5 ms·

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

by venus 14y ago

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.

devcpp 14y ago
Can you prove it? 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.
- venus 14y ago
  > Can you prove it? 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.
- mattgreenrocks 14y ago
  These types of responses always reek of the need to be right (thus claiming very important Internet Points). Or, closer to home: "I've given up looking, and so should you." Purpose is essential. You can cut it out, claiming you're somehow above it all, but you're cheating yourself, ultimately.
- Tichy 14y ago
  What would it even mean? What if the purpose of life is to build as many feeling entities as possible and kill them all at once in a slow and torturous way, so as to maximize the amount of pain that can be dealt in a single moment? 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?
  - zoba 14y ago
    If the purpose of life is to "build as many feeling entities..." then that is what should be done. You see, it is the way that we arrive at our understanding of the purpose that convinces us that it is right. By using the scientific method we can feel confident that we have discovered truth. Science provides us with evidence for why we should believe things and when we have evidence we have two options: we can either be rational and change our beliefs based on evidence, or be irrational and ignore the evidence. The type of "purpose of life" that I'm talking about would only be discoverable by intense scientific activity. It would be like the laws of physics: so undeniably true that you'd be a fool to not believe them. That said, I think your postulated "build as many feeling..." purpose of life is particularly unlikely. However, because no one has ever seen the purpose of life before, we must be careful to not rule out things prematurely, no matter how absurd they seem. I imagine most people of Darwin's time were so set on the idea of creationism that evolution was inconceivable, thankfully Darwin saw through that.
- verysoftoiltppr 14y ago
  I can prove you have no purpose to yourself. If you say you have purpose to yourself, you then ask: but then what's the purpose of myself? You enter infinite recursion. You can only have purpose to others. Life can only have purpose to something else other than life. Does that other thing matter?
- zoba 14y ago
  This is the first time I've publicly posted about this, and I'm glad to see that someone (you!) understands it. You're comment is spot on. I'll add a bit: 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.
  - venus 14y ago
    Firstly, thank you for talking about it - I do not mean to argue with you about your own thoughts. But I think differently. 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.
orangecat 14y ago
If there is no God, then our lives are even more important, because those things we value as humans--like love, friendship, kindness, happiness, curiosity, and humor--only exist because we're here to value them. As Harry James Potter-Evens-Verres put it: "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!"
- venus 14y ago
  Excellent quote! I couldn't agree more.
- verysoftoiltppr 14y ago
  Have you ever considered why you value what you do? You can't have a rational conversation and say doing whatever you value is justified by the act of valuing it.
  - jmole 14y ago
    Following your hypothesis, it's impossible to have a rational conversation about anything. Look at solipsism for goodness sake. We can't even know that anything outside our own mind really exists. 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.
    - verysoftoiltppr 14y ago
      You can have a rational conversation about anything as long as you don't use irrational arguments. 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.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Life has no purpose. 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.
- n_coats 14y ago
  well put
- verysoftoiltppr 14y ago
  The objective of life is dying.
- sinnerswing 14y ago
  The journey is the purpose.
- tianshuo 14y ago
  I agree with many parts of Buddhism but sorry pal, reincarnation (and heaven/hell) is totally BS. You have been cheated and ask yourself a question? Do you remember what happened before your present life? No? Then how come what you do now effects your "future" life that doesn't even care about your present life. Reincarnation is unfalsifiable(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability), which means it is as believable as the Flying Spaghetti Monster(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_monster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_monster) 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? Accept life does not have a purpose, and all that exists are patterns, consciousness itself is only a complicated pattern.
  - 14y ago
Xcelerate 14y ago
> Life has no purpose. It's just applied randomness, like everything else. 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?
- venus 14y ago
  I'm sure smarter men than myself believed the world is flat, or that leeching drained bad humours, lacking as they did proper knowledge or even a proper way of reasoning. But we do not lack for these things today. 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.
  - Xcelerate 14y ago
    This won't convince you (and in fact I never try to convince anyone), but if you're curious where someone with a scientific mind who also believes in God is coming from, perhaps this can at least give you a little insight into why we think what we do. I wrote this a few days ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/16icpq/only_6_of_scientists_identify_themselves_as/c7wj4zp http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/16icpq/only_6_of_s...
jmole 14y ago
I like Viktor Frankl's solution to this apparent conundrum: the purpose of life is to find a purpose. 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.
- zoba 14y ago
  Thanks for posting this. That phrase is the conclusion I came to in the parent comment of this chain. I have not heard that phrase elsewhere though. I wonder if he means it in the same way as I do? I'll have to check out his book.

by venus 14y ago

devcpp 14y ago

Can you prove it? 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.

venus 14y ago
> Can you prove it? 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.
mattgreenrocks 14y ago
These types of responses always reek of the need to be right (thus claiming very important Internet Points). Or, closer to home: "I've given up looking, and so should you." Purpose is essential. You can cut it out, claiming you're somehow above it all, but you're cheating yourself, ultimately.
Tichy 14y ago
What would it even mean? What if the purpose of life is to build as many feeling entities as possible and kill them all at once in a slow and torturous way, so as to maximize the amount of pain that can be dealt in a single moment? 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?
- zoba 14y ago
  If the purpose of life is to "build as many feeling entities..." then that is what should be done. You see, it is the way that we arrive at our understanding of the purpose that convinces us that it is right. By using the scientific method we can feel confident that we have discovered truth. Science provides us with evidence for why we should believe things and when we have evidence we have two options: we can either be rational and change our beliefs based on evidence, or be irrational and ignore the evidence. The type of "purpose of life" that I'm talking about would only be discoverable by intense scientific activity. It would be like the laws of physics: so undeniably true that you'd be a fool to not believe them. That said, I think your postulated "build as many feeling..." purpose of life is particularly unlikely. However, because no one has ever seen the purpose of life before, we must be careful to not rule out things prematurely, no matter how absurd they seem. I imagine most people of Darwin's time were so set on the idea of creationism that evolution was inconceivable, thankfully Darwin saw through that.
verysoftoiltppr 14y ago
I can prove you have no purpose to yourself. If you say you have purpose to yourself, you then ask: but then what's the purpose of myself? You enter infinite recursion. You can only have purpose to others. Life can only have purpose to something else other than life. Does that other thing matter?
zoba 14y ago
This is the first time I've publicly posted about this, and I'm glad to see that someone (you!) understands it. You're comment is spot on. I'll add a bit: 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.
- venus 14y ago
  Firstly, thank you for talking about it - I do not mean to argue with you about your own thoughts. But I think differently. 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.

orangecat 14y ago

If there is no God, then our lives are even more important, because those things we value as humans--like love, friendship, kindness, happiness, curiosity, and humor--only exist because we're here to value them. As Harry James Potter-Evens-Verres put it: "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!"

venus 14y ago
Excellent quote! I couldn't agree more.
verysoftoiltppr 14y ago
Have you ever considered why you value what you do? You can't have a rational conversation and say doing whatever you value is justified by the act of valuing it.
- jmole 14y ago
  Following your hypothesis, it's impossible to have a rational conversation about anything. Look at solipsism for goodness sake. We can't even know that anything outside our own mind really exists. 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.
  - verysoftoiltppr 14y ago
    You can have a rational conversation about anything as long as you don't use irrational arguments. 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.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Life has no purpose. 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.

n_coats 14y ago
well put
verysoftoiltppr 14y ago
The objective of life is dying.
sinnerswing 14y ago
The journey is the purpose.
tianshuo 14y ago
I agree with many parts of Buddhism but sorry pal, reincarnation (and heaven/hell) is totally BS. You have been cheated and ask yourself a question? Do you remember what happened before your present life? No? Then how come what you do now effects your "future" life that doesn't even care about your present life. Reincarnation is unfalsifiable(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability), which means it is as believable as the Flying Spaghetti Monster(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_monster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_monster) 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? Accept life does not have a purpose, and all that exists are patterns, consciousness itself is only a complicated pattern.
- 14y ago

Xcelerate 14y ago

> Life has no purpose. It's just applied randomness, like everything else. 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?

venus 14y ago
I'm sure smarter men than myself believed the world is flat, or that leeching drained bad humours, lacking as they did proper knowledge or even a proper way of reasoning. But we do not lack for these things today. 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.
- Xcelerate 14y ago
  This won't convince you (and in fact I never try to convince anyone), but if you're curious where someone with a scientific mind who also believes in God is coming from, perhaps this can at least give you a little insight into why we think what we do. I wrote this a few days ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/16icpq/only_6_of_scientists_identify_themselves_as/c7wj4zp http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/16icpq/only_6_of_s...

jmole 14y ago

I like Viktor Frankl's solution to this apparent conundrum: the purpose of life is to find a purpose. 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.

zoba 14y ago
Thanks for posting this. That phrase is the conclusion I came to in the parent comment of this chain. I have not heard that phrase elsewhere though. I wonder if he means it in the same way as I do? I'll have to check out his book.