Steve3007 wrote:Atreyu:
The "meaning" or "purpose" in the most broad sense of the term is "to evolve". Life exists to go beyond its current boundaries. To grow and expand beyond its current limitations.
And if life is not doing that then indeed there is no meaning or purpose. It might as well not exist at all, if it is not going to "evolve"....
If you believe that to be the purpose of
your life then there's nothing wrong with that. I also regard growth (in many senses, including emotional and intellectual) as
part of the self-declared purpose of my own life.
But these are our own self-declared life-goals, are they not? If there is another person in the world who is happy simply to enjoy the simple pleasures of life and not to have any sense that they have "grown", but just to take each day's pleasures as they come, do we have the right to declare, as if it is an objective fact, that they
might as well not have lived at all?
I'm sure they'd disagree. And I think they'd be right to do so.
No. Life exists to
progress, whether we agree or not. I was speaking in very
general terms, as in life in general. The purpose of life
in general is to evolve. As in taking "Life" as a sort of Whole.
If an individual organism cannot evolve itself, then it exists for the purpose of helping other entities evolve. It is
food for them, or it aids them in their own evolution just by
virtue of their existence, whether they wish to or not. So
you might not be able to evolve, nor want to, but you can certainly be
"food" for some other organism which
can evolve, i.e. another organism can use your existence/life for its own progress. A bird cannot progress to know calculus, but if you eat a bird you can
use its energy in order to think about and understand calculus.
So you might say that the "highest" purpose of an individual organism is to evolve (for itself). A "lower" purpose would be to at least
exist so that other organisms can evolve. The "general" purpose of life is to just evolve
in general.
Belindi wrote:It's a necessary attribute of a living thing that it goes beyond its "current boundaries". Change is intrinsic to living things. Indeed no thing, alive or not, would exist unless it was involved in change.
Change happens willy nilly. Every living thing's purpose is not to change.
Change is not progress. Change is not necessarily going beyond its boundaries. Change can be death, degeneration, decay. No, merely "change" is not the meaning of life. That would be like saying "to reproduce itself" or to "maintain itself" is the meaning of life. Again, we have a vicious circle from which their is no escape.
No, the meaning is not merely "change", it's
progressive change, i.e. "evolution". The purpose is not to degenerate, decay, or die. And the only reason things like degeneration, decay, and death exist (what is the meaning of death?) is because they are a
part of another entity's evolution....