Yes, hear, hear! I like the way you think, Magical Realist. "The concept of an afterlife is inhumane and immoral. Belief in the continuation of your "soul" or consciousness after death is wishful thinking. Belief in an afterlife devalues the one life that actually exists: this one." Perhaps, the Categorical Nihilist has more in common with the theist than he cares to admit. Both are anti-life. Once he realizes that there is no ultimate meaning and that he will not partake in the afterlife, the future, he, the nihilist, devalues it. Let the dead bury the dead, eh? Take the Marquis for example; he believes that he is the complete opposite of a theist, hah, adopting a form of egoistic hedonism, a pleasure seeking fool, so to speak. If they ask you, 'What is the evidence of your Father in you?' say to them, 'it is motion and rest.' Why do we have brains, to think? No, we have brains to produce adaptable and complex movements. A nihilist is like a deer caught in the headlights unable to move, unable to seek. “They came into the world empty and they also seek to depart from the world empty. But meanwhile they are drunk. When they shake off their wine, then they will change their ways.” "The most despicable men" who say "they have invented happiness...and they blink."-Nietzsche "What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans. Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy. Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning." “Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future.” There's More to Life Than Being Happy Spoiler We come into being as a slight thickening at the end of a long thread. Cells proliferate, become an excrescence, and assume the shape of a man. The end of the thread now lies buried within, shielded, and inviolate. Our task is to bear it forward, pass it on. We flourish for a moment, achieve a bit of singing and dancing, a few memories we would carve in stone, and then we wither, twist out shape. The end of thread lies now in our children, extends back through us, unbroken, unfathomably into the past. Numberless thickenings have appeared on it, have flourished and have fallen away as we now fall away. Nothing remains but the germ-line. What changes to produce new structures as life evolves is momentary excrescence but the hereditary arrangements within the thread. We are carriers of spirit. We know not how, nor why, nor where. On our shoulders, in our eye, in anguished hands through unclear realm, into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation, we bear its full weight. It depends on us utterly, yet we know it not. We inch it forward with each beat of heart, give to it the work of hand, of mind. We falter, pass it on to our children, lay out our bones, fall away, are lost, forgotten. Spirit passes on, enlarged, enriched, more strange, and complex. We are being used. Should we not know in whose service? To whom, to what, give we unwitting loyalty? What is this quest? Beyond that which we have, what could we want? What is spirit? Betrayed by transcendence, we return to the present. We look around, we touch, we taste, we feel. Presently we begin to say, “This is better than that.” We value it, we want to hold on to it, point it out to others, and almost at once there’s a trying to create, to contribute, a drive for transcendence which leads us to betray the present, commit our energies to the future. Love of the present leads us to betray the present; the effort to hold something forever leads us to lose even that moment of possession we might otherwise have. It is not the disorder and confusion of the marketplace which drives me to the mountaintop; it’s my delight in the marketplace that impels me to desert it. Love of life leads me to betray life; love of the actual sends me searching after the ideal; love of the present leads to the sacrifice of the present to a future that never comes. Taken from “On Not Knowing How to Live” by Allen Wheelis
I disagree we have immediate consciousness of the present situation. All sensory information is memory, it all goes through a filtering process, and it's all in the past (albeit milliseconds in the past).
An absolute frame of reference is a contradiction in terms. A view on one's life that is from the perspective of a nonliving nonconcious universe. How can there be a perspective on one's life from everywhere? How can there exist a pov that is nonrelative and absolute? It can't. Jung said it best: "All life is individual life, in which alone the ultimate meaning is found."
I do recon that life is a succession of events, meaningful events to us, that over the course of our life or, over the period of our time (yes exactly like this), acquire a meaning but. Is it not only the events? I'm talking about our life itself, you might say that the meaning of our life is exactly these experiences, to live them, to recall them at bedtime, to tell the stories to our friends, our grandchildren but still, besides all those events, what would have been the meaning of our life then? Enjoying events, separately as much as considering them, what is the meaning of it again? Surely has a purpose doing so, which is to infer a meaning to the whole, but what meaning would it be? Again, you are infering a meaning to the event in particular, but what about the whole of them? Still, they have a meaning to you because you chose to apply a meaning to it for yourself. Again, it is you infering a meaning to experiences in particular, of course thru reason. Is really life's only meaning a mad rush for experiences and sensations to satisfy our senses and aspirations and to ease our fears? Is that the meaning of life? Not to me, but i'm quite of a nihilist. How this? Explain to me. Sorry about this confusion then. I wonder about the purpose by asking "What for?" and, meaning by asking "Why?". If you ask these questions, to what conclusion would you come in the end? I'm on my phone and it is laggy, more on that later.
If you are remembering an experience, aren't you in fact remembering that event as it happened to you immediately? It doesn't make sense to posit memory of something if there is no experience of that thing existing to you in present. The memory has to form somehow. IOW, there was an immediate interaction with the world that gets stored AS that memory.
Is the issue whether or not life is meaningless, or whether or not life is fake? I disagree pretty vehemently with the idea that life is fake. Life is as real as real gets. I think that I do agree that the universe as a whole doesn't have any inherent meaning. Certainly not any meaning that human beings like me know about. But that doesn't mean that my personal life is without meaning. It just suggests that perhaps what's meaningful in my life are the things that I find meaningful, not some cosmic purpose or agenda that's been imposed on me from above.
You're confusing meaning with purpose again. Not that we don't experience purpose in life too via our career and our relationships and even our solitary pursuit of knowledge. But life has meaning beyond purpose, much as say a great work of art has meaning beyond any purpose it may serve in the world. Viewed as an aesthetic experience, life occurs for individuals for its own sake and out of the spontaneous creativity that arises out of their interaction with the world. It is meaningful precisely BECAUSE it is indeterminate and free and contingent. Would we even be satisfied with a life that only had some cosmically mandated purpose? No. Religion is an example of that, in which humans are viewed as mere tools or extentions of a higher divine plan or will. This is quite the opposite of meaning. It is the sterile mechanistic function of being a mere means to an end. Of being a cog in a vast impersonal cosmic contraption. But life is NOT a means to an end. It is an end in itself. Can we ask for anything more? The meaning of a whole life is found only in its being lived. This is a meaning that occurs subjectively and individually while at the same time expressing the universal qualities of what it is to be human. My life--every life--has meaning INHERENTLY--much as does human culture, or play, or spirituality, or art, or music, or poetry, or human relationships. The story of its progress and accomplishments need not refer to anything else beyond itself. It IS its own purpose--indistinguishable from the drama and journey of the one living it out. You make that sound tawdry and menial. As if the pursuit of meaningful subjective experience were something without merit--a mad scramble for pleasure and fulfillment that is trivial because it doesn't serve some function in a universal machine of interacting particles. But don't you think it astounding that life should almost universally seem to itself something worth living for its own sake despite its rather crude materialistic origins? And that this intensity of subjective meaning validates it beyond any function it might conceivably have in the physical world? I'm a nihilist too. One might call me an ecstatic nihilist because I view life as a self-valuing dynamic experiment in meaning that lacks any predetermined function in any objective sense. Indeed reducing life to some physicalist functionhood would make it something without value in itself, much as say asking what is the purpose of a diamond saps it of its inherent value. Asking why again assumes purpose tied to something outside of oneself. What if the answer to why is simply "for its own sake?" What if the sole reason for asking why is to awaken us to the immediacy of the purposeless value of life itself, much in the way of a zen koan? Why climb the mountain? Because it's there. Why live life? Because it is!
Life has no meaning to those who are meaningless. To those who do realize that they do have meaning it is very meaningful to them. So it is up to each person to choose what they think about their lives and whether or not it means anything to them.
I agree with all of that, except for the suggestion that in order for something to be real, it has to last forever. Transitory and instantaneous things can be real. Causally dependent things can be real. Pretty much everything that exists is transitory and causally dependent. We can create purposes in our own lives. We do that all the time and most of our activities are goal-directed. We're always seeking and chasing after something. (A pay-check, a promotion, a girlfriend, entertainment, knowledge and enlightenment, lunch...) Maybe we might even find the ability to find satisfaction by simply being right here in the moment, not reliving what happened in the past or anticipating what might happen in the future.
Beautiful! You nailed this. We are all, each of us, on a journey, to answer the question, "Does MY life have a meaning?" And when we die, we find it was not about getting somewhere at all. It was about the journey itself. The pure undestined journey is the true reason for the journey, though we deceive ourselves time and again that it is about a destination. The practiced and precise movements of our life was not that of a goal directed purpose, but of a dance choreographed to its own privately heard music.
We aren't talking about individual lives, which I agree can have personal meaning, but the meaning of existence in general. Let's not confuse the issue.
That's OK, No one expects you to be perfect. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I didn't mention though what makes my life so fulfilling....besides my great circle of family and friends, I love to Imagine what things were like, are like now, and will be like in the future. For example, when I was a kid, we would rush home from school, turn on the radio, and sit with our ears glued to it listening to the next episode of Superman, Tarzan, and Hob Harrigan. On the weekends we would grab our billy carts, go for a spin down the steepest hill, and on Saturday Arvo, the usual Saturday matinee which cost 11 pence, for two feature films, a couple of cartoons, the news of the world and again, the obligitory serial. Growing up in my teenage years, saw me fall in love with Annette Funichello, and spend my money on LP and 45 rpm vinyl records of my favourite singers of the day, Teresa Brewer [who I also fell in love with] Elvis Presley, Johnny O'Keefe, Col Joye, Buddy Holly, Marty Robbins, Johnny Horton Dean Martin and many more. Growing up saw a few dicy periods like the cold war, the Vietnam war, which we all obviously survived, then came, Star Trek on TV, Heart transplants, other formally unheard of medical procedures, the space age, computers, Satellites, space capsules, rocket to the Moon, Apollo, outer solar system probes, such as Pioneer and Voyager, more incredible technology, more direct real time communication from one side of the world to the other, and I nearly forgot the mobil phone! Tomorrow, I confidently see man's dream of reaching another planet come to fruition, a permanent base on the Moon, manned visits and outposts on an Asteroid, Asteroid mining, more unheard of advances in communication technology, glasses free 3D TV, and probably other discoveries I have not yet heard of. So I have a lot to live for........ Why wouldn't I be happy? I wouldn't be dead for quids! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
You should probably narrow down or specify what you consider "meaning", or that root in the "meaning-less" of the title, to be. Tossing it out there in a broad, ambiguous context can doom the assertion right out of the starting gate. Since it is otherwise debunked by simply providing definitions of life out of a dictionary -- or providing examples of everyday usage (i.e., that English-speaking people readily recognize and do attach significance to the term / symbol [life] in multiple ways). If it's actually "real" that you're quibbling over, then you need to clarify how it follows from comparisons like "dream" and "temporary memory" that a judgment of "life is not real" is applicable on the grounds you state. Otherwise, Heather Passerby could just as much arbitrarily declare and make it law that cheesecake isn't cheesecake if it is made from a store-bought package and because is not permanent (turning into blue-green "fur" eventually). IOW, at least appeal to something classic, like Parmenides' contention, that only what is eternal / unchanging can qualify as real. The commonsense belief that something is gone for good -- if it is destroyed in an explosion, dies, etc -- that there is a "flow" to time or a sequence of different versions of the universe annihilating / replacing each other as they occupy a special state called "now", is ironically provided by life's experiences and the consciousness of brains. Not what falls out of reason and experiment directed at this idea of a "life-independent" manner of existence. That is, directing reason and experiment[*] (as naturalism might arguably do) at the the latter eventually yields the kind of stuff that falls out physics, which jibes more with the eternalism view of philosophy of time than the commonsense presentism view. [*] Apparently one has to be deliberately myopic here about even these being dependent upon living agents or artificial entities constructed by them. That is, for "unconditioned existence" to be exposed involves removing the filter of life / consciousness altogether-- to either die or never be born, for such producers of evidence (as either our perceptions or our thought results) to cease or never arise from the nothingness. [For authorities concerning this "nothingness", one should consult the beliefs of extinctivists -- certainly not believers in afterlives, panpsychism, etc.].
I think that the individual events of our lives are typically meaningful, in that they usually find their places in our larger theories, plans and schemes. But I'm less sure whether our lives in their totality, from beginning to end, have that kind of meaning. Maybe history gives some people's lives a bigger context in which to be meaningful, but... I'm even less convinced that the human race has any grand purpose in the cosmic scheme of things. Maybe that's because I'm an atheist. Clearly one of the attractions of many sorts of religious belief is that they provide a cosmic context that gives people the feeling that human life in its broadest sense does have a cosmic meaning, purpose and goal. Of course collectively speaking, the human race isn't a sentient being like its individual members are. So the human race's lacking a bigger meaning and purpose in its own right isn't going to bother it like it seemingly bothers some of the individual people who make it up.
Meaningful to a spider? I doubt it. A spider couldn't care less if we lived or died. To a spider, our lives are meaningless. Only to oneself is meaning attributed to life, and even then, when the human race and earth has long since existed, there will have been just as much past time elapsed as the time that will elapse in the future. There's not one shred of evidence life is anything more than the second law of thermodynamics unfolding in nature. The concept of the human race coming into existence in this multiverse and surviving for an elapsed time and then ceasing to exist is akin to an individual life being born and then dying. Nothing in the multiverse in which we live has any importance or meaning, it just is...for a while, then it isn't.
You know for a fact that a spider experiences meaninglessness? How? And if life is so meaningless and unimportant, what keeps you from killing people or yourself as one might smash a spider?
I did not choose to be born, it is very unfair to force me to become a human. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
No, as a matter of fact I don't know for a fact whether a spider thinks about how wonderful the human race is and how we mean so much to the spider, or whether the spider contemplates his own existence. I said "I doubt it." I doubt that a spider cares whether you or I lives or dies, and I doubt that a spider considers his own or our existences "meaningful." Is it meaningful to you? Fine, but prove that has any meaning. Odd that you would think of a concept like that. Do you think the human default state is to kill other humans or to kill oneself unless otherwise enlightened with some sort of "meaning" one has attributed to life? I don't need some artificially created "meaning" in my life to stop me from killing others or myself. Do you?
Go to school --> Graduated --->find a job --> marry --> Go to grave Everyone repeats this process, is it meaningful?
