 Thank you so much. Let's just start my timer so we don't overrun. There's lots to get through. So yes, we've got two halves to this talk. One part about philosophers, one part about babies. So we just check. Should I have hands at any philosophers in the room? Phew. Well, quite sure if he's a philosopher, he says. Any babies in the room? Oh, good. There's some babies. And yeah, so this talk is basically philosophers versus babies. Who knows more about the meaning of life? I'm a baby psychologist, so this might be slightly biased in how it turns out. But, oh, it's just a bit keen there. There we go. This story starts in 2003 when, for reasons, I had the list of every philosopher in this country. And being a geek of a certain generation, whenever I think about philosophers, I think about life, the universe, and everything. And I think, what is the ultimate answer? And, well, we know the ultimate answer. We don't know the ultimate question. But I had a list of every philosopher in the country. So what are you going to do? Oh, no. I wrote to them. I wrote them individually, a letter, posted that out to every single philosopher in the country, and asked them a question. So I asked them, I have it in my head, that you might know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Therefore, I'm writing to ask if you could explain it all to me. Don't be too flattered. I'm writing to every philosopher in the country. So I sent that letter to 644 philosophers. It cost about 250 pounds in postage, but you can't put a price on knowledge. And how many replied? Three, zero. I'm waiting for one particular number. There we go. It was actually 22 replies, which, it's been 19 years now. I think that's all I'm going to get. And that's one other part of the letter I asked them. So I asked if God were required to explain himself, I'm sure she could do it in a few eloquent paragraphs on one crisply type set full scrap sheet. Though as an atheist, I've not tried asking her, and you're welcome to go further. So I said that they could send me something they'd already written or give me a short answer. So I'm going to go through all those answers. I'm going to go through them pretty quickly, so I'm not going to actually read a lot of them out, but I'm going to classify them for you as to whether they're about life, the universe. And it turns out that quite a few of the answers were about God. So we're going to have a category of God or everything or nothing, perhaps. So the first one came just three days later, and it's from Mark Nelson, who said, a good account of meaning of life, the universe and everything, could not be contained in one crisply type set full scrap sheet. Bear that in mind. Moreover, I think it would end up looking a bit religious. So one for God. Second one, there are lots of reasons why life is valuable and worth living, but there are not many of them very informative ways of collecting them into a single category. And he sent me a reading list. He sent me two books I had to read. I'm not going to try summarizing that either. So number three, meaning of life, it's every philosopher's nightmare question. And then drawing and canton, Aristotle and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Quite a short, still a pretty good attempt. But this is good. I'm annoying every philosopher in the country with their nightmare question, but hopefully that means that they've got a prepared answer for it. And then I got number four. Andrew Belsey, Cardiff University. I've been keeping tabs on him because the meaning of life is preparation for death. I hope you are well prepared. Now, I don't know about you. That sounds like a death threat to me. So within four days of starting my project, I had a death threat from a philosopher. As I say, it's been 19 years so far. I think I'm in the clear for now. So already my categorization system is broken. I don't know what this category is. We'll just say this is not about life, it's about death. So that's number four. We'll get speed up a bit from here. So Andrew Zuboff sent me a couple of things to read. An introduction to universalism, which isn't about the universe. And then why should I care about morality? And they were quite good. Number six, his letter wasn't very interesting. It's a nice short thing though. Respect every good you meet and pursue any good you like. The interesting thing with Tim Chappell is what happened to him three years later, when he fell off the side of Ben Nevis. He survived, but in that moment he had this near-death experience. And being a philosopher, he wasn't actually very well-prepared for it, as we'll see in a second, but he did write a paper about it. So he wrote this paper about the fear of death, and I read that, and discovered that the main thing that happened to him was an incredibly English thing that he just felt slightly embarrassed about the trouble that he was causing to his friends by going and dying in this way. He then clearly had quite a big effect on him, because a couple of years later he wrote this paper, Infinity Goes Up on Trial, Must Immortality Be Meaningless. So he's now spent a whole other paper discussing whether he could live forever or not. You probably can't see that, but the whole first page is actually a quote from Douglas Adams. So it's all an explanation of where our bag of the infinitely prolonged. If my students had given me a quote that was a whole page long, I'm not sure I'd have accepted that. But the journal of, oh, you can't see what it is. They didn't seem to mind. So, got a few more. This was, we don't really know the answer, from Harry Lesser. Another vote for God from John Haldane. And then we get to Michael Rush. So he gives me quite a long letter saying that it's not a real question in philosophy. Don't you know that? Or are you trying to catch philosophers out? And then at the very end he gets to this nice line. I think it was Philippa Foote who said that if you ask a philosopher a question, they talk for a bit and you go away no longer understanding your question. So there you go. So I think we can, if we can't ask about the meaning of life and if we buy the claim that there's no purpose, what's left? Well, to quote those well-known kooky funsters, Bill and Ted, be excellent to each other dudes. Aristotle might well have agreed once we'd agreed upon a suitably Greek translation of dudes. And I think we can all learn a lot from that. So that was quite a good answer. And that wins my vote for the philosopher that I actually want to go and have a drink with and discuss this in the pub. How are we doing? Oh, I'm going faster than I expected. So, be excellent to each other. Nice, catchy, simple answer. Can we do any better? Well, number 10, Derek Parfit, the most famous philosopher on this list, one I had actually heard of, based at Oxford, died I think last year. He was the first one that actually wrote about the universe. So he sent me a paper called Why Anything, Why This? Well, he didn't just consider this universe, he considered no universe, every possible universe. And that was, I think the first one that actually completely blew my mind. It didn't have any useful information about the meaning of life, but it was wonderful. He went beyond just a single universe. So thank you, Derek. Another couple that were about life. And quite a few of these, they did send me papers that they'd written elsewhere. And I have read all of the things that people sent me. So, another life. This was great. So, I've got a paper called Some Estonishing Things from Jonathan Gorman. What a great title that was. I've got another one with an email is, I think we might have already gone past it, where the title of the email was The Meaning of Life, and then the content of the email was, For the Meaning of Life, See the Attachment. And the Meaning of Life was attached. It wasn't a very good meaning of life. Another book recommendation. I didn't get around to buying that book, so I don't know what the answer. Well, it wasn't Michael Proudfoot's answer, it was his friend. So I didn't think it completely counted. This was quite a nice response from Norman Jarrus at University of Reading, where he just didn't really say about the meaning of life. He said he'd once been to a really great cricket match at Old Trafford. The sun was shining, had a beer in his hand, and he felt that was lovely. And that's what his blog's post is all about. And that was his nice attempt to capture the meaning of life. So we're up to 15, 16. Oh, dear Casper, I am an economist, not a philosopher. But I'm still going to give you the answer, and he did give me quite a long answer. I think I even wrote back to him to thank him, and then he sent me an even longer answer after that. I think I had to thank him and apologize that I misclassified him. But maybe by now he is a philosopher. We've sort of perked up his interest. Another one that was quite focused on life on Earth. One more about the universe. And, yeah, I didn't understand that one, unfortunately. And a nice short one. So let's have this one. Life has no meaning. Individuals can make their life meaning by thinking about the way they would most like to achieve, what they would most like to achieve, than trying to achieve that. And, yeah, in the letter, I told them that I'm sure they're getting letters from cranks all the time, and that I was no exception to that. So Mark was quite kind to say, no, at least you applied in the way that you asked us this question. Yeah, so nearly at the end, Fiona MacPherson. So this was the very first one. You probably can't see that in there, but she was the very first one to actually quote the Hitchhiker's Guide back to me. So a nice award for her. One more vote for God. And then we get to Dame Nancy Cartwright, Professor at the London School of Economics at the time. I think she's at the University of Durham now. She has nearly as many letters after her name as she has in it. She's got several honorary doctorates, all sorts of fellowships. Her research is on what the logical implications of quantum mechanics are for the foundations of logic. So if anybody can answer the question, what is the meaning of life? It is Dame Professor Nancy Cartwright. Unfortunately, if she does know, she's not going to help me. I have to do my own homework. So there we are. We had 22 philosophers. Ten of them gave me answers that were to do with life. Two managed to talk about the universe. Several said it's not a real question or they're not going to tell me the answer. Three, which is the lesson I thought, said it was God, and then one, death threat as well. So that's pretty good odds for all the philosophers in the country. That is good answers. And if you want the full set of those answers, I was writing a book for NaNoWriMo where you have to write 50,000 words in a month. And to pad it out, make it a bit longer, I added in all of these answers and did a little commentary on them. That book is free to download. It's actually copy left as well. So if you want to take it and change the ending, you can do that. So that's on my website, one monkey slash help yourself. It's also on Amazon. But then a couple of years, actually quite a few years after the book, I came across this potentially ultimate answer. So this was in H plus magazine, an essay called Cosmic Evolution and the Meaning of Life. And pause for one second. I need to get something. So this was a different approach to the answer. This actually, what John was doing was saying, okay, maybe four years ago, I was going to write a book about the philosophers don't think there's an answer that's meaningful to the meaning of life. But is evolution itself meaningful? Has it created more meaning in the universe? Certainly it looks like we're better asking the question, is there a meaning of life than Australopithecus would have been, or the dinosaurs, or sea slugs 200 million years ago, trilobites. So it does seem like maybe we're getting better at answering the question of the meaning of life. And so perhaps the answer is to sort of take that bigger cosmic perspective. So maybe we don't have the answer yet. But evolution and sort of progress, if it is moving towards an answer, hasn't necessarily stopped. It could carry on. We could build something artificial that helps us with this answer. We could have some machine learning. It may or may not be intelligent. It doesn't matter, but it might help with getting us to this answer. And don't just think about the next 10 years. Don't just think about the next century. Think on a cosmic scale. Think in millions of years' time. And then we don't really know what's coming next. It's impossible to tell what's happening in the next 10 years. So a million years, will there be more meaning? There's every chance there would be. In fact you might even think of it as that we're designing a computer. So mind bogglingly complex that we're not worthy to calculate its mere operational parameters. But the one catch with that is that we mustn't destroy it before we get there. Because if we do, then there really is no meaning and no hope of ever knowing the meaning. So that's the essence of John's essay. I really recommend it. It's lovely. And if I had to summarize it in one sentences, don't destroy the world. Let's maybe make a more cheerful version of that to leave the world in a better way than you found it. In fact, let's go and say be excellent to everything. So not just each other, but everything else as well. But the best thing about John's essay is it's quite short. And when I realized this, like, oh, if I print it really small, I probably can fit it on one crisply typed full scope sheet. So bad luck to whichever philosophy that wasn't true. And I hung this in my office. I've actually had a few email exchanges with John and we now pen pals. And yeah, there's also a few free copies here, a bit larger print if anybody wants to find out that at the end. So that is our philosophers. Right. Bang on time. Let's change gear now and talk about what the baby's answer to this is. So this is Cosmo, who is eight weeks old. He already thinks that he's winning at life. I think he is. And that is my day job. So this is me in my office. I'm a developmental psychologist. I study how babies learn about the world. And I've been doing that for 15 or 16 years. And just in 2011, my sister had her second baby there on the, whichever that is, left or right, the little one. That's Mirabelle. And at the time my brother was learning to become a stand up comedian. And I had a thought that as a family activity, my brother could tell jokes to the baby, make the baby laugh, and I could explain with science why the baby was laughing. And this was seemed like a great idea to me, a different way into the minds of babies. A bit more exciting than the way we do it in the laboratory. But my brother wasn't interested. I don't know if you know any stand up comedians, but they think of themselves as artists. And he basically thought this was too easy. He thought making a baby laugh is not a real test of his talents. I mean, he was going to do it, but he just wasn't up for this as a project. But the idea stuck in my head is like, wait a minute, babies do laugh a lot. They laugh more than you and I do. And it's so infectious when it happens. And when something's universal and sort of so powerful as that, there's probably something really important behind it. So I then spent the next 10 years researching what makes babies happy and why they're laughing and what that means about their development. I'll give you one example of something we did in that. So I worked with Imogen Heap who just finished writing the music for Harry Potter and The Cursed Child. And we were challenged to write a song, a scientifically designed song that would make babies happy. So we had lots of babies come into a lab, listen to little snippets of song that Imogen had created. And then we picked the right bit that she built into a whole song. Here we were launching that song to some of our baby music consultants. And when we put it up on YouTube, it got up to 14 million views of that version of the video. If there's time at the end, we may play it for you. That's one thing I've done, surveys of parents all over the world, have them send in videos of laughing babies. Can't go through all of that. But at the end of it, a couple of years ago, I wrote all of that up into a book telling you just that this is, the joyfulness is a really important thing of being a baby. Also, if you speak German, I think the German edition is funnier than the English edition, just judging by the cover. I don't speak German myself, but it looks funnier. And if I had to summarise the book in one sentence, it would be a quote from this guy. Don't worry, this is not Nigel Farage. This is a Danish comedian, Victor Borsch, who says that laughter is the shortest distance between two people. So laughter is something that connects you with another person. And that is so valuable for a baby who doesn't yet speak your language, doesn't yet have any other way to connect, and that does need to connect with other people. So laughter is part of the glue and the magic that sort of brings us together in all sorts of forms. And you can see this in the most popular way of making a baby laugh across the whole world. So I surveyed about 1,500 people, had responses from 60 countries, and everywhere tickling and peekaboo were the two things that make babies laugh. And what's going on in peekaboo is not surprise. It's really, after the first three or four times, even a baby knows what's going on in this game, what's going on in peekaboo is eye contact. You cannot play peekaboo while playing on your phone. You cannot play peekaboo while talking to somebody else. To play peekaboo, you have to make eye contact with that baby. You have to connect with them. You have to share your attention, and you're involved with them. You basically, you have to have a conversation with that baby. It's a conversation without words. It's a conversation that you're equal partners in. When you do that, the baby appreciates what you're doing. They reward you, keep you going on that. In fact, most baby laughter is an invitation for the person they're laughing with to keep doing what they're doing. The best way to make a baby laugh, other than peekaboo, is just to take them seriously, to stop, pay attention to what they're interested in, and when you do, they'll notice and they will be delighted. That is this magic trick that babies have to connect with people, to learn from people, because the most complicated thing in the world to learn about is other people. I'm 48, I still don't understand other people. I'm still learning, and I'm sure I will be learning for my whole life. Imagine what it is like for a baby. There are so many things I have to understand. The most fascinating, the most interesting is people. This is part of the way they go about it. You'd think about it. It ought to be terrifying to be a baby, but they seem happy. What is their secret? What's going on? One of the secrets of happiness is authentic relationships. It is connecting with other people, and babies, obviously, with the unconditional love that they get from families have this, but they also have this disarming quality of telling you exactly what they think. It's great working with babies as psychologists, because unlike anybody, any adult in a psychology experiment, babies aren't thinking, what do you want me to say? They just say what they think and feel. It might not be in words, but it's always honest, and when you interact with a baby, you notice that. You get this feeling that you are getting the baby trying to be themselves with you, and so the interactions, it's part of the magic of how we interact with our babies, that you get this from them. If you want to be happier, improve the quality of your relationships, improve the quality of relationships by being authentic. The other secret to happiness comes from this guy, Michal Cisaint-Mahali, who spent 30 years studying happiness in adults, and looked at the happiest chefs, the happiest violinists, the happiest athletes, the happiest people who were in prison for a life sentence, and in all cases discovered that the secret to this was getting into a flow state, being able to be very absorbed in something in particular. It's a kind of this diagram that encapsulates that, that when you're at the beginning of anything, it's your level of skill and the level of challenge at getting you started. But then if maybe you go a bit too far and you're challenging yourself beyond your skills, that's quite anxious, anxiety provoking, and maybe if things are too easy for the skill that you have, that's quite boring. The challenge is always to remain in this sweet spot where your ability and the challenges that you're setting yourself match up. When you do that, as his research found across all sorts of walks of life, this is really rewarding. This gets you completely absorbed in what you're doing at any given moment, and you feel a sense of purpose and joy in things. He didn't do any research with babies, but initially, until someone from Montessori called him up and said, well, this is what our babies do all the day, every day. Every day in a baby's life is a new challenge. Every day in a baby's life they are succeeding at something they couldn't do the day before, and they love it, and they are delighted. They have purpose. They have this deep satisfaction. They also, I did a bit of research in South America, in Brazil, where we discovered that, let's ask you a question. On an average morning, on a scale of 0 to 10, how happy do you wake up? Anybody that's sort of below 5 on a first thing in the morning? How many people above 5 every morning? A few. Okay. Well, babies in this survey, all on average, we're waking up 8 out of 10 happy and above. This was Brazilian babies. British babies, 7.4 and above. Sorry, Brazilian babies are slightly happier than British babies. But the other one that's a good secret of happiness is a good night's sleep. Good night's sleep is where you're processing all the things that happened the day before. If you're doing new things, if you're absorbing new information, sleep is consolidating that. Your sleep is better. Maybe you wake up happier. One very, very recent part of the secret of the meaning of life just came out just two weeks, a month ago, in Scientific American, where they discovered that all this sense of purpose is great. This sense of mission is important. But actually stopping and enjoying the beauty of the world is also really, really important to feeling that life itself is meaningful. Again, babies could have told you that instantly. Just the way they get captivated by beautiful things that we have overlooked is right there in front of us. And then the very last secret of happiness comes from two and a half thousand years of Buddhist philosophy where basically the whole idea of meditation is not to be emptying your mind and then getting rid of your worries. It's actually to avoid that completely and to be sitting with whatever is happening to you, to being present in the moment. All of the meditation training is actually more about being able to concentrate right on the present. Don't worry about and ruminate on the past concerns. Don't worry about your future things. Just deal with what's in front of you now. That is the Buddhist secret. That is quite tricky. It takes quite a lot of years of meditation to do it as an adult. It's one thing again that babies are little Zen masters. They are present. They are absorbed in what they're doing. In terms of the secret of a good life, I think the babies are a bit better than these philosophers. Just to summarize that, be authentic, be purposeful, be present, pay attention to the present moment, belong, connect to other people, and be joyful, sort of experience and delight in the beauty of the world. It's what babies do. Babies laugh more than you and me. I think they have a secret that we should pay close attention to. Thank you. I'm just going to show you my friend Claire and Les Jay being excellent to each other. So good. We'll have to play that again, I think. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.