Hmm. All this talk about how fear keeps you from posting to the forum makes me feel cowardly for not wanting to post my ideas. So perhaps I'll just share a couple of my little musings on the forum. For the approval of the Rinkworks community of course.

This quarter I'm taking Ethics, which sounded like another "Why cloning is bad and you shouldn't use your scientific knowledge for EVAL", sort of class, but which turned out to actually be interesting by some feat.

We're studying the ancient philosophers. So far we've done through Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, etc. While I was reading this weeks assignment, I kept thinking, "No, that's wrong...", or "That's sort of how it is.", and then realized that I had this whole concrete idea in my head about these ideas and concepts they had been discussing thousands of years before me.

Which is kind of cool. You don't think that people who were dead before your great-great-great-greats were alive would have idea which compare to yours. But they do. Freaky.

So, finally getting to the point, my question is this:

What is really the meaning of life? Why are we here?

I know that Rinkworks has a very large religious community. I know that most religions try to answer that question one way: by saying that the reason for our existence is for God, known by God, and ultimately only interpretable by us through his works and his various messengers. So, to make this interesting, I want to keep this whole argument outside the sphere of religion. I am assuming that God's purpose is, since he is omnipotent, omniscient, etc, going to be achieved. There is no way to really make God's goal become more likely, so there is no way for a human to really do anything in their life to assist the accomplishment of this goal. AND I AM NOT, ABSOLUTELY NOT, saying this is necessarily true. So those of you who are now thinking "She obviously has no conception of religion. Of course our actions are important to God", can stop thinking that. I'm just making this assumption so that the argument will stay out of the realms of the religious. If you want to have a debate about God's purpose for everyone, then that can be a seperate or subthread. I don't mind it, but I am asking specifically about people's beliefs on human beings as seperate entities outside God.

Alright, now, those of you who didn't leave as soon as I said that I wanted to think about the world without God, welcome. Thanks. Nice to see you. Free drinks at the bar.

So why are we here? I believe, and have always believed, that the purpose of life was experience. Without life, there is no experience. You don't exist, or possess faculties, with which to experience anything. On a spiritual level you may posess a soul(God or no God), but then you exist as a being outside experience. Pure energy in a scientific perspective, maybe entropy, just an idea waiting to happen but without any actual physical presence.

Epicurus said that the purpose of life was to increase pleasure. Not necessarily your own, but in general the pleasure of the community. This would say that any act that gave you or someone else pleasure would be fulfilling your purpose in life.

I have always believed in this philosophy. However, I think that it is possible to increase pleasure through pain, which is completely opposite Epicurus' philosophy. Not sado-masochism, sick minded people. Of course, even Epicurus said that you could not have pleasure without pain, but I believe that pain can actually be a kind of pleasure. Like, anger will fill you up to boiling, and a depression can leave you a completely hollow ball. I believe that intensity is pleasure, and that you should always act to increase intensity whenever possible. So the ultimate evil would be a dull, ordinary life with no excitement. Kind of like in the movie Adaptation, if you've seen that, only without the whole drug thing.

Of course, giving pleasure to other people would not always be equivalent to increasing the intensity of their lives. Since the conception of pleasure varies between people, then the only good would be anticipating what people's ideas of pleasure are and working to increase that pleasure. For some people, this can mean being cruel, while for others it can mean lying, demeaning yourself, dominating, letting them go their own way... Etc.

So the ultimate purpose of life then, is to increase your own idea of pleasure and to develop the skills needed to increase the pleasure of others. You can fulfill this in a lot of ways. Getting the job you want fulfills your pleasure, while allowing you to help others and increase the pleasure of the community. Forcing yourself to work a job you hate decreases your pleasure, and can cause you to do inferior work, which decreases the pleasure of the community.

Socrates said that the only way to be happy was to balance your physical desires(pleasure) and your reason. Therefore, pleasure would not be the ultimate goal of life, but contemplation and striving toward a goal. In my philosophy, I disagree that pleasure is a lesser goal, but I do believe that the only way to truly achieve anything in your life is to continuously strive. Once you achieve what you desire, then there is no longer any point to have it, unless you construct a new set of goals which you can accomplish.

So, therefore, I disagree almost completely with Aristotle's view that there can be an Ultimate Goal, one which leads to nothing but which is an good in itself, and toward which everyone strives. I don't believe it is possible to ever be happy with having achieved a goal(except possibly in the religious sense, but thankfully we are not considering that).

So, to sum up: Life is about experience, that experience being the achieving and the spread of pleasure to the community through a series of goals which ultimately lead to nothing and are ended by death, whereby you either end completely, go to your respective resting place, or repeat in some other form.

Of course, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. So, tell me your opinions. Thank you very much.

Melanie