a lot of things. One isn't taking away from the other.
I knowingly married a woman who is unable to bear children. We adopted two, and I don't feel in any way that my life is less for not spawning.
Here is a hypothetical: in scenario 1, you are an average Joe and have three kids. In scenario 2, due to your dedication to medical research, you never have kids, but you develop a new drug that eliminates diarrhea and saves millions of lives every year. Do you really think scenario 1 is a more meaningful life than scenario 2?
No, because humans are not born self-sufficient. Humans have to raise their offspring, not merely produce them, in order to be successful.
> I knowingly married a woman who is unable to bear children. We adopted two, and I don't feel in any way that my life is less for not spawning.
Your genes are not just in you, they are also in other humans, so your genes can improve their reproductive fitness by producing people like you who help to raise other people's children (in which those genes also reside).
With that in mind I'll leave your last question as an exercise :-)
According to your initial comment, the purpose of live is to reproduce, and if that was the end of it, then having as many kids as possible and let the seeds fall where they may is a winning strategy (and many animals do exactly that), but for humans it is a winning strategy only if one can get other people to raise your kids, which means it works only if the cohort of freeloaders is small enough.
As for the genetics part, it seems you think there is an altruism gene(s) and that I can somehow determine if others have the same genes that I have and then invest in them. The idea of an altruism gene is dubious; if if such a thing exists, the mathematics say it is a dead end. The two kids I adopted (from another ethnic group even) are far less likely to have "my" gene than had I married a woman who could bear my children.
The source of my altruism (as such -- we adopted to fulfill our own emotional needs) is far more determined by culture and circumstance that by the influence of genes.
That last point closes the circle for my own stance: meaning is cultural and personal. It makes me scratch my head when Christian friends try to convince me that their morality is not objective because it is based on the Bible, but we can see historically that different people/generations interpret the Bible and justify whatever morality is in vogue at the time. It is no more fixed than that of atheists.
Yes. And it turns out that in most large mammals, including humans, the former strategy beats the latter.
In smaller mammals, like rodents, the latter strategy beats the former.
And your point would be...?
> The idea of an altruism gene is dubious; if if such a thing exists, the mathematics say it is a dead end.
Not so. In fact it's the exact opposite:
That's where I find purpose: in being useful to others.
This is just essentialism. We can draw that line at any arbitrary point. I can say Darwin isn't running the show, Einstein is. You can try to point out the ways biology effects our lives and argue that it should hold a more privileged position, and I can wave it away and insist you're being sentimental. "I wish that were true, but we're just rocks that happen to think and reproduce, nothing more."
And just as credibly, I can say that things are at the level of human abstraction and that life is about farting around. I can point out how profoundly conceptions at this level effect our lives, and argue that it should hold a privileged position.
You're free to set your standard and the arbitrary point you prefer, but that doesn't devalue anyone else's decision.
It's just a philosophy that doesn't resonate with you because you have a different perspective, that might make it less useful to you but it isn't really a mark against it. I don't eat steak and have no desire to, but I don't argue when people say that steak is delicious.
If you can't use biology to explain society, then based on your reasoning about why Darwinism is preferable to relativity, I think you should reconsider whether or not this is true universally rather than for you in particular.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-secret-evolut...
Democracy and a night on the town are a little more challenging. Both are actually pretty recent inventions, having existed only for a few thousand years, which is nothing on an evolutionary time scale, and the jury is still out over whether either will survive in the long run. (Personally I'll give you long odds against.) But the short version of the answer is that genes have only very indirect control over the brains they build, and sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own (so to speak) and goals of their own, some of which can be in direct conflict with the goals of the genes that built them. For example, birth control pills are an quite literally an existential threat to our genes. So in the long run one would predict that our genes will tend to build brains that have an instinctive aversion to things like birth control. But the dynamics of human societies are off-the-charts complicated and non-linear, so who knows?
This article is just supposition. "Monogamy forms the basis of complex social networks." As opposed to polygamy...?
"Females preferred reliable providers to aggressive competitors." Pretty impressive how their attitudes were preserved in the fossil record.
The article is pretty clearly written from the perspective that polygamy is weird and unnatural, noting that we have an "imperfect record " of monogamy - as if societies where this was the norm were a mistake.
The article goes on to make it clear this is a controversial idea, not one that has wide acceptance in this community. If you have a better article or a better argument to present I'll check it out, but I don't see why I would accept this argument.
> But the short version of the answer is that genes have only very indirect control over the brains they build, and sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own ...
> But the dynamics of human societies are off-the-charts complicated and non-linear, so who knows?
I think you've conceded the point.
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I think it's both, spread our DNA and faff around in between reproductive times. But there is no imperative whatsoever, and no one will judge your preference at the end. On a long enough timescale, even Einstein's impact is lost in the cosmic background noise.
In fact the act of making copies of our DNA might be a great example of playful work. Sex is fun and it has the capacity to spread our genes.
That's an interesting idea, but I don't buy it. I think playfulness requires a brain.
How would you distinguish "playful" chemistry from "serious work" chemistry?
The original link was about finding meaning after all, right?