Life's Goal (the Meaning of Life)

Prompted by Kaneko's post here I thought I would give my thoughts on the goal of living.

More than any other species humans work together in groups for the common good. All group strengthening behavior is viewed as good while all behaviors that tend to weaken the group are seen as bad. This is a genetic development since strong groups are more likely to pass on their genes compared to weak groups. Everyone knows what ants can do socially with a very limited brain and the study of similarly simple minded creatures gave rise to the field of sociobiology. Our nearest genetic relatives, the Chimpanzees, are group oriented as well but not to the degree as we humans. A short summary is here: Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members.

But humans are still individuals with inherited behaviors, motivations, and emotions geared towards selfishness resulting in a complex mix of emotions begging to be put into some sort of coherent framework for living. This means we, unique among the animals, have a choice in how we live our life.  We can shift the nature of our being towards selfness or groupness within the constraints of the deep emotions and motivations we were born with.

So why choose groupness over selfness in this day and age when we are beyond the small tribal stage of civilization. Both reason, spiritual transcendance, metaphysics, and consciousness give the same answer with their different approaches.

Reason:
Only by working together can humanity overcome the future challenges to its existence. This includes over-population, environmental degradation, and warfare. Only together can we keep expanding our collective knowledge that will help guide us in our struggle for survival as a species. Thus groupness must be extended to cover all of humanity and not just one's own culture, religion, or nation. This extension will require a new transcendent world view.

Spirtual:
Those special people who are able to reconcile their conflicting internal emotions via new mental constructs and lifesyle to find internal peace turn out to be loving, understanding, and light bearing. This love is not limited but extends to all of humanity.

Metephyics:
As seems likely our 3D universe was created out of a higher dimensional space consisting of dimensions that include all our conscious sensation qualities. Any moving process that has any kind interaction between its elements tends towards equalibrium and uniformity and such would seem to be the case for any concievable eternal moving cyclic process that could trigger creation. To keep the cycle going wourld require something to slowly degrade or build up to eventually trigger a catastrophic event (creation) to set things right.Possibly creation itself would set things right but perhaps the purpose of self-assembled universes is to create creatures that can connect to the conscious sensations in order to combine them together or strenghen their combination in the form of a soul of some kind. If this is the case then the weakening of conscious bonds is what triggered creation and its restoration is the purpose of creation and we humans have a part in that by strenghening the collective consciousness of all people.

Consciousness
We humans seemed to have evolved connections to certain conscious sensations for the purpose of some sort of extra sensory communication of perceptual and emotional biases. The location of conscious sensations in the brain from electrical stimulation studies on awake patients undergoing brain surgury (no pain sensors in the brain) show that conscious sensations originate not in the area involved with reasoning or memory but in the primary sensory cortices and primay emotional centers. So some sort of communication seems to be the only possible explanation under certain mental states of perhaps both the sender and receiver. This also means we humans have potential connections to each other that are beyond our rational control. To gives the famous phrase from John Donne No man is an island a deeper and more intimate meaning.

If this metaphysical idea is somewhat correct it would tie together the evolution, reasoning, spiritual, and consciousness drives towards oneness or groupness.