Amos

Exactly Jay and now you are saying that life has no purpose in itself except that we give it. This means that, just like Sunday, life has no intrinsic purpose but if we can give it one we must be outside of life so we can give it a purpose. The difference between the purpose Sunday and the purpose of life is that the purpose of Sunday can be different for everone wherefore it is just a "form" while the purpose of life is the same for everyone and therefore is the Ultimate Form.

If you tell me that the purpose of life is to have many nice Sunday afternoons you are not talking about the purpose of life but about the purpose of Sunday afternoons, girlfriends or what have you.

Just

I am of the opinion that once:
1) physics and chemical laws were decided
2) ammount and type of matter was decieded
3) universe began (if it ever did)
Everything that has happened since then was always going to happen - thanks to the phyisical and chemical laws.
Therefore life has no purpose. It was inevitable from when the universe started, just as it was inevitable that the sun exists.
We are just a mass of chemicals which can operate just as the sun operates.
Before you ask if there is a point in life ask:
"is there a point to the universe?"

callmejay

Um, how can we be "outside" of life? I can give MY life a purpose, in a sense, but there's nothing objective about that purpose, it's just a way I can choose to look at life. It's NOT the same for everybody. If I decide the purpose of my life is to make the best damn popsicle-stick sailboat ever, than that doesn't make that THE Purpose of Life.

Amos

There is nothing objective about that because in the purpose of life we are the subject that is why everybodies popsicle-stick sailboat/sunday afternoon will be different. The fact that we are motivate to make a popsicle-stick sailboat is why we are subject in this search for meaning.

Comquirk

My take:

Biologically, it would seem to me that the purpose of life is to procrate. This is not to say that homosexuality is 'wrong,' just a genetic abberation (a word?). This purpose is also not one of philosophy or moral law, it is simply biological and does in no way effect a person's life if not fullfilled.

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

My thoughts are fairly similar to those already stated, but I will try to be a bit more expansive in my answer.

When we talk about "life" in this context, we are talking about living things. Anything that has DNA (or some related thing) and is concerned with procreation is alive. That's probably not a sufficient explanation of what life is, but it will do for most discussions I think. However, in a debate like this, we are not just concerned with living things, but with the process by which living things perpetuate themselves. The most significant fact about this process is that once, long ago, material that was not alive became alive through some chemical (not mystical) process of abiogenisis that we don't yet fully understand.
This first living thing had the unique ability to reproduce itself. So, once it came into being and began this process of life, the process continued in its descendents, even after the original organism was no more. We, and every living thing are descendents of the first organism, and theoretically, the process of life must be an unbroken chain, that stretches between us and this first organism. Consequently, we are related to everything that is alive, and perhaps everything that has ever lived on the earth.

The reason why life has been able to perpetuate itself is because every living thing has, as its first priority, the reproduction of its own genes. This can be done either directly by having children, or indirectly by supporting our close relatives who share most of our genes. If you take the broader perspective, we are also concerned with the perpetuation of life itself, because if our descendents are to survive they must be part of a living environment.

The develoment of life was not inevitable. It's something that need not necessarily have happened. And the universe itself is incapable of caring whether we live or not. Indeed, the general trend in the universe is towards increased entropy, and as living things we defy that trend. So, as far as I'm concerned, life is a perpetual struggle against entropy. Our purpose in life is to overcome entropy and to ensure that our descendents will carry the process of life onwards into the future, even after we have succumbed.

If you are of a poetic bent, you can see this as a noble struggle against the inevitable -- a struggle that we can win in the short term. Every minute that we are alive is a minute during which we defy the vast, uncaring universe. Every minute that we are alive is another minute where the universe has meaning and purpose; for there is no meaning or purpose in the universe save that which we, as living human beings, bring to it.

Amos

Very nice Kim but you let me add these suggestions. Most of us animals are more concerned with getting our rocks off in the right place than geting out DNA spread around. In fact, it is about the time that we are smart enough to care about the well being of our offspring that it is too late to procreate.

The first living thing that had the ability to procreate survived and the rest did not.

Our real purpose in life is not to struggle against entropy but to find harmony with it and in our effort to find this harmony we struggle and procreate. The struggle you refer to is the chaos we see around us and out of this chaos new life is created. The chaos is needed to create the opposites that are needed for procreation.

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

This is, of course, the same thing. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, sex is just DNA's way of getting itself replicated.

I'm not buying that. Only yesterday, my sister told me she's starting to save for her kids to go to university. Her kids are three years old, and one years old. Do you know many mothers of young children? In my experience, they tend to be very protective. They are just as strongly biologically driven to care about the well being of their children as men are biologically driven to "get their rocks off".

Sorry, I'm not particularly inclined to be very Buddhist about it either. The only way of being in harmony with entropy is to be rendered down into your component atoms -- in other words, dead. Life exists because we are able to exploit a loophole in the law of increasing entropy. We continue to live -- thus decreasing our local entropy -- because we are in an open system with a continuous input of energy from the sun. Simply to stay alive we must consume energy in such a way that there is a net increase in entropy in the universe, no matter how much we may reduce entropy on the local level. To put it plainly, we always consume more energy than we make.

That doesn't sound very harmonious to me. It sounds more like a struggle to get enough energy to continue to survive. And presumably, in the long term, we must inevitably lose this struggle as the energy of the universe is depleted. Still, the heat death of the universe is an event on a time scale far too large for us human beings to imagine. We have a canvas more than broad enough to explore this process of living, and invest it with whatever meaning we choose.

I'm not sure I understand your meaning here. In what sense does chaos create opposites? In what sense are opposites needed for procreation?

In the technical sense, chaos refers to the propensity for some complex systems to amplify very small variations in the initial state of the system, in such a way as to make the system unpredictable. The classic example of chaos is the incorrect compass reading, which might only be a very small error near the point of origin, but which increases the further you travel along the incorrect path, so that in the end, you might find yourself miles away from your intended destination.

Amos

Very close, yes, but with no genes in our brain I don't see how our DNA is in charge of our will to procreate.

For sure, motherhood is very protective but increasingly more mothers don't see it that way and some will leave their children to seek greater happiness elsewhere. In the old tradition the cost of raising children was never part of the equasion and today it is only part of the greater "family planning" scheme.

I don't think Buddha can reverse this flow of energy but there exist an idea in the literary/religious tradition that chaos exists only during our involutionary period and not in the evolutionary period. During this period we are aware that father sun has relations with mother earth and we want to be part of that exchange and become active participants and not just consumers that want to stay alive. After this, in the evolutionary period, we no longer actively participate and are just happy to stay alive for two reason, first, we are older now, and second, we have found this tranquilizing harmony with nature and lost our ambition to create, co-create and procreate. We just relax and live off of the richess we gathered during the evolutionary period. All of creation is the product of a union between a positive and a negative and I don't think anything can be formed outside of that process. For example, the process called cloning will depend on the success between our positive action and the response made by the subject to be cloned.

The opposites are created in our confrontation with the chaos that we see around us. In Gen.1:1 we read that there first was "chaos" and the idea expressed with "God said" is the initial point of departure here called "creation" with a purpose in mind (not your "error") that must gain assent to increase and later become "formed" to find existence in Gen.2. My perspective here points at an intelligent design wherein we are the creator of the essence (the idea) that must gain assent to increase and later become formed in the experiment.

If what I see is true, you must give these ancient sheep herders some credit for their insight.

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

Well Amos, I'm a little disappointed that your thoughts on this topic have terminated in a Bible quote. For one thing, it means that the notion of chaos you refer to is a trivial, mystical one, rather than anything specific and interesting.

I take it that you consider the Bible the last word on the subject. But if you have any further ideas of your own that go past simplistic biblical notions, then I'd be happy to hear them.