h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I liked it anyway.

You saw my point then ran straight past it. Life just IS; it is the process of living. Now that is the real question, the one about this "LIVING" thingy. As you and most others point out, that is about being individual. This provokes the old debate about determinism or existensialism:- "I think therefore I am " versus "I am therefore I think". We've got this life thingy, anyway, completely unasked for and no instructions to use it. My one is for FUN! So there.

Quite right, Mac. Life just IS. The function of life is to survive and procreate. The purpose of life is the subjective awareness of the output of the circuitry that drives us to do, or try to do, these things. But here's the rub. Human life is COMPLICATED. All sorts of intermediate and secondary endeavours get attached to the "prime directive" circuits. They become prime directives themselves. Why the heck else would doing philosophy be a prime directive? But I could no sooner stop doing philosophy than stop eating. Fun is fine, but it's only part of the complex tapestry.

Noggin

the meaning is not always the purpose

So the Question is What is the meaning of life?

Perhaps the question should be What is the purpose of life?

42 is not, however, the answer to the ultimate question, for the ultimate question has not yet been discovered. 42 is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. Surely, we would have to minus the universe and everything to discover the meaning of life?

Well, the reason this whole thing started was because the mice wanted to keep this kind of talk from interupting their Brockian Ultra Kricket games in which men suffered and died and after seven and a half million years they kind of figured that finding "the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything" would be the same thing as finding the "Meaning of Life"

By the way, Deep Thought must have had been doing some funky math, because, in my opinion, the Answer you get if you ADD Life, AND the Universe, AND Everything, you get: INFINITY! THE TOTAL PERSPECTIVE VORTEX!

But, Deep Thought knew what he was doing, so 42 MUST be correct. After that, finding the Question is just an idle passtime as is evidenced by this loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong thread here.

Nerd42

Life is equal to 1 because 1 is the loneliest number, except for possibly zero, which is lonely for a robot that has feelings, which they don't which makes 1 the lonliest number ever, two being a couple, three being a crowd and Nerd42 being a hitchhiker.

Here is something appearently unconnected to 42, but it may have SOMETHING possibly to do with the Meaning of Life:

"If I got stranded on a desert island (with electricity)/
And I could bring one record and my hi-fi/
I'd bring that ocean surf cd (Relaxing Sound of Ocean Surf)/
So I could enjoy the irony." - Dylan Hicks

Hey Nerd! good logic. I recently discovered that my birthdate = 42! Wicked.

'So I could enjoy the irony'

Maybe Irony da meaning of life? We all search for a meaning, and maybe it has none!

Now that WOULD be ironic.

Kirp

Yeah, I think you hit on exactly what I was trying to say, though now that I read back on that little bit I begin to doubt that I was actually saying anything much. OhWell.

Nerd42

I'm not going to ramble on here about my opinions, but if you want to get an idea, I've just added a journal entry (my first ) on the Meaning of Life.....then I saw this conversation.....and thought it would be an excellent PR opportunity....

Mac
If life is for fun, how many people manage it?
It seems to me that not many people manage it, therefore they are not succeding in there purpose ?
what IS fun?
Freud and William Blake both say a version of happiness is havoing something to love, something to do and something to look forward to.
Perhaps that equals fun?
Of course individual purposes and meanings are all valid.

if none of this existed, if there was just nothing (watever that is) no one would no any difernt because no one and nothing would be alive to admire and aprretiate it, but the fact that we r here, leads to the question of why?

you say it might be for fun? well some people would find talking about this fun.

Maybe the question is 42 * 1

Wow, I think you've hit it on the head, fazed up!
That does actually make sense. In my head only of course, but I think that could mean something. Let me find a way to put it into words, and I'll get back to you...

I understand that if there was intelligent life out there, the most basic form of language would be mathematics as 1 = 1 in any language whether that be # = # but not # = ##

I also heard that a scientific language has been invented already... I wonder what 42 means, maybe "me" or "um"

i saw this this thing in new scientist which was about the theory of everything and they think then number 8 has a lot to do with it, its some kind of maths

Why is the answer to b) No? If what Buddhists (for example) believe has any connection to reality, these clumps of consciousness keep coming back to bodies in order to experience the world (until they lose their attachment to their egos and surrender to the infinite). And if the answer is No as you say what do these clumps then get up to?

Your reference to experiencing fear in an NDE is interesting - this is what (I think) the Tibetan Book of the Dead is about - explaining to the consciousness the experiences it will have after death which to an unprepared or unwilling mind would seem very frightnening. This sort of 'negative' NDE may be the origin of the stories about Hell - ie that to the ego the loss of self seems like a dreadful fate.

Was your NDE entirely negative?