Hey Joe said:
Here's the way it works. I throw a random statement out there, and you answer it with another completely random statement that has nothing to do with the previous statement. We keep on going until somebody says something sensible or we stumble upon the meaning of life. Whatever comes first.
YOUR TOMATO IS RUDE
It is really very simple. I don't mean to spoil the fun by saying something sensible relating to the 'meaning of life', but to keep my insights on this topic to myself whilst everyone continues to stumble around in the dark trying to answer the Ultimate Question seems to be the better course of action.
Before I tackle the Ultimate Question, I should issue a warning. Do not read any further if you do not wish your spiritual, religious, socialist, communist, capitalist, humanist or deeply held philosophical point of view to go fundamentally unchallenged. I do not intend any upset of any person, communities or cultures and I would like it recognized that what follows is not my opinion or belief, but inescapable fact. Don't think I'm any happier about it than you are after reading it. However, suffice to say that I have lived with the truth for many years now and have found reassurance despite suffering periods of personal turmoil (as is quite common to all of us who have been around for a while), that I am living, to the best of my knowledge, in actual reality (i.e. no Heaven or Hell, no God, no Jesus, no Allah, no Buddha, no Tao, no life after death, no reincarnation, no spiritual plane, no metaphysics, no future of humanity, no harmony to recapture a lost Eden, no Aliens to answer your existential questions, nothing, nada, zip)...
Okay then, here goes:
When people ask the question "What is the Meaning of Life", they can mean many things when they refer to "Life"; in fact, they are actually asking multiple questions. People sometimes factor the question into a number of sub-questions, such as "why are we here?", "is there a supreme being/creator?", "what is the future of the human race?", or merely the more personal: "what SHOULD I do with my life? (even if I don't actually feel like it... tell me the real answer, I'd like to know the extent to which I am 'wasting' my life...)". All this complexity has encouraged 'logical' philosophical debate and 'emotional'/'spiritual' religious adherence, the questions have also formed themes for artists and writers, whose work has had a more derivative effect on television drama, motion pictures, animation, even video-games. All culture.
Yet, "Life" does not need to be factored in order to answer the question. "Life" does not even need to be properly defined. What I think you mean by it in the phrase "What is the Meaning of Life?" may be quite different from you know you meant. This mismatch is not a problem, as it is overshadowed by a far bigger semantic problem that has hitherto been overlooked.
Philosophers have been blind to the fact that they have made an erroneous assumption that there is an extrinsic meaning of life. Yes, there may be many intrinsic ephemeral meanings that we can personally apply to our lives, espouse in the community (such as "Don't kill babies"), enshrine in law (either secular, religious, or both), promulgate through culture (including educational institutions), or attempt to reinforce by positive feedback (for example, celebrating birthdays, baby showers, etc.) to the extent that we sometimes collectively delude ourselves that the common things humanity strives to do have real objective meaning, rather than just being a nicer way to be before death ends our the continued appreciation of 'Life, the Universe and Everything' by our inherently soulless emergent solipsistic consciousness.
To use a simple analogy, imagine you are asking a similarly structured question about something far less expansive and divisive:
"What is the colour of this shoe?"
Clearly, "shoe" is the object under consideration. When asked everyone will agree on the colour. The colour is a quality pertaining to the shoe. The shoe has colour. The colour does not have shoe. With me so far?
"What is the meaning of life?"
Ask yourself: is this the same kind of question...
I'll wait while you ruminate on it for a bit, because the truth is much better arrived at yourself, rather than being flat-out told.
Okay, enough waiting. If you've got this far, or even if you are an undisciplined reader prone to reading the final paragraph of a post, it doesn't really matter. For the conclusion you should have reached was that although a shoe has colour you cannot say that life has meaning in the exact same objective terms. This is because the concept of "life" is so vast it includes multi-coloured shoes that give meaning to women's lives, everything else you can think of and more besides that. Although by its nature it contains all meanings they are all judged subjectively. Therefore, there is no objective frame of reference to 'stand in' and pose the question "What is the meaning of life?", for to be objective to life one would have to be outside of it (physically, conceptually, semantically). Note: those thinking that there is a loophole involving Jesus being outside of life spiritually and therefore being in an objective position to tell us the true meaning or "Way" on his resurrection has one small flaw - and this isn't religious bias - even if Jesus occupied an objective frame of reference vis-a-vis LIFE he was not in an objective state of MIND, in other words he was a ghost at the time as wasn't looking at anything straight. [ Oh, I recognize I have a responsibility to prevent the spread of depression and suicide that could result from comprehending these facts about the nature and limits of semantics within the envelope of what language adheres to. Just because I have proven that there is no meaning to life does not mean that there is no point in any of us carrying on living. I have. I like the fact that there is no important thing that I really should be doing, that the consequences of my actions are only limited by society and my own desire to not leave myself with bad memories of things I have done to people. I am very keen on etiquette. I know, manners are totally unnecessary and often unreciprocated, but I like knowing that at least I made the initial effort. In a way it gives my life some small ephemeral meaning, but I'm not saying "Be excellent to each other" is in any way the Ultimate Answer, just something nice to live by as you mark the days to your hopefully natural demise. There really is no point in killing yourself, you're not getting reincarnated, you're only going to be alive once and you might die before you hit seventy, so things have got to be really bad (and stay really bad) for you not to JUST WAIT. ]
- and continue to evolve, grow, learn, and make better video games.
