In my opinion, Dr. Wang’s unmodified and unpretentious insights point to the key to Rick’s entanglement and pain, which is the irreconcilable contradiction between knowledge and meaning. And this contradiction, broadly speaking, belongs to everyone, but it appears in a different way.
Before discussing Rick and his family in detail, I would like to explain my views on this contradiction from a general perspective.
I don’t think anyone would object to it. Humans are rationally oriented animals. If you don't speak so academically, there is a tendency in people to use "interpretation" to understand and understand the world.
There is a good example to interpret this tendency: When you continue to have bad luck in your life, do you involuntarily start to reflect on whether you have done something wrong recently and have been punished. This tendency has nothing to do with religion. What people think of as the subject of punishment can be God, God, destiny, or cause and effect. But this tendency is really about faith, which is a kind of worship and dependence on reason.
We are eager to "constrain" our world with universality and regularity. We like to ask why, and we prefer to answer all the whys. This tendency naturally began to appear in the process of human development. Primitive society used gods to explain weather phenomena, ancient Greek philosophers used "element" to explain the composition of all things, and Chinese Taoists used "Tao" to explain the laws of all things, and so on. In short, we do not allow the world to exist in a disorderly and random manner. We acquiesce that there are laws in everything in the world, and we can understand the world from this.
The continuous development of science is the most concentrated manifestation of this tendency. The natural sciences in modern times have advanced rapidly in all fields. Classical mechanics, evolution, and electromagnetics have occupied the high ground for less than a century. The theory of relativity, cell theory, and quantum mechanics have seized the top of the mountain. Scientific leaps have increasingly confirmed the correctness of our rational inclinations, and have given us the power to surpass human beings.
Come back to Rick.
Rick can be said to be an extreme manifestation of human rationality. The play repeatedly tells us that Rick is the smartest person in the infinite parallel universe, and countless adventures have proved to us that this is the case. Even superheroes will be played by Rick in applause.
But the existence of Rick also proves to us another thing, that is, science cannot create meaning for mankind.
Human beings are also meaning-oriented animals. Among the 100,000 whys we have questioned, one of them is always asking, what is the meaning of this matter. Sometimes we can answer, for money, for parents, for children, for survival, and so on. But what always troubles us is, what is the meaning of our existence itself?
And the farther we go on the road of science, the more we discover that the meaning of existence is being dispelled. And Rick, it is the most prominent manifestation of this situation.
Summer was once challenged by the meaning of existence because she accidentally discovered that she was pregnant by accident: she was the product of a random event. But Morty, who had just buried his body with Rick, understood a truth: No one's existence is meaningful, and hope that summer can also accept this fact.
Here I guess that the screenwriter should narrow a science/philosophical topic to the category of the family and the individual. The most familiar discussion on this topic may be Nietzsche’s sentence: "God is dead, and we killed him."
When we think that God is our creator, the meaning of our existence comes from God. He created mankind with purpose, so the reason he created us is the meaning of our existence. However, the development of science has not only driven God out of our lives, but also tended to tell us that the emergence of mankind is indeed a random and small probability event. Existence has no meaning. It is just a change of a certain parameter in a random process that makes you start thinking and mistakenly believe that existence has its meaning.
Specifically, we tend to think that humans are unique creations because we can think that we are different from other creatures that follow instinct. However, scientific progress has slowly revealed to us that the production of consciousness is the product of a certain number of nerve cells clustering. In other words, the existence of consciousness is indeed unique, but it is not independent of the evolutionary process. The difference between us and other animals is likely to be the number of nerve cells and the complexity of the nervous system. As for the generation of consciousness, it is only a collateral product of this difference in quantity and degree—the product of a random process.
There is even a theory that the view that our "body serves the brain and consciousness" is simply an illusion. Like other animals, we exist for survival and reproduction, but the tools that other animals acquire in evolution are sharp claws and fangs, and ours is a more powerful brain.
As the smartest person in the infinite parallel universe, Rick naturally understands this truth and feels painful because of it: Since existence has no meaning, why do we have the instinct to think and pursue meaning?
Regarding another concept, love that is often associated with the meaning of existence, Rick’s explanation is: "an ever-increasing sense of familiarity." For Rick, love is not as magical as we think, its existence It's just a physical necessity.
Rick’s view is also derived from modern science. Through research, we have gradually realized that our feelings are actually a natural physiological change in the neural sense, which is selected by the nervous system and finally received by our consciousness. A person's happiness, anger, sorrow, and joy are indeed more complicated than being hungry, but there is no essential difference. Specifically, love is actually a "body map"-a "screenshot" of a certain state of human physiology, stored in the nervous system-a process of recurring and being felt again. Usually this "screenshot" will be a happy or excited state of the human body, but of course it can also be shocked or painful. As for what kind of "screenshot" recurrence will be interpreted as "love" by our consciousness, it is the result of our acquired learning. But in essence, love is really just an "increasing sense of familiarity." The love for the family is the product of familiarity and human community. Love for a partner is a combination of familiarity and acquired thinking patterns. Love may really be neither magical nor mysterious.
For Rick, his intellect deconstructed everything, including meaning (this deconstruction is often seen in dramas, such as the episode of The Devil's Grocery Store and the recent superhero episode). That’s why Dr. Wang said that Rick habitually uses his intellect to justify his avoidance of dealing with family problems—all of which is meaningless, so I don’t waste time doing it.
And this question will inevitably become a question for everyone in modern society: when meaning is "disenchanted" by increasing intellectual knowledge, how should we face our lives?
What Rick shows is nihilism and hedonism. Selling weapons to killers is just to make money to go to the amusement hall; at the expense of Lincoln, just to get the drugs to cool off. It is worth noting that Rick's enjoyment also includes his adventures with morty and summer.
David Hume once said that when he felt the joy in life, he forgot to question the meaning of life.
At the end of the first season, Morty asked Rick why he rarely said his mantra: wubba lubba dub dub. Rick’s answer is: I love my grandchildren/I don’t care. And this is probably the answer that Rick gave us: to recognize the nihility of meaning (and no longer seek it vainly), and at the same time, be able to enjoy it while being aware of the meaninglessness of feeling and love.
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