Create your own meaning. 

Meaning to life is a grammatically correct sentence but an illogical question in itself.

 

Is there anything in one persons existance that brings happiness , for some people definitely  for others probably not

 

In 100 years you will be dead and very few people will remember you

I don't know.

I have a simple and direct answer. No.

Yes, it does. And that purpose is to send small, unmarked bills to:

 

nigelTheBold

615 Leicester Square

London, England

WC2H 7LA

Eat good food. Work some, play some, and rest some. Thirst for knowledge and adventure. Laugh everyday.

Oh, and getting laid is not a bad idea either.

 

 For New Atheists: Is This Really All There Is?

Free Will: Why we don't have it, and why that's a good thing.

 

 

The short answer is no.

The long answer is us social species have a natural interest in, What did he mean by that? We do not ask what animals mean. We do not ask what the wind means.

But as soon as a thinking creature causes things we ask what that creature, a god if you will, means by that.

A natural disaster and an act of god are entirely different things. The former is not expected to mean anything. That latter is expected to have meaning.

And then of course we confuse the two. When cattle bunch together it means a storm is coming. From that confusion comes searching for meaning in everything and we get a belief in omen -- mantricism I think it is called. The bible is filled with it both implicitly and explicitly. Lose a war and it means god is pissed. That is no different from reading chicken entrails.

That is the bottom line looking for meaning in the world. You are trying to read chicken entrails. It is a very primitive thing to do.

Yes, life has meaning.

You could come close to formulating it in common language and although I probably am not literate enough to succeed, I will try.

Try thinking about yourself as a 80 year old man or woman, respectively, whose life is just about to end. There is no tomorrow and no personal improvement scheme occupies your mind, since you know it ends here. Thinking this way, there is a brief moment in which you come into perfect focus, like an entity able to evaluate the key moments of your life with a kind of 'a-ha' clarity.

You may recognize this phenomenon as catharsis and while it is related, there is an obvious difference - this one has no element of pretention or expectation in future life.

In fact, if you take Christianity, it sort of has an element of this in the concept of Heaven and Hell. Assuming there is no consciousness after death, and there was nothing before birth, there is nothing else, therefore life is all there is for you. If this life gains a defining moment at any point, this moment might become your personal eternity - there is nothing else. The result of your evaluation decides whether your defining moment will be Heaven or Hell, quite literally.

Obviouslly, I have no clue how this will turn out in the last moments of my life, because the exercise that I engage in is just that - an exercise with a point grounded in my expectation of continued life. I have made some pretty tough decisions asking myself how I would feel about it as a dying 80-year old, but I have no guarantee that any of those will be taken into account. You will know why if you succeed in this exercise, I am always surprised with what I think and the resolution I gain in the moments after this consideration. Actually, it is a mystery to me how things I thought were alpha and omega fade away, while other aspects I never even paid attention to come into sharp focus as all-important.

There are other 'a-ha' experiences you yourself probably can relate to, from professional life, academics, or just life experience; these moments when everything falls into place and you are dead certain about everything, even though unable to grasp all of it or retain this feeling in any form. Yet, somehow you become richer.

Feel free to think this is bogus stuff with no real effect, but every time you feel the urge to ask a question about meaning, you are giving yourself a clue. I certainly feel I have gained from it.

AwEsOmE

 Why are we conflating meaning with purpose? We're the only things that create meaning, at least that we know of. So yes, there is meaning, and it's created all the time by us. Is there just one meaning? For what?

The question is a shitty question, and always has been. You get responses that are largely normative, like "drink beer" or "get laid" that have nothing to do with answering the question, because it's a silly question. You can't get a positive response because there is none. It ranks highly among other shitty questions, like:

"What is the meaning of life?"

"What is the purpose of life?"

etc.

These are bad questions, and probably don't address what you really want to know. If you want advice on finding a feeling of worth and meaning in your life, then the question is "How do I find feelings of worth and meaning in my life?" not "Where's the meaning?" because the former actually addresses your problem, and the latter can't be answered.

Actually, if we grant ourselves meaning and purpose, then "drink beer" and "get laid" answer the question perfectly (just like every conceivable response, hehe).

 

Such kind of questions is actually very important, because the answers are not arbitrary. You can set your meaning as you want, but you know that it won't be good for other people. We are in several big global crises, just because we don't know the answers or we don't behave according to them. The right human relationships will allow us to live in harmony together and reach everyone's highest potential, this is why we want the answers so much. It's rational. Ignorance is dangerous, and ignorance about this is the most dangerous.
We don't have the right human relationships, because we don't know who we are, we don't know why are we here and what we want our future to be. We don't know who our fellow man is, so we can be harmful towards him, and we often are. We're psychologically, economically, lawfully, and religionally separated from each other, and it causes us harm. This signifies a wrong answer. The purpose of life is not to be separated, quite opposite. No man is an island. "Drink beer" or "get laid" are not correct answers either. These things are not wrong, but they bring no solution. How will we recognize a correct answer? If it will allow us to live together in harmony and reach our highest potential, then it is the correct answer.

The correct answer is, what Mark, a.k.a. I AM AS GOD AS YOU proclaimed by his very nickname, and also what esoteric teachings emphasizes very much. I am as God as you. We are the gods. There is no real difference between God, nature and humanity. There is no God besides us. It's all the same thing. The religional notion of God is just a bogy-man for bronze age nomads. We already are innately potentially divine. We must recognize that potential divinity in others and help them to realize it, this will help to realize our own divinity. This is the art of Self-realization. It begins with self-respect.

It inevitably means to take the care for others as our global priority of all nations. It's absolutely unacceptable to let other gods like us live in misery and starvation, when we have much more than we need. Saving ourselves from this great crime will give back our self-respect, it will change the way how do we see ourselves (Self-awareness), and finally, we develop the Self-realization.  (btw, this is why I value activism and activists so much )

You and everyone else:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/16746

 

I wouldn't use the term pre-determined, but I would say deterministic. Our thoughts appear to be the direct result of chemical and electrical interactions. If this is true they would construct a causal chain and would be out of our control (in fact we wouldn't have any control at all). Are you suggesting there is more to it?

My answer to you would be such:

Participate in the human condition.  Improve it, if doing so makes you feel good.  Act empathetically to relate to others with maximum results and thereby perhaps add their experiences to yours, thus vicariously experiencing/ learning about possibilities which are not at your current disposal.  Make meaningful connections in order to gain self-confidence.  Read, love, and argue often because that's what life's all about.  Hope the forum appreciates my two bits.

Yup, I am suggesting there is more to it. Just taking it form dual nature of all matter, particle and wave, one of these being statistical rather than deterministic, everything is beyond determined at this point. Many things that are actual established science are very hard to wrap your head around, I don't see why it should be different with nature of the universe and our thought. I see why someone wold think that thought precess is deterministic, just like I can see why someone would think the sun revolves around the earth, if no alternative explanation exists.

It's not a matter of a lack of alternatives. There are in fact alternatives for quantum mechanics. You seem to subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation, while I subscribe to the Bohm interpretation. At this point it's nothing more than speculation as they are empirically equivalent.  What it really comes down to is weather or not there is randomness in the universe. If there isn't then everything is strictly deterministic. I'm not a believer in a cosmic dice game.

I am but a traveler on the road to awesomeness as I can see you are as well. So I'm sure you know that the path of the awesome man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of un-awesome men.

Seriously though it is kind of an awesome book. I remember when I first read it I was moving to a new city and I had this roommate that was an mma fighter who was really into it. He could talk about that shit for hours. I Think in his mind he really thought of himself as being like a samurai in some way, which is kind of weird.

I can't believe how many times I said awesome in this post.

No, I don't actually. The idea that some wave function should collaps and become decided at the moment I looked at it and just because I looked at it, is pretty silly to me. The whole cat-in-the-box is neither alive nor dead is so non-intuitive, that you would be compelled to look and try to experience further. But this is beside the point.

The point is that we don't have experiences that would allow us understanding of any of it 'correctly' at the moment. There is no reason what so ever to subscribe to Bohm rather than Bohr, other than that feeling you have, a sort of intuition that this world makes more sense. If this in turn produces a constrained interpretation of reality, since deterministic translates into no choice of our own, you are gearing your world according to futile misunderstood technicalities, like trying to cross the Pacific hanging on to a toothpick as a flotation device.

I think you got it. It's not particularly profound, but it is an unfortunate assessment of some people's tendency to attempt escape from their unfulfilling lives instead of changing them.

Pretty sure that's projection, but don't think I can't understand the sentiment. It's difficult to find a collection of fulfilling activities that can make life seem "meaningful". True enough. 

Oh, hahaha!  I needed a good laugh.  Thanks!

Fair enough. I agree to your point that I am in no position to make a claim to knowledge, but you're in no better a position than I. I am somewhat relieved that you view it as objective. The idea that waveforms collapse just because we looked at them always seemed narcissistic to me. What are your thoughts on entanglement and locality?

Interesting decomposition there. Hadn't thought of it that way before. Hmmm...

That's exactly my line of thought. It would be very difficult (impossible in my opinion) to distinguish between pseudo-random and random data. I also understand how random (or pseudo-random) behavior can add together to created predictable behavior. As long as it's bounded, it can act only in the ways allowed by those boundaries. What I don't understand is entanglement as it relates to non-locality. In my humble opinion it would make a lot more sense if the entangled pair's states were determined upon separation to be opposite, rather than determined upon measurement. Non-locality would seem to require instantaneous information transfer.