Jeff Lindsay (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} progrium) wrote,@ 2009-03-01 11:03:00 |
|
The meaning of life
I decided early on that the meaning of life is to find or make your own meaning. Simple enough, but self-referential. For a while I was asking, what is the meaning of meaning? The significance of significance? I didn't come to a good answer. But again, self-referential. Autopoietic. This was a clue to something, but I didn't realize it.
A self-referential meaning of life doesn't seem satisfying, despite being able to agree with it. Perhaps there is more? Why is it self-referential? What does that mean? Again, I didn't realize even these were clues.
Then I went down a path: Meaning gives purpose. Purpose drives action. Action is change. To change is to exist. The meaning of life is to exist. Self-referential. But wait. If life is an infinite existence, then process is all you have. The means becomes the end.
All of a sudden, "the meaning of life is to find your own meaning" becomes not about an end goal, but an infinite process. It's not about "your own meaning" so much at all. It's about the simple imperative "to find." Which can be further resolved as "to question about." I've been doing this all along and didn't realize. Okay, but now what? Where do we go from here? Easy...
Let's assume as a byproduct of questioning and exploration, we learn/develop. Development defined as "increasing one's ability and desire to satisfy one's own needs and legitimate desires, and those of others." If that's what happens as time goes on, we see an asymptotic path to omnipotence. However, as time goes on "the distance between it and the asymptote eventually becomes smaller than any distance that one may specify." This means that as far as never fully achieving omnipotence, at some point we'll be so increasingly close we might as well be.
In my path to learning more about life, my question then becomes, What would a universe full with omnipotent living systems be like? But I can imagine this questioning going on forever. And we'll never have an answer. But it doesn't matter at all. At least it shouldn't anyway. Not by my reasoning here. As long as we keep questioning and keep exploring, which, by the way, is inevitable, so it also doesn't even matter. BUT: it is all we have (process, means), so we might as well enjoy the self-referential ride.
Believing you should and actually can have an absolute answer to the meaning of life, to me, is a lot like people caught up in predicting and trends, trying to define Web 3.0 before it happens. They're doing it wrong.
I decided early on that the meaning of life is to find or make your own meaning. Simple enough, but self-referential. For a while I was asking, what is the meaning of meaning? The significance of significance? I didn't come to a good answer. But again, self-referential. Autopoietic. This was a clue to something, but I didn't realize it.
A self-referential meaning of life doesn't seem satisfying, despite being able to agree with it. Perhaps there is more? Why is it self-referential? What does that mean? Again, I didn't realize even these were clues.
Then I went down a path: Meaning gives purpose. Purpose drives action. Action is change. To change is to exist. The meaning of life is to exist. Self-referential. But wait. If life is an infinite existence, then process is all you have. The means becomes the end.
All of a sudden, "the meaning of life is to find your own meaning" becomes not about an end goal, but an infinite process. It's not about "your own meaning" so much at all. It's about the simple imperative "to find." Which can be further resolved as "to question about." I've been doing this all along and didn't realize. Okay, but now what? Where do we go from here? Easy...
Let's assume as a byproduct of questioning and exploration, we learn/develop. Development defined as "increasing one's ability and desire to satisfy one's own needs and legitimate desires, and those of others." If that's what happens as time goes on, we see an asymptotic path to omnipotence. However, as time goes on "the distance between it and the asymptote eventually becomes smaller than any distance that one may specify." This means that as far as never fully achieving omnipotence, at some point we'll be so increasingly close we might as well be.
In my path to learning more about life, my question then becomes, What would a universe full with omnipotent living systems be like? But I can imagine this questioning going on forever. And we'll never have an answer. But it doesn't matter at all. At least it shouldn't anyway. Not by my reasoning here. As long as we keep questioning and keep exploring, which, by the way, is inevitable, so it also doesn't even matter. BUT: it is all we have (process, means), so we might as well enjoy the self-referential ride.
Believing you should and actually can have an absolute answer to the meaning of life, to me, is a lot like people caught up in predicting and trends, trying to define Web 3.0 before it happens. They're doing it wrong.
