What do you truely believe the meaning of life is? In my opinion the meaning of life is to enjoy it, simply to be.

When life is good, one might as well enjoy life but i think that we are living in the illusion that such comforts are simply granted to every living organism. Simply being is frankly the ultimate purpose of life, however, our lives are filled with infinite complication on how exactly do we do just that. Philosophy aims to promote the enjoyment of life; in simple terms - human wellbeing and prosperity. How can we make life better?

Religion addresses this by defining what is the wellbeing of one person vs. the wellbeing of all people, and it demonstrates the struggle between the wellbeing of one and the wellbeing of many because what may benefit one person may be bad for a great many. Selfishness leads to the prosperity of one individual and the sacrifices one makes for the wellbeing of many allows humans to continue living.

It is a huge question, "what is the meaning of life?" You are very right - in the grand scheme we are all just trying to get by, avoid suffering and unnecessary death, but they are inescapable as long as we choose ignorance over enlightenment to the struggles and suffering in our world. What would you choose?

This is actually quite simple.

The meaning of Life, is Love.

Sounds horribly cheesy and cliche, but I've found it to be rather true. Air conditioning isn't working and it's 85 in here (95 outside), so I don't feel like typing up all my reasons for this. But I've been thinking about it for a long time now, and I'm quite convinced.

Can you love someone if both of you are dead?

Well, life doesn't necessarily have meaning. At least in an objective sense. You can create meaning though, mainly by affirming life and being authentic - that is, through living by your own standards and ethics.

Anything imposed on you from without IE - Divine Command Theory, Plato's world of forms, Kant's Categorical Imperative or even Harris' "science" of morality - denies you the ability to make your own choices and therefore live meaningfully. What does not come from my life, obstructed it.

The act of creation is very important. What system you come up with is subjective to a certain extent, but I would say that it should be consistent within itself and necessarily guided by reason. The meaning of life is to live how you want to live. You find meaning when you assert yourself and affirm life. When you seek power over your life and yourself.

"Well, life doesn't necessarily have meaning. At least in an objective sense. You can create meaning though, mainly by affirming life and being authentic - that is, through living by your own standards and ethics. "

-Alastor_the_Undead_Philosopher

What happens to a society (society defines by whatever means) if our standards and ethics are different from other people's standards and ethics? What if we all have different standards?

"Anything imposed on you from without IE - Divine Command Theory, Plato's world of forms, Kant's Categorical Imperative or even Harris' "science" of morality - denies you the ability to make your own choices and therefore live meaningfully. What does not come from my life, obstructed it.

The act of creation is very important. What system you come up with is subjective to a certain extent, but I would say that it should be consistent within itself and necessarily guided by reason. The meaning of life is to live how you want to live. You find meaning when you assert yourself and affirm life. When you seek power over your life and yourself."

-Alastor_the_Undead_Philosopher

I do not think that at this current stage of human history people are born into such a mature and enlightened state of being - to "assert yourself and affirm life." How can we expect progress in such direction to triumph over chaos unless we bring ourselves to understand a necessity which every human being holds in common and to prioritize that necessity before our own personal goals?

I believe we must go against what is momentarily beneficial to us as individuals and build upon a means through which we can all benefit, if we ever hope to live in a world free of its current horrors.

"What happens to a society (society defines by whatever means) if our standards and ethics are different from other people's standards and ethics? What if we all have different standards?"

Well, this is a political question. Or rather, since natural rights don't exist we have to come up with them through social contracts. Murder or rape might not be wrong in a universal sense, but we can still decide that it is wrong in a social sense. In fact, I would go so far as to say that all forms of coercion should be deemed "socially impermissible."

This doesn't mean that I think that the individual should subordinate themselves to society or "the will of the people." It would be more like a union of egoists, living together for the pleasure and happiness they find in the company of others. Simply put, if you want to have the benefits of society, you have to agree to not impede on other people's freedom in the process.

If for some reason my ethical code has lead me to think that murder or bigotry is an acceptable behavior then the rest of society will soon drive me away. Besides, I think it's fairly self-evident that the company of others increases my enjoyment of life, thereby giving it meaning.

I understand. It seems that in the objective sense you are quite right. This so called "Law of the Jungle" suits the indifference of the universe; however, i also think that our survival and our domination as a species on this planet is the direct result of our sociability. If we somehow came to loose it we may or may not be quite as successful or perhaps even extinct. In the universal sense it, of course, wouldn't matter that humans are extinct, but what is the point of philosophy if one day it would all be forgotten?

I do agree very much with what you are saying, but my point was that, in the same objective sense, our purpose in life is simply to survive; and sociability, it seems, is one of our better tools for doing that. :3

Life must be its own purpose. Beyond that, as far as I know, life might as well be meaningless. This makes survival the goal... not only of the individual but of life in general. I'll surely be driven to insanity if I think about it any deeper, so I'm going to stop here.

Do you think it might be interesting to have a philosopher if the month? Or maybe to take tome to discuss differnt philosophical points of view from different philosophers? Like Descartes?

Yes, certainly. It would be amazing to have users come and present their understanding of certain styles of philosophy and the famous figures who hold similar views.

If you want, you can present Descartes in the next journal :3 just Note this account with what you'd like to include and how you want it to be presented. I think it would be better to do "Philosopher of the Week" rather than Month, so we can move a little quicker with discussions.

I appreciate your input very much. :3

Well, who controls yours?

Controls or influences?

In my opinion, most people are influenced by the following:

-social norms
-politics
-the news
-education
-upbringing
-environment
-genetics
-countless other things

Philosophy is in some respects highlighted when a person chooses to evaluate what influences their mentality and makes a decision on whether those influences are reliable or not - how well does the information fit into the bigger picture which makes up your world view?

I think its a great topic to discuss. :3

I personally believe that whether or not we let something 'affect' us, it will affect us in some way. Especially emotionally and psychologically.

If someone calls you fat, and you shrug it off and don't care what they think, you're still letting it affect you. You're letting it affect you in a positive way, helping you become more firm in your own self view, but it's still affecting you.

In effect, EVERYTHING influences us. Absolutely EVERYTHING that we observe.

As soon as we come to realize what affects us we can choose to accept or ignore that influence. The hard part is knowing we are influenced and figuring out what is affecting our subconscious minds. When we come to a realization, we move on to look deeper and deeper into ourselves and into our lives only to find more questions.

I think a better example would be this: When someone calls you fat, you might shrug it off, but you may be wondering later why you're in a bad mood, why perhaps when you look in the mirror you seem to look somewhat off putting; it may even seem that you are gaining weight. When you suddenly become concerned for your weight, influenced by such a crude comment, you may want to rethink how this comment affects you. You've probably started paying attention to your waistline a lot more after hearing about it in such a negative way, you begin to see details in your body you would normally ignore.

You don't look any different than you did yesterday, but you feel worse about yourself because the rude comment made you think about yourself negatively. When you come to the realization that the person who called you fat was an idiot, you choose to ignore this influence for its lack of credibility. If you're questioning this person's credibility you may want to check a reliable source for your weight concern such as the US Dep. of Health & Human Services.

Everything influences us, and not only what we observe. :3

Well, everything influences us, but the things that we do not observe, do not influence our minds directly. If we live in an isolated tribe, and a bomb from a nearby war goes stray and hits one of our huts, we are influenced -- we fear -- that bomb. We may wonder why it fell on our village, and we may have many thoughts and ideas as to what happened. But because we do not observe the war, and we have no knowledge of it, the idea that there are people fighting out there and people dying for possibly stupid reasons, doesn't affect us. We don't know about it.

Once you ignore the person calling you fat, it is still affecting your subconscious, even if it is not in a negative way. In effect, you CANNOT choose what affects you and what does not. You can only choose HOW it is going to affect you. You may become depressed because you realize (or think that) you're overweight, or you might raise an eyebrow and ask, "Oh, really? Am I?" and go weigh yourself, and look up a table of optimal weight to height ratios for your gender/age. If you end up being fat, you can think of it as a friendly gesture from that person, and you may decide to do something positive about it and do some exercise... That is, take a positive role, and help yourself lose weight. You may even, at least in your mind, thank that person for being informative.

If you end up not being fat, that can affect you in two ways. You can look down on the idiot, and call him as loser, etc., or you can feel sorry for him, and wonder what could have happened to him to make him like that. In the end, it is all about perception. We can change our perception at will, but whether we do or not depends on other perceptions. The entire human brain is a complex system of links to links to links of more links... Everything is connected, in ways we do and we don't realize.

What we saw on a television when we were 5 years old, can affect what type of soda we get from a vending machine.

We can now, hopefully, understand more and more about what influences us, so that we can make better informed decisions. True, we cannot know everything, but if we aim to know all, we will know quite a lot. :3

I agree on what others said previously. We are constantly influenced by our enviroment and realizing this gives us some sort of free will. What I think about the sense of life: We all have a limit when it comes to our mind. Thats why one single human will never understand everything, since he doesn't understand the full aspect of what happens around him due to a limited mimd. To reach a certain amount of knowledge, humans look for company that might help him. We don't realize our limitation directly, but rather through our subconscious mind. This may be proven, that most humans have the dedire for social contact. By being selfish, you limit your own horizon, because you have no one who could could see things different and point out mistakes. Differences make one think. Humans should try to work as a unity to discover new things and learn how to live peacefully together. What happens nowadays is that most people have rather superficial topics on which they concentrate their mind.

This is a very insightful point of view.

There is a great need of a properly functioning society to retain knowledge of past experiences even after many generations, and a properly functioning society is that which does not trample over peoples differences but collectively learns from the mistakes of its members.

It is through our mistakes that we've come to make progress in answering the deepest questions which concern our existence. At every point of human history we might have been sure that our ideas were correct, yet after they fail we must not refuse to correct them, whether out of fear or selfishness. Communication is the best tool we have, but communication dwindles when people are unhappy with their lives.

Thanks casualuser! :3

I actually mean that others give their point of view of someone else thoughts, so that you look with as many perspectives on a thought as possible. This action would require different thinking of others to some extent. We nowadays understand unity as a society where everyone thinks the same. That doesn't have to be the case, because like I previously said, differences in thinking/ mistakes of the past make us think.
We could imagine a unity where all humans discuss about their thoughts or ideas for the society and lateron agree on a compromis. The only problem here is, that there are always peole who never agree on compromises, either because they think its not the right thing or because they are not capable of using their brain. I think my concept would only work in small groups, if you weight the average human mind as a factor.