Modern life often defaults to a “Passive Nihilism”—the quiet assumption that if there is no God, no absolute meaning handed down to us, we are free to invent our own. Often, to survive this cold reality—inventing one’s own meaning in life is a lot of pressure—we unassertively devise meaning by filling our time with the urge to deeply engage in personal projects, careers, hobbies, or pets. Sometimes they’re gluttonous endeavors, like partying until 6AM at a club in Ibiza. Other times they feel more meaningful, like stepping back to gaze upon a painting you’ve just finished. They’re all rewarding in their ways, but they’re also ephemeral “memes” which we can’t take with us after death; rarely can we leave them behind. These human undertakings leave us with more questions than answers, a hint of dissatisfaction, and a hair of loneliness….
But there is a deeper meaning already woven into our human existence, one that does not require us to invent anything; it only asks us to recognize it. You are the current iteration of an incredible “pile of work”—the collective efforts, emotions, and persistence of 20,000 generations of ancestors. You are the result of 330,000 years of a single algorithm running recursively. A single, continuous, connection home with a startling 100% success rate.
The Components of Human Existence
To understand this opportunity for deep satisfaction, we must define what “Human Existence” actually is. It’s not defined by a straw man debate about whether genes or memes are more important or satisfying. It’s not about whether humans have soul or life after death. It’s about Stoicly embracing the physical self, the culture one finds themselves in, and personal identity that you have developed.
It is an architecture where all three components are important to the integrity of the whole. Should any layer be compromised or fail to propagate, the continuity of human existence is effectively broken:
- The Physical Self (Hardware): In biology, this is the genotype and phenotype. In computers, this is the hardware. It is Darwinian, you receive it at birth, and you cannot change the underlying specs during your lifetime. To get new, upgraded hardware, you must produce offspring. Genetics offers a mechanism to pass down what’s best for the the genes, not the species. It is the infrastructure that allows the rest of the system to run.
- The Culture (Firmware): Unlike the physical self, culture can be updated during your lifetime. We take the values we were given, refine them through your experiences, and in collaboration with all of the currently living generations, we change it. It changes faster than hardware, but less quickly than software. It is Lamarckian, if the Giraffe stretches it’s neck to reach tall branches, it passes this longer neck on to future generations. Culture offers a mechanism to enforce what’s best for the species, not the individual genes. This separates Homo from almost every other Genus. Culture must be compatible with the hardware of all of the individuals, or it cannot be flashed to the drive.
- Personal Identity (Software): This is the most malleable layer—your unique personality, quirks, and daily choices. It is the application running in memory. It changes spatially (based on who you spend time with) and temporally (as you age). It is also Lamarckian in nature, but only needs to be compatible with your individual hardware, not the rest of society. This is where you feel the most powerful, but it’s a trap to ignore the hardware and firmware aspects of human existence.
Human Existence is the sum of these three layers working in unison. To transmit the full integrity of human existence is more than the replication of genetic sequences, or the generation of novel ephemeral memes; it is to pass on the hardware, the firmware, and the software together in an elegant recursion, the way all Hominidae have. Secular Incrementalism is the sublime resistance of a universe trending toward silence—refusing to let the oldest network connection in history to reach its terminal state; generation after generation, piling our collective gravitas into the universe.
Gaming The System
Many intellectuals make leaps of logic without realizing it. Sam Harris argued “If we were true Darwinians, every man’s deepest desire would be to continually donate sperm to sperm banks so that he could sire thousands of children for whom he’d have no further responsibility.” and while I agree with the conclusion implied in the argument – there’s more to life than procreation – he’s wrong about why. Evolution provides no mechanism to operate on the “offspring” primitive in this manner. His quote should say, “If we were true Darwinians, every man’s deepest desire would be to have sex all day until the hormonal pathway is satisfied after an orgasm” – and that’s true. There’s more to life because there’s a hormonal feedback loop. Young males can only have sex so many times per day before the desire recedes, and they focus on other things.
Similarly, Jordan Peterson argues that expected value of offspring between males and females plays a role in why some cultures value male offspring more than female offspring. He argues that while most females will create offspring, it will typically be with a single male, but a male offspring might sire hundreds of offspring with multiple females thereby increasing his footprint in the genetics of the population. It is argued that parents might perceive this as a higher expected value, and hence dedicate more resources to the male offspring. This logic is subtly broken in several ways. First, if the male is siring offspring with many females, many of those females are likely pair-bonded with other males as well, defraying the effects. Second, based on culture, individual parents could indeed game the expected value of male offspring, but why would they? There’s no mechanism for our genetics to understand expected value 10 generations from now. No, a much more plausible explanation is social in nature, specifically economic and tied to property ownership or status. Or, perhaps an even more plausible explanation is, males mostly fail to find pair-bonded females, and hence procreate, so parents started dedicating more time to them to try and help, and that became fixated in the culture. The desire for grand kids seems almost universal, and strong. This is the simplest answer.
Darwinian evolution breeds simple urges in, nothing more. The rest of the complexity is emergent. Culture is emergent, and enforces it’s own rules about who eats, who gets access to mates, and who influences the culture through status. While there is nothing morally wrong with gaming the system, we shouldn’t confuse “hacking the rewards” with “ignoring the purpose” of the mechanisms which make human existence possible. When a child observes your behavior, absorbs your reactions, and hears your voice daily for decades, that is a truly powerful force that strengthens all three tiers of the architecture: hardware, firmware, and software.
On Suicide
We often think of suicide as a tragedy of the individual, but there’s nuance that needs to be understood:
- Individual Suicide: This is an immediate destruction of the hardware. If the individual has no offspring, this destroys the firmware and software as well. But, if the individual has already created offspring, they potentially live on in every way. This could be why suicide has not completely bred itself out of the humanity.
- No Offspring: Choosing not to have offspring is the voluntary disconnection of a 330,000-year-old network connection back in time. There is no way around this. Live to 20 and commit suicide, or live to the ripe old age of 110, it’s inconsequential. While a sibling carries 50% of your hardware and much of your cultural firmware (providing some system redundancy), your specific fork—the unique cultural and behavioral updates you’ve made during your life—is deleted instantly. This is a “rich” form of suicide because it appears to be a lifestyle choice, but it is functionally a decision to end 20,000 generations of recursion.
Once the logic is laid out clearly, the gravitas made more apparent. Today, we have developed tools like birth control to “game” this reward function.
The Primitive Primitives
Intellectuals like Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson often make the mistake of over-complicating this with “expected value” math or “millions of descendants.” But the hardware doesn’t calculate expected value. It operates on simple primitives.
The system doesn’t “want” babies; it wants to satisfy the recursive reward function, constantly testing for loneliness and horniness**.** Spend time with other humans and the loneliness goes away; if that time goes really well, the horniness goes away too! In the intellectually primordial world of early Hominidae, much like any mammal, our ancestors didn’t have a concept of genetic legacy; they:
- Saw movement
- Identified the movement as animate or not
- If animate, made a quick decision:
- Eat – food
- Fight – foe
- Fuck – potential mate
Conclusion: The Recursive Mandate
Secular Incrementalism is the conscious decision to paint on the canvas of human existence, with all of the colors in the palette. participating in the existence that made us possible, not merely hack the rewards. Meaning isn’t a gluttonous, narcissistic projection we cast onto the void; it is a recognition of the body of work—the joy, the struggle, and the persistence—of the 40,000 individuals (we each have two ancestors) who kept the network connection open. We may be too far away, or in a completely different time window from any other intelligent life forms in the universe, but we can temporally and spatially connect to the only aliens we know to have existed, right here on Earth.
The most beautiful and elegant way to exist is to ensure the human existence carries on. It is the way we move from the the dull compulsion of the economic, to the stoic joy of full human existence—with all of it’s pomp and circumstance.