For me the meaning of life is: To reach one's full potential and to be excellent to each other.
So basically self-actualization while being awesome. :)
The Meaning of Life
51–60 of 123 posts
Re: The Meaning of Life
#52"Let instinct trump logic" - bad advice. Instinct is simply pattern matching current conditions against memory. Without experience, instinct is a poor criteria and logic should be employed. Read Kahneman for the supporting research into that.
"Let instinct trump logic" - bad advice. Instinct is simply pattern matching current conditions against memory. Without experience, instinct is a poor criteria and logic should be employed. Read Kahneman for the supporting research into that.
I'd also recommend Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind (http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/d...). He makes a lot of interesting points, including that most people come to a conclusion about an issue, then look for reasoning to support it, and that most of us operate on instinct most of the time—logic is a more costly, difficult mode whose use can be cultivated but which is not at all the default.
Re: The Meaning of Life
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, as he states in the article, instinct is the result of experience. He is saying the mechanism of instinct is older in humans than logic, so the process is more refined/trustworthy when comparing the two. Seems right to me..
There is very good book on this topic "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. Instincts can be very misleading sometimes.
Research trumps all :)
Re: The Meaning of Life
#54Riffing off of Robert Wright's book Non-Zero [1]:
* Consider the apparent self-assembling of the universe over the last 13.8 billion years.
* Consider the seeming overall long-term trend (certainly not a monotonic one) of "improvement" in life. Adapting Gregg Easterbrook's thought experiment [2]: Would you permanently trade places with a random person who lived 1,000 years ago? How about 10,000 years ago? Would anyone, at any time, do so?
It's a defensible proposition that, as theologian Philip Hefner put it, we are created co-creators [3]. To what end? Who knows. But if past performance is any indication, it'll be pretty neat.
From this perspective, conducting one's life in accordance with (a weak version of) Pascal's Wager [4] seems like a reasonable course of action.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-The-Logic-Human-Destiny/dp/067... (not an affiliate link)
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Beside-Still-Waters-Searching-Meaning/... (ditto)
Re: The Meaning of Life
#55I thought life is all about launching a minimal viable product, tweaking it to narrow in on product/market fit, and then scaling up. You mean there's more to life AFTER that ?! oh brother. I'll worry about that once I get there
Re: The Meaning of Life
#56Life is a gift of God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, who in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in God's own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accompl…
I'm not hating on your answer here, you certainly are free to believe as you wish and at least as right as anyone else, but appeal to popularity, especially when that popularity was often forced at the point of a sword, is not a very good argument.
I'd say the phrase, "nobody wins an argument", most definitely applies to debates between believers and non-believers; i.e. he's not arguing in favor of Christianity, but rather is in the business of saving souls.
Re: The Meaning of Life
#57I went to a debate about the existence of God a few months ago. Dan Barker, an atheist who has contributed to the Daily Show, had the winning quote: "There is no meaning of life -- and that's a great thing: it means that there's meaning in life." The quote is poignant regardless of your religious affiliation. Barker was saying that the meaning of life is intensely personal. Each of us invents it through our own exper…
That is so much shorter than what I posted on Derek Siver's site it is embarrassing: Born at the end of the '60s just before Christmas I was named after a saint. Later I found out that Santa Claus was largely invented by Coca-Cola to sell sodas and all the unlikely, but commonly held, beliefs that he was omniscient and omnipresent for at least one night of the year was seriously undermined. Then it was only a short j…
Snopes on the Santa/Coca-Cola myth: http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp
Re: The Meaning of Life
#58Some people postulate the meaning of life resides in God.
So I wonder then, what the meaning of God's life would be?
Simply adding recursive complexity doesn't solve the question, but now you have two problems.
For the record, I think the real problem is the question. It supposes that "meaning" can be something outside of what we experience and I don't believe it can be.
Re: The Meaning of Life
#59Life is overcoming entropy.
Re: The Meaning of Life
#60In summary, finding the meaning OF life (to quote Dan Barker - thanks @hawkharris) is to find the meaning IN life, for you personally.
A the end of the day, we look for the meaning of/in life to ultimately be happy, or at least content. For that, we need a "purpose", and the philosopher Daniel Dennentt has some good advice here:
“Find something more important than you are, and dedicate your life to it.”
So, how do you find your purpose - something that is "more important than you are"? For many people, the answer is based in religious belief. Others may find value in a letter penned by 20 year old Hunter S. Thompson:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/04/hunter-s-t...
Key quote:
"In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.
As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES."
I would add that the DESIRES need to be aligned with, and perhaps subservient to, that thing which is "more important than you are", otherwise ==> hedonism.