The Meaning of Life?

Free discussion of anything human or divine ~ Philosophy, Religion and Spirituality

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peter
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Post by peter »

It's almost inevitable that 'God' comes into a discussion like this sooner or later - but I'm not sure that that is always helpful. We all carry so much baggage around with us in respect of our conceptions of God - his nature, mode of operation, limitations or otherwise, damn, even his gender - that it just obfuscates the issue(s) of purposefulness and meaningfulness, casting a new layer of fog over an already opaque area of contemplation or discussion.

But going back to a human centric view of the universe - and what are statements like "we are the eyes through which the universe see's itself" if not human centric - then if this is so, then our purpose and our meanings become the purpose and meaning of the universe by default. Under such circumstances I have no problems with putting forward "the defeat of suffering" as a good contender for the award of "The Overarching Purpose of Life, the Universe and Everything".

But suddenly this seems very parochial; it assumes that no other life, or comparable emergent entity, no other extra-earth consciousness (or equally significant attribute that we can have no conception of, not having developed it) is to be found anywhere else in the uni- or indeed multiverse. Suffering might just be a pinprick on a microdot in our remote corner of the infinite entity in which we find ourselves: barely significant in the Great Scheme of Things (should such a Great Scheme exist). (Aside: what is the relationship between the Great Scheme and the Omega Point - are they one and the same?)

Anyway, I think we can all agree that once again I've talked myself into a hole on this subject ("Keep digging Peter, we can still see your head!", I hear you call) and it's time to shut up.

But I'm going to finish with the one bit of decent wisdom I've learned over the course of my life (not discovered myself, learned from reading I hasten to add) and that is to try, as you go through life, to do a little good. And in the absence of this, it not being perhaps possible at all times, then at least try not to do any harm.

That, I think, is about as good as it gets.

(And Wos - just in case you wake up long enough to glance back at this post - far be it from me to instruct you on theology and meanings, purposes etc - I would never be so impudent - but can I just ever so gently remind you of a beautiful poem by the romantic poet Leigh Hunt that begins, Abou Ben Adhem may his tribe increase........)
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Post by samrw3 »

I just remembered one theory - dont remember the specifics but basically the proposal was the meaning of life is survival.

According to this theory all life was created from big bang, evolution and so forth. Then as each life - animal, plant human was created its design/meaning was to survive. This is easier seen in animal life where all sorts of patterns and habitats, animal biological designs have evolved for various forms of animal survival. We can then extend this to humans. We humans have taken upon ourselves to try and develop optimal ways for our survival. But if you think about it all our feelings/emotions are based on the raw purpose of survival. We want people to like us or approve of us so that we can fit in, adapt and survive at a more optimal level.

Anyways the authors did a far better job of creating the framework and setting out the arguments - just relaying what I remember.
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Post by wayfriend »

samrw3 wrote:the meaning of life is survival.
Yeah. I really don't like that.

Not just because of the bad places this kind of philosophy can lead to. Which are really, really bad.

Logically, it's a bit tautological, in that it basically means the purpose of existence is to exist. It kicks the metaphysical can down road, merely begging the question. Survive why? It's a dodge to avoid having to find an answer.

Maybe there is no purpose. But if there is a purpose, it needs to be a purpose with some purpose in it, yes?
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Post by samrw3 »

I suppose I should have stated that I did not agree with everything the authors wrote :D

But I found the thought exercise interesting and can be insightful of looking at our emotions and decision making at some level. Example why did I spend time creating a better budget model at work - to be accepted by my boss in hopes to get recognition and ultimately hoping for better salary increasing my optimal survival. But also to make my job easier - again more optimal survival.

But PS their argument (which again not saying I agree with) was since we do exist - the only choice really is to survive - why purposefully eliminate ourselves? Or by doing nothing or very little not adapt to improved survival modes?

Anywho...just throwing it out there because I found it interesting.
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Post by wayfriend »

samrw3 wrote:I suppose I should have stated that I did not agree with everything the authors wrote :D
I assumed so, don't worry.

Well, I don't think the need to survive needs to become the meaning of existence in order for us to work hard on it. If we have a purpose, then survival is the means to that end. Survival serves our ultimate purpose, it doesn't need to be it.
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Post by Avatar »

I think you're anthropomorphising though. Only we (humans) feel the need for some sort of purpose, something to make it all worthwhile.

Life in general, (living organisms) has no imperatives other than to keep living. Even the drive to reproduce is just a way to keep living "genetically" as it were. The only other purposes that exist are the ones we dream up to try and make it bearable. :D

Life just is. It has no objective meanings or purpose, just subjective ones. (Which is fine, whatever keeps you going.)

If all life in the entire universe ceased tomorrow, and only inanimate matter remained, the sun would still rise, the planets revolve, etc. etc.

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Post by wayfriend »

The thought of the vast universe tick-tocking away through infinity with no one to so much as witness it fills me with a complex dread.
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Post by Fist and Faith »

Which doesn't suggest that's not what's going.
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Post by Zarathustra »

Avatar, I don’t think it’s fair to say that life simply is. It is not that simple. You can say that for rocks and dust, but there is more to life than its bare existence. Asking what is the meaning of life is the same as asking what does it mean to be alive. Your answer would not distinguish rocks from elephants. To be alive is to be the part of reality that bears witness to reality. We are the mind, the conscience, the decision makers of reality. We are doubly real, a loop in reality that knows its own reality. We are the *certainty* that something exists rather than nothing. We are the turning point between events in the universe happening due to natural laws, and events happening due to wants, desires, needs, purpose.
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Post by peter »

But life, consciousness, self-awareness are just emergent properties that arise from ever more complex arrangements of the ninety plus elements of the universe. Placed under the microscope of ever deeper scrutiny (as it were) the artificial division between living and non-living material ceases to exist and the 'continuum' like reality becomes apparent. (eg. Down at the level of cellular organelles, prion protein and viruses, the distinctions become blurred, the dividing lines dissapear and what you are left with is simply increasing complexity of activity mirroring increasing levels of complexity in respect of composition and structure. Meaning really only appears at the level of conscious contemplation (ie within the emergent property), but in a specific place or places of the material continuum.

None of which flies in the face of the idea that there is direction in the way in which the universe is developing. The more I think about it, the "it's all random chance" explanation of science seems a cop out to me; I can't begin to say what the'omega point' might be, what the goal of this direction might consist of - but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. No - science can't get its head around it, but neither can it come up with a feasible answer for the "appearance of direction" either; the monkeys (as I said above) producing the works of Shakespeare won't cut it for me. I want mechanisms to explain the tendancy to progress that I see with my eyes. Until I get these, I have to reserve judgement.
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Post by Zarathustra »

Peter, I agree that we cannot be explained by random chance. Did you ever get the book mind and cosmos By Thomas Nagel?
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Post by peter »

Not come across that one Z. Will certainly hunt it down.
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....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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Post by Fist and Faith »

Eight threads down is a duscussion about the book.
https://kevinswatch.ihugny.com/phpBB2/v ... hp?t=25816
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Post by peter »

Trying to source it at my local library has been a waste of time. It certainly sounds like a highly pertinent book for anyone interested in this subject. I'll give eBay a go and hope for a bit better luck there.
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Post by peter »

Ouch! Thirty quid! Maybe the library will get it for me; I'll put in a request and see what happens?

:)
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Post by Avatar »

wayfriend wrote:The thought of the vast universe tick-tocking away through infinity with no one to so much as witness it fills me with a complex dread.
Really? I find it quite liberating myself. :D
Zarathustra wrote:Avatar, I don’t think it’s fair to say that life simply is. It is not that simple. You can say that for rocks and dust, but there is more to life than its bare existence. Asking what is the meaning of life is the same as asking what does it mean to be alive. Your answer would not distinguish rocks from elephants. To be alive is to be the part of reality that bears witness to reality. We are the mind, the conscience, the decision makers of reality. We are doubly real, a loop in reality that knows its own reality. We are the *certainty* that something exists rather than nothing. We are the turning point between events in the universe happening due to natural laws, and events happening due to wants, desires, needs, purpose.
But all those things exist only in our heads. The elephant might bear witness to the events of natural laws, but it does not care.

It might know needs, even desires, but all it knows of purpose is drive...it does not know why it is driven to mate or eat or drink, only that it experiences hunger or thirst or lust.

For the most part, I think that only nerve impulses differentiate between life and rocks.

The "certainty" that something exists rather than nothing does not alter the fact. Something could exist without us being certain, or indeed, without there being anything at all to experience that certainty. (Solipsism aside. ;) )

The universe does not care, even though we might.

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Post by Zarathustra »

Avatar wrote:But all those things exist only in our heads.
Let's assume you're right. It changes nothing: our heads are in the universe.

But you're wrong. We are altering the very fabric of reality with things that are "only in our heads." The entire earth is feeling the effects of our ideas, wants, goals, designs (for better or worse . . . ). An alien species could not look at this planet and fail to see that something is affecting it in addition to natural laws. Natural laws in themselves don't build cities. This is not "atoms behaving like atoms." Atoms don't typically launch themselves into orbit--in defiance of gravity--without an intelligence building machines to help them get there. That state of affairs can't happen without an awareness of those laws. This awareness is more than just "in our heads." It's not a hallucination, nor is it a superficial addition. It's the power to use natural laws in ways that otherwise would never occur naturally.
Avatar wrote:The elephant might bear witness to the events of natural laws, but it does not care. It might know needs, even desires, but all it knows of purpose is drive...it does not know why it is driven to mate or eat or drink, only that it experiences hunger or thirst or lust.
I believe elephants do care. They seem to mourn the passing of other elephants into death. And this caring goes for most animals, to greater or lesser degree. As for the "why," well *we* know why.

I believe that caring is not just an illusion that natural selection has accidentally generated to motivate organisms towards self-preservation. I believe it is a real feature of reality that natural selection has stumbled upon--like the ability to fly--and once it emerged, its own usefulness made it more likely to continue. Caring is an intentional state (like all mental states), meaning that it is a directedness toward an object. This directedness is more than rocks falling in a particular direction due to gravity; it is a directedness in virtue of how it impacts a subject. A relation between subject and object.

So, once caring emerged from latency into actuality, it forms a feedback loop that can actually affect evolution. Caring that benefits a population gets multiplied. But this benefit is fundamentally different from something like the ability to fly. Caring can be directed at inanimate things, like ideas and knowledge themselves. Caring eventually lifted us off the ground, giving us the ability to fly that evolution itself did not supply.
Avatar wrote:The "certainty" that something exists rather than nothing does not alter the fact. Something could exist without us being certain, or indeed, without there being anything at all to experience that certainty. (Solipsism aside. ;) )
Perhaps this is true for certainty, but it is not true for knowledge. Somethings--like space stations--can't exist without knowledge. Without parts of the universe knowing how things work, these things would never arise.
Avatar wrote:The universe does not care, even though we might.
But we are the part of the universe that cares!
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Post by peter »

Interesting exchange.

I'm tempted to ask what you think (the pair of you) is the fundamental core of your different positions here?

If I recall correctly, neither of you believes in God (in say the way Wos does - in a traditional sense) yet there is clearly some core difference in your respective views of the universe.

Yours Av, seems a more 'brute existence' type of perception, while yours, Z, has an almost 'spiritual' recognition of there being something more - something as yet un-grasped - about its nature. I incline more toward the latter - but as my earlier posts will have made clear, am in no sense able to 'nail it down' to any explicable degree, or even make much sense of it.
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....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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Post by Zarathustra »

peter wrote:Interesting exchange.

I'm tempted to ask what you think (the pair of you) is the fundamental core of your different positions here?
It seems to me that the core difference is: reductionism vs emergence.

The "more" in my position is simple: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I do not believe that life is just a collection of atoms. I think that the functioning of atoms in certain structures (i.e. living organisms) creates new phenomena in the universe that are existentially different from atoms. A new type of being arises that can't be explained purely in terms of "atoms behaving like atoms."

In much the same way, a book is different from from a bunch of random letters. Sure, the fundamental building blocks are the same in each case, but random letters can't tell a story. Nor can random letters encode a detailed schematic for launching a vehicle into space. The shapes of the letters, and even the grammar rules for putting them together into sentences, can NEVER explain how these shapes on paper (or computer screens) can eventually arrange themselves in ways that allow other bits of matter (e.g humans) to physically launch themselves into space and explore the solar system. Just because these schematics don't violate the rules of grammar, or indeed, depend crucially upon those grammar rules to fit together coherently in the first place, doesn't mean that those grammar rules *produce* the patterns of letters that make up a detailed explanation for how to do such things. There simply is no causal relationship between these two existentially distinct levels of order.

One might be tempted in this case to bring up the hundreds of monkeys typing on typewriters for an infinite amount of time, eventually producing all the works of Shakespeare, which would be a purely reductionist account of words forming stories (well, ignoring the existence of monkeys and typewriters!). But that's clearly not what happens when we produce scientific knowledge--or even when Shakespeare produced his plays! This isn't a hypothetical thought experiment. The universe literally combined atoms in such a way that eventually The Bard himself was produced, an amazing collection of atoms which required only a single lifetime to produce those works! Even the entire history of the universe is not long enough for that to have happened at random, purely from the laws of physics alone. The laws of physics don't encode the ways that atoms combine in order to make this possible. New laws must be discovered--laws that describe how living organisms evolve according to relationships that entirely ignore how atoms fit together. Not only must those laws describe how living beings arise, but how some of them encode conceptual thought to the degree that meaningful ideas are conveyed in metaphor, simile, allegory, allusion, etc. These relations aren't captured in the laws of physics, because the objects which are related aren't physical objects. And even the physical objects themselves--such as Shakespeare--can't be fully described by the laws of physics, because he includes these immaterial relations within himself.

Indeed, the relation of scientific knowledge to the world--while having direct applications to matter--is itself an immaterial relation. The knowledge of scientific laws are not encoded in scientific laws. Something entirely new has arisen in the universe once you have collections of atoms (i.e. us) who understand the very laws that govern collections of atoms. This knowledge changes the relation of atoms-to-atoms in ways that can't be explained by the laws that govern atom-to-atoms. While the causal chain between humans and their works ends up coming full circle back to matter, there is a step in the middle which isn't matter.

This is why it makes a difference that parts of the universe is aware of itself.
While the knowledge of the moon's existence doesn't change the fact that the moon exists (well, that's debatable, too), the knowledge of scientific laws most certainly changes the relationship of human bodies to the moon. Prior to such knowledge, humans could not go there. In a very literal sense, knowledge of the world alters which worlds we can inhabit. That's not a superficial difference. Pieces of the universe being aware of itself enables paths to open that otherwise would remain closed. They don't open because of physical laws, but because of the knowledge of them. And knowledge of physical laws is an entirely different phenomenon than the physical laws themselves. Not only is knowledge immaterial, subjective, and experiential, but the causal direction is reversed: rather than natural laws causing an event to happen, an event (e.g. subjective understanding) uses natural laws to make something happen. Again, the difference is as clear-cut as gravity making an object fall, while knowledge of gravity and other laws makes it rise. A full accounting of every natural law that makes a rocket work is insufficient to explain why it exists in the first place, because those natural laws don't include an understanding of themselves, upon which the existence of the rocket depends.

In short, rockets exist because the universe is alive, conscious, intelligent and has goals. This is the only explanation. It's the literal truth.
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Post by peter »

That's an interesting way of putting it Z; life is matter's way of taking control of it's destiny. For the first time (as it grades up through the complexity of its organisation) it becomes master of it's own course. Instead of merely being at the mercy of the physical laws, it becomes able, via its knowledge of those laws, to manipulate them to effect control on its own passage, to exert influence on the direction it takes where previously it had was none.

I like that. We approach the area where we have to consider emergence - beyond simply the observation that it happens, but into the realm of from whence does it spring?

To accept that the universe is teleological, we have to take the next step and say that what we seen via the emergent properties of life and consciousness, had to have some temporally prior and greater manifestation either driving or drawing its direction - presumably toward some goal beyond that which we currently understand (and of course, here we enter the realm of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's 'Omega Point').

:?:

(This, incidentally, is why, I believe, that science is so hostile to even a consideration of the idea that the universe displays purpose. Once acknowledged, one is into the realm of difficult questions - questions from which it would rather hide than have to face. It took the discipline hundreds of years to break free from the chains of religion; it is not going to allow it to slip in through the back door in the form of an acceptance of purpose. I take the view that the possibilities of the universe's capabilities far exceed our current capacities to even conceptualise; that the acknowledgement of purpose in no way takes us back into the realm of superstition and dogma. Rather it opens new and exciting avenues of investigation, the following of which will draw us ever closer to full understanding of why we are here (as distinct from how).)
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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