what do you think the meaning of life is?
 

yeah, let's have another of those threads. you know the ones. the ones with no real right or wrong answer that we can fight over.

i believe, ultimately, the point to life is to live your life however you want, within reason and not by harming others. just make that space between the point when you were born to the point of death memorable. i don't know. what do you think?

I don't even understand what it means to have meaning. What is that? Meaning? What? I don't even... That concept does not fit into my brain.

Here.

Seriously, why do people think their lives serve any sort of higher purpose? And why do they think there's just one purpose for all of their lives?

I don't see how it's possible to have any concept of meaning without believing in a higher power that defines such things. And I don't believe in any higher power.



Which reminds me of the time a teacher in school suggested that atheists were idol worshippers (which is one of the strongest taboos in Judaism) because they were putting themselves above God, and therefore worshipping themselves or something. Even as a 12 year old believer I saw that was stupid.

There is no true meaning to anything ever.

Just live as long as you can and enjoy yourself.

To make more life and ensure the survival of our species of course!

Boobs.

To leave the world a better place than when you found it, so future generations can continue to benefit.

Also, boobs.

More boobs logically = better place so yeah

For some reason we think we're more important than other lifeforms and that our lives must have "meaning". Nah, do you think the lives of bacteria has meaning?

No, we're just here and then we die, and that's it. Have fun I guess?

let me put it another way: why do we exist? why are we here? where did we come from? is Darwin's theory of evolution correct? maybe we're a happy accident? i've heard a few interesting theories about this, some saying we didn't evolve from apes which means we either evolved from something that no longer exists or we were 'placed' here somehow (aliens!). i've heard another theory that we were created by a 'supreme being' similar to a wizard (no joke) and that our point was to serve. that same 'wizard' magically created stone structures and a dragon, and then completely disappeared. then again i can't remember all the details of the theory, so i may have gotten it wrong.

the shit you talk about while stoned. i think it's all fascinating though.

oh yeah, and to those saying "we exist to multiply and ensure the survival of our species/enjoy life/there is no meaning", i agree. i mean, in a way they're all correct because it's true. we do need to reproduce in order to survive, we should enjoy life, there is no meaning because life is chaotic and we are nothing special. well, we are special, but in comparison to the entire universe we aren't anything special. thing is, even if i agree with all that it still doesn't answer my question. why are we here? even if there's no definitive point to our existence, where did we come from? why have we evolved beyone all other animals on our planet?

confusing. maybe i just talk shit.

We have only evolved beyond all other species if you judge our evolution by human values. And we value the kinds of things that we do. I suppose a self-aware termite might think that being able to build towering, self-aerating hives out of dirt without sullying oneself with tools is the apex of evolution, and the purpose of life is to serve the queen.

Something I don't get is why being created by a higher power could possibly give us purpose or meaning. You still have to do all the work of figuring out life for yourself. Serving the purpose of another is a poor substitute for that, and being created for that reason makes you no better than a slave or tool. To me that's more meaningless and hopeless even than nihilism, and it is a fate that can never be escaped. I am always disturbed by those who gleefully embrace that state, and by the teachings that command us all to do the same. I'll take a coldly infinite and pointless universe over a cosmic shackle any day.

I agree totally with the last sentence, if only because accepting that everything is down to random chance is a lot better for my mental health than trying to derive meaning when shitty things happen.

As for why being created by a higher power could give someone purpose or meaning: The act of having been created is not what gives meaning. It's the idea that the meaning of life has been revealed (if obscurely) through revelation, so humans don't need to think about it. But that wasn't what I was getting at in my original post. I was making the point that asking the question of the meaning of life is meaningless unless you already accept the concept of a higher power. And yet people who don't believe in a god ask that question every day.

for some reason i can't really agree with this. i remember you mentioning something similar before and i felt the same then. i believe because we're at the top of the food chain, we are above all other animals. our intelligence ensures that. but you could argue that we're only at the top of the food chain because of human values, the food chain itself is just another human creation, does that mean it means nothing? are we just blinding ourselves with human beliefs? i understand that human values wouldn't mean anything to an animal because they are an alien mind, but does that really mean that everything we know means nothing in comparison? i don't believe that, but as a human i guess it's hard to comprehend.

i completely agree with this. personally i don't believe we were created by a higher power, i think we either evolved from something that no longer exists or we were 'placed' here. planted and left to grow. not necessarily by aliens or a supreme being, possibly naturally and by accident, or maybe by humans somewhere out in space. maybe we've existed in the universe longer than we think, and maybe we were 'planted' to ensure the survival of our race. i'm not so keen on Darwin's theory of evolution. i think the missing link is a big indicator that it's wrong, but that's just me.

good point. so we're here because we were in the right place at the right time, if you like. our spark of life was all down to chance. then again i still hold onto the theory that we were planted here. that doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means that through the chaos and random chance we grew.

so the meaning of life is chaos and there is no higher power. next question is "where did we come from?"

I come from Poland.

i come from my mother

i come into your mother

There is no missing link. Every single fossil that has been found has been further evidence in favour of the theory of evolution. And while we don't have fossilised evidence of every single species that has ever existed (nor should we, given the incredibly unlikely circumstances that must occur for fossilization to happen), we've got enough of a range that there are no gaps that can't be filled by a little educated speculation.

Incidentally, you shouldn't call it 'Darwin's theory of evolution'. Darwin only started the idea. There's been a shitload of progress in the last 150 years and the science has progressed significantly beyond his original theses.

If you want to get your head around evolution, read The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. It's the book that convinced me that it's a plausible theory and life didn't need a creator of any kind.

thanks Nate, i'll give that a read.

i knew that was cumming.

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Get rich or die.

Being at the top of the food chain tends to be a temporary state of affairs. Something usually comes along to take the place or simply knock you off the top, or else you become the victim of your own success. We are all very aware that we subsidise our success on the back of the very environment that allows that success, which is the most sublime fuck-up I can possibly imagine.

Art and science and philosophy are all very pretty and engaging to particular kinds of minds such as my own, but the only real measure of success is that you are still here. When we judge other entities by different measures we end up with discrepancies between reality and our model of it. From one such point of view, a "successful" disease is one that causes the most death and destruction, yet when we look around we don't find too many of them. The ones we do see all the time are significantly less deadly under ordinary circumstances. The perennials: rhinovirus, influenza, Staphylococcus, E. coli etc. Now HIV, which is a masterpiece, these have successfully evaded our best efforts to wipe them out. Hell, we mustn't get rid of E. coli we need it to stay healthy!. The exceptions (like malaria) enjoy animal hosts and vectors.

The terrifying and deadly rare diseases don't become endemic for that very reason. They burn through the host, being extremely successful in the short term, but they subsidise their success on the back of their host organism so much that they kill it quickly, reducing their chances to spread further. Ebola never got a foothold in our species until a less deadly strain emerged, and it killed more people in a year than every other strain did through all human history. They, like Marburg virus and Lujo virus, are brief and passing fancies in the world of infectious diseases (DISCLAIMER: they likely still exist in their natural host organisms, to whom they are less deadly and thus more successful). Even the Plague burned itself out.

What I'm saying is, sure, we do amazing things and we value our accomplishments much more highly than the things other species do. But the means by which we do these things comes at a massive cost that renders them utterly unsustainable. We haven't been here for very long, and if we keep this up then we won't add much time onto that. A fine standard of success and notability, if all those special traits are what ultimately clobbers us before our time. We'll be like a Marburg outbreak: brief, scary, ultimately unimportant to the world at large.

Our evolutionary history from other species of primate is very well documented from both fossil and molecular evidence. We know where we came from, research now is all about uncovering fascinating little details and wrinkles in the story. My favourite line of evidence are the endogenous retroviruses in our genome. Ask me about it some time.

Are we really getting into an evolution debate? There's mountains of evidence for the theory and not much evidence for anything else. Evidences available upon request.

Not a debate. Class, maybe. I dunno, my contribution to both tends to be the same.

That's just what the secret Universal Government beneath the Pyramids of Giza wants you to think. You have to fight the machine, form your own ideas.

I thought it was a giant cat head underground and that the pyramids were its ears?

I don't want to live a futile and insignificant existence but I'm also fairly convinced that there's no alternative. My meaning is "Learn as much as I can, because some day I might be proven wrong."

I don't mind living in a futile existence. I don't give it much thought. I'm a pragmatist, I guess. Everything is what it is, and unless I see a way to change it for the better, I just accept it. I am perfectly happy finding love, and beauty in the small things, invading a vagina as often as possible, and trying to cause no harm. That's all the meaning I need.

We're never gonna know the answers maaaaan.

May as well just live in idle stupidity.

We're never gonna know the answers. Because we're asking wrong, illogical questions. Deal with it

thanks for taking the time out to write this, i think i understand.

i'm too stupid to do that.

personally i still don't believe we evolved from apes or whatever the fuck it is. i honestly believe we were always our own class of animal (different), if we weren't planted here that is. i have no evidence to back that up and you can call me stupid if you like but that's what i reckon. we were never swinging through the trees, eating bananas. DEAL WITH IT

No we weren't, but our ancestors were. You can see evolution happening on a microscopic scale, it's why when your doctor prescribes you antibiotics, you have to take exactly the recommended amount, otherwise they'll be able to adapt to the changes. They literally upgrade themselves like the new Cybermen download updates.

i'm not saying we never evolved, and that we aren't still evolving, i'm just saying i don't believe we came from apes. i think we evolved from an animal that was it's own class and nothing to do with lanky-armed tree-swingers.

Don't think of a monkey gradually becoming a human. Think about great apes and humans sharing a common ancestor a few million years ago. The way lots of people think about homo evolving from monkeys seems to imply that other apes would eventually evolve into modern humans.

Yeah, if you think the gap between us is too wide, just break it down. We're not so far from cavemen, they're not so far from flatfaced hominids, they're not so far from upright apes, and they're not so far from particularly ambitious proto-chimps.

Because you're right, hominids are a seperate group from lemurs and the like. They're just both derived from a common ancestor, and that's impossible to deny because it's also true of literally every species on earth. Go back far enough, and you'll find a forefather species that diverged into humans, slugs, beetles and sequoia trees.

We can't have come from any non-ape because we currently are a variety of ape. This has been very well known for a very long time. When Carl Linnaeus founded the field of taxonomy (a nested hierarchical structure for the classification of living things) he couldn't put the human species anywhere else, and he tried. This was pre-Darwin, and he likely believed in special creation (though his studies did some work eroding that assumption), he wasn't happy about it, but he saw, clearly, that every part of our anatomy is ape anatomy. We have all the same structures. We now know that we have all the same genes, in fact some of the genes that have the physical effects that set us apart are not special human genes, but rather broken versions of monkey genes. That's why, for example, we have such tiny and weak jaws: the genetics required for strong, robust jaws like other primates have are all fucked up, but that opens the way for a larger cranium.

We are apes for the same reason that ducks are birds. "Ape" is not a different kind of animal, it is a group, a subset of old-world monkeys, which are a subset of primates, which are a subset of mammals. And the Homo genus is a subset of great ape. We can construct from comparative genetics very detailed family trees. We know that from the combined lineage of the great apes, the common ancestor of all four genera of great ape, it was the orang-utan lineage that broke away first. Then the gorilla lineage broke away in at the next fork. Then the human and chimpanzee lineages split apart. Of the various species they each gave rise to, only one human and two chimpanzee species remain. The very same evidence that proves that we evolved also proves our shared ancestry with modern non-human apes.

I don't think of just living your life as best you can without being concerned about meaning as idle, or stupid. I think it's probably a lot less frustrating than trying to find meaning in the meaningless.

you guys are convincing me. and i don't mean that to sound pretentious or anything either, i'm just equally convinced that we never derived from apes, but i understand how we could have. i'm in two minds about it, i guess.

i still hold onto my "we were planted here" idea though, but only as a slight possibility.

you never know. we could be wrong, man. we could be wrong.

At this point, being wrong about that would be like being wrong about the shape of the Earth. There would have to be something that can account for the full suite of evidence we have for our current model. At this stage, that would have to be a brain-in-a-vat type revelation.

NO WE COULD BE WRONG

GOD DAMN IT

DON'T CRUSH MY DREAMS