The Meaning of Life?

[stya]

What's your point?

I think therefore I am?

I can't be sure anything is real except my own thoughts?

Are you a figment of my imagination dageir, sent here to taunt me?

Where are you going with this?

You can not be sure of anything, not even this sentence.

Someone had a bit too much of Matrix films. Step up to the challenge of the question please, you can be sure of a lot of things, arguing like that won't lead anywhere.

[dageir]

What are you sure about? I dare you.

[stya]

Same argumentation, I could point out anything, yet you would say "WOLOLOLO YOU CAN'T BE SURE", as I said there is no point going there.

[dageir]

In my opinion you can know nothing for certain (not even this). Realising that makes you able to appreciate
the presumed world better. If you take nothing for granted, you will be able to find new truths and meanings.
If you are locked into one certain assumption, you risk to become the philosophical equivalent of a rock.

The apparent meaninglessness and uncertainty can be an asset for your presumed existence.

[stya]

If you take nothing for granted, you will be able to find new truths and meanings.

But if you can have no trust in those truths and meaning, there is no point finding them. You need to trust something at some point, also self-assurance helps picking up girls so that's kinda important, be sure you are the man or at least fake it

[dageir]

I assume you can know nothing for certain, there are different degrees of probability, probably.

[Onep]

Life has no meaning aside from the intrinsic value of propogating the ancient, albeit incomprehensibly complex, chemical reaction that began eons ago. Anything else, is simply applying meaning to the meaningless.

[GenghisKhan44]

Our path is different, with the adaptation of language, and ideas and thoughts being transferred from person to person down the generations, we have reached a point where we are conditioned from birth to behave as we do. Indeed from infancy we have a thirst to accept such conditioning, we seek it. Different, yes, but that doesn't make us any more important or less natural. Things like morality are social conditioning which is the lubricating fluid of our complex social society. We are taught what is good or bad, it doesn't come to us naturally. Empathy though has an influence also but mostly later in life. Good and evil don't actually exist, they are social constructs.

What a very interesting point-of-view you have. I mean that. Many people assume human beings, in the natural state, are inherently good. Yours is kind of refreshing. And I agree that humans must be conditioned to goodness; it does not come naturally to us. If you have ever heard the term "concupiscence", that's more or less what we mean. Humans tend to choose evil if they do not learn to choose the good.

And while I would agree to some extent that social conditioning can play a part in morality (and vice versa), I have a hard time believing free will has no role at all in the development of our subjective morality. And you may say that that is because I am conditioned to believe in free will. But if that is so, then how is it that you are conditioned against free will - at least in the sense that we can choose what we want to believe is moral, even in defiance of social conditioning?

Might it possibly be because humanity, different from all the other creatures - who change behaviour at all only on account of genetics (or human meddling) - are capable of innovative thought? And that among these thoughts might possibly be different ideas about how we ought to live?

Just because chemicals in the brain provoke certain chain reactions which prompt thought and action doesn't mean you are at their whim. You can restructure the brain and reinforce it to produce outcomes you find desirable. I dislike the idea because it leads into a mindset where people accept their faults by blaming others and never make an effort to change and improve themselves.

I don't blame you. Really I don't.

I blame your predestined brain chemistry.

But seriously, I agree that the option to presume that nothing can change the way you are is open to people, and some people choose to believe that. I also agree that I don't like it. However, if the body is reducible to a number of chemical reactions, of which we more or less know the outcome, what is left for us to control? Determinism seems impossible to escape.

Well... unless we abandon materialism. That is, I think culpability is possible, but only if we abandon the idea that we can completely understand, well, at least ourselves, in a quantitative manner. That there are just some things, some qualities, some reactions, about which a microscope or a crucible cannot tell us anything.

The question is... is it better to abandon the concept of free will (or self control), or to abandon materialism? And if we abandon one or the other, how do we keep the world from going out of balance?

On your last point perhaps, I have no well defined opinion on free will. In the end it seems inconsequential to me, I can shape who I will become in the tomorrows and hiding from the things in the past by blaming someone else is not healthy.

I don't see how, if the human person is restricted to a material existence. Free will is not to be found in chemistry, biology, anatomy, or any of the natural sciences. "Science" is a matter of determining patterns, not breaking them. One only defies gravity with science by finding some other rule by which one can float in the air.

Acefirebird touches on the subject, I have no interest in debating the existence of free-will. It's a term tied to fate. That we are fated to act as we do, that our environment and experiences are predetermined and given a certain set of circumstances we will always choose the same option.

Well, if you wish to drop it - so be it. Feel free not to reply.

[Jalpha]

Humans tend to choose evil if they do not learn to choose the good.

I don't believe in evil. I think humans are born selfish, and self centered with little regard for the wellbeing of others. If a monkey takes a banana from another monkey, is that evil? Why apply a separate ruleset to ourselves? In my mind it is because without it our society would not be possible. Morality is a necessary part of our society, but it is an idea we have constructed.

Whilst I don't believe in good and evil (mostly because they are considered absolutes, black and white) I should point out that I do believe in positivity and negativity. That each action we take every day has a complex interation of negative and positive effects on everything around us, and that each action we take has a net contribution of either negativity or positivity to our environment as a whole. Semantics maybe, but the connotations inherent to the words good and evil are absurd to me.

Might it possibly be because humanity, different from all the other creatures - who change behaviour at all only on account of genetics (or human meddling) - are capable of innovative thought? And that among these thoughts might possibly be different ideas about how we ought to live?

I believe it possible for any animal to conceive an innovative thought. However without language, that thought will die with them. Just look at how hard it is for our own species to accept innovative thought, the preference is always to reject ideas which are different. Not so many of us are capable of rational, logical argument and the modification of ones belief system.

Different, yes, I concede this. Just not special.

[MagicManICT]

Yes, morality is a construct that has served mankind... unfortunately, I don't think we can say it has been for the better all the time. The question becomes "Are we more than animals, or are we simply animals?" If we are only animals, then why prop up all this morality?

I wish I could remember the philosophy I had read years ago better, but there is a belief out there that our waking times are not real, therefore the physical universe is not real. The only reality is the dream state we enter when we sleep (or take massive amounts of drugs). It was referred to in Inception, if I recall right. It's an interesting theory, but one that doesn't serve humanity very well (unless you're a drug addict).