the meaning of life

astroguy

There is no meaning of life apart from...well...life itself. The meaning of life is to reproduce i.e. to keep creating more life. That's what the meaning of life is, in the literal sense. But, in another sense, life is what you make of it. We are all here for a finite amount of time and the meaning of life is whatever it means to you. To get the most out of life and appreciate the beauty and complexity of the world might be a general meaning, that could probably apply in some sense to everyone.

theg81der

Yea I have this experience. I wake up and just for a second every answer in the unniverse is on the tip of my tongue. Then its gone. I also don`t know who I am, what year it is, what sex I am etc when i wake up sometimes like I`m just thrown into my body from somewhere else. And I have alot of these moment, doing nothing specific where I become aware of some great truth, an answer - then gone. Always felt I was here to do something, like I have a purpose. You feel like that?

CuriousOne

heavyballs wrote: »

i would like to share something that happened to me about 5 years ago,has anyone ever experienced anything similiar.
I was doing nothing in particular,just at home on my own when i kind of went into a trance or a simple day dream,but it wasn't a normal day dream.
It semed that in those few seconds i realized the reason I and we as a race are here.In that short space of time everything seemed clear,the mad thing about the experience was that as soon as I had that knowledge it was taken from me.
I hope this makes sence to at least 1 person.

Could it be that the blood, which normally circulates around your head, suddenly diverted to your scrotum and testicles leaving you with a distinct heavy feeling, the memory of a goldfish, and an unexplainable inability to spell?
This makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks.

Robb

I can only suggest looking at a relgion for the answer. Islam has answered my question on that.

It helps grasp how mortal we really are, and I mean it when you come to grips with how short life is I am 22 and have this point of view makes everything else life throws at you really easy.

I like to divide people into 2 groups. People who are scared to know and people who are scared not to Know.

If you want the meaning of life, read about the relgions of the world, explore Ideas only one that made sense to me was Islam. I approached it from every angle, science, philosophy, evidence, history....

If you want a good read, and if you sit back and think on Muhammad(peace be upon him) his life read the book Muhammad his life based on the earliest sources by Martin Lings.

FionnMatthew

heavyballs,

You've had an epiphanic moment, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it. It was valuable for causing you to wonder. This is the germ of philosophical thought. This is the real fortune of your experience. To wonder, to experience curiosity of this sort is an essentially philosophical attitude, and with it, you have been joined to a great human tradition.

Professional philosophers normally look down on the question "what is the meaning of life?" It's a common prejudice among nonphilosophers that this is the sort of question philosophers are continually trying to answer. Mostly, though, philosophers spend their lives involved in debates around the project of trying to arrive at satisfactory definitions of thinks like 'knowledge' or 'goodness.'

There is reasonably widespread agreement among philosophers that 'life' isn't something that can or could have a 'meaning.' 'Meaning' is, in philosophy, something that more appropriately applies to words, to sentences. It's a property of language. Meaning is something by which we communicate. It's therefore strange to ask what the meaning of life is, because 'life', the universe, etc. are not linguistic things, and therefore can't 'mean' things. It isn't part of their nature that they signify or communicate.

Nevertheless, consistently, nonphilosophers seem to require that philosophers have something to say about the meaning of life. It's a very common feeling, that there ought to be some accounting for what life is supposed to be about, or where everything is going - what the point is.

This has led philosophers to think that perhaps, when people ask "what is the meaning of life?" really they are asking a lot of questions at once, and confusing them all. Therefore, you really shouldn't expect a simple answer to your question. Many questions are unlikely to be addressed with one answer.

Try and devolve your question into several questions. All of the following questions are often seen as playing a part in "The Big Question":

What is the meaning of life

• What sort of thing am I?
• What is the universe?
• What caused me to be alive?
• How should I live and what should I do?

By devolving your (confused) question into many smaller, better defined questions, you thereby set out conditions which define what will qualify as a satisfactory answer. You will then know better where to look for your answer, and you will have better criteria for assessing the answers you find.

I'm advising you to do this because I laud your curiosity, and because I am reluctant to simply relate my own (transient) conclusions about what life is all about. They won't mean as much to you if you haven't gotten to them by your own efforts. I would hope that, if you follow a method of formulating more well defined questions like this, you will see fit to follow your curiosity to read widely and in earnest. This will enable you to invest your life with the meaning you seem to require, and that exercise is, I have found, its own reward.

What I will say is that often, when people ask "what is the meaning of life," what they really seem to mean is "what is the moral of the story of my life?" It's clear that people expect life to be something like a story: a novel or a movie, in which an author arranged the elements so as to frame a particular message. It pays to remember that stories are like life for a reason: they are themselves attempts to understand and answer the myriad questions that are often confused and come under The Big Question. So, really, whenever you watch a movie, and it seems to offer you answers about what life should be about, what it is to be happy, what sort of thing we are, etc., really you're just being made privy to someone else's answers to these questions.

Life tends to be less easily or comfortably comprehended like this, because it tends to ask the questions towards which these 'answers' are addressed. The authors who offer you answers can only offer you theirs. But it would be more fruitful if you were to play the same game as they are playing, and become an active maker of answers, rather than a passive consumer of them.

extrinzic

I agree with the gist of your view, but aren’t you guilty of looking down on the question yourself? Answers are one thing, but philosophy isn’t overly concerned with answers, is it? Is the question, “what’s the meaning of life?” any more confused than “What sort of thing am I?” I don’t think so! Indeed, both questions seem very abstract to me. The categorisation of things is just as indeterminate as the purpose of life: both questions presuppose an answer. Answers are nice, and philosophical reasoning can be useful if we try to reason what we should do to uphold justice, for example. It just falls apart if we try to define what justice is in the first place. All in all, “the meaning of life” is a valid question; if what questions are derive from human language. Just don’t expect such questions to make sense in the context of an indifferent materialism.

FionnMatthew

extrinzic wrote: »

I agree with the gist of your view, but aren’t you guilty of looking down on the question yourself?

No, I didn't think so, I thought I was addressing it, which is to respect the motivation and the place that it comes from, while suggesting that its form is responsible for it seeming to be such a mysterious question. I wasn't looking down on it, or those who ask it.

Answers are one thing, but philosophy isn’t overly concerned with answers, is it?

Well, yes, in short. Yes, it is.

Is the question, “what’s the meaning of life?” any more confused than “What sort of thing am I?”

Yes, I think it's pretty certain that it is more confused. Answers to the former question, if you read back over the thread, are normally hilariously vague, or far too diverse to be responses to the same question. The very fact that 'what's the meaning of life?' can be interpreted so widely should lend us an anxiety about it. If we insist on using terms which are so inexact as to increase confusion between us, philosophy is a doomed enterprise, where everyone does a lot of talking, but nobody really understands anything anyone else says.

I mean, it really ought to be a worry to someone when they understand the terms of their question so little that answers of absolutely disparate type are acceptable. People who ask the question should have a burden of explaining what exactly it is they mean to find out when they ask it. I think that's a norm that should apply to any question, and any asker.

I'm not saying "what sort of thing am I?' should be a final question. It might be devolveable into yet more well formed questions.

But it's likely that any response to the question will take itself as being specifically an answer to a question that invokes the field of ontology. Answers will take themselves as addressing placement or location, categorisation, type or description problems within metaphysics.

Since many answers to 'what is the meaning of life?' interpret it as just this question, and address answers like this to it, interspersed with answers to other questions (for instance, "the answer to the meaning of life is that we are just vehicles for our genes, and we are just supposed to reproduce" - a classically confused answer), we should regard it as a net benefit that now we're able to divide up the spoils of our answer, and take them as being answers to clearer questions.

The categorisation of things is just as indeterminate as the purpose of life:

Nope, sorry. That's just false. The success of scientific epistemology in providing very reliable explanations for the natural world in terms of formal and material causes, and the decline of the usefulness of the teleological cause in fields like biology, provides an overwhelming case for the notion that there simply is no 'purpose' to life that human beings do not give it themselves, because purposes are intrinsically a human-made sort of thing. We have become very good at the categorization of things, at least the things we know very well - very good at tending to our regional ontologies, such that they rarely these days are impinged upon by the natural world such that they are shown to be inadequate. That this is the case is reasonable evidence that our ontologies are not arbitrary, and that 'what there is' is not indeterminate.

both questions presuppose an answer.

That is mostly of the nature of questions. But the presupposition does not necessitate that the answer to the question is indeterminate. The presupposition is variably justified or unjustified, depending on the formation of the question.

Answers are nice, and philosophical reasoning can be useful if we try to reason what we should do to uphold justice, for example. It just falls apart if we try to define what justice is in the first place.

I beg to disagree. If we try to reason what we should do to uphold justice, without furnishing a working definition OF justice, we are setting ourselves up to be hopelessly confused.

Nothing falls apart if you try to define Justice. You just start a new discussion. There isn't widespread agreement, but you do establish an array of likely positions on 'justice', and you thereby get to know the landscape.

When philosophers try to answer the former question (how to uphold justice) they always specify a working definition - which of the key traditions on 'justice' they take themselves to be addressing. They do this to avoid the confusion of their respondents, since the decision between working definitions of justice is the decision between different problematics, different schema, different ultimate questions, different methods of implementation, different jurisprudences, different motivations for the organization of society, for juridical matters, etc. If they didn't specify their working definitions, they would be inviting people to, for instance, call into question their highly specialized work on the implementation of distributive justice for not answering problems raised against the divine command theory of justice. That would be a hopeless scenario, where nobody was really talking to anyone else.

All in all, “the meaning of life” is a valid question;

So, you actually seem to be suggesting that philosophers should not attempt to answer the sentiments behind the asking of this question by approaching it in a critically minded way. You seem to be saying that philosophers are simply not allowed suggest that the question isn't meaningful itself - that it is, importantly, slightly incoherent. And neither can we ignore it. Because it is a 'valid question,' on account of the vague intuitions of people untrained in philosphical thinking that the question is a good one (intuitions that are explained by the approach I've outlined above). And therefore it would be unfair, exclusive or high-minded of philosophers to look down on the question. So we are bound to answer a question we think is hopelessly confused, and debarred from answering it with the only method and set of answers that we think satisfactorily addresses it.

Basically, if this is what you're saying, you have ensured that no satisfactory answer will ever be had to this question, having declared that the only coherent way of addressing it is off limits. You have made it more than a question; you have engineered your own insoluble mystery, a question so vague that any response can be taken as an answer, but no response will ever seem adequate to address the motivation for the question.

if what questions are derive from human language.

That's nuts. So all I have to do to form 'valid questions' is string together syntactically correct sequences of words from a natural language?

Are these 'valid questions'?

• How tall is the same further?
• What is the largess of doors?
• How many isn't?
• What is the meaning of nothing at all?
• etc

The questions above aren't valid questions because some of them introduce category mistakes which are at odds with our default ontology. Some of them have syntactic anomalies, some of them are problematic on the semantic level. None of them are bad questions for the same reason 'what is the meaning of life' is a bad question, because I'm trying to prove a point. Simply that just because a question is made up from the elements of a human language doesn't mean that it's a good one, or that it deserves serious consideration.

The reason 'what is the meaning of life' is controversially a bad question is that it sounds so much more meaningful, because we're very used to it. But I contend that it is just as confused as the above ones. It invites a wealth of interpretations, but seems in its scope to be more than is addressed by the answers to any of them, and therefore gives the appearance of being a greater mystery than it is. By dividing it, we can conquer it, and demonstrate with the answers to more regional questions that there isn't anything more to be had or desired from asking it.

Just don’t expect such questions to make sense in the context of an indifferent materialism.

I don't really know what that's supposed to mean. Do you take me as being an exponent of some 'indifferent materialism'? If I was forced to conjecture on what you mean to say here, I would say that you are taking a vague swipe at what you take to be the nature of my critical attitude. You identify systematic, analytic reasoning arbitrarily with some strawman philosophical stereotype which also includes a positive position on metaphysical issues (i.e., some form of naturalism or materialistic monism) and a strange sort of exclusive attitude characterized by your use of 'indifferent,' mostly meaning 'disinclined to treat everyone's vague, sophomore philosophical intuitions as well-formed arguments and questions.'

But I don't know. You probably didn't mean that, because 1) that's some seriously ignorant stereotyping, and 2) fails to characterize me, given my philosophical sympathies. So I really don't know what you meant by that last sentence.

mark renton

just read opening post, sorry but have adhd and rest of posts here are far too big for me

just a point i would like to add here that it is commonly known that meditation can achieve clarity in the mind, be it the meaning of life or what to have for breakfast - this i believe is what the op experienced

extrinzic

FionnMatthew wrote: »

No, I didn't think so, I thought I was addressing it, which is to respect the motivation and the place that it comes from, while suggesting that its form is responsible for it seeming to be such a mysterious question. I wasn't looking down on it, or those who ask it.
...

The reason 'what is the meaning of life' is controversially a bad question is that it sounds so much more meaningful, because we're very used to it.

I think it is clear from this statement that you do look down on the question. I don't suppose to assume you judge people on the value you place on their ideas.
I appreciate that there is no absolute distinct divide, but I think it is fair to say that science is concerned with categorisation of the world for useful ends. Rarely does it question the philosophical coherency of its discipline. On the other hand philosophy is concerned with clarifications of ideas, and science, as an idea, is open to philosophical scrutiny. Without philosophical insight, scientific analysis is meaningless. We simply cannot escape the fact that meaning is the result of human values, and is distinct from demonstrative facts. The categorisation of things can be demonstrably useful, but this says nothing about the truth of any categorisation, only the current structure of the order we impose on nature via categorisation. This is increasingly straightforward when it comes to scientific analysis, but never set in stone (See theory of gravity, theory of evolution etc.). Most of us can get by accepting a theory of gravity as true, insofar as it is useful, but the problem with definitions of justice is that they are always rejected by somebody, sooner or later. Thus, a definition of justices is in fact a contested theory of justice, and not justice in itself. I do believe that questions concerning the meaning of life are valid philosophical questions, regardless of the lack of any one answer (or, indeed, an answer at all). Such questions do not make sense in the context of a scientific analysis, and this is why I commented on indifferent materialism. Incidentally, I wasn’t putting words in your mouth, but simply posting my view.