4 ms·
You seem to assume that you can only have a meaning to life if there is an afterlife. Most people judge themselves against a narrative that matters to them. M
by MattPalmer1086 11mo ago
You seem to assume that you can only have a meaning to life if there is an afterlife.
Most people judge themselves against a narrative that matters to them. Most people do not want to cast themselves as a villain in their story.
You may ask "but what does it matter if we are all dirt". It matters to them, even if there is no godlike perspective above it all. To be honest, I'm not actually sure why having an afterlife or some super-being would create any more explicit meaning for an individual life.
- mlrtime 11mo agoOne can make the argument that certain religious practices would help a person realize what OP is feeling all the time about morals, not just in front of their death bed. Lots of replies here about after life, and just doing the right thing because you're supposed to or "empathy", yet there are a set of people like OP who only observe this when their life is put in front of them for review, maybe they do need religion?
- smitty1e 11mo ago> Most people judge themselves against a narrative that matters to them. Most people do not want to cast themselves as a villain in their story. This is a reasonably assertion as far as it goes. At the risk of being a dripping faucet, I'm poking at "Why?", given an inevitable return to the dust from which all came.
- hansifer 11mo agoWhat's wrong with "because of social and evolutionary pressure"?
- smitty1e 11mo ago"Evolitionary" implies some direction and execution scope, does it not? Possibly I'm guilty of over-reading the word.
- card_zero 11mo agoHow does extra scope (like an afterlife) solve the problem of purpose? Now you have two problems of purpose. If I remember rightly, C.S. Lewis in his sci-fi made heaven into an endless series of adventures, which is the minimum necessary to make it attractive. But this still doesn't resolve to an ultimate purpose any more than a finite life does. Often the question "what is the purpose of my existence?" is a proxy for some less abstract question, I think. Consider Young Frankenstein, and the gag where characters sing "Oh, sweet mystery of life at last I've found you! At last, I know the secret of it all!" because they got sex. Less cynically, it may simply be a matter of identifying comfortable values, in terms of the possible values available in the human condition in the present day. I mean you're unlikely to be honestly asking a question with a giant universal scope, if you claim that it bothers you personally.
- smitty1e 11mo agoI don't find it contradictory to subscribe to both an individual Destiny and an "universal scope" Destiny of which the individual Destiny is a component. This Destiny is in tension with Free Will (in my telling). In retirement, my hope is to produce a lengthy, pretentious exploration of a few ideas that will doubtless help someone's insomnia.
- card_zero 11mo agoRight, but any identification of the Ultimate Purpose is going to be a very vague bad guess. I kind of like "to learn", but besides that I tend to keep returning to a string bag of mixed values that won't boil down to anything neat.
- smitty1e 11mo agoThe reason I don't think Destiny can amount to more than a "very vague bad guess" as an intellectual matter is that such a solution would tamper with Free Will.
- 11mo ago