Meaning and purpose

[kaliyuga]

What is the meaning and purpose of life on Earth, in particularly human life?

I post this on a Friday so my esteemed forum-friends have the weekend to ruminate on this most fundamental question.

[Turkophagos]

Eat, shit, reproduce.

[kaliyuga]

Eat, shit, reproduce.

That may be considered a purpose - perpertuating the species - but does it have any meaning? And without meaning is human life nothing more than an empty shell?

[Loddfafner]

Our purpose is to provide meaning to the universe. Without conscious witnesses, the universe itself is without meaning. If all possible universes happen, the one that can produce conscious beings is the one we inhabit.

[Liffrea]

Life is its own purpose.


Originally Posted by Loddfafner
Our purpose is to provide meaning to the universe. Without conscious witnesses, the universe itself is without meaning.

Man is God, God is Man, both grow within the other (insert universe for God if you so desire). The anthropic principle has a lot going for it and certainly provides meaning without recourse to a lot of metaphysical hot air.

[Eins Zwei Polizei]

"The meaning of life is life. The end of life is the end" (comedian Corrado Guzzanti while playing a nihilist Catholic priest)

[Eldritch]

Our purpose is to provide meaning to the universe. Without conscious witnesses, the universe itself is without meaning.

That's right. The purpose of life is to evolve to a level where it is aware of itself, and from there on to develop and improve itself. The ultimate goal of the process is the universe itself as a conscious entity.

[Eins Zwei Polizei]

By the way there's not much sense in looking for an 'objective meaning' of things. Meaning is something projected by subjects every time. Even if a specific meaning could be assigned by a peculiar supernatural entity (i.e. "God") to life or whatever else, this wouldn't prevent other subjects to project different meanings.

[Peasant]

Bt84uBuGKNk

[blan]

many different takes on this,

i have heard it said humans are bacteria/a cancer we cover up the natural world and destroy it like a flesh eating virus and that is our purpose, to consume and destroy... thats one take, others say we are here out of love, God created us for love to have a creature who could love and be made in his image, maybe it is because God was lonely and needed something to worship him and comunicate with.
maybe there is no purpose maybe our advanced minds make us think there is purpose, maybe our purpose is to reproduce and then die going back into nature,

one thing is for certain there is purpose we have to find it though,
humans are creators, builders, makers , doers, we teach we learn we build, construct it is within us, however with all that said ...we are also destroyers.
all living beings must destroy and take the life of other beings plants, animals, micro bacteria if we want to live.

[Psychonaut]

That's right. The purpose of life is to evolve to a level where it is aware of itself, and from there on to develop and improve itself. The ultimate goal of the process is the universe itself as a conscious entity.

That sounds strikingly similar to Teilhard's omega point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point).

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Eldritch
That's right. The purpose of life is to evolve to a level where it is aware of itself, and from there on to develop and improve itself. The ultimate goal of the process is the universe itself as a conscious entity.

Rules of complexity certainly seem to be integral to life, I wonder if we can speak of them in the same sense as we can the four fundamental laws of physics?

[San Galgano]

I go with eristic of Protagoras(or better with the sophism of Protagoras)

If you don't know what are you searching for , once you find it, you will not recognize it as the target you were searching for.

[Psychonaut]

By the way there's not much sense in looking for an 'objective meaning' of things. Meaning is something projected by subjects every time. Even if a specific meaning could be assigned by a peculiar supernatural entity (i.e. "God") to life or whatever else, this wouldn't prevent other subjects to project different meanings.

This would only be the case if you interact with the world as if it were an object. If you are a lone subject amidst a field of objects, then of course you are the sole source of meaning. But if both you and the world are subjects, the transmission of meaning becomes a two way street.

[Aramis]

This would only be the case if you interact with the world as if it were an object. If you are a lone subject amidst a field of objects, then of course you are the sole source of meaning. But if both you and the world are subjects, the transmission of meaning becomes a two way street.

Oh, I understand. So is the universe, as a subject, going to crush our dreams of meaning sooner or later?

http://cricketsoda.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/whos-your-daddy-darth-vader-shirt.gif

[Psychonaut]

Oh, I understand. So is the universe, as a subject, going to crush our dreams of meaning sooner or later?

I don't understand your question. Could you rephrase it?

[Eldritch]

That sounds strikingly similar to Teilhard's omega point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point).

Oh? I've leafed through The Phenomenon of Man, but never actually sat down and read the damn thing. Perhaps I should.

If you read Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (http://www.singularity.com/) you'll find a very similar argument. It just has an even cooler name: The Omega Omnisphere. :dance:

You may recall a discussion on Transhumanism in some thread earlier in the summer, and me promising to return to the topic as soon as I get the opportunity to read up on a few things? Well that still stands, but it's taking quite a bit longer than I anticipated at first.

[Eldritch]

Rules of complexity certainly seem to be integral to life, I wonder if we can speak of them in the same sense as we can the four fundamental laws of physics?

Uh, I'm not sure I understand the question, can you please elaborate?

[Aramis]

I don't understand your question. Could you rephrase it?

What's the relation of an individual human being to the subjectivity of his world?

Hence the Vader picture, who's fun you spoiled with logics. :(

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Eldritch
Uh, I'm not sure I understand the question, can you please elaborate?

There are four fundamental laws of physics, electromagnetism, gravity, weak and strong force.

In biology there are no comparable laws as such; natural selection is close but not quite on the same lines. However a few (but certainly not the majority of biologists) have argued that there are laws of complexity in nature as inherent as any physical law. What these laws state is that life began out of a process of autocatalysis that selection works upon. For some life is an emergent property not located within its constituents emerging from a prebiotic soup of chemical elements but a whole. It is importat to understand that this is a scientific proposal and in no way meant to be mystical but it lends to a greater sense of place than the general view of evolution as “chance caught on a wing”.

So is it a reasonable question to ask if life tends towards complexity?

[Psychonaut]

What's the relation of an individual human being to the subjectivity of his world?

I'm not sure there's one answer to that. Mine would be that the character of the relation depends on the mode in which the subject participates with the world. Intentionality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentionality) is a two way street, so when you interact with the world as a lifeless it, that's what is revealed to you; but when you do so as if it were a thou (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_thou), something completely different unfolds for you, and nature reveals a different side of itself—one that is wholly living and chocked full of telos. You find something similar with people; you'll see a robotic mass of conditioned responses when you treat them as objects, but catch a glimpse of their infinite potentiality when you open up and let them reveal themselves to you as subjects.

[Eldritch]

...

So is it a reasonable question to ask if life tends towards complexity?

Okay, I see what you mean now.

Well, I think that question is quite reasonable, and the answer would seem to be that yes, while inanimate matter seeks entropy, life seeks complexity. Which will win in the end? ;)

[Loki]

Our purpose is to provide meaning to the universe. Without conscious witnesses, the universe itself is without meaning.

But without anyone to observe our positive (?) influence on the universe, this is in itself a futile exercise, unless the purpose would be our personal gratification in thinking that we have provided meaning to the universe. The universe has no emotions and cannot appreciate anything done for it.

Simply put, our most basic purpose in life has always been survival for as long as we can, and procreation - possibly with the hope that our descendants would go on to some wonderful accomplishments one day we haven't dreamed about. In essence, the latter has been achieved. And now, since survival until a great age is no longer considered out-of-the-ordinary, procreation has also drastically declined in developed countries.

We have no other purpose really, of you think about it, other than pollution, destruction, and internal competition because of the boredom of life in itself.

[Don]

What is the meaning and purpose of life on Earth, in particularly human life?


Meaning: no one.

Purpose: to preserve it. (not only from the individualistic point of view.)

[Loddfafner]

But without anyone to observe our positive (?) influence on the universe, this is in itself a futile exercise, unless the purpose would be our personal gratification in thinking that we have provided meaning to the universe....

I don't grasp how the existence or nonexistence of an outside observer affects the question of whether or not our own existence is futile.


Simply put, our most basic purpose in life has always been survival for as long as we can,

A warrior might find purpose in honorable combat without regard for longterm survival, if the Illiad is to be trusted.


and procreation - possibly with the hope that our descendants would go on to some wonderful accomplishments one day we haven't dreamed about.

When a dog mounts a bitch, is he thinking about puppies or is he just doing it because he can?

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Eldritch
Well, I think that question is quite reasonable, and the answer would seem to be that yes, while inanimate matter seeks entropy, life seeks complexity. Which will win in the end?

Hmmm

Seeks would be to imply a purpose, it is more to the point that left to its own devises a phase space (in this case the particles of matter that form all living things) will travel in all possible configurations, most of which will lead to entropic states.

The fact that this isn’t the case is interesting, and is the result of some very simple laws of nature. Why this is becomes another interesting question (without any answer at least from a scientific point of view).


Originally Posted by Loki
We have no other purpose really, of you think about it, other than pollution, destruction, and internal competition because of the boredom of life in itself.

You would enjoy The Lucifer Principle, from a basic level it’s all about the genes, what does power bring? The two basic necessities of existence sex and room to grow, in this we are no different to any other form of life, Marx just got tired of looking into the palace instead of out from it. War and violence are not foreign interlopers on human nature they are the very engine of “progress” the road to heaven is paved with the skulls of others. The really interesting thing about man is that one he actually stops to ask the question why this is so and second he dreams that things could be otherwise, which suggests to me we are not just meant to be red of tooth and claw.

[Aemma]

Our purpose is to provide meaning to the universe. Without conscious witnesses, the universe itself is without meaning. If all possible universes happen, the one that can produce conscious beings is the one we inhabit.

Ahhhhh! :lightbul:

I just picked up this most interesting book yesterday, Biocentricism:How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza, MD with Bob Berman.


Principles of Biocentrism:

First Pirinciple of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

Second Principle of Biocentricism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.

Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behaviour of subatomic particles--indeed all particles and objects--is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

Fourth Principle of Biocentricism: Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

Fifth Principle of Biocentricism: The very structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentricism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The universe is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.

Sixth Principle of Biocentrism: Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

Seventh Principle of Biocentrism: Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Funny how some gentlemen farmers are able to subtlely plant a seed in another's garden of thoughts without that Other being fully conscious of it! ;) :D

[Azdaja]

(I wrote this a few months back and decided to post it here, as it seems to be 'in line' with the thread topic. Note that a god-granted 'objective meaning' would, by it's very nature, grant objective meaning to our own subjective meanings. I can debate this at great length)


How many times have you heard some friend or other, recently involved with a new romantic interest, utter something along the lines of, “we met for a reason”? This sort of statement has all but become obligatory. This is not to say that it’s untrue…though perhaps it’s not quite true in the sense that the people who tend to state it believe it to be.
Actually, I lie. It’s definitely not true in the sense these people believe it to be. We have here, in statements such as these, a fundamental problem with differentiating between “reason” on the one hand, and “meaning” on the other. Most certainly, you and your new love interest did meet for a reason. Many reasons, really, though we can divide them up into two general groups.
First, we have the physical meeting itself, which was the effect of numerous causes: you telling your friend you’d go on the blind date, her telling her friend the same. You getting into your car and driving to the restaurant, her doing the same. And so on. In this sense, “reason” simply means “cause”. For every effect (such as the physical meeting) there is a cause, or “reason”.
Second, we have internal motivation, the subjective correlate to the objective empirical phenomenon noted in the above paragraph. You told your friend you’d go on the blind date because you were bored, or because you were lonely, or because he offered to pay for your meal, or whatever. One could say (and this is very important) that our motivations give meaning to those actions which are under our conscious control.
Motivation presupposes an intelligence of some sort. Without some type of intelligence, without some manner of mind, there can be no motivation. And what does this mean? If the meaning behind an act is rooted in it’s motivation, and if there can be no motivation without a mind from whence it springs, then logically speaking, only those empirical phenomenon which are the external product of a intelligent mind can have meaning.
And what is the meaning of such phenomenon? Obviously, the meaning is that which we, through our motivations, give to it. Yet when people say, “there must be a reason why this or that is happening”, something other than personal motivation is being inferred. This is especially true when the event in question is not something that has an obvious psychological component (such as falling in love), but is rather the effect of outside natural forces, or the effect of numerous motivations from numerous quarters, some producing desired results, and some undesired. I’m thinking here of things like being struck by lightening, getting HIV, or whatever. Sure, if you weren’t walking around outside, the lightening wouldn’t have hit you. If you weren’t taking it up the butt without protection, or shooting up heroin, you probably wouldn’t haven’t gotten HIV.
But this isn’t what people want to hear. There needs to be a deeper meaning behind the bad stuff (AIDS) and the good stuff (meeting your new love interest), and that deeper meaning must not have a thing to do with simple causality, OR with personal motivation. No. The meaning of their particular circumstance must be DIVINE in it’s scope.
Years ago I said (and I’m obviously not the only one who has echoed such sentiments) that a belief in God immediately grants every life, and every event without every life, a deeper meaning. Why? Because if there is a God, then every empirical event whatsoever has a motivation behind it. And where there is motivation, as noted earlier, there is meaning. If there is a God, then there is a great universal mind guiding the causal chain on it’s way. Sure, there is still personal motivation and personal meaning, but such things are themselves no more than effects of the great will of God. Your cancer is a “test from above”. Your new romantic interest is a “soul mate”. That bolt of lightening struck you because you didn‘t go to confession last week, or because you ate some pork chops, or because (if you’re really gay) you “did what thou wilt” but forgot to “harm none”.
With God in the equation, the empirical world functions as a body subservient to a higher mind. Without God, the empirical world functions as a series of causes and effects, the vast majority of which have no “meaning” behind them at all. Good and evil are reduced to function and dysfunction, with the latter not being due to tests from God or punishments from the devil, but only mistakes and glitches in the machinery of the universe.
We need to ask ourselves which of these two scenarios makes the most sense: a universal meaning behind every reason, or a lack of meaning behind every reason save only those which are the products of our own motivations. In order to figure out which of the two is more correct, we need only realize that maturity is a consequence of being able to see the world, with all of it’s phenomenon and denizens, as separate from our own internal environments. A child, for instance, tends to see others as extensions of himself, and is outraged when he does not get his way. But punishment, and the lessons of life, beat into him the clear distinction between self and others.
So to, the tendency to project psychological truths upon the empirical world, where they have no bearing, is something we see throughout early human cultures. The result? Myths and legends. Stories which attempt to explain some aspect of the natural world as, ultimately, the motivation of some deity or other. The explanations given by these stories are always wrong when taken literally (ex: Adam and Eve), yet are always right when applied not to the empirical world, but to the human psyche.
How odd it is that, so often, the very same people who laugh at the idea of the earth being created in seven days will rush out and talk about the mystical “reason” why they met their flings of the month. The Genesis account of the world’s creation was written thousands of years ago by primitive people who lacked the knowledge and technology which we, in our age, possess. Taking into account the resources they had available to them, they did an admirable job….if not scientifically, then at least artistically.
But again, that was 3,000 years ago. What’s your excuse?
.

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Azdaja
Years ago I said (and I’m obviously not the only one who has echoed such sentiments) that a belief in God immediately grants every life, and every event without every life, a deeper meaning. Why? Because if there is a God, then every empirical event whatsoever has a motivation behind it. And where there is motivation, as noted earlier, there is meaning. If there is a God, then there is a great universal mind guiding the causal chain on it’s way. Sure, there is still personal motivation and personal meaning, but such things are themselves no more than effects of the great will of God. Your cancer is a “test from above”. Your new romantic interest is a “soul mate”. That bolt of lightening struck you because you didn‘t go to confession last week, or because you ate some pork chops, or because (if you’re really gay) you “did what thou wilt” but forgot to “harm none”.

It is human nature to impose a face upon a phenomenon, this is the central point of the anthropic principle and why most scientists will often caution against it. It is a problem only if you forget it’s a tool with a specific job in mind. If you have a hammer and you come to see all the problems in the context of nails….you’ve slipped into illusion.

The primary agent from the human perspective is the subjective organ that is the mind. Humans believe in purpose, truth and the like because our minds are developed to recognise patterns (even when none exist) and to create, in effect, a narrative about how things are, how things were, and how things will be. Yet humans cannot possibly know how the world really is, we have five sensory organs designed for specific functions, take the human eye evolved to recognise a mere portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, or the ear, which actually has more nerves going to it from the brain than vice versa. Our mind conditions what we look for as much as it interprets the information from our senses.

Even our scientific theories are not “truth” or “fact” they are simply patterns but, crucially, patterns that work. Beware scientists who say they deal in “facts” they are leaning far closer to the priesthood than they should….

As for purpose, pay your money make your choice, purpose is one of the lies to adults (we start with smaller lies at a younger age) along with truth, justice, fairness, society etc, all these agents are agreed fictions, how you interpret them and what agent you invoke as the cause tells more about you, and how your mind works, than what is actually going on.

[F.K. Barbarossa]

Fellow philosophers,

I read 2 interesting things here, first that there's no meaning and second that we are sensorily limited. At first one can think there is no meaning and that would be reasonable, as it was already, in other words, said the universe doesn't care whether we kill ourselves, what would end any possible meaning, or keep living and doing whatever we want, apparently. And here comes our limit, how can we affirm there is no meaning if we are not aware of everything? Maybe we are not even aware of a tenth of the universe or less, much less.

People i respect a lot on this matter thought supposedly the same way, people like Socrates, Plato, Siddhārtha Gautama among others, it's said, that they all talked about transcendence as a “variable” in this “equation”. They were like us, and could not find any meaning on the limits of our consciousness, so they had to search for it beyond them.

Sorry for my bad english, it's a bit rusty.

Best regards,
F.K. Barbarossa