What gives life value?
Some argue that if we lived forever that life would be greatly depreciated in value. But does its value largely come from its brevity, finitity, and frailty? Is the argument that life in the universe is only possible within like 0.0000001% of the history of the universe an argument for the value of life, or its insignificance, and likihood that it was more of a mistake? Surely its value is mostly in the experience of life and not the relative span of time?
Comments (56)
I agree. Re:Value.
Length, time, distance, speed, motion, etc... are all relative. Which means they don't actually exist. So the length of your life is an illusion. You only have the eternal here now.
The mind needs relativity to know. It compares things and calls it knowledge. Value and insignificance are just descriptions that can be applied to anything.
I think there are several correct answers to this depending on your perspective and age. Personally I would not want to live forever. I wouldn't even like to have 200 years, mainly because I am getting bored now and I am only in my 50's.
The most interesting atheists I have known have argued that mortality and the lack of an afterlife (in their worldview) act as an aphrodisiac for living. Life is more precious if it is finite and if it is the only one we get. I respect this answer. Personally I think my valuing life is an emotional reaction based on enculturation, but who knows for certain?
It is only finite in the mind. I have no proof I am not eternal. The idea I am finite is an idea in the mind. Which then causes fear and wonder.
The mind likes to live with fear and wonder. It gives it more stimulation. Mental masturbation.
Everything is in the mind..... except reality (which is everything)
This looks wrong. That the fork is to the left of the knife is relative to where you sit to table. Do you conclude that the fork does not exist? Of course not.
Values are not found. Nor is meaning.
Yep.
The very worst thing about dying will be not finding out what happens next.
Given that some organisms live for hundreds of years where others barely a single day, it would not be felt as ‘merely a day’ or ‘a long century’ because generally speaking time is felt subjectively apart from the physical measurement of time. We know this when we are young and developing, the days drag when we wait for a special event or fly by in ‘holiday’ time.
I don’t understand about arguing for ‘the value, or lack of value, of life’. Without life there is no ‘value’ and what you may or may not call a ‘mistake’ in such abstracted universal terms is utterly meaningless.
Life as a human item has many fluctuated somewhat over human history. In terms of sacrificing human lives it could be argued that life was so valued that offering up a human life meant it was given more value than in times where life isn’t so readily sacrificed.
As for arguments that value is relative that doesn’t much help matters as we then need to address relative to what and how relative it is to said item/s. In the current era we live in this is further complicated by our cultural need to measure and log things. The power and understanding measuring items has given us (in terms of knowledge and insight) is so ubiquitously useful that we do perhaps over apply it (heuristic blindness). Meaning when measuring as a cultural and scientific practice has led to so many benefits it can become increasingly hard to recognise/register when/if such a heuristic is in fact utterly useless and misplaced.
For example, I can value certain things like a painting or a sunset, yet to measure such a value against other things lacks any universal constant and moreover lacks any real way of determination. I have noted to friends that I would rather lose my right hand than my sense of taste and I truly believe this … yet if by some extraordinary circumstances this hypothetical became a reality would I actually opt for losing my hand or am I just kidding myself? The value is therefore based on subjective appreciation of reality and no matter how much someone may tell me that x is worth more than y I am not simply going to agree when my personal position says otherwise.
I conclude that left and right do not exist objectively.
Nothing. What makes God real? The fact that people believe that God is real?
Experience, yes. Especially the experience of being human, male, straight, and white.
P.S. Add value for being American and Republican.
Ah, that magical word, "objectively". Folk wave it and think their philosophical errors dissipate. Best avoided. So let's go back to this:
Quoting Miller
The mathematics Einstein developed shows how the laws of physics are the same for all observers.
Some folk erroneously think that he showed that the laws of physics are dependent on the observer,
That sort of misunderstanding might lead one to say something odd, such as that length, time, distance, speed and motion do not exist.
Insofar as the current model of life - the theory of evolution - is concerned, all that matters is:
Birth [math]\rightarrow[/math] Childhood [math]\rightarrow[/math] Adulthood [math]\rightarrow[/math] Mate [math]\rightarrow[/math] Death.
All the above are achieved by the following:
1. Mayflies [lifespan 24 hours]
2. Humans [lifespan 90 years]
3. Greenland sharks [lifespan 270 years]
There we go. FIFY. Some do. Some may be right.
Quoting TiredThinker
Appreciation perhaps. That's potentially one reason roller coasters, skydiving, and bungee jumps are fun. Imagine driving and seeing an oncoming car swerve in your lane barely missing yours by inches, then careen off a cliff and blow up. You'd be pretty thankful now wouldn't you. Bet you'd go home and the next meal you ate would have just a bit more flavor.
Quoting TiredThinker
I feel some truths are self-evident.
The answer is both,
“Give someone chocolate for the first time and they will fall in love. But they will never have the same sweet experience as the first time if they eat it again.”
Life comes with a finite of experiences if we lived forever we would probably face eternity with “Apathy”
Immortality is a goal for the fearful and to respect life you need to give it the dignity to end gracefully when the time comes.
Stop confusing metaphysics with physics.
“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.” -Dennett
Exactly.
But in the age of digital piracy we use upload and download. :nerd:
Life is not rare from the standpoint of being since there is no other alternative that has content. Anything that presents content to itself must be a kind of life. A infinity of years of time can pass in an awareness void, unconscious universe, and then suddenly, pop!, we're alive but never ourselves again in a strict sense. Death is not an experience! Time passes for the living.
We're in effect quasi immortals with no conserved content/substance but the inevitability of being conscious since we cannot be dead to ourselves.
Life has value because it is inescapable from the long view of a kind of eternal return, like the phase of flowering on the cosmic tree. There will always be a season for the blooms of consciousness. An eternity of nothing never appears to itself. An eternity of something must appear to itself because the only verification that it is something, is an appearance to itself.
To live is not to experience life's value but to be born is in light of life's value. It's a population question, 'should I have children?' is among the questions involved.
Value is a more abstract notion of something we want essentially.
'Something "we" want' already implies a living thing and a duration of time.
For the purpose of this discussion (about meaning) you could say that life is that which has separated itself from the rest of the world (via a cell membrane) and tries to maintain itself, its form, over time.
So to answer your question, life gives itself values by trying to sustain itself over time. It doesn't make much sense to speak of value without both "experience ( a living thing)" and a duration of time. Theoretically, any duration of time could do.
The Principle of Relativity is fundamental to physics.
You shouldn't encourage him. :wink:
Quoting Varde
Hm. I've met quite a few folk who are very motivated to live and yet are in constant pain.
Not sure what either of you are claiming here.
However, what they indicate is objective: bilateral symmetry, dipolarity, complementarity, etc.
Quoting _db
Same as every other real X: conditions that differentiate X from ~X; lacking such conditions renders X indistinguishable from ~X (i.e. fictional).
If "God is real", then it is so independent of whatever "people believe".
I'm not talking about the 'principle of relativity', im talking about up down, left right, fast slow, far close, long short, are all just relative measurements is the human mind and dont exist in reality.
If life's value is in its relative span of time, then God would probably be rather miserable, contrary to the teachings that God is in an infinite state of happiness. However, the perceived value of life can proceed from the brevity, finitity, and frailty of life. One may possible perceive that human life is valuable only because it is short, finite, and frail. Life may be treated as a mere commodity in which scarcity increases value and abundance decreases value.
On the contrary, the intrinsic value of life is independent of what humans perceive of it, and as such cannot merely come from the relative span of time of that life. I believe you are correct in saying that the value of life is mostly in the experience of life, how we live life, how we experience life, how we make our choices, those are all which makes life meaningful, instead of simply the relative span of time. In my own view, the value of life comes from the usefulness of life for us conscious beings, that is happiness and goodness (both may be seen as synonymous in our universe).
Things have value "objectively" because they lead us to the greater good that is the greater happiness. I sincerely think that the economic perspective of scarcity and value makes little sense in the greater framework of ethics and value theory. I believe the value of things are not determined by their scarcity, instead it is a general rule of reality that things which are of greater value require greater effort to attain and thus are generally more "scarce". Perhaps we may say that scarcity is a consequence of value, not the other way around.
As such, the value of life is in its capacity to lead us to goodness and happiness, and perhaps in some perspectives, life is the only way for us to attain goodness and happiness, outside of which we are faced with oblivion and nothingness.
Immortality, in order to be fully livable, would have to consist in a memory limit of a mortal human lifespan – maybe a maximum of 100 years – new memories "rewriting over" +100 year old memories (regardless of their emotional weights) continuously. Such an immortal might want to offload her memories in journals, photos, videos, digital files, etc throughout centuries and millennia before she permanently loses the ability to recall them subjectively. Also, to keep track of lost friends and current rivals, stashes and secrets, etc. She will be a perennial stranger to the more-than-century-old aspect of her past self, living in a perpetual hundred year bubble of self-awareness. This might maintain an immortal's sanity and motivation to 'create new memories' – feeling alive "full of value and joy" – across endless millennia.
Was just trying to give a safe obvious and uninteresting answer, minus the eternal return bit. Pain and pleasure must also mediate the reason folks with chronic pain continue. The instincts must engage pain and pleasure to keep up the momentum of life. We might classify fear as a kind of pain (under the banner of suffering more like). The crisis of terror in suicidal ideation (as a pain, or motivating instinct) might deter us, among other expectations of future pleasure or avoiding harm (a pleasure), to continue living.
Being able to fulfill our needs must give life value. Which of your needs that aren't being fulfilled, Banno? Please share some personal juicy tidbits by which we can be enlightened while at the same time laugh a lot. Hopefully you are working hard to fulfill those needs in spite of the chronic pain. Live, laugh, love. Thanks.
Always a scary thought to lose memories. 90 year olds often forget ever having had parents which is utterly crazy. Lets just assume memories aren't lost.
That way leads to madness for an 'immortal'.
But what value would each experience have if we were likely to experience everything an infinite number of times? Experiences are precious only if they're... well... precious.
Except that some experiences seem to be innately preferable, and not really dictated by their rarity. A walk along the beach or in a forest, bonding with friends, watching your children play, or a truly monumental shag.
But where does those innate proclivities come from if not the finitude of life? Those innate, universally positive experiences have been hewn over millions of years because they kept our DNA thriving (the need to stay close to water and food, social cooperation, the need to care for our children or have them in the first place, etc.) And for that to happen, we have to reproduce and die.
If we were immortal we wouldn't need to choose as carefully what gives us a strong dopamine dense experience. Sure things would be repeated many times, but their sense of novelty doesn't really need to fade. We can probably think outside of the box if immortality is also outside of the box.
Humans and most animals exhibit bilateral symmetry, but mind you, only externally (superficially); our innards are, relatively speaking, a mess, symmetry-wise that is. Beauty is only skin-deep.
Returning now to what is an intriguing possibility if we take a person and look at him directly from the front or the back - two halves as if there's a mirror going right through the middle (medical professionals know this as the sagittal plane), from the crown of a person's head down to the perineal (what I call a) knot (the point where all your ass muscle fibres form a knot-like structure). What if...one half of us live in one universe and its mirror image, the other half, lives in another universe. I haven't had time to iron out the wrinkles but I'm going Goldbach, offering a conjecture for those smarter than me to figure out. :grin:
Immanent and not transcendent, I get it! :up:
Remember Keyser Söze from The Usual Suspects? :wink:
:up: Good to know it all works out in the end for you. Lucky you!
Others have pointed out that if our lifespan were only longer and our vitality thus extended, we could grow as a society past the problems of our egos and all the trouble they bring. Thus life would have more value.
Anyway, if you were immortal, you'd never have evolved a dopamine response. Or indeed any response. Or indeed a central nervous system.
We have evolved already though. I am forward thinking here. Age researchers think we may someday slow or reverse many aspects of aging so it isn't as hypothetical. I am just wondering how it might change our perspective of life. Will we be happier and more free in our lives, or will it be more like Futurama (the show) when antiaging technology exists but suicide booths are a thing. Lol.
That's not really the way it works. The values we have are based in large part on the qualities we evolved. Answering questions about what we'd be if eternal on the basis of value judgements of finite beings doesn't really make much sense. It would be like a hoover imagining what it would do if it could become human and deciding that it would vacuum much bigger floors. :D Also it's not really forward thinking, since you're not about to become immortal, or about to have the option. Unless you know something I don't.