The Meaning of Life

[m4tt_666]

Simply put, my personal view on the "meaning" of any and all life is in and of itself without meaning. Never forgetting our truest form is infinitely locked up within unconscious matter itself, it is only our finite conscious that seeks out this mirage.

[cousinbasil]

Simply put, my personal view on the "meaning" of any and all life is in and of itself without meaning. Never forgetting our truest form is infinitely locked up within unconscious matter itself, it is only our finite conscious that seeks out this mirage.

So you don't know, either.

[m4tt_666]

quite the opposite. to achieve the full sense of the already created concept of such a thing as the meaning of life, would, at the same time, be the admittance of your non existence.

[cousinbasil]

quite the opposite. to achieve the full sense of the already created concept of such a thing as the meaning of life, would, at the same time, be the admittance of your non existence.

Like I said, you don't know either.

[m4tt_666]

you argue for the sake of arguing. what I'm producing is what i perceive to be the clearest form of truth. At best, you can only infer based off of what I've produced and it is by this reason alone that you take the idea I've produced and have subsequently altered it within your range of perception distorting its true reason.

[cousinbasil]

Hey, don't be offended. It's okay if you don't know the meaning of life. I know I don't.

[m4tt_666]

I wasn't offended in the least. Your lack of information and input on my previous statement is what i was most put off about.

[cousinbasil]

I wasn't offended in the least. Your lack of information and input on my previous statement is what i was most put off about.

Okay I will respond to your "statement."

Pretend for a minute that no one who reads this forum knows what you are thinking, if you are thinking anything. All one would have is your words, which are intended to convey what it is you have in mind. Examine your statement and see first of all if it is logically unambiguous:

Simply put, my personal view on the "meaning" of any and all life is in and of itself without meaning. Never forgetting our truest form is infinitely locked up within unconscious matter itself, it is only our finite conscious that seeks out this mirage.

Now follow the first sentence's actual subject/predicate, which I have put in a different font color so you can see what you actually wrote, if one is to take you literally:

Simply put, my personal view on the "meaning" of any and all life is in and of itself without meaning.

You are saying your view has no meaning.

And you don't bother to capitalize the first-person singular pronoun all the time, and do the same with the first word in some sentences.

So both the form and the content seem rather off-hand. Which is fine, except you are talking about nothing less than the meaning of life and expect to be taken seriously.

Again, no offense, but a reader of this forum would only have a handful of posts by you to respond to so it's difficult to see much of a position.

[m4tt_666]

i first want to thank you for truthfully looking at my statement, and it is interesting, i agree that as finite beings we only have so much ways in which we can describe. i also feel that everyone has a fighting chance to look into the infinite and discover what it means for themselves and subsequently the Universe they create.

It is in this way that we can merely try and discern by inference at best, what another is actually thinking, if of course that person and the ideas they behold, are actually what we are seeing in the first place.

[Blair]

subsequently the Universe they create..

No-one creates the universe, to think otherwise is delusional.

[m4tt_666]

to think at all is pure delusion. the simple fact remains even though we can acknowledge this, we can never fully grasp what it means and are forced, in turn to deal with the Universe regardless of that fact.

[Blair]

Oh ok.
Try using capitalization, by the way, it will make your nihilistic, burnt-out twit ruse all the more poignant.

[m4tt_666]

i will bear in mind my lack of capitalization may cause some users to further distort the truth as i perceive it based off of this and other unavoidable facts about ones perception in comparison with another. i can only give you the general tool for unlocking your Universe, for i feel i have already done this within the confines of my Universe, and mine alone.

you will or you won't, there is no difference.

[Locke]

The meaning of Life is everything and nothing. The difference is in one’s frame of reference. A baby is born and the Universe turns. Millions die and the Universe turns. A star burns out and the Universe turns. Galaxies collide and the Universe yet turns. We are nothing to the Universe.
We are everything to this small world though. An improbable collection of star-dust that dares to looks out to the heavens and ponder it’s meaning. Dares to look into our being and describe it’s composition. To us life is a gift; perhaps by extraordinary chance or by grand design. A gift once given though is the recipient’s to do with what they will. Squander it or cherish it. Choose wisely…. I certainly didn't. :-)

[Blair]

Choice is an illusion.

Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

[Locke]

Choice is an illusion.

This is interesting. Do you mean that all branching choices are invalid because the future of all things has been preordained? For example; If I buy a pair of dice tomorrow and roll them one hundred times. Even if my recorded rolls matches a statistical probability; those numbers came up not in a random order but in the exact order they were meant to?

Or, do you mean that I as a human believe that I have choice; but, in reality I am primed to make choices because of conditioning? For a simplistic example; A host presents me the choice of vanilla or chocolate ice cream for dessert. It appears to be two options; but, in reality it is only one because I like chocolate and would never chose vanilla.

[Blair]

Close to the former. Nothing is exempt from cause and effect.

Shitweasel.

[Locke]

Ah, I see. So, every atom in the Universe is set upon it's path and then strikes another atom which in turn continues in a chain reaction. The butterfly and the tornado effect. If one had the ability they could map all of the atom's movements back into the past and predict movement into the future.

One of my issues with this type of thought is life. The idea of cause and effect works very well when objects don't introduce their own locomotion into the system. A leaf follows the flow of water; using hydrodynamics one could predict its eventual resting place. But, fish with their limited brains regularly swim against the current. You would respond that the brain also is subject to this cause and effect and probably throw another shitweasel in for good measure. :-)

Moreover what is to be gained by this type of thought? You would be so ensconced in the system that you could not escape it. Would you stop making choices? Did you eat last night? Did you have a say in what it was? You could apply a computer algorithm to generate a pseudo-random series of numbers and then number the food in your home so that it chose what you ate. But, you would say no. Those numbers aren't random. Does that mean you don't believe in statistics?

It's not even that original an idea. What difference is this type of thinking then God is omniscient and so knows exactly how the Universe will end. Since he chose the exact manner of its beginning; he also chose the exact ending. It's seems that all this thought did was remove the name God under the pretext of some scientific understanding of the Universe and kept all the underpinnings of the idea of God.

[Blair]

Believe whatever you like shitweasel, it's not my concern.

[Locke]

Hahaha!! And I have nothing to learn from a person who has bought Zen and the Art of the Two Sentences.
"Ooohh.. everyone will be impressed with my wisdom. I sound like a sage." But, really; it's like a child who constantly interrupts adults talking to fulfill their need for attention. " Look! Look! Look!"

You should publish your koans The Fool Who Read Buddha and now Pretends to be Enlightened

*yawn* I'm bored now.

[Kelly Jones]

Give it a rest, prince. It's not effective.

[psychoactive]

One of my issues with this type of thought is life. The idea of cause and effect works very well when objects don't introduce their own locomotion into the system. A leaf follows the flow of water; using hydrodynamics one could predict its eventual resting place. But, fish with their limited brains regularly swim against the current. You would respond that the brain also is subject to this cause and effect and probably throw another shitweasel in for good measure. :-)

You may not be able to accurately predict the behavior of all things, however, this does not refute an all-pervasive causal relationship among things.

[m4tt_666]

-in relation to what was just said, i personally think that no idea is ever created, i believe that the true information has always existed and is just waiting for us to conceive it with the tool we all possess that is humanity's consciousness as a whole.

-with that said i also think its within this idea that ancient civilizations hold a seemingly mystic quality within their "predictions". for as I've stated, this information has always existed, it just took them to write it down physically, and preserve it at all costs to endure time for our mere discovery. you could call this discovery merely chance or divine fate, it all boils down to individual morals, i for one try for the most part to remain unbiased in every presented situation.

-i also think people hold an unaware relevance to what past civilizations had said in correlation to how truthful the momentary idea was preserved in. i believe their sense of mentality has endured time in this way, even if we continue to deny the factual evidence of merely reflecting on the scenario in which I've just drawn up.

[cousinbasil]

Give it a rest, prince. It's not effective.

I second that.

One of my issues with this type of thought is life. The idea of cause and effect works very well when objects don't introduce their own locomotion into the system. A leaf follows the flow of water; using hydrodynamics one could predict its eventual resting place. But, fish with their limited brains regularly swim against the current.

I think this is quite insightful, Locke. I agree with you that life is a big red flag when it comes down to many types of materialist philosophies. I must categorically rule out that life violates causal relationships; having said that, it is clear that reality consists of many levels, which one encounters in an experiential manner, and the cause/effect procession can traverse these levels, or include them, within the same phenomenon.

For example, I see a book lying on the floor. I pick it up and place it on my desk. The effect is that the book is on the desk. What is the cause of this effect? My action could be said to be the cause; if so, what has caused my action? Here we must look at a different plane of reality, as it were, in that my volition must be taken into account, much the way you are viewing "locomotion." Absent life, the second law of Thermodynamics assures us that once the book is on the floor, it will stay there until it rots or until the physical environment (a tornado ripping the house down, say) somehow intervenes.

But once we involve volition (or locomotion, which is the ability to move which must somehow be initiated) we must ask what causes volition.

The key thing here is that life is a ripple in an otherwise uniform environment, in which life locally causes an increase in order. (I tell the kids to pick up their toys when they are done with them.) Moreover, life is relentless in its pursuit of evolving and becoming more complex and ordered, always at the expense of its environment, which it causes to become correspondingly more disordered in some fashion.

Something causes a thousand troops to move when a general says "march." It is not caused by the food they have eaten which supplies the energy for their locomotion. Life and consciousness must be taken into account, but still there are always causes for every effect.

[Locke]

You may not be able to accurately predict the behavior of all things, however, this does not refute an all-pervasive causal relationship among things.

Hello,
I think I may have an example of a non universal causal relationship if you'll allow.

If you and any other people on this forum read and do the following "Stand up.. Take step back... then take a step forward... then sit down". This statement takes very little energy on my part. The computer sends very little data to transmit this message. But, I can motivate a 170 pound mass to move. The input energy in itself is not sufficient under Newtonian physics to move the specified mass; But, comprehension on the readers part amplifies the small message into gross reaction.

So then is man a special case of causal relationships? And since the universe is so vast; the probability of human level intelligence existing elsewhere is not negligible. Then man's special causal relationship is not just limited to us. Is it that special anymore?

I would appreciate any thoughts, thank you.