Thread: Meaning of Life
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Old 02-08-2009, 01:23 AM   #13 (permalink)
braindamage351
Insane
 
There is no meaning to life. And the question is wrong in the first place. Why should life have a meaning? Does it even make sense that it could? It really doesn't. Things only have meaning relative to something else. A hammer is a hammer because we use it to bash in nails. But a hammer without people to use it is just a stick with metal jammed in it. Mankind, or more appropriately, the rest of mankind, has meaning to each and every one of us. But we have no meaning to ourselves. It makes no sense that we would.

We simply exist. There is no reason. A chemical process was arbitrarily set in motion a few billion years ago, and ended up producing us. Everyone on the planet, including me, has the cart before the horse. The most basic rule of any rational way of living is that you do things for a reason. And yet, we're doing and doing, and expecting the reason to become apparent afterward. The only reason we don't go insane is because of cognitive dissonance. Human beings cannot tolerate physically doing things that they don't mentally agree with. It wears us down very quickly. So either our actions change or our beliefs change. And it's usually the beliefs that go. Even if you're just digging up holes and filling them in, after a long enough time you'll start to believe there's a reason for it.

Some people love the freedom. They take that utter openness as an invitation to do whatever they want, like that one guy who posted about how "rules" are bad and you should go out and be happy and so on. But that's wrong. I really like the metaphor Kant used for this sort of thing. I can't remember it perfectly, but it's along these lines: as birds increase in speed, the wind creates drag, and prevents them from going as fast as they could. So some people suggest, wouldn't it be great if the wind went away? Then they could truly fly free. But in reality, if the wind was suddenly taken away, all of the birds would fall right out of the sky. Kant's real point was that if there was no concrete logical framework, all philosophies are simply invalid. The lack of rules doesn't make them free, it actually inhibits them, because none of them can exist at all, at least in terms of substance. They're arbitrary conjecture.

If human beings have no concrete meaning, then we really have no meaning at all. And there is no proper response to this state of being. Not even inactivity. After all, what's the point of not doing anything? There is no point in doing, there is no point in not doing, there is no point in living, there is no point in killing yourself. The rational response is to go "does not compute" and explode. But luckily we're human, so we can easily just ignore it and bury ourselves in our biological and social desires.
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