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--- meaning_of_life_discussion [2024/06/23 13:38] – ultracomfy
+++ meaning_of_life_discussion [2025/04/09 20:16] (current) – ultracomfy
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+~~Title:Discussion: The Meaning of Life~~
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 Life and evolution is one huge battle of races. Lifeforms emerge, fight for domination and expand or exterminate based on fitness, and that's the cycle of life. So, what's your meaning? Obviously, //your// target is to expand your kind, your //personal// DNA as much as you can! You see, life is a fight! You, personally, are competing with every other strain of DNA, so you must find the best, most fertile, most //fruitful// partner that you can get, because if you don't then you go extinct, and that's disgraceful. Without your genes passed on, you are worthless. [[Spook|You LOSE]](([[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5QGkOGZubQ|Good day, Sir!]])), against everyone else who successfully passes on their DNA.
-All those other humans around you, your [[Friend|friends]] and foes? They're all RIVALS, whenever something good happens to them it is BAD to YOU because it reduces your chances of MATING. Life is a [[zero sum]] game! You can't have friends. Unless you help each other improve your odds of mating, of course. [[Rape]]? Perfectly fine, you're just trying to pass on your genes. Hold still already, [[woman]], and serve your function!((Geez I usually like pointed arguments, but this one is tough even for me.))((Don’t worry, all, I’m MOSTLY sure he’s being satirical! (See the previous footnote and the following paragraphs) -[[User:Piouslittlechristiangirl|PLCG]]))
+All those other humans around you, your [[Friend|friends]] and foes? They're all RIVALS, whenever something good happens to them it is BAD to YOU because it reduces your chances of MATING. Life is a [[zero sum]] game! You can't have friends. Unless you help each other improve your odds of mating, of course. If it's about reproduction and DNA then [[rape]] would be A-OK. Obviously, rape is NOT ok. This right here used to have a funny joke but people didn't like the joke, so fuck you! :>
-It should be clear that this is a strawman. Proponents of the "life is a competition (of genes)" idea will most likely not hold this position (even though they really should if they believe in it). Yes, you //can// look at life through the lens of survival of the fittest, and you will find that many things will suddenly make a lot of sense, but 1) many other things will not and 2) this doesn't mean life //is// survival of the fittest. For contrast, you can look at life through the lens of class struggle. The fight of the burgeoisie to suppress us, the worker proletariats. Or through the lens of empathy. Or through the lens of races, black versus white. Many things will make sense when you look at life from that perfective, but many things will not, and it //definitely// doesn't mean that any of this //is// the meaning of life.
+Even proponents of the "life is a competition (of genes)" idea will most likely not believe that rape is OK (even though they really should if they believe in life being about reproduction). Ultimately - Yes, you //can// look at life through the lens of survival of the fittest, and you will find that many things will suddenly make a lot of sense, but 1) many other things will not and 2) this doesn't mean life //is// survival of the fittest. For contrast, you can look at life through the lens of class struggle. The fight of the burgeoisie to suppress us, the worker proletariats. Or through the lens of empathy. Or through the lens of races, black versus white. Many things will make sense when you look at life from that perfective, but many things will not, and it //definitely// doesn't mean that any of this //is// the meaning of life.
 The point is, looking at life through the lense of, say, survival of the fittest, has no prescriptive power. It has //descriptive// power, as I said it's a very useful perspective from which to look at life. It has some predictive power as well, for sure, it's certainly a useful model for analyzation and making predictions about the future; however, it is missing //prescriptive// power - none of any of this is proof enough to go from "in our observation, survival of the fittest served as a useful model for describing animal and even some human behavior" to "survival of the fittest is the absolute meaning of life".
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+So, when we ask the question of "What is the meaning of life", then that question has a very specific, philosophical meaning. This is //not// about what //you// think is good or what makes //you// feel good and content with yourself. When we ask for a meaning of life, then the answer to that is absolute. It's the meaning of //life//, not the meaning for an individual piece of life, nor its opinion on that. When life has a meaning, that meaning must be derived from something above life and applies to //all of life//. The things mentioned in this list are, say, personal objectives or objectives individuals may feel compelled to achieve alone or as humanity as a whole, but they are not a //meaning// that is applied authoratively across all life. For that to happen, there must be an authority above life that can declare such a meaning (and even that gets difficult to defend). As it stands, things don't do much more beyond existing. Followers of the religions think that there is a funny man in the sky solving all their philosophical problems for them, but the factual basis gives no reason to believe in any of it. Until it does, the best assumption is "atoms are a thing, and life emerges dynamically from there" followed by "and that's about it, this is why we exist and what life is" concluding in "what the hell is a 'meaning' supposed to be?". It's a spook. You can say "waves of water are meant to become calm again" and it sounds smart because most waves usually do that, but that's not a meaning, it's a prediction of what is going to happen based on empirical evidence and the laws governing the movement of fluids. When a wave swamps an entire village and kills hundreds of people, that wave wasn't "meant" to ruin human lifes. There are billions of waves on earth right now, they aren't all "meant" to rise up and fall down again, they just do. We, as humans, are not any more special as waves of water. We rise up, we do our thing along with the other molecules of water, sometimes drowning villages, sometimes bringing water into drought-ridden places where water was desperately needed, and then we fall down again. An individual molecule of water never does a thing on its own, much like individual humans never do succeed or do things on their own, and then we evaporate into factual nonexistence as the wave dissolves. An individual water molecule could say "our meaning is to create a wave as high as possible" and it would just be the statement of an individual water molecule. Even if every water molecule on earth agreed to form a wave as high as possible, this would not change the factual reality that waves just happen. The same goes for the universe - billions of stars just for us? Impossible! No, actually, until we know better we have to assume that it's all just physical realities. The stars are out there, alright, but this doesn't "mean" anything.