the meaning of life (and why I love Stanford)
I cried after IHUM discussion today. I just felt like the conversation that I had just taken part in was the most beautiful thing, and that this is the purpose of a college eduction, or of education in general.
Which of these is true? If none, what is the right answer for the end of the sentence (to you.)
My life is meaningful if and only if it is good for me.
My life is meaningful if and only if I am morally good.
My life is meaningful if and only if I believe it is meaningful.
My life is meaningful if and only if it is not arbitrary or open to doubt.
My life is meaningful if and only if it is actively and at least somewhat successfully engaged in a project (or projects) of positive value.
I believe none of these make your life meaningful, because I don’t believe that some people have a “meaningful” life whereas others don’t. We either all have meaning or we don’t.
I believe that society subconsciously defines a life to have meaning as one who has a positive impact on others. However, this is just a social construct to counteract our selfish instincts to cooperate in society for the benefit of all.
There is no absolute truth, is there? Everything I believe could at one point could be proved false. Even this statement. That’s circular logic, though, isn’t it? Maybe we can never know truth.
My life is meaningful if and only if I am remembered?
Can you be meaningful in a negative way? Like Hitler, could one say he had a meaningful life? Then my definition of society’s “meaningful” life is incorrect.
Are there levels of meaning? Once everyone dies, anything that made life meaningful would be eradicated. So death makes life meaningless. But immortality would make life meaningless, because they say death brings meaning to life.
In order not to lose hope entirely, we must still believe that at least on a small scale, in our everyday life, things we do will have significance on a small level. When you take time into account, however, and blow up the picture, there is no meaning to an individual life. This is why people cannot see the idea of infinity, I suppose, because realizing this concept would be acceptance of the meaningless your life.
However, looking at it from a math perspective- if you have a function, where the output is the amount of meaningfulness in your life, and you center yourself at the origin, with the axes as time and space, one could conclude that the output (meaningfulness) increases as you get closer and closer to the origin in time and space. As in, when you take a circle of people who are very close to you, your life has more meaning to them (yes, this is a relative meaning) then to those further and futher away (until at the point of-oh!-infinity, your life has no meaning). The same goes for time, before your birth your life has relatively little meaning, and after your death the meaning of your life is less and less, until at some point for everyone it approaches zero, at infinity.
However, taking the integral of that function, there IS meaning associated with your life. Removing oneself from time or space, there still is area under that curve.
Something to think about.
Which of these is true? If none, what is the right answer for the end of the sentence (to you.)
My life is meaningful if and only if it is good for me.
My life is meaningful if and only if I am morally good.
My life is meaningful if and only if I believe it is meaningful.
My life is meaningful if and only if it is not arbitrary or open to doubt.
My life is meaningful if and only if it is actively and at least somewhat successfully engaged in a project (or projects) of positive value.
I believe none of these make your life meaningful, because I don’t believe that some people have a “meaningful” life whereas others don’t. We either all have meaning or we don’t.
I believe that society subconsciously defines a life to have meaning as one who has a positive impact on others. However, this is just a social construct to counteract our selfish instincts to cooperate in society for the benefit of all.
There is no absolute truth, is there? Everything I believe could at one point could be proved false. Even this statement. That’s circular logic, though, isn’t it? Maybe we can never know truth.
My life is meaningful if and only if I am remembered?
Can you be meaningful in a negative way? Like Hitler, could one say he had a meaningful life? Then my definition of society’s “meaningful” life is incorrect.
Are there levels of meaning? Once everyone dies, anything that made life meaningful would be eradicated. So death makes life meaningless. But immortality would make life meaningless, because they say death brings meaning to life.
In order not to lose hope entirely, we must still believe that at least on a small scale, in our everyday life, things we do will have significance on a small level. When you take time into account, however, and blow up the picture, there is no meaning to an individual life. This is why people cannot see the idea of infinity, I suppose, because realizing this concept would be acceptance of the meaningless your life.
However, looking at it from a math perspective- if you have a function, where the output is the amount of meaningfulness in your life, and you center yourself at the origin, with the axes as time and space, one could conclude that the output (meaningfulness) increases as you get closer and closer to the origin in time and space. As in, when you take a circle of people who are very close to you, your life has more meaning to them (yes, this is a relative meaning) then to those further and futher away (until at the point of-oh!-infinity, your life has no meaning). The same goes for time, before your birth your life has relatively little meaning, and after your death the meaning of your life is less and less, until at some point for everyone it approaches zero, at infinity.
However, taking the integral of that function, there IS meaning associated with your life. Removing oneself from time or space, there still is area under that curve.
Something to think about.