I'd have to take the Nihilistic stance that life is without any objective meaning. It appears to me that any meaning, morals, or values that somebody claims are inherent to the universe are merely their own human abstraction; this post included. Yet, that shouldn't (and doesn't) stop anybody from prescribing meaning to things and living "full" lives and achieving happiness. There are two facts that I strongly believe in: We're stuck being humans, for better or worse, and the universe will continue to be indifferent.
A decent summary, but I'd still suggest anyone who relates to this answer to read Nietzsche (specifically, The Gay Science and probably Beyond Good and Evil).
The meaning of energy is to be a natural demarcation between living (smart matter) and non living (dumb matter). This is its purpose. There is no other.
I'm sorry but without concrete definitions this entire discussion is stupid. (Retroactively defining words to make your position tautological is not valuable either.)
The entire article consists of a remark that life is a self-replicating chemical reaction.
A more interesting question to debate might be whether this replicating property is an acceptable definition for life, (i.e. can there exist systems that aren't replicating but can be considered life, and how might these arise independently of replicating life?), or what happens when you apply various definitions of life to other systems than the physical universe.
A pithy statement, but a pretty weak argument. Given the entire purpose of the field of philosophy, this paragraph or so doesn't resonate especially strongly.
One thing that I don't get is what was before and what is the source of Big Bang. So Big Bang, boom, expansion, star/planet formation, red shift, evolution, selfish gene, humans - I get. But where did the Big Bang came from? Fluctuation from nothingness? Why? From something else? Why? Something existed before and produced the Big Bang? Where this thing that existed before came from then? Doesn't make any sense.
I suggest directing some of your curiosity towards Google. This topic has been discussed many times before. In short: Your notion of "cause and effect" is not necessarily meaningful or applicable to all aspects of nature. Time could have been created in the Big Bang.
Also, it's possible that the entire process was continuous... the closer you rewind towards the big bang, the longer it takes to rewind just a little bit further.
Thanks for the link, it's interesting read.
Even if time is created with Big Bang, and there are probabilistic quantum processes that don't demonstrate "cause and effect" in traditional sense these explanations come down to some singularity and suggest to accept that singularities just happen.
My personal favourite explanation is that since in the beginning there was nothing, there wasn't just no matter there were no rules. So there was no rule to say 'you can't get something from nothing' so out of true nothingness things would happen. And from there it was a matter of generating the right set of rules (which could have taken an unimaginably large number of iterations) where nothing was contradictory and then viola, the universe was ready.
This may be a meaningless question. If the very moments of creation of the universe are indeed the moments of creation of spacetime, what does "before" mean? Moreover, if the universe is "existence," how could we begin to perceive, imagine, or study existence without existence?
>how could we begin to perceive, imagine, or study existence without existence?
Through the deduction and reasoning. We don't exactly perceive sub-atomic and many galactic processes, but just infer their existence from some or other observation. Presumably "existence" is not entirely detached from "outside".
Yes but if the universe is everything that we perceive as physical, that is the material world, how could we possibly seek to examine the nonphysical world through the physical?
Consider, even reason itself is based on the rules and inherent properties of our physical universe. How can you examine a system which may not even have "reason"? Hell, our "physically" limited brains may not fundamentally be capable of comprehending such a system.
In essence, you may as well try to describe the nature of the supersensible using the sensible. It just doesn't make sense.
Our brains comprehended a lot of stuff which appeared to be incomprehensible. Relativity theory, quantum mechanics, most branches of mathematics are so abstract that have no direct connection to the real-world "physical" experiences of our brains and bodies. And yet some members of humanity (although quite limited subset) develop these areas and reason within them. If "reason" in the widest sense is such a fundamental law that it extends beyond the whatever singularity took place, then it might still be possible to deduct something. (Simplistic example) Imagine creatures living in 2D world that itself is in 3D world and sometimes interacts with 3D object. Should these creatures be able to deduct some information about "outer" 3D world after prolonged study of projections that sometimes suddenly appear in their 2D world?
You could argue that intelligent life is something that our ecosystem has evolved in order to resist mass extinction due to meteorite impacts. Last time round with the dinosaurs there was no answer but maybe next time we'll be ready. It just about makes sense if you think on then scale of whole ecosystems and meteorite impacts and many planets.
I was thinking about this too the other day. Life seems to (more or less) be a set chemical processes that accelerates entropy in a given universe.
Say if you were the designer of the universe and started the big bang. If someone told you to calculate how long it would take until all energy is evenly distributed - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe), the simple way you would calculate this is just to calculate how many generations of stars your universe would support.
But if some sort of life (like us humans) arises and populates, say, 10%, of the star systems, entropy would happen a lot more than you originally estimated! Entropy is accelerated by life!
In my conclusion, it seems that the ultimate goal of all energy/matter - not just life, is to express itself through the second law of thermodynamics - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics). To use up itself and become static again. That ultimate death is your ultimate goal.
i agree with you - and if this is true then the meaning of life is what we define it to be - only religions assert that there is only 1 true meaning and its the meaning they defined
maybe the blog writer chose the wrong word - instead of -meaning- the word -process- would have been better - in that case we may say that --the fundamental process of nature is a transformation of non-replicating into replicating--
