You’ve started with Antonio Damasio’s Descartes' Error. Why is that top of your list? 

The book isn’t actually about the meaning of life, but it’s incredibly important for pursuing the topic in a useful way. It came out in 1994 and it had a huge impact. There are probably two main advances in the book that I hadn’t seen in previous work in philosophy or psychology or other fields. The first is that he puts a big stress on the importance of emotions to rationality. People often think that rationality and emotions are in conflict with each other. You hear people say ‘Stop being emotional, be rational.’ What I learned from Damasio is that that is just not a good way of looking at it. By drawing on famous examples, such as Phineas Gage, and by drawing on his really deep knowledge of neuroscience, he shows ways in which rationality, especially the kind of rationality that is involved in decision-making, really does require having your emotions working well. 

The second respect in which this was a breakthrough book is the way in which it understood emotion in terms of what the brain does – not as a kind of abstract computational process (the way a lot of ideas at the time about thinking worked) but very much tied in with the particular brain processes. 

So the insights are: firstly, emotions matter to thinking about how you should live your life, and, secondly, the brain matters to thinking about emotions. So if you put those two things together, you get a different approach to thinking about the meaning of life: one which takes emotion seriously, and the other which takes the nature of the brain seriously. 

Do you want to give an example?

A starting point for a lot of Damasio’s research was the 19th century case of Phineas Gage. He was a railroad worker who took a rod through his head, and it should have killed him, but he survived, despite the fact he clearly had a hole in his head. What’s really interesting is that his personality changed. He retained his ability to use words articulately, and he was certainly OK doing mathematics. But, basically, he became a jerk. He went from being a responsible employee and a good family person to being someone who was very difficult to get along with. So the brain damage he got didn’t affect his reasoning ability, but it really affected his behaviour in negative ways. What Damasio discovered, using the old pictures of where Phineas Gage had gotten the rod through his head, is that it had damaged a part of his brain that was very important for connecting high-level reasoning with the emotions. Then Damasio, who is a neurologist, was able to find similar kinds of damage in a bunch of patients that he was treating in Iowa at the time. So this was a way of getting at how crucial the interconnections between verbal and mathematical reasoning on the one hand, and emotional processes on the other, are to enabling people to function well as human beings. And that becomes really crucial for assessing what it is to find a meaningful life. It isn’t just a matter of being able to reason about how you should live your life; it’s a question of getting your emotions engaged in a way that makes your brain work, to enable you to find meaning in life.  

Before we get to that, tell me about your next book, The Really Hard Problem. What is the really hard problem?

This book is by Owen Flanagan who is one of the best people currently working in the philosophy of mind. He’s starting off with an idea from the philosophy of mind called the hard problem. The hard problem is the problem of figuring out how a physical system like the brain can have consciousness. And it certainly is a difficult problem. It’s one on which lots of progress is being made right now, though it’s still not at all solved. Flanagan has written a bunch of books that are very well informed by current work in psychology and neuroscience, and he’s also written about the hard problem. But in this book he is dealing with what he calls ‘the really hard problem’, which is the problem of the meaning of life. If, as he thinks, the human being is not anything that’s supernatural, if there’s no such thing as a soul, there’s no such thing as immortality, if, as Damasio assumed, we’re just a biological system, how is it possible that we could have meaningful lives? That’s what he takes to be the really hard problem. And many people have reacted the same way. Lots of people have thought that if there isn’t a God, and if there isn’t religious truth, then life is inherently meaningless. How, if you take a more secular, naturalistic, scientific approach, can you find meaning in life? And he’s got some very interesting things to say about that. 

It’s certainly a big question.

It’s the question I try to tackle in my book. But his approach… 

Yes, what’s his solution?

He doesn’t actually have a solution, but it’s a very good book. There’s a lot of discussion of Buddhism in it. He’s very interested in Buddhism, not as a religion, but as a way of life. He takes a lot of practical ideas from the Dalai Lama – such as having positive emotions and avoiding conflicts as recipes for finding meaning in your life. He pursues various avenues for thinking about how there can be meaningful lives in a physical world. But he doesn’t have a crisp answer. Nevertheless, it’s an extremely intelligent exploration of the question. 

Tell me more.

What he does in a fair amount of detail is to consider the relation between Buddhism and the philosophical questions.