DaveC426913 said:
The purpose of life is to come to terms with the fact that there is no purpose to life. You will pass on regardless of whether you do something with your life or piss it away.
Thus, the ONLY reason for doing something rather than nothing is the reasons you create for YOURSELF.
This is not a philosophy of hopelessness, it is a philospohy of self-empowerment and self-responsibility.
Dave, have you ever seriously thought about the question of what exactly the self is? It is convenient and common to accept without much thought the notion that the self is nothing more than the chemical biological body. With this notion, the purpose of life that you described makes some kind of sense. But if there is something more, or different, that defines the self, the purpose of life might be something different. Do you think that possibility deserves any consideration?
Tzemach said:
Maybe we should be looking at things from another direction.
When we are looking at questions that are this mysterious and profound, I think we should look at things from every direction we can think of.
Tzemach said:
Does life exist to experience the universe or does the universe exist because life experiences it?
Those are both interesting ways to look at the question. Let's look at both of them.
If life exists to experience the universe, then we know that three things exist: life, the universe, and the ability to experience. This raises the question of in what sequence did these things come to exist or did some of them come to exist simultaneously. Combinatorically, there are six ways the three could have appeared separately, twelve ways in which two of them appeared simultaneously, and one way in which all three of them appeared at once. We could logically examine each of the nineteen possibilities and maybe draw some conclusions. I would suggest that we not rule out any of the nineteen without good logical reasons.
In the second case, if the universe exists because life experiences it, then we have posited a causal relationship that requires that life and the ability to experience must exist prior to the existence of the universe. This possibility is included as three of the prior nineteen possibilities.
In my thinking about these possibilities, the one which makes the most sense to me, and which provides a framework for answering all the tough questions, is the combination where life and the ability to experience are identically the same and they (it) came first, thus it is the fundamental essence of reality, or the ontologically fundamental stuff. Then came the universe (i.e. the rest of it, since life/the ability to experience exist and are also part of the universe). In my view, and in my posts, I usually talk about 'the ability to know' which I consider to be identically the same as 'the ability to experience'.
I'd be interested to hear anyone's reasons why any of the other possibilities makes more sense.
Paul
