This is one of the main works of art by a fellow known as Fred Dagg, whose oeuvre includes the discovery and commentating the sport of farnarkling, and who wrote the real New Zealand national anthem. In it, he explains the meaning of life, in 1977 to the presenter of the ABC's Science Show 100th episode, Robin Williams (no relation) who was choking in the background for most of it.
I think that this is a particularly significant occasion for the program and it seems imminently suitable that we should ignore very briefly the peripheral areas however valuable, in the wonderful tapestry of science, and I think we should have a crack at addressing ourselves instead to the perpetual cosmic giant killer: the question of what is life? It’s been worrying scientists for thousands of years. Mind you, they’re a jumpy bunch of garçons, your science boys, and they do tend to worry very easily, and I feel that the very least we can do is to spend a few moments of our very valuable time in quiet and restful contemplation as to what it’s all about and why we’re here - and then after that we can have some lunch. Now, as to the business of when life actually got going, there’s very, very little argument amongst the lads who are working in that area. Of course, some of them are getting on a bit now and the smallest upset would have them toppling into the afterlife, so they do like to sit round and agree with one another and knock off the departmental port.
The actual day of the beginning of life is not known, because of course the National Geographic was in a very adumbral stage at that stage. It is known though and generally agreed by the boys, that if the first man who ever lived was alive today he’d be pulling around about 47 million dollars a week in old age pensions. Now science slowly, with the help of these discoveries, is piecing together the story of man’s evolution and there seems very little doubt that man is descended from Neanderthal primates, as we scientists call them, or in lay terms mummy and daddy. Now of all the many turning points and crucial stages from primitive ape-like creature through to the sophisticated and marginally less primitive ape-like creature that you see about you at zoos and football matches, the most curious development of all is that of the human brain.
Now the main shortcoming of the human brain is that it has led to all this discussion about the meaning of life, which is not really very healthy. It’s quite a dangerous business, because the more you think about life the less likely you are to reach a conclusion - that is, if you don’t count including that you aren’t going to reach a conclusion as an actual conclusion. Now of all the attempts to work out what life is actually about, one of the more interesting ones were the boys that reckoned that you don’t know anything. You can’t know stuff these guys reckoned, because when you think about it - and you’ll just have to accept the term ‘think about it’ there until the man arrives with the official phrase book - all your so-called knowledge about the world is based on your perceptions. And your perceptions are just a touch more fallible than people have cared to admit.
Robyn Williams: You’re here talking about Bishop Berkeley and the solipsists, of course?
Fred Dagg: Yes, Bishop Berkeley whose brother, I believe, is the captain of India. Now it has been suggested by the Bishop that you can’t know things because your perceptions are notoriously fallible. For instance, the visual sense has been known to play tricks. Now sometimes when you think you see something you actually don’t see it, and sometimes you don’t see something or you say you don’t see it and it’s common knowledge around the village that you saw it. And of course that can lead to trouble. Now you can’t go drawing any conclusions, this is what these garçons reckon, from that sort of thing or you’ll make a monkey of yourself in open court.
Now the whole business of doubt was perfected and refined a little later on by a character named Rene Descartes, who was a member of the French nation, and after he’d finished with it there wasn’t a whole lot of mileage left in it. And the up and coming apprentice thinkers decided to give the whole area a swerve and get onto something with a bit more class. What Rene did was he started doubting things. Now once you start doubting your perceptions you get onto realising that you can’t be sure whether you’re actually here or maybe only think you’re here, which is a bit of a worry and it’s only a matter of moments before you’re picking spots of light off the wall and putting them in a basket and pretty soon you’ll find yourself in a tight white overcoat and a room full of Napoleons and Lord Nelsons - which is the principle fallacy of Rene’s idea.
Now of course in the 20th Century we have produced a fair array of theories about what life’s actually about, and probably the existentialists take the buttered confection for getting closest to thinking they had it all worked out. They talk about how terrible life was and how they didn’t know if they’d really get to the weekend, they reckoned life was a pretty dreadful business and was filled with a thing called ennui. Now ennui is a terrible thing but it seems to have roughly the same effect as terminable boredom. Ennui actually is a French word meaning Henry, and the story goes that once you get a touch of the Henrys it’s all downhill and the only way to relieve the symptoms is whip down the harbour and pull a wave over your bonce and call it a day. Now from these examples you can see the dangers of thinking too much about what life is about and whether or not it’s worth living.
Now I have studied most of the better known theories and if I understand them at all, which is a pretty dubious proposition, and if I’m here at all, which again, there is some doubt, I must say that they’re not really very helpful all these theories. Not really very helpful at all. Now a mate of mine, a bloke named Bruce Bayliss, he reckons that he exists; he’s quite positive that he exists and if he doesn’t exist he reckons why does he have to pay tax. Now he reckons that even though he does get the Henrys a bit now and again at the end of the financial year, he’s convinced that he’s here and if some people reckon they’re not here then that’s fine with Bruce and they can buy their own beer. He seems to, in his terms at least, have dispensed more or less completely with the traditional worries about his own existence, although there are those who claim that Bruce is a wee bit closer to the simian primates than most people reckon.
Now Bruce is called a naïve realist and I don’t know that he’s not right myself. I’ve seen a few existentialists in me time, I’ve been to funerals, and they don’t seem anywhere near as happy about things as Bruce does. And if we’re all imagining we’re here until we image we’ve bitten the dust, then I think it’s a lot easier on the wife and kids if we imagine ourselves to be a bit happy about it. Now I’m not suggesting we all become like Bruce, it wouldn’t do to revert completely to being chimps, but somewhere in between Bruce and the rest of the scientific world there lurks a workable hypothesis, which I reckon we should all get our teeth into.
Enjoy...
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