| That is so much shorter than what I posted on Derek Siver's site it is embarrassing: Born at the end of the '60s just before Christmas I was named after a saint. Later I found out that Santa Claus was largely invented by Coca-Cola to sell sodas and all the unlikely, but commonly held, beliefs that he was omniscient and omnipresent for at least one night of the year was seriously undermined. Then it was only a short jump to realise that Jesus was probably all made up too, that he wasn't the son of God and, by extension, there might well not be a God. I became a devout atheist at the age of seven - by 'devout' I mean that were there to be a Rapture as some believe that there will be, I will consider the 'proof' of the second coming to be symptomatic of hallucination, possibly a spiked water supply, and refuse to believe in God because I prefer to live my life that way without one. The question "What is the meaning of life?" had no easy answers in 'forgiveness', or 'love thy neighbour', or the promise of an afterlife for those who did good deeds as if we were on Santa's omniscient list of good children to recieve presents. So I used logic and logic alone to arrive at the definitive objective answer no matter how it may seem uncomfortable to my sensibilities to reveal it. The truth is, that to ask this question objectively you have to necessarily be totally objective about life and to be objective about anything you have to be outside of it with a detached point of view. With 'life, the universe and everything' with a whole 'philosophical universe of discourse' included in the set of things being considered I had to immediately dismiss all instrinsic attempts at an answer as not definitively objective due to their lack of detachment and inescapable subjective bias. Realising that I needed to be outside the 'universe of discourse' to properly pose the question I saw what the difficulty with answering this had been all this time... ...'meaning' is part of the 'universe of discourse' and it not available if outside of it. Consequently, all claims to a definitive meaning of life are erroneous in logic as an objective answer cannot be found. It is not so much that life is meaningless and we should all be nihilistic atheists, but that we are free to live any way we please as there is no wrong answer - as there is no definitive objective ULTIMATE answer! Every way you wish to give your life meaning is equally valid for your life, with the caveat that this is an ephemeral guideline you choose to adopt not an eternal truth - actually, I like the way this same argument was presented "in reverse" by Mr Sivers as whenever I have posted about this in various fora in the past I have felt that I've come across as overly alienating by hitting them with the cold truth first instead of pandering to their intimately held, but unfortunately subjective, beliefs. Putting it all the other way around encourages more people to read on and seems more life affirming - even if I know, in truth, that life is without extrinsic meaning. |