Sep 22 2009
Video games and Purpose of life…
Only to those who enjoy video games and ice cream, though; and in particular, this concept of their purpose pre-supposes that the value of these things is given by their utility to humans.
In this case, because we are the creators of ice cream and video games, this is obvious. But we can still be the arbiters of the “value” of things of which we are not the creators; we can find them laudable or deplorable, useful or useless, etc. We do this all the time even with other living things, from other humans down to species of disease. Especially when we come together to consider things as a society, we always measure the value of things relative to its significance to ourselves.
Life isn’t “building to” anything any more than there’s a punchline at the end of the whole numbers. It’s just the established context of this improv comedy sketch in which we find ourselves wandering on-stage. We get to decide how to use that context to further develop the sketch, and keep the whole gag rolling.
The fact that we are on a small speck of rock in the cosmos need not make us feel insignificant — although it is reasonable to be concerned with having all your eggs in one basket. Why should the mere size of space cow us? It is grandiose and magnificent, to be sure, but it’s just space filled with some stuff: what makes space filled with stuff so tremendously more significant? Nothing makes Betelgeuse or Andromeda more fundamentally “special” than Deimos or Titan, say. Meaningless cuts both ways.
And so, we are only left with the question: what do we care about? What does conscious living (or if you prefer, biological life) mean to us? That is the measure we really care about.