Which is scarier – not knowing the reason why you’re here, or knowing (or at least strongly suspecting) that there IS no reason why you’re here?
The purpose of life, indeed the whole of reality is based upon, honest, loving, relationships.
May truth, love, and realimacy be yours today.
I don’t think life has any meaning. But it has no bearing on my life. Whatever I could think, I still have desires and feelings. If I’m thirsty, I may think what there’s objectively no point in sustaining my life, but I still want to drink. And once I get my hand on a glass of water, it still makes me happy. And it’s the same for essentially everything. I want to listen to some good music, I want to avoid suffering, something makes me sad and I want it to change, etc…
The purpose of life is to transform the non-living Universe into a single, transcendent living being. That being will be God. God, being entirely free of the constraints of time, having come to exist, will therefore have existed eternally and will exist eternally. That is the Purpose of Life.
Or it isn’t.
I would say that you need to make your own meaning to life. You need to establish the point of your existence, otherwise you’ll be seeking out these answers forever. Taking a few philosophy classes helps, but ultimately it is you who needs to create your own philosophy.
I don’t get why fears need to be justified to you with a rational explanation. This is akin to asking me why someone has a fear of enclosed spaces or a fear of heights. Can you not just accept that some people (including myself) have irrational fears?
I would say the latter, which is why we humans in general tend to create meanings and points where there are none, thus becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.
Slightly off-topic: Is there a psychological term for the fear of randomness, chaos, and general disorder?
Dinsdale wrote:
I’ll try to keep this jargon free. The problem in stating categorically that God does not exist is that there is an implicit assertion that He might. In other words, implicit in the assertion that something is NOT possible is the assertion that it also IS possible.
Think of it this way: if there were no “is possible”, you’d have nothing to add your “not” to.
I’m not sure I agree there Lib; can a concept not be entirely fictional?
Yes it can, but that doesn’t make it impossible. Think how much science has borrowed from science fiction to make fantastic technologies into a reality.
Once again, you cannot construct “not possible” without “possible”. You cannot make a negative without something to negate. That’s why it has been formalized as a fallacy — a substantive denial of a positive onological proposition.
Thanks Lib; I think I may have been misreading ‘is not possible’ as ‘does not exist’ (which isn’t nearly the same thing).
Fromm here to eternity…
Dude, where are you getting your dictionary from? 
Consider the following statement:
“It is not possible that two electrons, occupying the same quantum state in the same place at the same time, can exist.”
Is this statement nonsensical too?
Er, correction to the above post:
“It is not possible that two electrons, occupying the same quantum state in the same place at the same time, can exist.”
Is this statement meaningless too?
(Gawd, I hate not being able to edit my own posts!)
Hm, interesting theory. Hydrogen gas coelesces to form stars, which over time fuse heavier elements. These traces of heavier elements are ejected through a nova to go into forming other stars and planets. The heavy elements combine to a form that can mechanically take in other molecules from its environment and therby reproduce itself. These forms become more and more complex and more able to survive their environments over the generations by only the strong passing on their genetic information. Perhaps the billion-year process of life and evolution is the universe waking up from a dream and slowly becoming conscious.
Or maybe the universe is a rectal wart on a giant celestial Shoggoth, and the “big-bang” and inflationary period was the flare-up. I shudder to think of what will happen when preperation H causes “the big crunch”.
No. That is not an ontological statement. Once again, the fallacy is “a substantive denial of a positive ontological statement.”
Or proposition, actually. Just to be perfectly clear.
Consent validation is the purpose of self-recursive interactives.
The purpose is to weed out all variables of coersion on yourself or from other existents.
NObody consented to be born.
Nobody consented to live an entire life abusing the consent of others against their desire to validate their own consent.
Rationality always uncovers consent, and irrationality always abuses it to simulate it - consent redemption is precisely how ‘all of this’ is understood/decompiled.
New thoughts are abstracted only in the event of not adopting the law “might makes right”. Those who operate this law, even unaware, will not learn or produce anything new - they don’t do any work in the sense of sentient beings.
-Justhink
That is to say, consent redeption patterns will force consent no matter who you are.
Consent redemption is ultimately conversional to the mind which comprehends itself in the means that we do.
-Justhink
The meaning of this existence has to come from outside it otherwise it’s circular.
I can’t say this life has meaning because…….
And then point to something within it.
It would be analogous to saying the bible is the truth based on the bible.
It’s survival. All life strives for it, competes for it, evolves at it.
In a social species like ours other elements emerge, but I’ve always felt that just plain survival was the basis for them all.
Somewhere in the galaxy, other things are surviving too.