“What is the meaning of life?”
I’ve come to find that this is actually quite a silly question because it is akin to asking what is the meaning of light. Well, duh, it shines! The meaning of life is life itself - just living. And there is nothing more profound to it than that. Of course, we can look deeper into the reasoning behind this.
Well, as science and technology continue to advance at a rapid pace we are increasingly becoming aware of ourselves as machines. We begin to doubt the existence of soul and free will when we consider that whatever we do and whatever we think is actually just part of the way our program runs - the software of our brain which we are getting closer and closer to recreating ourselves. How do we have free will or freedom of choice if our every “choice” is actually just another switch in our programming, executed based on the input provided to it by our sensors to the world around us and information we gathered through them in our past sensory experiences. Science removes mystery from things. That’s what it does. And once it removes the mystery from how our mind works, we begin to feel naked. Is it really that we’re just a sum of our parts?
Yup. Looks like we are.
And this is where we get back to our original issue. We are alive. We have life. Why do we say so? Because we feel it. We feel life in ourselves. We feel alive. So objectively speaking it may be that we are just sum of our parts and that we are just machines. It may even be that our feelings are just a result of a yet another subroutine in our brain software. But the fact that we are the ones who feel those subroutines running our brain is what matters to our life, because this is what makes us alive! And the importance of this living to us, alive beings, is all the more amplified by the existence of so many other alive beings which share the same predicament. We are not alone. We interact with each other, create societies, cultures and civilizations - all around the fact that we are all alive and want to be as alive as we can be.
Because the meaning of life is to live, for if we don’t live, we MIGHT as well be merely machines executing commands from our neocortex based on the sensory inputs from the surroundings.
What is the meaning of “meaning” anyway? I found that trying to answer this question is a real eye opener that makes things quite clear. Meaning is irrelevant outside of a living being. A rock on Mars means absolutely nothing objectively speaking. Mars itself means absolutely nothing objectively speaking. Pluto is neither a planet nor an asteroid, objectively speaking. It all “means” nothing when there is nobody for it to mean something to.
But if you come to Mars and pick up that meaningless rock, you would immediately assign meaning to it. It might be the first rock you picked up on Mars and therefore this fact is what would give this rock a meaning to you. You might put it in your room back on Earth in a special place and cherish it every day as it reminds you of your first visit to Mars. But.. it’s just a rock. Heck, it’s not even a “rock”. Calling it a “rock” or calling it anything is just something we do. Objectively speaking, that rock is just matter.. just a piece of the universe, just a bunch of moleculs in some sort of a structure.
So, speaking of meaning. Objectively speaking nothing makes sense. For something to make sense we first have to have a being with a brain that feels life within itself, to which that something would make some sense. A flower doesn’t smell until someone smells it. It merely emits something, which a living being could interpret as smell or might as well interpret as the weapon of mass destruction. 
So, whatever we are objectively speaking, the fact that we feel alive is enough for us to be at peace with the fact that at the same time we are “just” a machine programmed to function in a particular way, by “god” or “natural selection” or something else. The fact that we feel alive IS the thing that adds meaning to everything, the thing which makes something make sense, the thing which makes us assign meaning to our lives, to our societies, to our past, present and future - the thing which makes us want to feel alive even more, and hence grow and grow and keep growing and evolving into beings that are even more self aware than we are right now.
So, what is the meaning of YOUR life? Well, if meaning of life in general is to live, and to live is to feel, and to feel means to feel the desire to feel good. The meaning of your life is therefore in the pursuit and achievement of the ultimate “feelgood”. This is not hedonism, mind you. Hedonism, or mere pursuit of quick pleasure is just one level of “feelgood”, not the deep and profound one which you will know once you feel it - which people usually describe as the sense of accomplishment. You will find a way to feel this way once you look into yourself, who you are right now: what are your interests, skills, desires and beliefs. Once you know who are you and who you want to be you will also know what is it that you need to accomplish to feel accomplished, to feel that ultimate “feelgood” - that you have fulfilled your meaning and left a legacy to others like you to build their meaning on.
This is a beautiful thing. If demystifying ourselves does not scare us into meaninglessness, but rather gives us even more power to mean something and something more - then there is no end to what we could become. For finding ourselves naked did not make us less of who we are - but more. We shine on our own, because we are alive and we radiate life to others around us. Sentient Life is the magic of the universe, now demystified. We are it. And it are us.
March 24th, 2008 at 11:22 am
The meaning of life is whatever meaning you choose to give to it, so better choose a meaning that makes you happy.
Objectively a human is yet another bag of molecules. A complicated one, but still. In a way it is funny to see this thing ascribe meaning to itself: how much is the opinion of something meaningless about meaning worth? In a purely materialistic worldview we either get stuck in a loop of meaninglessness when reasoning about the meaning of life, or create a circular reasoning of meaningfulness. Because considering ourselves entirely meaningless is unacceptable, we either have to take our meaningfulness as an axiom, or introduce something immaterial that creates meaning into our reasoning.
These two solutions are more or less the same, one is unprovable because it is an axiom, the other happens to be unprovable as well. Personally I like the immaterial-something-providing-meaning solution more because it allows for further investigation of the source of meaning, although I’m fully aware such investigations may as well be fantasies and the question “what gives meaning to the giver of meaning” remains.
It’s similar to “If God created everything, who created God?” and “If the barber shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself, who shaves the barber?”.
Maybe “meaning” is a human invention, then humans indeed are the ultimate source of meaning and therefore any meaning they choose for themselves will be their actual and most deep meaning. Or maybe meaning is like time, it just exists and looking for the ultimate-ultimate source is just as pointless as asking what caused the beginning of time.
March 24th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Well, as I concluded a while ago all reasoning sooner or later does a full circle of some sort, meeting its beginning with its end - at the point we call a “paradox”.
So, we objectively “meaningless” beings give meaning to ourselves which is again a contradiction in term and hence a kind of a paradox.
I suppose in such cases we just have to apply an external principle to it in order to choose the “better” of the meeting opposites. In this case we choose to believe that we add meaning to ourselves and other things around us because if we chose to believe in infinite meaninglessness we’d essentially choose to end all motives to our existence - which might as well be a slippery slope towards a collective suicide. Depression is already one of the biggest epidemies of humanity - so much so that some scientists have said that one way humanity could end is that it just stops wishing to survive.
Choosing to believe in either side of the meeting opposites is probably irrational, yet it seems that choosing the belief in ourselves as meaning givers is a less irrational option - and for lack of any rational options in this limited context, it is a rational choice.
Interestingly, this might just underscore my belief in individualism. We are gods to ourselves. Nothing else HAS to matter because we choose what matters and what doesn’t.
The only thing that limits our divinity in this sense is the existence of 6.something billion of others we which have to interact with.
In which case I point to the principle of non-initiation of force / non-aggression.
March 24th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
“But for anyone who is truely suffering and who questions why life must go on, news taht the purpose of life is “to live” would have to come as a disappointment. That is because it is no answer at all.”
page 15 of YOU WERE BORN FOR A REASON by Takamori
March 25th, 2008 at 3:13 am
Frank, yes it may seem disappointing at first, but I did say that the meaning of life *in general* is to live. We have to be more specific when it comes to a specific person, which is why we go deeper into what constitutes “living”, and I think that is what our feelings are. We feel therefore we are alive. Furthermore we are intelligent and self aware and can therefore have an introspection of ourselves to see who we are and where we want our life to go, and then based on these conclusions pursue a path which would bring us the most of the most positive feelings - the most fulfillment.
I might be putting this in a bit too many words, so to recap; if the meaning of life is living and we are the ones in control of our life then we give meaning to ourselves. We were born for a reason, indeed, we just have to look into ourselves and find what it is.
I should probably check out that book though.
Thanks for the comment.