The Meaning of Life.

[mythbusterfan]

In the Wizards Dillemma kit askes Chao what teh meaning of life is and Chao asks kit what the meaning of his life is.

what do you believe is the meaning of life?


for my part, i believe the meaning of life is to help people to get through life helping as many people as i can. and to die for a good cause. but that doesn't mean that life can't be fun or full of joys. i enjoy alot of my life. most of it. and i learn to life witht the bad things in life.

in short i think the meaning of Life is...

To Live.

[saash3120]

Hmmm... MBF, that's a really hard question. I wonder about the meaning of life a lot, and I haven't really figured anything out. I mean, I tend to think that life just showed up somehow and started living, and while nothing was necessarily meant to happen by that, we have to help life be the best it can be since we're alive. Does that make sense? I'm not sure if I'm being clear. Basically, I agree with you: you have to live the best life you can, and help others do the same. And as for the problems, you can almost always learn either to live with them or fix them. Which is pretty much what wizardry is about, isn't it?

[~Z]

Originally posted by saash3120:
Hmmm... MBF, that's a really hard question. I wonder about the meaning of life a lot, and I haven't really figured anything out. I mean, I tend to think that life just showed up somehow and started living, and while nothing was necessarily meant to happen by that, we have to help life be the best it can be since we're alive. Does that make sense? I'm not sure if I'm being clear. Basically, I agree with you: you have to live the best life you can, and help others do the same. And as for the problems, you can almost always learn either to live with them or fix them. Which is pretty much what wizardry is about, isn't it?

I don't get why wizards bother to ask Chao about the meaning of life. if the pig hasn't slipped since it was first asked, why should it now? Ihaven't the slightest idea.

[Peter Murray]

Maybe Chao hasn't been asked for the first time yet, and that's the point? His experience of timeflow doesn't work like that of humans, it's more like that of the Powers.

I'm not sure that life has any meaning other than the meaning you give it. But MBF's one sounds like a good one.

[Sean L.]

[~Z]

Originally posted by Peter Murray:
Maybe Chao hasn't been asked for the first time yet, and that's the point? His experience of timeflow doesn't work like that of humans, it's more like that of the Powers.

I'm not sure that life has any meaning other than the meaning you give it. But MBF's one sounds like a good one.

How does that work out? If Chao has been asked, hasn't it been asked at least once, it first time?Why does it's timeflow matter? Their timeflow might be different, but they still have 1sts, 2nds, 3rds, et cetera, don't they?
I do agree that life only has whatever meaning you give it, though.

[zilvox]

Are we talking about in terms of the book, or in real life?

Meaning is an implication that there is more to what an object or process is, than the actuality of its existence. Language has only been invented by conscious beings so far, and language is the only example of meaning beyond reality I have ever found. Even warning colors are only a warning for animals that have a reason to react to it. If animals that see and react to red survive better, an instinctual reaction to that color might be born within a species. However, this form of "meaning" is still only possible for conscious life.

Case in point: red has no meaning to a rock, or dust, or a star, or a tree even.

I always thought "what is the meaning of life" a silly question to ask, because it implies that the entire universe is a "language." It's not, language is a way of translating, compacting, and communicating different perceptions of reality or opinions on how to deal with said reality. Life is required to create language. This being the case, that means other life would have to exist to perceive life as a language, which brings up the question: what is the meaning of life for this other form of life than?

There was this short story I heard once where this king liked making maps. He wanted a perfect map of his kingdom so he kept making larger versions of his domain. Eventually he made an exact copy of his land, as a map, down to every little detail. That map was no longer a map though, because for it to be perfect the people had to move etc, etc. Instead of a map, he then had a second land exactly like the first. Thus in trying to create a perfect map he had taken it a level deeper and it stopped being a map. The meaning of life is the same idea, in a different form.

The one reasoning for life having meaning I ever found was the idea of god. If there is god, s/he can give us meaning, and so there is a meaning of life. However the same problem I brought up before comes out which is : what, than, is the meaning of god?

In the book I suppose there could be a "meaning of life" though, because there is a language in it that defies the logic I used above. The speech even works without any "life." Also there is a god-esq creature, which also uses the speech.

______yes this is a long post, breaking it for easier reading________

What is the purpose of life is a better question. It is what most people mean when they ask "what is the meaning of life", and in some rare cases the words can be exchanged. However in the cases where you can't exchange the words I think the purpose is to live our lives. God/the one/whatever could give us other purposes (like slowing the lone one) but that isn't even necessary, any self set goal is you giving yourself a purpose. Even a small goal counts, for however long it lasts. Most people continuously give themselves goals to reach, so that they have a purpose in life.

In the end I think people just make deep questions deeper by misusing the language that they state the question in.

Edit: sorry my vocabulary is lacking, I know what I want to say but I don't know how to write it the way I want to...

[elzefa]

zilvox, I don't think you're vocabulary was lacking or if it was you got your point across perfectly well.
I liked your story about the king, reminds me of the time my friend retold the Mayor of Casterbridge with it set in medieval Japan and a anime flare to it.

Back on topic.
To live life to your full capacity.
"Live life like you're gunna die, cause you're gunna." William Shatner

[anotherBob]

Actually, Chao gives a pseudo answer to this unasked question in W@W.

The meaning of life is to preserve life. Try to leave the universe in a slightly better condition than when you came into it.

Also, as Chao asks Kit the meaning of his life in response to Kit's question in WD, he is answering it in a great way. There is always a more personal meaning of life, and that is the individual's meaning of his or her life.

Bob

[SpacePen]

meaning vs. purpose

zilvox, that's an interesting dividing line - to separate "meaning" from "purpose". And it seems to me a difficult line to see, draw, or keep straight sometimes! To borrow a phrase from "Till We Have Faces" and take it completely out of context - meaning and purpose "flow in and out of one another" like the eddies of water in a brook...

But I have a story and a "what if" thought to go with it. Some time ago, when I visited Stonehenge for the first (and only) time, I was directed (by the tourist's recorded audio guide) to turn around and look away from the great ring of stones to descry a small hill.... The audio guide informed me that this was a barrow. I had a mild shock; because I had up until then never expected to see a barrow "in real life". My only previous experience with the word was in fantasy novels (like "The Lord of the Rings"). Of course if you had asked me, I could have told you what a barrow was, and if you had pressed me, I probably would have said that yes, they existed "in real life". But they don't exist where I live! I had unconsciously placed them in the same category as fantastic creatures - elves, dwarves, brownies, pixies, dragons, gnomes, talking animals, mermaids, the transcendent pig, etc. - the category specifically marked "not to be seen in real life". The category of stuff that authors invent as fantasy, not the category of stuff that is shared by both our primary universe and the author's secondary universe.

Moving "barrow" from the category with dragons in it to the category of food, houses, rain, grass, and all other things I had met "in real life" made me think of all the things which, for the author, are in the second category which may not yet be in that category for me.

Suppose you take the idea of God seriously - God would be analogous to an Author. If authors place things in their secondary realities that reflect things in their primary realities, what if God places things in our primary reality that reflect things in God's "meta-reality" (I would have called God's reality the primary one except I already labelled our universe as "primary")?

To one who is "in" a story, all things are part of that reality. But to us who read the author's story, things and events can have symbolic meaning. What if there are beings who, existing in God's "meta-reality", find in our primary universe events and things and characters which have all manner of symbolic meaning (for them)?

And if you take the claims of some (or most?) religions seriously, death is our door into that "meta-reality" of God's; in which case the meaning of life will be revealed to us in the end (or, rather, in what we call "the end"... which may not actually be an end at all, but another beginning).

We may yet find, on the other side of death, that many things we took to be only part of our primary reality are in fact shared, symbols, in a sense "more real than we thought". Even as the barrow at Stonehenge suddenly made barrows "more real" to me than I had previously thought.

In fact, who knows? The secondary realities we create may even point back to God's meta-reality in a way we never thought possible. Dragons and elves and all that may in the end be symbols and even shared ideas that turn out to be more real in that meta-reality than we ever thought them to be here.

Ach... you can tell it's 2am when I start waxing long on such topics!

[FocusPunch]

It changes on me every so often, but my longest standing definition is that

The meaning of life is to find MEANING in LIFE.

So finding understanding, through love, experience, loss, anger, saddness, happiness, everything really.