ANNOTATION:
Poor Reasoning and Vague Generalizations

• First, you ask a question "What is the meaning of life?".
• Second, you give "the quick answer" that "The meaning of life is to increase fitness."
• Third, "in order to start giving the long answer", you examine the key terms in the short answer (not in the question). The examination reveals that several of the key terms can be interpreted in various ways.
• Fourth, you select certain of these interpretations to paraphrase the "short answer", arriving at a foolish statement that "the purpose of (living) organization is to continuously increase future probabilities of encountering this same type of organization."

First, the question "What is the meaning of life?" can have so many different interpretations, and is so psychologically charged (i.e. it already pushes many buttons), that the correct thing is to carefully examine the key terms of the question. Clearly the place to begin is with "life". You said:

"in this context it normally means our present being here on earth, but this may be generalized to include life as a particular type of organization and development characterizing biological organisms, and even more universally as organization and development in general."

I'll start with it the other way around. Life, in biology, is an emergent property at the level of the cell. If we examine the internal components of a cell, all we have is biochemistry, which differs in no important respect from chemistry you can set in motion in a test tube with a few chemicals off the shelf. Yet, if we look at the cell as a whole, we see that it has a state of organisation that allows it to perpetuate, and we see that it has life. A cell that is irreversibly ruptured, poisoned, etc, loses this property and dies.

The cell is a product of the genes it contains, as they contain the information that specify its construction and functioning. The cell has evolved purely as a mechanism, or vehicle , for the efficient replication of its collection of collaborating genes. Therefore, the property of the cell (and of groups of cells that make orgainsms such as ourselves) that we call life, is no more than a by-product of the replication strategy of groups of genes. There is no meaning in this replication strategy, there is no meaning in life. This is the key lesson of understanding evolution: the genes that replicate the best (such as by collaborating and making living organisms) become more abundant, while those that replicate poorly, disappear. Perfectly simple, and perfectly senseless.

So there is no "meaning" to the simple biological phenomenon called life. Is there a meaning to human existence? Humans are just organisms like the rest. The fact that we are elaborate organisms, with consciousness to boot, just shows that it helps our genes replicate for us to be so. I conclude that there is no special meaning to human existence. We are simply here, and its up to us to make the most of it, though historically we have made it pretty heavy going, interspersing our moments of happiness with extraordinary quantities of human-inflicted human misery.

Returning now to my analysis of your four-step discussion: I've shown that the first, the question of the meaning of life, is fundamentally flawed. The second, your "quick answer" that the "meaning of life is to increase fitness" could be a good answer if, in the third step, you had restricted your understanding of "meaning" to simply the '"what" (definition, present)'. But then in the fourth step you end up with "the purpose of (living) organization...", which I called foolish because "purpose" is the direct opposite of the actual feature of life, which is its meaninglessness, its senselessness.

Understanding these things clearly becomes very important when it comes to ethics. I don't fundamentally disagree with your summary of how we should act:

"by doing things that increase our own long-term fitness, taking into account the fitness of the systems (society, ecosystems) to which we belong. Enhancing long-term fitness is the fundamental good, or basic value of our philosophical system."

But why state it in these evolutionary terms? By doing so, the fact is easily obscured that the fundamental good may be served by thwarting increases in long-term fitness. After all, my fitness is increased if I steal your mate. The fitness of society is increased if it conscripts me and others to conquer another society and grow rich. We should make no mistake about the fact that we may have tendencies toward antisocial behaviour, because it has actually increased the fitness of our ancestors. These are things that we do not wish to perpetuate. It is only by recognising links between evolution and human behaviour that we can hope to live in a more enlightened society.

So I would restate the basic value of your philosophical system as maximising personal and global happiness and longevity. But so what? There are no prizes for philosophizing to arrive at this conclusion, because Blind Freddy knew it yesterday. And if philosophizing just means speaking in generalities, with nary a real example thrown in, then it won't get us any closer to our goal, since we must tackle actual problems.

REPLY: One Small Insignificant Detail

Evolution IS Meaning. It requires no more definition or justification. We exist in order to evolve. That is our only true purpose other than to get drunk, have sex, and smile. Which, at a simplified level, can be discussed as a part of social and even intellectual evoltion.

PS

I agree whole-heartedly with the rest of your commentary.

If you want (or can spare the moment) Please reply to me here, as I have yet to actually acquire an eMail address.

REPLY:

I do not say that living organization has an in-built teleological purpose, that it was built to reach some far away end. I just note that life functions "as if" it tries to optimize certain variables or reach certain goals (basically those that increase fitness). If systems would not have these properties, they simply would not be selected. Variation is at the most fundamental level blind , and thus cannot foresee the future, but all mechanisms that allow a shortcutting of blind exploration by making possible some partial anticipation (e.g. vision as a way to perceive obstacles before you run into them) are intrinsically useful for survival and thus tend to be selected. See Campbell's concept of vicarious selector. Evolution itself is not goal-directed, but many of its products are. Frank:

"And if philosophizing just means speaking in generalities, with nary a real example thrown in, then it won't get us any closer to our goal, since we must tackle actual problems."

"the fact is easily obscured that the fundamental good may be served by thwarting increases in long-term fitness. After all, my fitness is increased if I steal your mate. The fitness of society is increased if it conscripts me and others to conquer another society and grow rich. We should make no mistake about the fact that we may have tendencies toward antisocial behaviour, because it has actually increased the fitness of our ancestors. These are things that we do not wish to perpetuate. It is only by recognising links between evolution and human behaviour that we can hope to live in a more enlightened society."

". I sum, the only real disagreement I see between Frank and me concerns the semantics of the words "meaning" and "philosophy". Apart from that, I agree with his thoughtful comments.

I also agree with Corey Cottrell's rejoinder that evolution is meaning: we exist "in order to" evolve, i.e. become more fit. The "in order to" should again be interpreted prgamatically as the "what ... are for" of Dawkins, not as a supernatural force that moves us inexorably to some final goal or point Omega.

REPLY: ever considered this

"Whether you are interested in Moksha, Liberation, Freedom, Transformation, you name it, you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it is the same thing."

"We don't want to be free from fear. All that we want to do is to play games with it and talk about freeing ourselves from fear."

"Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is 'you'. There is nothing there inside you other than that."

"When the movement in the direction of becoming something other than what you are isn't there any more, you are not in conflict with yourself."

REPLY: A Questionable Starting Point

I belive that Mr. van de Loo's reply has a very questionable starting point:

"If we examine the internal components of a cell, all we have is biochemistry, which differs in no important respect from chemistry you can set in motion in a test tube with a few chemicals off the shelf. "

If it does, why can't I just cook up a nice live pet for myself at home after a trip to my local chemistry supply store?  The history of scientific inquiry, particularly where it addressed the mistaken explanations of the natural world by theologians and philosophers, has been a relentless and fruitful application of reductionism.  We have been able to reduce chemistry to the level of tinker-toys:  Just understand the molecular principles that govern how the atoms combine, and you can duplicate the molecule.

That is, until we opened up the cell and discovered that the tinker-toys within are not simply combining via molecular principles (even though these are obviously in play):  some of the tinker-toys are being assembled by other tinker-toys, using an information system stored in the structure of yet another.  Living organism do not grow.  They are built.  This is so different from being "just biochemistry" that science authors are unable to describe it without resorting to metaphors of processes and objects that we have ourselves created.  And although we all may agree that evolution describes the general phenomenon of this mechanism as it generates greater levels of fitness, it does not explain the mechanism itself.  

I believe that we should be very, very careful about casually tossing around terms like "meaninglessness" and "senseless" when talking about life--that should be as much of a luxury to the rational mind as is the idea that one's religious text of choice is inerrant.