Comics
This is a community for everything comics related! A place for all comics fans.
Rules:
1- Do not violate lemmy.ml site-wide rules
2- Be civil.
3- If you are going to post NSFW content that doesn't violate the lemmy.ml site-wide rules, please mark it as NSFW and add a content warning (CW). This includes content that shows the killing of people and or animals, gore, content that talks about suicide or shows suicide, content that talks about sexual assault, etc. Please use your best judgement. We want to keep this space safe for all our comic lovers.
4- No Zionism or Hasbara apologia of any kind. We stand with Palestine π΅πΈ . Zionists will be banned on sight.
5- The moderation team reserves the right to remove any post or comments that it deems a necessary for the well-being and safety of the members of this community, and same goes with temporarily or permanently banning any user.
Guidelines:
- If possible, give us your sources.
- If possible, credit creators of each comics in the title or body of your post. If you are the creator, please credit yourself. A simple β- Meβ would suffice.
- In general terms, write in body of your post as much information as possible (dates, creators, editors, links).
- If you found the image on the web, it is encouraged to put the direct link to the image in the βLinkβ field when creating a post, instead of uploading the image to Lemmy. Direct links usually end in .jpg, .png, etc.
- One post by topic.
view the rest of the comments
Hahaha, I do enjoy the conversation :P
Ah, I see.. then meaning/purpose it's not 2 aspects of the same thing, but rather... one is the thing, the other one is the performance/efficiency of the thing.
But.. would you say that the use of the word "meaning" in "the meaning of life" is meant to imply "the performance of life at fulfilling its purpose"?
I feel that then talking about meaning without purpose makes no sense, because you can't evaluate the performance of something without having a goal to evaluate it against.
I agree, "The meaning of life" is more "The purpose of life" in the way I'm using the words, that's fair.
Can we have meaning without purpose, intention or aims? What about making meaning out of things that are essentially random?
Humans are good at that. Faces in the Cloud. God stopped the bullet. I got cancer for a reason.
I kinda wish people wouldn't find meaning in things without purpose sometimes. Maybe they feel as you do, that by giving meaning to these things then they don't lack a purpose.
Doesn't this contradict your previous definition of "meaning"? If there isn't intention/purpose then how do you reflect on whether the "outcome matches the intention"? didn't you say that this reflection is what defines meaning?
Maybe I'm missing something? or perhaps you are using a different meaning of "meaning" here?
What I feel we humans do too much is give too much importance to ourselves... we tend to see faces in the cloud because we are constantly measuring reality to our own little pocket of experience.. we tend to think the bullet stopped because of something we're meant to do... we tend to think we got cancer because of something we did...
We keep thinking nature governs itself with the same rules and motivations that we experience in our little minds.
Note that "life" is not the same thing as "nature". The purpose/goal of life might not be the same thing as the "goal" the Universe moves towards.. most of the Universe is dead, non-life. For all we know, the Universe might actually have ultimate death as its destination, and we are actually "the baddies", we might be the ones who fight against the ultimate "purpose" of the Universe, the ultimate maximization of entropy and the peaceful state of equilibrium where things stop exchanging electrons and we reach a cold thermal death.
I don't think the Universe "cares" about whether we see faces in the clouds, or what we think about the bullet/cancer hitting/missing us. Life might have the purpose to preserve itself.. but that's because life is shaped by evolution to be that way (and we had to!). We had to use those same thermodynamics the Universe moves towards in order to perpetuate ourselves, sometimes thermodynamics are on our side, but not because the Universe willed it so, but because we adapted ourselves so that it is so (we would not have survived otherwise). I feel there's a lot of "survivor bias" in most of the existential questions humanity makes itself. We ask ourselves "Why are we here?" while forgetting about the astronomical amounts of trial-and-error that happened to reach this point... it's like someone wondering "why did I pick the right door?" after having chosen every single other door before that one and failed.
Let me end in a happier note:
I feel most problems become meaningless when we sit back and see things from a broader perspective. We often put too much value in things we believe are valuable, when in reality, they only are valuable because we ourselves place that value on them.
Being able to sit, relax, and just enjoy your time (without being stressed about the things you are NOT achieving) is not a bad way to pass your life. In the grand scale of things, we are insignificant, don't worry too much about things you can't change, it's not worth it.
And for the things you can change to improve life... why worry about it? just do them! There's literally no logical reason to be stressed about things. Just go and do what you can do and don't worry about the things that you can't do.