[HackerX]

I have an issue. You see, for quite a while I've been tossing around this idea:
The meaning of life rests in life's ability to ask questions (choice). Life has meaning for as long as there remains unanswered questions. Essentially, the purpose of life is to experience life.

Of course, that's all terribly redundant. An issue of tautology.

Can anybody resolve it for me?

[Blue Moon]

Of course, you could also go the deterministic route and say that choice doesn't actually exist, and that everything is based on what happened before. I guess you could still say then that the purpose of life would be to experience life-- to experience whatever has been predetermined for you to do.

[maru]

Life doesn't have meaning *only* while you are finding the answers, because you create limitless questions.

"Life Isn't About Finding Yourself, It's About Creating Yourself"

[cannotseethe]

I'm not convinced the statement really is tautological. There are two terms involved, life versus question-asking. Something non-trivial is happening, semantically speaking, as you've linked two things of different type.

To be more specific, one way to supply meaning to a thing, a particularly pragmatic way, is to detail how it behaves in a context greater than itself. Here you have a computer program, as a bunch of text in a file, compiled and executed on a computer; what it does is compute pi. That's it's purpose or meaning. Here you have a living thing, as a bunch of chemicals and goo, embedded in the world; what it does is ask questions about that world. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable and non-empty way to supply meaning to life, to me.

[Ericds84]

Cannotseethe--The only problem I see with what you're saying is that humans could just as easily be construed as eating-and-shitting machines, or--biologically--genome-duplicating machines. Our existence could be construed in so many lights that defining meaning by what we do would almost be pointless; everyone could come up with his "own" meaning of life.

Is inquiry a tremendously meaningful activity? Absolutely. But is it the meaning of life? That's a tough sell.

[slip]

	Originally Posted by cannotseethe To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	what it does is compute pi. That's it's purpose or meaning.

Is its function necessarily its purpose or meaning? What it does isn't what it means. Its meaning is the value of its function as interpreted by its user.

If we express meaning as purposeful intent, then the meaning of the pi program is obvious to its creator, but hidden from the user. Without access to the creator, meaning is lost.

[cannotseethe]

	Originally Posted by Ericds84 To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Our existence could be construed in so many lights that defining meaning by what we do would almost be pointless; everyone could come up with his "own" meaning of life.

That's the problem contained within questions about the purpose of life. Defining purpose requires a context in which that purpose is expressed. The question is only confusing when the context is omitted. In any case, I wasn't advancing a particular viewpoint, but instead commenting on the logical content (or lack thereof) of the statements made in the OP, and offering an interpretation that they do, in fact, have non-trivial content.

	Originally Posted by slip To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	What it does isn't what it means.

In a strictly pragmatic sense, what a thing means can only be grounded in terms of what it does, so yes, what it does is what it means. There's no other substrate. Naturally, this is only one sense among many in which to ask and answer such questions, but since the question posed in the OP had to do with whether or not certain statements were tautological, I only needed to supply one sense in which they were not.

[Amphorian]

Originally Posted by Ericds84 To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Cannotseethe--The only problem I see with what you're saying is that humans could just as easily be construed as eating-and-shitting machines, or--biologically--genome-duplicating machines. Our existence could be construed in so many lights that defining meaning by what we do would almost be pointless; everyone could come up with his "own" meaning of life. Is inquiry a tremendously meaningful activity? Absolutely. But is it the meaning of life? That's a tough sell.

Life inherently has no meaning accept to survive. Humans do and must give further meaning to their own lives.

[Yardy]

Isn't the search for "purpose" a bit misguided?

There doesn't seem to be a "why" we exist. Energy has come into the peculiar state that it can view and reflect upon itself, but all living things die - they must - and so energy is displaced and recycled.

---------- Post added 07-21-2010 at 01:38 AM ----------

The meaning of life isn't to survive or some other. Life is just a state of matter, which is a state of energy, reacting upon itself.

Evolution, survival, these are the byproducts of life, not the purpose of it. These are just things that will happen naturally if you choose to place life in any hospitable environment.

[Slowandeasy1]

	Originally Posted by Amphorian To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Life inherently has no meaning accept to survive. Humans do and must give further meaning to their own lives.

I concur, to quote Aristotle (Ethics, The Golden Mean)
1. Man's Essential nature is Happiness,
2. Nature's Ultimate Virtue is Excellence (ie Good Habits, Survival)
3. Happiness in Excellence is the Primary Human Virtue

[Paul Siraisi]

Life, as best as anyone can tell, is a result of other processes in the universe.

And then it has its particular character, which involves its constituents trying as hard as they can to live (and sometimes the ones with extra time on their hands thinking up elaborate reformulations of that pursuit).

[reb]

Hacker, no...i don't think i can resolve it. i can tell you how i resolved it....

in zen, the koan is designed to make the seeker reach a point where they have beat themselves to a bloody pulp on the question. somehow, this is supposed to lead to 'enlightenment'. in the meantime, the concrete answers are far more rare than truthful car salesmen. the frustration is free, as a result of supply and demand. confusion is an add on provided at no extra charge.

my own queries led me to 'who gives a shit about the stupid answer? i'm not wasting another second on this damned ignorant bullshit.'. the time required to reach this point is directly apportioned to the degree of stubborn hard headed arrogance of the seeker. maybe it won't take you most of your life to get to where you don't bother with terms like 'tautological' and 'paradox', or questions to which answers are infinitely ephemerous, nearly meaningless and ultimately personal.
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[HackerX]

It's not my intent to try to resolve the meaning of life. Rather to ensure that my statement is at least logically sound.


Ultimately, my statement rests not so much with the "meaning" of life, but rather with the separation between what is life and what isn't (see mindless autonoma).
Personally (in my own words), the meaning of life doesn't have an "answer" per se, instead the answer falls on the infinite number of questions* (see choice) that life can (presumeably) experience. i.e. Life's purpose is to live through choice. Or something along those lines.

* Not questions in the human comprehensible sense, but far more on the lower level.

[LifesEcstasy]

Yes. Give up talking yourself in circles.

[cannotseethe]

	Originally Posted by LifesEcstasy To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Yes. Give up talking yourself in circles.

If he stopped asking questions, he'd be dead by his own definition.
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[Olympics2010]

'The meaning of life is to experience life' is not a tautology necessarily, I would say. And, it is not quite feasible to figure out what exactly the meaning of life is, just based on the fact that the aforementioned 'tautology' doesn't hold, anyhow.

[Bhokarala]

Why is i that you see a tautology as a problem? Yes it's redundant but it's not a logical fallacy. just because "A cat is a cat because it is cat" (a tautology) doesn't give it's proof, that doesn't make it any less true. I think the real question you should be asking is not HOW this is true, but WHY. (Though I agree, it isn't enough to be right, one must know one is right).

You might just see man as a biological machine but when you do so, you forget he has a brain, and as such, he cannot be a machine of any kind. The same thing that goes with atoms. The second you say man is just chemicals, or just an assemblage of matter you forget one thing: the fact he lives. It's the one thing that is not made up of matter, or particles (at least as we know them). The second a man dies, he becomes a corpse of chemicals but the question you need to ask is what has left. It's just trying to define what that thing we call life really is. What it is, exactly, and why is it here? Why us?

Life is life because it consists of our consciousness and our ability to make choices. I agree that a world without choices isn't life. To me, the purpose of life is to act in the way man should. Just as a fish cannot live out of water and a wolf cannot survive without hunting, or a plant cannot live without photosynthesis, man has a specific nature allotted to him. And it's through his mind that he achieves that (the choice). An animal does not have any choice in the matter; he is innately programmed to live. But man, given a choice, has the option to die. So, by opting to live, every second of your day is a reaffirmation of this, is essentially refusing to die. You could look at it that way, if you don't object to calling a human a form of animal.

I think a man does give his life meaning. He chooses to attempt fame, to be held in high regards etc. And a man who does nothing with his life essentially forfeits it's meaning (or at least the potential of a greater meaning).

---------- Post added 07-22-2010 at 10:50 PM ----------

Oh, and what is life and isn't life? Well:

1.) You must have choice
2.)In the case of man, he must have reason, consciousness, and existence.
3.) Because he is given a choice to act as he ought to or not, he has the choice to not live. (not a phisiological sense, but a metaphysical one). This represents itself in the case of morals. That which is moral, is proper to man, that which isn't isn't.

That being said, life is more than not dying. In the case of the clinically insane (who lack reason) they are alive in the physiological sense, but not metaphysically. Yes, they are living but they aren't really living. Those that engage in immoral behavior? Yes they are living physiologically, but they're not living very well. Generally, immoral decisions come with consequnces (a heroine addict lives in poverty, he who steals experiences guilt (except when he doesn't which makes him inhuman. Emotions are inescapable and to be devoid of them is not human. In this case, I point out that hitler was human, but not human).