[kim_johnson]

talk about an age old question...

one criticism of analytic philosophy is that we begin with things that we want to understand / explain such as... the meaning of life. and then... we end up writing an essay on a footnote by Gareth Evans on the meaning of meaning...

that being said W. said: the aim of philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle. and: sometimes the answer to the problem lies in the dissolution of the problem. and: the solution to be problem of what lies outside space and time itself lies outside space and time. and: he who understands immortality lives in the present. the present moment is eternal. and: our lives are endless the way our visual field is without limit.

linguistic analysis leads me to analyze (or perhaps reanalyze) the problem as follows:

what is meaningful in my life or what is it that i feel makes my life worthwhile? - friendship and helping people and having fun and thinking about things.

those are the things that make my life meaningful and worthwhile.
those are the things that are meaningful to me in my life.
those things are the meaning of my life.

not sure that any of that follows as a matter of analytic truth (or even as a matter of inductive force). but... i guess that is what i think... the meaning of my life is the process of discovery of things that i find meaningful. and having a meaningful life (to me) is doing those things that i find meaningful...

[pachyderm]

THE meaning of life is to produce more life. One can generalize and say that it is to advance life, in general.

So there.

[kim_johnson]

according to evolution by natural selection evolutionary functions (and dysfunctions) are fixed by whatever it is that increases ones relative fitness (gives one the disposition to survive longer than and reproduce more offspring than other members of ones population). but clearly... that has poor application to sociology and ethics (which is why sociobiology really is so fraught quite aside from the 'just so' explanations that come too cheap and really are unfalsifyable much of the time).

> One can generalize and say that it is to advance life, in general.

But yeah... I quite like that...

Meaning and thought are properties of intelligent / intentional agents. Things aside from this (marks on the page etc) only have meaning insofar as they derive that from intelligent / intentional agents. So I guess I think... That there aren't mind-independent facts about what it is that our lives are supposed to mean independently of what it is that we find meaningful about our lives. I suppose one might appeal to meaning that depends on an intelligent designer... There are epistemic problems, however, with how it is that we are supposed to access that... So... We seem to be left with whatever it is that we find meaningful.

Dennett has this thing about how human beings are the nervous system of the planet. Able to spot danger from afar (e.g., meteors) and do something about it. We can use our cognitive capacity for good or for harm... What things do we find good and meaningful and worthwhile? Peoples answer to that varies but there do seem to be points of commonality.

'Mans search for meaning'
Brilliant book. Written by an analyst who is considering why some of the holocaust victims used to throw themselves on electric fences compared to why some of the holocaust victims used to... get through and keep going. people who they cared about / felt connected to. that seemed to be the difference. terrific reading for people interested in such things... the variety of things that people say make their lives feel meaningful...

[pachyderm]

Gaia.

The earth is (becoming) a self-regulating system, of which we are a part.

Are we PMing out in the open?