If you despair about something and subsequently need to seek answers, you may class that as a purpose.But that does still not mean that life and existence innately has a purpose or meaning.
People seem to be of the opinion that whatever perception of life they see or experience is a 'valid truth' of what life really is. If I go through life and get scared and excited, is that what life really is? Is it the combined experiences and perceptions of all intelligent beings? It's pretty much everything, the sheer multitude of possibilities of interaction and experience, the infinite of potential. If something is everything, how can it have any meaning? Anything is possible and nothing is or isn't preferred.
I don't really care about what people think, until as I said they start arguing, calling themselves right or waging conflict over it. Then it just gets to being fucking pathetic.
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Mon 5 May 2008, 2:08,
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People seem to be of the opinion that whatever perception of life they see or experience is a 'valid truth' of what life really is. If I go through life and get scared and excited, is that what life really is? Is it the combined experiences and perceptions of all intelligent beings? It's pretty much everything, the sheer multitude of possibilities of interaction and experience, the infinite of potential. If something is everything, how can it have any meaning? Anything is possible and nothing is or isn't preferred.
I don't really care about what people think, until as I said they start arguing, calling themselves right or waging conflict over it. Then it just gets to being fucking pathetic.
Yes, sense of purpose* is arbitrary,but I don't think this should stop us feeling one, or affect our behaviour, for the reasons given above. It does mean that we can't make an appeal to life's supposed innate, pre-determined purpose as a source of authority, though, fair point.
We can make an appeal to our human-created reasons for thinking that such-and-such is life's purpose, although I admit the term "life's purpose" sounds a bit wrong. Really it would mean "the only purpose which apparently makes sense, as far as you or I know, so far, although we could be wrong." Also this would be a trivial thing to appeal to, since it couldn't contain any details that weren't controversial.
*I mean that having a sense of purpose at all is arbitrary and not justified by anything. Having one particular purpose rather than another is arrived at by reason.
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Mon 5 May 2008, 2:22,
archived)
We can make an appeal to our human-created reasons for thinking that such-and-such is life's purpose, although I admit the term "life's purpose" sounds a bit wrong. Really it would mean "the only purpose which apparently makes sense, as far as you or I know, so far, although we could be wrong." Also this would be a trivial thing to appeal to, since it couldn't contain any details that weren't controversial.
*I mean that having a sense of purpose at all is arbitrary and not justified by anything. Having one particular purpose rather than another is arrived at by reason.
What this seems to boil down tois that you expect knowledge to be final and perfect, and on observing that there's a vast difference of opinion about what's true, you conclude that there isn't any knowledge. You don't seem to consider that there might be progress in verisimilitude.
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Mon 5 May 2008, 2:46,
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Well I would highlight things like Solipsism which claims that nothing other than yourself can be known to be true.But the fact that someone can even hint that there are no external frames of reference or ways in which we can ever truly be certain shows that ultimately veracity will be an unjustified thing. There is still knowledge, knowledge is what we know as knowledge, but that doesn't necessarily make knowledge an inherent truth. It's more an expression or a possibility, just as you can't say that a certain spelling of a certain word in English is correct and others are wrong - a word might need to be spelt a certain way to belong to a set, of English or whatever other type of knowledge it is.
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Mon 5 May 2008, 3:12,
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There's (unknown) objective truth.(Otherwise logic fails, because A and not A are equally true.)
This means that probably some of our knowledge is true (or some of our future knowledge might be, and we can't know which). This means there is progress in knowledge and purpose to argument.
The thing about correct spellings of words is just failure to define a problem tightly. Like you say, there is a correct spelling of a word in order to belong to a particular set. There isn't a correct spelling of a word, or a correct albatross, or a correct anything that can't undergo a specified (or implied) test for correctness.
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Mon 5 May 2008, 3:27,
archived)
This means that probably some of our knowledge is true (or some of our future knowledge might be, and we can't know which). This means there is progress in knowledge and purpose to argument.
The thing about correct spellings of words is just failure to define a problem tightly. Like you say, there is a correct spelling of a word in order to belong to a particular set. There isn't a correct spelling of a word, or a correct albatross, or a correct anything that can't undergo a specified (or implied) test for correctness.