Why do you search for the meaning of life.

What do u feel is your purpose in finding the purpose of life?

by purpose of life, i do not refer to the superficial "I want to live life to the fullest" - for some, or "I want to contribute something positive" - for others. I mean the concrete and universal answer to our means of being on this planet.

sure, it bothers us (us refers to you and me who actually think. unlike most people in this world) to do anything without a reason, without knowing cause and a purpose for being here, but do you seriously believe you will find that clear cut answer?

do you fear if that answer might delineate how infinitismal and worthless you are to the world? do you fear that it might possibly give a complete negation of your own life's ambitions and goals? Certainly, then you might be even more stumped. and you might say, "I know the answer. now what?."
:bugeye:

 

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If you listen and believe wholly in what 'sceintists' tell you. you know that we are an insignicance in a vast universe, and that we individuals are an 'accident' and are merely biochemical machines.....and gee theys got the chemicals to keep on keeping right, then YEAH you will feel like a worthless piece of shit pervading you when you aren't escaping this meaninglessness in desperate escape trips

But i feel the real pupose is to see right through their BS. through their spin. and to keep exploring this

so, yu do this. does this suddenly make the world change? no more wars, inequality, destruction of Nature. Mo. And maybe many people dont WANt to look too deep cause they feel so lost about that
but i personally dont see any alternative. i cant live in some plstic illusion. the REAL is NAture and its intelligence, and us living intelligently with it

 

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Purpose of life... well, I came to think that the only purpose is to live as long as you can.

But the purpose of finding the purpose? Well, I guess that we are just too curious, and to some extend arrogant. For centuries we think that we are something special, I suppose that you want to find out why you are so special... Or it is just our intellect, making us curious about the whole existance. After all, there is no real purpose in discovering/uncovering every secret in the universe, including its beginning.

As to this:

Ok, looking at this subjectively, I would not care. What about my life being totally insignificant in the big scheme? It still is my life and I can still do what I want with it. But then again, my only goal is death, everything else would just be delusional. You cannot win in life...

Now this makes me think about an interesting point, or rather a crossroads. I can say that anyone should make what he wants with his life, after all, it is his only real possesion; but that would be wrong. Or at least I would lie at this point. In fact, I and most other people I know care about the lifes of others and what they do with it. Otherwise, I would not come here to discuss anything.

Ah, apparently I have given my life some kind of purpose already, and this purpose is far more complex than the one I first stated... interesting.

Makes me think if another possibility. We do not give our life purpose, our enviroment does. And we life according to that. After all, we are a species intend on survival, just like every other life on this planet. And the conventions inside this species makes up behave in a way we perceive to be needful for survival. So I would assume that the collective and the continuity of the line gives our lifes purpose. There you might find your individual worth.

 

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You are simply a vessel for DNA to create more copies of itself. Your DNA has given you advanced mechanisms for assuring the success of this. One of them is a curiosity about the world around you. The more you know, the likelier you are to be able to survive environmental suprises and such. A byproduct of this is a curiosity about your own existence. This, combined with an overriding will to survive forces one to postulate a purpose for existence. "Gee, I'm here. I really need to survive. I like living a lot. There must be a reason..." Nope. Your reason for being is to propagate your unique DNA. This is not depressing to me at all though. Our intellegence allows us to understand this, yet still strive to enjoy life as mush as possible. I love my family, scuba diving, hiking, astronomy, etc. whether I have a universal purpose or not. Don't really need one!

 

The need for a purpose might have an evolutionary purpose. That is, the desire to find out where we fit socially or in general would have provided people with an advantage over those who went wherever to do their own thing.

 

There is no mission behind our life. We are meaningless. We are just playful processes of evolution and if we feel that, we become universal playfulness and enjoy evolution of universe in many more dimensions as it evolves spontaneously. Just see the formations of big stars, big galaxies and formation of life in universe. They are creativity, multidimensional creativity happening for no reason but for greater and greater joy, celebration, festivity and colors in expression of herself in space and time. There are many other infinite domains of perceptions where this creativity flourishes but we are in process of evolutions and thus we do not right now grasp those domains of living using our sensual perceptions. we are players of divine life which is a gift to every one for no reason, no qualification behind, no degree behind to get this blessings from goddess of creativity. It is sheer gift, without any pre-qualification of us.

 

I picked up on this quote "sure, it bothers us (us refers to you and me who actually think."

Thinking is common to all human beings and in common with everyone we all pick up a fragment of this conditioning progress. It used to bother me until I discovered that thinking is the conditioning process through which I had created myself and continued to re-create myself. Then I started to re-learn how to stop the thinking and to allow my other senses to be attentive in the moment. In that moment the original mode of perception, the is-ness of the world becomes apparrent and thinking is seen to be the past. Moments later the I re-appears and the thinking mechanism starts up. Then it starts to bother me... Now it bothers me that I got pulled into your conditioning and ...

Either you see it or you don't either way you will make a life,...

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Aristotle long ago came up with the purpose of life: It's to live happily. The pursuit of happiness is written in the US's Constitution, I tend to agree with that assesment, the purpose of life is the freedom to pursuit happiness.

G.

 

I don't search for a meaning to life. I have decided what the meaning of my life is/will be. Therefore, the question has been answered.

 

Everything happens for a reason. There must be a reason for the existence of the human species, a reason for the existence of each individual.

 

To each there is a purpose and purpose may change over time but we all have a knock on effect on the whole of society; just let the purpose be good... for all.

 

So that we can live in the best possible way......?

 

No! everything happens out of chance, there's no reason to life, and no reason to the universe, and the only reason you exist, is because two people got together and had desire to copulate, you are the end result. If they had not engaged in coitus you would not exist, or had very little chance of existing. However by the laws of causality, if neither of them engaged in coitus you would not be here, you were not meant to be here, but the end result of their copulation and a bit of "chance" the sperm seed was able to impregnate, therefore you are here. By chance, according to the laws of causality.

*In a strict reading, if A causes B, then A must always be followed by B. In this sense, sex does not cause pregnancy, nor does smoking cause cancer. In everyday usage, we therefore often take "A causes B" to mean "A causes an increase in the probability of B" – or sometimes that A is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for B.

The establishing of cause and effect, even with this relaxed reading, is notoriously difficult, expressed by the widely accepted statement "correlation does not imply causation". For instance, the observation that smokers have a dramatically increased lung cancer rate does not establish that smoking must be a cause of that increased cancer rate: maybe there exists a certain genetic defect which both causes cancer and a yearning for nicotine.

Alternatively, A may be:

* one of many possible causes of B,
* a single step along a causal chain (sex often leads to release of sperm, which can lead to the combination of sperm and egg, and the combination sperm and egg leads to pregnancy)
* one of many factors which, when combined, lead to B

Another complication is typified by the example of the moon's gravity. It isn't accurate to say, "the moon exerts a gravitic pull and then the tides rise." Gravity, rather, is a law expressing a constant observable relationship among masses, and the movement of the tides is an example of that relationships. There are no discrete events, "pulls" that can be said to precede those other events, high tides!

Our view of causation depends on what we consider to be the relevant events. Another way to view the statement, "Lightning causes thunder" is to see both lightning and thunder as two perceptions of the same event, viz., an electric discharge that we perceive first visually and then aurally.*
click

G.

 

godless,

I would love for someone who thinks this all happened by pure "chance" to fill me in on how this is the only sensible answer, as many people seem to have been asserting.
You can skip everything about the big bang, and everything after evolution begins, please, as these are not pressing questions for me. (at least until after I figure out that middle part)
I am just trying to understand how the compounding of complexity by spontaneous methods makes so much sense. Would someone suggest that matter "evolves", in the same way living cells are supposed to? Or does the whole question center around the beginning of living cells?
Please do not use the analogy of a seed, or anything that has a previously informed system, growing more complex by transformation of energy, as this pre-supposes an informational system. If someone wants to say the informational system is there by "chance" in certain types of non-living matter but we can't detect it yet, please stop asserting that this is the only sensible answer.
Maybe somone would postulate that in the unfathomable energies of the big bang the DNA-like information of the complex systems was created. What logic shows that the addition of these great amounts of energy should result in something more complex than the most complex chemical elements? If it did, where did these other "elements" disappear to?

The second law of thermodynamics, and also the word "spontaneously" seem to be extremely important to this question, and if either are to be disregarded in any way, I will expect a very good reason. (Maybe the second law is poo-poo nowadays?)
If a "then there is this part we can't explain", enters anywhere along the line, I assert that people should stop implying this is the only sensible theory, just like theists need to stop implying theirs is the only sensible theory.

Also, I am not interested in hearing about how all matter is alive, and therefore it makes sense that it evolves, if it is coming from a theist, as I doubt many people would assert that that statement is the only sensible answer to my question.

*** Also GODLESS, if your "cause" for the past is the universe as it is today, I submit that this doesn't explain anything at all. Every "cause" following from its "effect" is no more sensible than the reverse, even if it is less complicated. Many would say it is less sensible, your saying that time is going backwards. I see the value in thinking either, so I abstain from the vote on that one, for now. ***

Also, if someone wants to point out that questioning these things is not sensible, that is one possibly valid opinion.

P.S. I guess this should be a new thread, I don't know. Maybe it relates to the topic by showing that through asking these questions we get satisfaction in playing around with our brain cells, and this results in some twisted version of "happiness". Or maybe this shows that humans DO NOT pursue happiness therefore that concept of our "purpose" in life is hard to follow.

 

The ontological argument has been re-hashed and refuted so often it is merely a feeble atempt to create a "cause" of the universe, without given a clear definition what caused the cause!. Thus no evidence has been shown other than religious *CLAIMS*, of a supreme being, this was refuted way back by Hume! click

Flaws of the ontological argument:

Flaw #1 - What do you mean by "God"?

The theist does not initially define "God", as used in premise 1, in any meaningful way. We are told nothing about the nature of "God" (apart from it being described elsewhere as the "ground of being" - see Flaw #5). We see from 1 and 2 together that he considers there to be only three possible definitions for God: necessary, contingent or impossible.

Guess which he chooses to suit his argument? God is therefore necessary because that was chosen that for the definition of God (being "perfect", God cannot be dependent on anything else, and theists do not define God as "impossible"). He has not shown that God is not contingent, nor has he shown that God is not impossible (either of which would be unacceptable to a theist) - we shall address these later. He appears to merely assert this to support his own argument, although premise 3 is based partly on Anselm's argument which is weak to the point of being invalid anyway (see section 2, below).

God is by definition necessary because the theist defines him as such. Hmmm..

( Actually, this is not an entirely fair criticism. The theist is attempting to determine the modal state of God. If God is impossible, the argument cannot proceed. If God is contigent on something else, then there must still be a supreme being of sorts, which would itself be necessary. This effectively limits you to the choice of God being impossible or necessary. Still, most non-believers, and some theists also, would reasonably object to the whole idea of this argument as it appears to be trying to talk God into existence. )

By defining God as being anything at all is to beg the question : how do you know this about something which has not been shown to exist? To then go on to use this definition to prove the existence of God turns it into a circular argument (not entirely circular, as we shall see - it takes several detours through even more rocky terrain before arriving back at the beginning).

You may as well say "By definition, God exists. Therefore God exists." The argument above appears to be doing exactly this, but in a rather long-winded and distracting manner.

How could God, the alleged creator of this universe, be contingent (dependent on something else)? There could, of course, be some sort of meta-god, which creates Gods of the sort that create universes. Some current theories of quantum physics, for instance, suggest that there could well be a "multiverse", an infinite number of universes. If this is so, then maybe each has it's own Creator. click

more on OA

So as nature has been nature, and the universe came to be, and so did we, there's no evidence of any why of the universe. It just is!. we exist, the universe exists, and those are axioms that cannot be refuted. But to "claim" that the universe has some purpose, or that our lives has some purpose in the vast sea of the universe is nothing more than WISHFULL THINKING!.

For instance; what was the "purpose" of 150,000 lives to be lost to a tsunami?. Is there a grand scale skeem of things by some diety?. or was this just a natural phenomena that took those lives?.

The tragedy happened by chance, those that died were in the wrong place at the wrong time by chance, the cause of the tsunami was an earthquake that happened ramdomly has millions of earthquakes have happened ramdomly throughout the life span of the earth BY CHANCE!.

Oh and as for the second law of thermodinamics, I'll refer you to talkorigins

have a nice day!.

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Godless.

 

Exactly.
The problem begins with the premiss. You're assuming a purpose (sic). This implies way too much teleology to agree with what we know of our universe. There is no purpose, I have no purpose; we simply are.
C'est tout.

 

A cause is a cause, not a purpose. Besides, I didn't mention any gods.

Now, the question was: why search for a meaning of life? I answered by telling why those who search do it.

 

Whitewolf, read your own POST! or should I repost?. You claimed everything happens for a REASON!. basically you din't mention anything about a "cause". And when you imply a reason, or cause to the universe, you simply imply a superior entity to cause the first cause, or that the entity created the universe for some cause.

G.

 

Why is there this assumption that life has a meaning?

Life is simply the work of brain neurons. Is there meaning to that?

 

Can't our species be necessary in nature in some way? Why must it be a reasoning entity? Oh yes, there goes "reason" but there was no other better word in my mind. I didn't mean to imply that each individual exists to entertain some bearded creep or to get into heaven. An individual is necessary within a group of people, the size of the group depending on his ability to impact. Humans are to advance.

If there is a reason for things to exist, why must that reason be god? In a world full of possibilities, a single option doesn't look likely.

(It's not a well-worked out theory, I know, but today is the first day I made myself think in that direction.)

Why MUST there be a reason? There doesn't have to be, but it's a possibility.