Actually it’s a value word. And it can be used in a value statement, which is to evaluate, sometimes they have a mixture of description in them, but for the most part they are used for judging. Many examples of value words, better, good, bad, evil, etc. Nothing wrong with that, not everything is descriptive. Good health is better than bad health. You want to argue with that, Deepak?
If I do and she says that she preferred getting water from a well and that outhouses have a certain charm, does that make my assertion correct? Because I definitely know ‘off-grid’ people that prefer outhouses. What you’re doing is assigning a value to something that doesn’t exist. You’re welcome to assign that value, but it’s arbitrary.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s nice that we as a society can agree on things, but ‘purpose by the mob’ is hardly a real purpose if for no other reason than societies can agree on some pretty horrific things.
You’re entitled to believe that you have a purpose, but it doesn’t make it so. Creating your own purpose is the same as saying that you’re unaware of your purpose. If my printer gains sentience and says that its purpose is to dance on Broadway, it’s nice that it feels that way, but really I just made it to print out my TPS reports.
“I believe the world is regressing. We have more vegans and fewer golf courses. These are solid reasons that I theoretically believe, so we are all failing at our purpose. Build more golf courses and kill the vegans or else resign yourself to a life of rejecting your purpose!”
Obviously, the statements above are ludicrous and me providing reasons for my rantings don’t make them less so. There is no objective value in golf courses or veganism and even if I could convince all of society to love golf and meat, that would not make those reasons any better. You love running water and preventing poverty and good for you, so do I, that doesn’t mean that those things actually have value. They’re simply the opinions you possess and simply saying that it’s your purpose to advance your opinions is no different than someone else saying that your purpose is to actively work against them.
They are ways that we communicate opinions. I can say the color blue is ‘better’ than the color red. I may even provide reasons why, but that doesn’t make it so in any type of objective sense. Advocating that the world be painted blue doesn’t make my life meaningful. Good health (however you define it) and bad health are simply states of being with no objective value. The bacteria in your system are pretty happy that they’re going to town when you have an infection. Some people in ‘bad health’ produce things that in my opinion are amazing simply because of their bad health (Dostoevsky’s epilepsy as an example.) The value of the state is all opinion. Whether or not your particular system of chemicals is kicking off substance P or dopamine is a matter of indifference to the universe.
Senoy,
People like where and when they grew up. Wherever it is. It’s called imprinting.
It’s how humans survive in a wide variety of circumstances. They are born into the world. They find that certain things work for them, bring pleasure. They repeat those behaviors and associate them with objects in the world.
I notice this in myself. I am more attracted to women that resemble some aspect of prior women whom I have pleasant interactions or memories with. My brain causes my heightened interest. In some regards activity precedes interest. I interacted with these women (not sexually, many just friends), when I see another resembling them my interest is more heightened that it ever was in the original interactions.
So people have a bias to where they grew up. Some do not, and hate where they grew up. This is also healthy. To prevent stasis and inbreeding, the human cause wants some humans to be outliers, seek other things. There needs to be a mixture of both tendencies.
If you took the entire population of W.Va. and transplanted them as babies to other locales, most of them would prefer and imprint upon their new home. Wherever it was.
Sure, but that just goes to prove my point. Our opinions are just biological mechanisms that contributed to (or at least didn’t harm) our ancestors’ survival. There is no reason to follow those biological dictates. I’m imprinted on West Virginia. That doesn’t mean that my ‘purpose’ is to go about making the world more like West Virginia. It means absolutely nothing other than a random assemblage of molecules happened to be in a certain place at a certain time. If that random assemblage had occurred in 11th century France, maybe those molecules would have felt its purpose was for the Anglo-Saxons to speak French. Either way, there’s not inherent point or purpose behind it, just a random group of molecules in the same place, that’s it.
There are a lot of run-ons here and I’m not sure I’ve completely unpacked your point, but it seems that you largely seem to agree with me except you really don’t want to. You basically concede that ‘progress’ and ‘heroin addiction’ are the same thing, but then seem to still believe that the former lets us ‘see our potential’ or some such. You’re just using nicer words to mean the same thing. Our potential is whatever we want it to be and it’s all equally meaningless. My ‘potential’ can be to die in a gutter with a needle in my arm. Now, I may not like that, or you know what? I might. There’s no inherent purpose or reason not to do so. Maybe you really like the idea of pushing toward a Star Trek future that you’ll never experience and ‘Good on ya, mate.’ that doesn’t mean that such a thing has any meaning or purpose. You could just as easily decide you like the idea of pushing toward Mad Max: Thunderdome. Neither of these has any particular objective value and life, the universe and everything regards both things not even with a collective shrug, but simply silence.
The reasons to do these things are that you are a human, living inside a human body, capable of feeling what a human feels. NOT a disembodied mind living outside the world entirely.
Suppose you live near a local tyrant. He has means to kill you after long, painful torture. He promises to do so if you have sex with his older daughter. His older daughter is repulsive, ugly and disgusting at all. You are also repulsed by her. However, he has a younger daughter. The younger daughter is the hottest woman you have ever seen. She finds you attractive as well. Furthermore, the tyrant offers you a million dollars for every time you have sex with the younger daughter. No obligation on your part, no strings attached, just money for every sex act on your part. Doing something you would already enjoy immensely anyway.
Which do you choose?
You are a human, with human desires, ability to feel pleasure and pain. Not an disembodied mind with none of these. Don’t pretend otherwise.
Having sex with beautiful princesses, while perhaps appealing depending upon the individual, I would conjecture does not a purpose make. I have no argument that we have desires and wants. We obviously do. Some of those wants are popularly called good and others bad. The question is why act on those wants and what is our purpose. Again, why not just kill ourselves- metaphorically turning over the card table and saying we’re done playing the game?
It said “sorry no matches here”.
I have heard so many people use these terrible analogies before.
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You get to play games like that over and over again, like literally 10,000 times. Living is something you can only do once.
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I don’t think that anyone has ever agreed that there even is a point of playing basketball games.
You seem to get enjoyment out of posting in this forum. Maybe that is a reason to stay alive?
If you seek detachment, Buddhism has had good results. But why detachment? Why are you posting here instead of on Tinder, trying to pick up chicks or guys?
That’s a pretty weak reason. “Your purpose is to have arguments with random internet strangers.” If that’s the meaning of life, I think I would want to off myself just to escape it. 
As for detachment, I’m not particularly seeking anything let alone detachment. I’m answering a question regarding purpose. My particular reasons for living at the moment are my own.
And yet, you’re answering the OP with “there is no point.” Do you draw a distinction between “the point of living” and “reasons to live?”
Certainly. A reason is an explanation for something, a cause. A purpose is something completely different. There’s a reason that I have ten toes and ten fingers-it was a trait that helped my ancestors to propagate their genes to me (or at least it did not hinder them.) There’s not a purpose or a point. Having 8 fingers would not be an affront against the universe or somehow fail the objective meaning test, it was just a random chance that happened to propagate until today. Nothing more and nothing less. My reason for living may just be that I lack fingers to pull the trigger on a gun. That’s hardly a purpose. It may just be that I’m scared that I’m wrong or simply that I’m inertial and suicide would require more effort than I’m willing to give. There could be an infinite number of reasons, but none of those would be a purpose or have meaning.
Wait…which “objective meaning test” was that again? Why are you focused on “objective” as though there is such a thing? “Meaning,” “value,” “purpose,” “point,” and indeed “reasons”…those are all constructs, artifacts of our perceived sentience. No?
That’s what we’re debating. If you contend that they are all merely subjective constructs, then we’re halfway to the OPs answer which is that you feel that objective meaning is an impossibility since such a thing by its nature is merely construct.
The next question that I think we have already dived into is whether subjective meaning is truly meaning at all. I would contend that it is not.
Of course your life doesn’t have a purpose. So what?
I mean, let’s pose a counterfactual. Suppose your life did have a purpose. So what? If God reached down and let you know that yes, indeed, your life’s purpose was to argue with random internet strangers, because that was God’s will for you, so what?
Why does God giving you a purpose mean anything? OK, it’s God. Why does God get to decide what your life’s purpose is? What if you don’t wanna argue with random internet strangers? What happens then? OK, God’s gonna punish you if you don’t fulfill your purpose, and reward you if you do? How is that different than some random stranger rewarding you or punishing you? The difference is that God knows what’s best for you, in a way that a random stranger can’t? But so what?
I get it that an eternity burning in Hell doesn’t sound so great. But that’s because I’m a random assortment of chemicals that evolved to avoid pain. Pain itself is meaningless. An eternity of bliss sounds great, but that’s for the exact same reason.
OK, God’s not going to punish me or reward me, but he’s God, and he knows best, and fulfilling my life’s purpose would be better. Better by what metric? Better because a random assortment of chemicals subjectively would interpret it as better? Dude, I’m a random assortment of chemicals, my opinions about how the universe should work are irrelevant. And that applies even if the universe itself disagrees, although I suspect that it doesn’t.
OK, but what if I’m not just a randomly evolved pile of chemicals? Like, God designed me? And so? If I design a vacuum cleaner, why should the vacuum cleaner care if it fulfills its purpose? OK, I care, because I want that clean carpet. But why does the vacuum cleaner care? If it cares, it’s only because I made it care, by programming it to care. And so it’s in the same position as the pile of evolved chemicals, because its desires and opinions about whether clean carpets are good or bad are imposed on it by its design.
So it’s all meaningless, even with God appearing in the sky and loudly contradicting me. I mean, I’ll care when God orders me to fulfill my purpose. I’ll do what he says. And that’s because I’ll feel better if I do and feel worse if I don’t, because that’s the sort of creature that I am. Doesn’t make it meaningful though, except to me, and it’s only meaningful to me because it’s happening to me.
I think this is a different discussion. The OP has already posited there is no God, so in the context of his question, discussions regarding God are fruitless since the presupposition is that there isn’t one. To bring God into it, we would have to delve into the nature of God and the nature of purpose.
Well, the nature of “purpose” anyway.
The point I was trying to make is in the title: “What is the point of living if we’re all going to die?”
And my question then is: “What is the point of living if we’re NOT all going to die?” How would it change the point of it all, if there was some type of personal immortality? If you knew your consciousness would continue even after you “died”, then what was the point of life in the first place? Like, is it some sort of larval stage? God lays a bunch of eggs on a planet, and the eggs hatch into larval souls, and the souls struggle for a while, and then go on to their adult life? And the whole point of life is to make sure that when you die you go to the Good Place, not the Bad Place?
Except what would be the point of that? OK, you ended up in the Good Place. Good for you. Except why does it matter that you ended up in the Good Place? The only reason it matters is the same reason we hu-mons think having children and enough food and no torture matters. Because we prefer it that way, no other reason.
My point is that the lack of an afterlife or a transcendent existence isn’t what makes life on Earth pointless. It would be equally pointless even with an afterlife, or a transcendent purpose. It’s pointlessness all the way down.
The problem is your argument can be extended to everything in the entire universe. Everything involving matter and energy just interacts in some arbitrary way. So the universe itself is pointless because to exist, it requires definition, and you’ve declared that the act of definition itself isn’t “real.”