Complex Numbers

The Answer to the Ultimate Question

Meaning? Purpose? A Jedi craves not these things.

https://theconversation.com/lifes-purpose-rests-in-our-minds-spectacular-drive-t...

Life’s purpose rests in our mind’s spectacular drive to extract meaning from the world

What is the purpose of life?

Life needs no purpose. What's the purpose of a rock? Its destiny is to be ground down into dust, but that doesn't make it the rock's purpose. We can give it another purpose - a paperweight, say, or a weapon - but that doesn't mean it was destined for that.

Whatever you may think is the answer, you might, from time to time at least, find your own definition unsatisfactory.

Every definition is unsatisfactory.

Humanity’s purpose rests in the spectacular drive of our minds to extract meaning from the world around us.

That's not a purpose, either. That's a result. You're basically talking about what we talked about in here a while back: apophenia, the seeing of purpose or meaning when there isn't one.

For many scientists, this drive to find sense guides every step they take, it defines everything that they do or say.

Which is not to say that curiosity isn't a good thing.

Take words, for instance, those mesmerising language units that package meaning with phenomenal density. When you show a word to someone who can read it, they not only retrieve the meaning of it, but all the meanings that this person has ever seen associated with it. They also rely on the meaning of words that resemble that word, and even the meaning of nonsensical words that sound or look like it.

I've actually been thinking along these lines for a while now. It came from beginning to study another language. Not only must one know what a word means, there's all kinds of metadata associated with it: what it applies to, how other people have used it in sentences, perhaps where you first encountered it, and (in the case of pronouns and words in certain other languages) its gender... just to name a few. And for people like me, the "meaning of words that resemble that word" is how I make puns. Like the one I've been suppressing since I started writing this, about having to go swimming to find one's porpoise in life.

There, I feel better now that I've gotten that out of my brain.

And yes, you do it too, even if you don't realize it. For example, I'm willing to bet that if you've encountered The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, you're poised to include the number 42 in a comment below, especially if you read this entry's title.

Recently, we have been able to show that even an abstract picture – one that cannot easily be taken as a depiction of a particular concept – connects to words in the mind in a way that can be predicted. It does not seem to matter how seemingly void of meaning an image, a sound, or a smell may be, the human brain will project meaning onto it.

Just like we project meaning onto life, even when it's not there.

In other words, the goal of our existence ultimately seems to be achieving a full understanding of this same existence, a kind of kaleidoscopic infinity loop in which our mind is trapped, from the emergence of proto-consciousness in the womb, all the way to our deathbed.

As was eloquently pointed out in Babylon 5, "we are what the universe has created so that it can figure itself out."

I don't believe that either, but as guiding principles go, it is rather appealing.

The proposal is compatible with theoretical standpoints in quantum physics and astrophysics...

I'm glad they didn't lead with that, because it would have made me stop reading the entire article. Hijacking quantum physics to support your pet philosophy is cheating, like ending a story with "...but it turned out it was all a dream."

Perhaps it does not matter if you find this proposal satisfying, because getting the answer to what the purpose of life is would equate to making your life purposeless. And who would want that?

*raises hand*

I'm comfortable with the lack of meaning or purpose. At least, I am today. I wasn't always. And as usual, ask me again tomorrow and I'll probably say the purpose of life is to enjoy beer. Right now, I have too much of a headache from doing that earlier. And sometimes I think that the sole purpose of life is to increase overall entropy (which all life does), thus hastening the eventual heat death of the universe.

But look, I'm not dismissing the article entirely. If I did that, I wouldn't have linked it. I find it interesting, but that doesn't mean I agree with it. It's perfectly reasonable for an individual to create their own meaning, or purpose, and live for it. I only object to the idea that there's one answer for everyone.

Even if that answer is 42.