Life's Purpose: A Psychiatrist Has the Answer

I'm always interested in hearing what people have to say about life's purpose (while noting that a sizeable number who are overwhelmingly atheist assert that life has no purpose).

Yale Associate Professor of Psychiatry Samuel Wilkinson thinks he has found the answer based on his studies of evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology.

In an interview with Yale News, Wilkinson discusses what inspired his fascination with understanding life’s purpose, how nature instills in humans a “dual potential,” and the evolutionary forces that spur us to be our more altruistic selves.

“When you combine the concept that we are free to choose with the dual potential of human nature, to me this strongly implies that life is a test,” said Wilkinson, who is also director of the Yale Depression Research Program. “The purpose of life is to choose between the good and evil impulses inherent within us.

“This seems to be written into our DNA.”

...I totally acknowledge we have a capacity for selfishness, but in other ways we also have a deep capacity for altruism. In a way that was unexpected to me, evolution has shaped us such that we are pulled in different directions. This is a core example of how nature has left us conflicted, what in the book I call the “dual potential” of human nature.

Prof. Wilkinson has a scientific explanation for the selfish and altruistic duality of human behavior--it's built into our DNA. But I'm still at a loss to see why one is necessarily better than the other, or why life is a "test" to see whether we will choose altruism. Who is the Grader?

Science is excellent at explaining why things work, but it's so far been lacking in determining answers to basic questions, for example, if I died today did my life have value? By the way, by what criteria does one determine that value?

Or maybe I had value because I left children behind. So that's it: propagate the species? If so, individual rats and cockroaches do more for their species than I did for mine. And so on and so forth.

For now I'll search for answers in the writings of philosophers and theologians rather than psychiatrists. One good things about Prof. Wilkinson's attempt is that it prompted me to get cracking on reading Paul Tillich and Teilhard de Chardin while there's still time to do so.