What is the meaning of the meaning of life?

[8ball]

Talk down to me old man. If it makes you feel big.

Anomie is not a solution to the bizarreness of existence.

 

[Pickman's model]

I don't know what you're on about but if you've got it in for me spit it out. Or I'll just ignore it whilst you stink up the boards with it.

I don't have it in for you. But I think you're talking bollocks with your notion of scientific advancement (whatever that is) leading to a better future where everyone gets on, you seem to think science leads the social when I think you'll find that's very far from the truth. If it was the case, then how do you explain the huge number of anti-vaxxers, far more than there were in the last century?

 

[Humberto]

Yes anti-vaxxers are deceived/wrong/cannot prove their claim cos it's shite. Kinda the point.

 

[weltweit]

...and you wake up back in your room and none of this ever happened...

Perhaps you took the wrong pill !

Seriously, I like the hamster wheel of life, most hamsters remain running up the treadmill, but they could all step to their left or right and escape the wheel altogether.

Are we sometimes so stuck on the wheel that we forget we can step off it when we want?

 

[8ball]

Yes anti-vaxxers are deceived/wrong/cannot prove their claim cos it's shite. Kinda the point.

I think the idea that education in some sense is likely to save us from going down the darkest paths is wrongheaded, though.

 

[Humberto]

I think the idea that education in some sense is likely to save us from going down the darkest paths is wrongheaded, though.

Perhaps. I was straining myself to join in the first place. Pickman's is the hard man.

 

[8ball]

Perhaps. I was straining myself to join in the first place. Pickman's is the hard man.

I was thinking about our main cultural bogeyman. It was the intelligentsia and the business elites who voted for the Nazis, and who spearheaded their programme. They were highly civilised and educated, and implacably evil in a way that was mostly chillingly banal. I’m a big fan of the scientific method, but it seems to me to be easily subverted and co-opted, and the same can be said for “education” imo.

 

[PTK]

I think most people perceive ‘truth’ in terms
of power and belonging, as opposed to any kind of alignment with an external reality. The scientific method is a very niche hobby.

Except when you have a serious disease, and the cure is the outcome of scientific research.

 

[8ball]

Except when you have a serious disease, and the cure is the outcome of scientific research.

And then a lot of people will still choose woo. I prefer to take my weapons from science, but that is not universal.

 

[PTK]

It seems to me that very few female fans of "woo" refuse to take the contraceptive pill. They do not trust woo when it comes to preventing conception.

 

[ska invita]

 

[ska invita]

+

 

[Aladdin]

PTK
Ffs.
What are you on about?

 

[toblerone3]

What's the meaning for whom? It depends on whether your working class, middle class, upper class, a member of the underclass, God or an animal, or a plant or a virus. The meaning is different for each.

 

[toblerone3]

For instance if you were reading a newspaper written by the Coronavirus what would it be saying about 2020?

 

[existentialist]

I like your repy, but I am unconvinced. I am not sure that it makes sense to say that the meaning of my life is reading novels. I am not sure that it makes sense to say that the life we live can have a "meaning". The definitions of "meaning" in the dictionary do not seem to conform to the usage the word in the phrase "the meaning of life".

If you don't think reading novels makes sense as a meaning in life, then it's no meaning for you.

I think replacing the word "meaning" with "purpose" gets closer to the real nub of the question. What is the purpose of life? It has no inherent purpose, we are naturally evolved rather than specially created, and the universe we live in bears no message, signature or directive that we can comprehend. So we inherit nothing in terms of purpose.

PTK, you make the elementary mistake of assuming that what gives meaning must also be meaningful to you.

That would imply one of two possibilities - either there is some ovarching arbiter of what qualifies as meaningful, or only what qualifies as meaningful to you counts.

 

[existentialist]

Meaning is something that humans try to describe but at the end of the day we are just a collective bag of molecules that have organised into an animal so that DNA can replicate. We have no meaning past the continued replication of DNA. Nothing else matters.

Happy days

Emergent properties.

 

[PTK]

PTK, you make the elementary mistake of assuming that what gives meaning must also be meaningful to you.

That would imply one of two possibilities - either there is some ovarching arbiter of what qualifies as meaningful, or only what qualifies as meaningful to you counts.

I am not taking either position. I am disputing the usage of the term "meaning" in this context.

 

[existentialist]

PTK
Ffs.
What are you on about?

The agenda just peeked out.

 

[existentialist]

I am not taking either position. I am disputing the usage of the term "meaning" in this context.

So I see

 

[8ball]

The agenda just peeked out.

Which agenda?

 

[NoXion]

For instance if you were reading a newspaper written by the Coronavirus what would it be saying about 2020?

I imagine something along these lines:

They don't seem to be concerned with much else.

 

[Cid]

Perhaps you took the wrong pill !

Seriously, I like the hamster wheel of life, most hamsters remain running up the treadmill, but they could all step to their left or right and escape the wheel altogether.

Are we sometimes so stuck on the wheel that we forget we can step off it when we want?

Generally hamsters don’t pay rent or buy their own stuff.

 

[JimW]

I find it instructive that we got several pretty decent answers to these questions a good two thousand years ago, or as decent as I think we're ever going to get but not so many people find them sufficient. Maybe uncertainty is healthy, certainly (ho ho) never been too impressed by the certain types.

 

[8ball]

I find it instructive that we got several pretty decent answers to these questions a good two thousand years ago, or as decent as I think we're ever going to get but not so many people find them sufficient. Maybe uncertainty is healthy, certainly (ho ho) never been too impressed by the certain types.

I’m not sure most people pay much attention to those answers. I probably don’t tbf.

 

[JimW]

I’m not sure most people pay much attention to those answers. I probably don’t tbf.

Yes, but again that's instructive too you'd say. Notice I don't bother with any of it much despite having read more than most at a guess.

 

[gentlegreen]

" Take therefore no thought for the morrow " ? from a healer with an inside line on "creation" who thought dirt and spit was good for cataracts ?
And all based on a garden with a tree and a talking snake ?

Or were you referring to ancient Greek or Chinese philosophy ?

 

[JimW]

" Take therefore no thought for the morrow " ? from a healer with an inside line on "creation" who thought dirt and spit was good for cataracts ?
And all based on a garden with a tree and a talking snake ?

Or were you referring to ancient Greek or Chinese philosophy ?

Whole gamut really, loads have had a go and theres been some decent efforts, though maybe later than the axial age pioneers. Probably a load I missed too, not very up on Islam for example and persia was full of clever people

 

[Pickman's model]

PTK
Ffs.
What are you on about?

It's just gas emerging from a corpse, giving the temporary impression of life

 

[Pickman's model]

Whole gamut really, loads have had a go and theres been some decent efforts, though maybe later than the axial age pioneers. Probably a load I missed too, not very up on Islam for example and persia was full of clever people

Those who can, do. Those who can't, philosophise