Purpose of Life?

July 2, 2008 8:34 pm J. Alden Page Philosophy

It’s been almost a month now since I’ve posted.  I sincerely apologize.  Life has been busy, I’ve been too wore out to think and have been undergoing an identity crisis of a “What the fuck should I be doing with my life?” nature. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of life. I used to think the purpose of life was happiness. Happiness is just a bunch of chemicals, and a happy state can be created artificially. Someone who is perfectly happy would not live very long, because desire is necessary for survival. Desire stems from not being perfectly happy.

One could argue that the purpose in life should be to maximize the amount of happiness experienced over a lifetime. This would make longevity important, and would give a reason to be happy without being completely happy. But, it wouldn’t provide a reason for keeping society alive. That would require changing the goal to maximizing society’s happiness. But, why should anyone care whether or not other individuals are happy?

Steve Pavlina wrote a post about how to find your purpose in life. The method he describes is essentially writing down as many possible purposes as you can think of until you write something that strikes a chord. The claim is that it should take about 20 minutes to find your purpose, but that it could take longer.

I tried this method about a year ago. After a couple of hours, I was still purposeless. I wrote it off as being silly and didn’t give it a second thought. Recently, I stumbled across his post again and decided to give it another shot. I wrote possible purposes for 4-5 hours. The next day I analyzed the purposes, and I found one that makes sense to me.

The purpose of life is the survival of consciousness.

I think consciousness gives the universe meaning, rather than thinking the universe gives meaning to consciousness. A chair doesn’t define you. But, your perceptions give the chair a meaning. You perceive its purpose, whether it is soft or hard, beautiful or ugly. This is still true when looking at the sky or even at other planets.

Meaning is an internal property of the observer. No meaning is applied to an object if an object can in no way be perceived. It follows that the existence of meaning requires conscious observers.

Something as complicated as a purpose or goal requires that things have meaning. No consciousness = No meaning = No purpose. This means that if there is a purpose and meaning in the universe, that purpose and meaning requires consciousness.

So the purpose of life? Ty to keep consciousness alive in the present and make it as fit as possible for the future. I think because meaning exists for the thinker, an individual can give life any meaning that can be thought. A meaningless universe sounds boring and undesirable to me, so I think the survival of consciousness is a good purpose.

The survival fitness of consciousness depends on abundance, diversity, adaptability, continuous creation of new conscious beings, and probably a large number of other things.