Life has no purpose. It's just applied randomness, like everything else. This is difficult for the non-religious to swallow, that's why religion exists.
HN isn't a support network but I fully understand and appreciate your post.
HN isn't a support network but I fully understand and appreciate your post.
"There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!"
If someone chooses to define a purpose for their life, then can be perfectly rational in doing so. Inasmuch as we accept that there is a reality (which we can't definitely prove btw), we can accept any number of truths based on our experience in that reality.
Solipsism proposes that the world is just a creation of the mind. However the only way to define the mind is in the context of the world outside of it. So no, the world isn't just imagination, and the imagination isn't just an artefact of the world. You can only define each one of them in function of the other. Just like you can't define good without bad.
No one I know has been able to define a rational purpose for their life. You can't have purpose to yourself, just to others. Either way it's an infinite purpose chain.
Just because the "purpose" of the cosmos is irreconcilable with the purpose that one being defines for themselves, doesn't mean that purpose is nonsensical.
I use the word nonsensical over the word irrational, because there are many things in the world which you would term irrational. One of them is the emergence of intelligence (yes, you can rationalize this as an evolutionary adaption, but the basis of everything is irrational, so who cares?). Irrational though it is, we are still, to some extent, rational minds trapped in this irrational world. To dispose of any presupposition as irrational, simply for the sake of logical consistency, is an irresponsible way to live.
It is neither rational nor irrational to live as a solipsist. It is simply an axiom on which you base the rest of your rationalizations. Choose your axioms wisely, and the world will unfold accordingly.
If you haven't read his book, I would highly suggest it. It's called "Man's search for meaning". He was a holocaust survivor, suffering through perhaps the most pointless of tortures, and he developed a philosophy that not only brought him through the situation, but has touched millions of lives sense then. I've never known a prominent motivational speaker/life coach/happiness expert who hasn't read this book.
If life doesn't seem to have a purpose, it's because you haven't created one.
What makes you so sure of yourself? Smarter people than you have both believed and not believed in a greater purpose or in God. It's something that's been debated since man has existed, yet you seem unusually... certain... that you are correct.
> This is difficult for the non-religious to swallow, that's why religion exists.
If every human's behaviors and motivations were so simple as to be summarily condensed into one sentence like this, things like depression and suicide would also be easily assessable.
EDIT: In what strange circumstances is a post that says "Life has no purpose" upvoted, and mine -- that says "How can you be so sure of yourself?" -- downvoted?
The reason I sound sure of myself is because all of supernatural religion is impossible. It is all impossible. It is against every single thing we understand about the physical universe and, should evidence emerge confirming any of it, all we knew should be upturned - but that has not and will not happen because there is no evidence whatsoever. What would you do with a theory in total conflict with every other (working!) theory you have, and with absolutely no evidence in its favour?
Show me any evidence, at all, that any of it is even remotely possible, at all, and I'll promptly eat my hat, your hat, any other hats around, and join you at the altar. Until then, it's nothing but a bunch of ludicrous superstition.
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/16icpq/only_6_of_s...
His whole point is that there is no conclusive evidence that there is no purpose to life, and there will never be if there is none to be found, and that is precisely why the only way to find one is to keep looking for it.
Specific religions as we know them have nothing to do with this. Indeed, even he said he had logically convinced himself there is no God. It doesn't all have to be about God-in-a-book.
There are depressingly few subjects in the world amenable to anything like what the mathematicians would call "proof".
I have no "proof" of anything philosophical. No-one does. But in my experience, laymen banging on about "proof" are likely doing so in defense of some ludicrous belief whose nonsensical tenets they loudly invite all comers to "disprove" - an impossible task. Let's hope you're not one of them.
Purpose is essential. You can cut it out, claiming you're somehow above it all, but you're cheating yourself, ultimately.
What I mean by that example: even if life had some purpose (for whom, set by what?), why should it be a purpose you agree with? Why would some external purpose override your own values?
You can only have purpose to others. Life can only have purpose to something else other than life. Does that other thing matter?
Venus says life has no purpose. After venus makes that statement, what does venus do next? Lets say it is some action, X. Why did venus do X? Well, because of Y1 (Y1 could be 'to sustain living' or 'to be happy' or 'to help others'). Ok, but why is Y1 important? Because of Y2. Ok, why is Y2 important? Because of Y3. And why is Y3 important? And so on and so on...and eventually there is no answer because venus believes life has no purpose. Any action venus takes, at its core, is illogical without a purpose.
So that is why I am saying that I was depressed: everything I did was meaningless, I had no idea what I should be doing. Then I realized the most important thing I could be doing was figuring out the most important thing I could be doing. If it turns out that venus is right, and there isn't a "most important thing I could be doing" then the fact that I wasn't doing "the optimal thing" doesn't matter because there isn't an optimal thing to be doing and I can be confident that I gave it my best shot.
When I said life has no purpose, I didn't mean it was futile or nihilist or anything else. I mean that words like "purpose" simply do not apply. Purpose is an anthropological term and is meaningless in this context. To what "purpose" do mountains rise, volcanoes erupt, meteors explode in the sky? It is inappropriate to try to find purpose in these things. Purpose is a human concept.
This applies to life too. We are here because we, by whatever crazy turns of chance and happenstance, are here. There is no other answer; indeed that is not even one. We may be wiped out by a meteor tomorrow and the universe cares not one whit.
Why, you ask? Who on earth are you asking? There is no "why". Why did the coin come up heads or tails? Why does someone live and someone else die in an automobile accident? Why is that rock here, and not over there? There is no "why". For there to be a reason, someone needs to have thought about it, and there is no someone. There are causes and effects, yes, but no "why".
So what do we do next? We do what we are programmed to do, after thousands of generations of trial and error - we love one another, treat each other with kindness, some of us screw up, but mostly we try to pull together to improve our world and the lives of the people we love. Because that is all we are, animals with organic computers for brains and this is the program we are running, and there's no "why" for that, either.
Bullshit. We don't know how long life lasts, nor whether supernatural purposes or intentful[0] beings exist, nor what (if anything) is after. That does not mean there is "no purpose" to it. It is its own purpose.
Personally, I am most in line with Buddhism and think reincarnation is likely, and that mind (consciousness) itself is a first-class citizen, but existence doesn't have to be eternal to be meaningful. In fact, if a finite existence were meaningless, then an eternal one would be meaningless and infinite, which would be far more undesirable than death.
[0] "Intentful" is not a dictionary word, but nothing else captures what I am trying to say so I am justified in making a word up.
Not in this state. The forms we take are conditioned by our karma. One aspect of the human form in this world is the inability to remember previous lives until extremely high spiritual states are attained, and even that latter bit is questioned by some.
The karmic effects and impulses continue on, invisibly. The memories (and much of the personality) die with the body. This is not a satisfying answer to some, but it's the most realistic.
And you could also ask how you are even reincarnated to a human when the probability of being a virus/bacteria is several magnitudes larger?
That discussion could go on for days: which lifeforms are sentient and which not, whether human birth makes future human birth more likely, etc. For sure: human birth is rare. Buddha compared it to an ocean with a wooden ring on it, with a turtle who rises to the surface once every 100 years. Human birth is as rare as that turtle surfacing inside that ring.