what is the meaning of life?

Answer 1

80% of humanity, the religious folks, don't need to ask the meaning of life, the church tells them....the supernatural explanation. But the rest of us can't swallow religious dogma, because there's no evidence. Nobody can prove that there life after death, that people are tortured or rewarded after life or that there's invisible spirits running around.

I've come to two conclusions recently:

1. Life has no meaning
2. Life has a million meanings.

First, there's a certainty that death and annihilation awaits not only you, but the Earth in general. It's an astonomical certainty that our sun will supernova and leave the earth a burnt crisp, not to mention all the other extinction level events around the corner.

Second, the million things that give us meaning are the pleasurable experiences we can conjure up during the short period we are here on the earth, in the form of the relationships we have with our kids and other people, and the 'housekeeping' types of purposes. What i mean by that are the curing disease, ending hunger, improving literacy, reducing crime, preventing war, helping other kinds of things.

So the bottom line is, we only have a temporary meaning to life, to reduce pain and increase pleasure, other than that everything is lost to oblivion.

Answer 2

One of the first things I always think about with this question is the acceptance of creation. It would seem to me if you believed in the evolution of man there would be no meaning to life, it would only be an accident of nature. But since we were created there must be a purpose to our creation.
I also believe there is, deep within us, an answer to any question we can ask.
For myself the meaning of life is;
Trying to leave my small part of this world a little better for my having been here.
I write to fulfill an inner drive,
I help those I can in an attempt to give back,
I cherish each moment that I have on this earth,
I relish those days that are bad as they make me appreciate the good days even more.
I hope that somewhere in there you can find an answer.

Answer 3

1. the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.
2. the sum of the distinguishing phenomena of organisms, esp. metabolism, growth, reproduction, and adaptation to environment.
3. the animate existence or period of animate existence of an individual: to risk one's life; a short life and a merry one.
4. a corresponding state, existence, or principle of existence conceived of as belonging to the soul: eternal life.
5. the general or universal condition of human existence: Too bad, but life is like that.
6. any specified period of animate existence: a man in middle life.
7. the period of existence, activity, or effectiveness of something inanimate, as a machine, lease, or play: The life of the car may be ten years.
8. a living being: Several lives were lost.
9. living things collectively: the hope of discovering life on other planets; insect life.

Answer 4

I believe we are all on this earth for a purpose; once we know what it is is half the battle; To leave this earth knowing that you done something worthwhile, have something to believe in, that to me is the meaning of life. I hope that helps you.

Answer 5

In general, life will multiply and spread to as wide an area as possible. It will also try to colonise regions that are initially uninhabitable.
So i believe humans live to ensure that his species survive. There are a few ways to do that. One of them is to aid in the advancement of human knowledge(science, technology etc). This is to ensure that the human race progress and improve in it's survival capabilities.
As for individuals like us, we live to contribute to mankind. That is why we work - as scientists or even businessman(to contribute to the economic growth of human nations)

Answer 6

The next person who asks this question (since it's been asked a million times!) will be visited with a plague of locusts!

Answer 7

Before we can tackle meaning, weve got to know what meaning is. Meaning is an intention, aim, or design. When we say we want to know what life means, we are really saying we want to know what its for. What purpose does it serve? Well, the primary feature of life is intelligence. By intelligence we mean purposeful activity. We make decisions and do things. Parameciums make decisions and do things. Rocks do not make decisions, although they can chip a tooth. If we knew why we have intelligence, we would be a great deal closer to understanding why we do anything, including exist. To understand intelligence, we must understand the mind.

Science has given us many answers, but the one thing that science is still completely silent about is the nature of consciousness. Of course, there is more and more information every day about the connection between consciousness and the brain. Scientists, both mad and sane, are undertaking detailed research on how our minds and behavior are affected when parts of our brain are stimulated, removed, and even added. These things affect our memories, feelings, and our thought processes. However, such research still doesnt answer the question of what consciousness is.

If you built a robot that had no real understanding but did have a vast store of stock responses and some clever rules about building sentences, it might fool many people into thinking it had intelligence. Because you programmed it, however, you would know that there were no "mental images" floating around inside the circuits of that machine. It simply took input, processed it according to specific rules, and generated output. The question is, why do we have these mental images and feelings? Why arent we biological "machines" that simply processes signals and automatically generate responses with no awareness of what going on? Why do we have consciousness, and where did it come from?

Consciousness is something completely different from other characteristics of matter such as mass, charge, structure, etc. While our consciousness seems to depend on the matter in our brains, we cannot detect anything unusual about our brains that would indicate why consciousness is attached to it. If we agree that consciousness is in the brain as a whole, is it in a single neuron? A single atom? A single electron? Assuming that nothing exists except for interacting particles, somehow within every particle there is something that provides the basis for consciousness.

Complex conscious activity may require highly complex structures such as our brains to occur, but the basis of consciousness must be present in matter itself. Our minds are simply one manifestation of a universal phenomena. People are examples of one way to organize the consciousness in matter. Are there other ways? How can we know which types of organizations of matter yield high-level consciousness like ours, and which do not? Are there structures which support levels of consciousness higher than ours? Are doorknobs conscious?

Not only is consciousness a universal property of matter, it is the primary property of matter. In fact, its the other way around, matter is a property of consciousness!

Yes, consciousness is primary. Matter sprang from consciousness. We cant help it if this is starting to sound like Genesis, its just the way it is. In the beginning was the word, and the word was pinging around the inside some sort of Mind, and it generated the physical universe.

So, to summarize, the meaning of life is linked to the workings of the mind from which the universe sprang.

Before the beginning of time, there was a single consciousness. In fact, there may have been a bunch of other stuff, but that's way outside our scope here. That consciousness thought and dreamed an infinity of thoughts, feelings, landscapes, and worlds, an infinity of possible creations. These mental creations thought their own thoughts, and these secondary thoughts also created their own inner worlds. The original consciousness observed and interacted with these inner beings as they interacted with one another, and that original consciousness began to provide the environments required for its creations to grow and develop. All of the entities within the mind of the first longed to exist independently and grow and create as they had been created.

The first consciousness, in order to allow its progeny full freedom of expression, began to imagine the conditions that would be required for the release of these inner worlds into objective existence. As it did so, all of space, time, and matter, including our universe, exploded into being. On the highest level, this physical existence contains an infinite number of dimensions and environments that match the infinite variety of possibilities that had formed in the mind of the original consciousness.

This process continues as the progeny of that first mind grow and create new thoughts and new worlds. We are a result of that process, and our purpose is ultimately the same: to grow, to develop, and to create, in order to express all of the potentialities within ourselves. We are still in contact with the original mind because we are made of it, we sprang from it, and because time has no meaning outside of the physical universe, our past, present, and future exist together as an infinite variety of possibilities within that larger moment.

Answer 8

Getting points on Yahoo?

Answer 9

Survival is the meaning of life.

We have one purpose, and that is to pass genes to our offspring. Think of us as just 'things' that DNA are using to spread themselves.

Answer 10

to actually live, love and have fun! because if your not doing that then your not living. life is about having fun and living it to its fullest. now stop wondering about life and live it. asking about life isnt going to help you live it any better :)