Why are we here? What’s our purpose? These are questions perhaps as old as humanity. And yet no lasting answer has emerged to satisfy our curiosity. Some have argued that before we can hope to answer such probing questions, we must first know exactly what we’re inquiring about. For instance, surely the question of “life’s meaning” demands we first know what “life” and “meaning” are. But what if this wasn’t so? What if the question of “life’s meaning” isn’t so much about life and meaning as it is about the systems that can understand the intention of this question? If so, then I ask, what are those systems and how do we study them? Before trying to answer this question, I suggest taking a step back, since hard problems can sometimes be solved by using new theoretical tools. In particular, there seems to be some utility in first examining two elementary concepts in mathematics: ‘nothingness’ and ‘being undefined’. By applying these concepts in the context of meta-mathematics, we can produce a meta-mathematical formulation of the empty set. This then helps to illuminate a simple procedure for detecting rules in recurrent systems. And with this procedure, we can define a function for measuring ‘critical explainability’ and then use it to show that a system is only a rational and reflexive semantic agent when it grows in critical explainability. I then posit that we are such agents and we have this characteristic. If true, this may be an answer to the question of life’s meaning.
Alexi Parizeau