A better question: what is the meaning of ice cube LEGO?
A while back, someone thought they would be smart and take on my Formspring challenge, wherein I said, “go ahead, try and stump me. I dare you.” They asked, “what is the meaning of life?”
I actually had an answer for them, one I thought was pretty good and pretty explicit in declaring the question itself as a category error — a question along the lines of asking “what does the sound of a train whistle smell like?” or “what shape is love?” Life is a state classified as a grouping of biochemical reactions acting in a self-perpetuating manner, and doesn’t have a “deeper meaning,” any more than “what’s the meaning of ice?” or “what’s the meaning of stars?”. It’s a mangled question, one that actually conflates a few similar questions into one seemingly sensible question, one for which most religions claim to have an answer. That theists generally have a better answer for an incorrectly formulated question is no big surprise, but I decided to take a stab at it anyway. Here’s what I answered.
What is the meaning of life?
THAT’S the kind of nigh-unanswerable question I was hoping for! Good for you!
It’s also a bit of a mangled question, which no matter how often it’s repeated I still can’t parse. It seems to be asking “why is there life”, but it’s actually not — it’s sort of presupposing an agency and a purpose to our existence specifically. At the same time, it’s asking what reason we have for living our individual lives the way we do. So let’s break the question down.
*rustle rustle*
Life itself has no meaning, any more than purple has a taste (unless you’re synaesthetic). Life on Earth is the culmination of a very long series of cause-and-effects starting when the quantum foam first fluctuated and kicked off the Big Bang. We don’t know how many universes or how many shots at this particular universe there has been, so we don’t know how likely or unlikely life is. We do know that we wouldn’t be around to think about it if it wasn’t possible (thus the anthropic principle), but there’s no specific agency to it that we can detect (despite people suspecting as much, since we’re evolved to detect agency in every rustling bush).
So, that covers “why is there life”. On to “what meaning can we impart onto our own lives, to give us reason to go on existing”, which is a smaller, and more personal, question. My life has meaning in finding comfort and happiness, and increasing the comfort and happiness of those around me. I also like rooting for human progress, and have a fascination with just how far we’ve come as a species in a mere ten-to-twenty-thousand years.
Of course, if this doesn’t answer your question, feel free to narrow it down some more.
Last week, this answer was used in a sermon by a Southern preacher by the name of Steve Davis. I’ve been following him on Twitter for some time — I had started following when we had a brief but civil exchange on theology, and he seemed like a fairly reasonable and sensible person whom I might want to converse with again in the future. In his sermon this past week, Steve referenced an abridged form of my answer to compare/contrast a theist’s “meaning of life” with an atheist’s.
What do you think of, when someone mentions the word “culture?” How does “culture” differ from “society?” What is/are your culture/s?
[…]
I am asking these questions because I am hoping to use the responses as part of the foundation for one of my papers this semester. If you could help me out, I would really appreciate it. I would ask that those who have a background in anthropology or sociology refrain from responding in comments – I am not looking for professional definitions. What I am looking for is purely layperson responses.
It’s a great question. And he’s specifically looking for laypeople, so I am eminently qualified — and so are most of you! Answer him here. Or here. CLICK DAMMIT.
Monday’s going to be a very busy day, what with dealing with the user migration that I would have started last night (update on that as soon as I have something to post about — I’m writing this at 8:30pm Sunday night, so I haven’t even pulled the trigger on the scripts yet!). Because of this fact, I’m scheduling this post to share possibly my favorite piece of music of all time. You probably know it, in fact. It’s a shame I can’t find any way to include this at the wedding, and it’s also a shame it really doesn’t suit the occasion, it being as sorrowful and poignant as it is.
I’ve gotten a reasonably thoughtful and articulate response to my recent blog post about morality — and I’m not merely calling this response articulate as a prelude to ripping the piece to shreds, as we see so often in the blogosphere. Granted, I think the majority of the post is wrong, resting as it does on chapter-and-verse of an unverifiable collection of stories that were put together in 325CE, but that doesn’t mean it’s not internally consistent and well-spoken. Believe me, it’s a welcome change from our usual semi-literate evangelical blog-stalker.
As an attempt to be civil I will sheathe the sarcasm, per a request for civility and dialog from @roofwoofer, the author of this response, on his month-old blog Faith, Reason & Good Sense. Many of these arguments were floating about in the back of my mind while I wrote the original post, but it’s rather difficult to bullet-proof your work against every possible line of argumentation without writing a novel-length post as a result, so I opted to stay on topic as much as possible instead of going on the wild tangents that would have been necessary to insulate against these charges. This will be lengthy, though. Fair warning. Continue reading “Wishful thinking”→
My grandfather was a war veteran. I didn’t get to say goodbye before he passed away, from long-standing health concerns that finally caught up to him. I was in Toronto at the time, and was actually in the process of saving up to make a visit back to Nova Scotia when I got the news. I arrived two weeks after his burial.
I miss him. My familial neglect at the sunset of his life is going to haunt me for a long time.
Digital Cuttlefish, poet laureate of the intelligent internet community, has written a poem that, if set to music, could be my theme song.
And I’m not going to idly sit by!
What he says is a crock! So I’ll teach, tease, or mock
Till my internal clock thinks I live in Hong Kong
Because Someone Is Wrong!
…On The Internet
On a topic of interest to me,
And the rancor’s increased; I’m becoming a beast
And that glow in the East is becoming quite strong
Because Someone Is Wrong!
…On The Internet
Yup. Describes me to a tee. Oh introspection, how I loathe thee.
(Note from Jason: Jodi has an account here, and once in a while is inspired to write guest posts, but rarely gets them to the point where she’s comfortable publishing them. Tonight, she finished one. Hooray!)
I’ve been told that I should write; this is why I can’t.
When arguing in online debates, or just commenting on blogs, the message is too difficult to get out, simply because of the human condition. I see it in comments all the time and it intrigues me to no end. Usually it devolves into repetition — people can’t figure out any other possible way to get their message out there, so they just repeat the same thing, worded slightly differently. I do it all the time. I sit and think and type and delete and re-word until I get a headache from trying to find the perfect wording; some wording that surely, surely the other party must understand. It doesn’t even matter if they ever agree with the argument that I’m making, I’m just sure that I MUST have gotten my point across, must have gotten my message out there in plain view.
But that is rarely how it works. This is usually what keeps me from writing long comments or blog posts of my own. The message. I get part way through and I stop because I know that no matter what I say, no matter how eloquent my language, how precisely chosen my words, it wont matter one bit. A thousand different people will read my words and interpret a thousand different messages from it. Even those who know me well, who know my mannerisms and the way I speak, will get it wrong, at least somewhat. I would take a chance and suggest that even internet friends that agree often probably make incorrect assumptions about the other persons message at least 50% of the time.
You can’t think another person’s thoughts, you can’t be in their heads. All this is is just text to you, I can say I’m raving mad but it wont make you mad unless there is something in this wall of text that triggers an emotional response in your own brain. Trying to get my message across the internet, the pure, original message that I intended with my first thought, is near impossible. Once I type these words and hit send it’s entirely up to you.
Not that it’s a lot easier in person though, body language screws up a lot too.
Look at this picture for a moment — click to enlarge. Kinda stomach-churning, huh? Looks a lot like an alien chest-burster in fact. It’s a rare isopod discovered off the Jersey coast that eats, then replaces, the tongue of a fish. Interestingly, outside the eating of the tongue, the fish doesn’t suffer terribly much in the way of ill effects from this disgusting, horrific, and horribly effective parasitic behaviour. Also interestingly, neither do people whose reason has been eaten and replaced by religious faith.
