I have no idea how I will face my impending end (and I’m doing everything reasonable to put it off as long as possible), but I get meaning from my goal of moving humanity into space, and I’ll continue to do so as long as I’m alive. When I see people who win the lottery have their lives ruined over it, I suspect it’s because they don’t have any real purpose in life other than material pleasure, and have never given any serious thought to what they’d do with the winnings. I’d have no problems at all; if I had a billion dollars, I’d start a serious space venture.
28 thoughts on “Death, And The Meaning Of Life”
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As we all know…
Q: How to make a small fortune in a space venture?
A: Start with a large fortune…
🙂
Indeed. Rand has a foolproof plan for getting rid of that billion dollar burden. Hangovers don’t scale well with wealth.
I think that will be less true in the future than it has been in the past.
Purpose in life?
Of course I have never purchased a ticket, but were I to purchase a Mega Powerball Fraction of a Billion Dollars ticket., and were I to somehow win, my first call would be to Gilbert Levin (is he OK?) and ask what it would take to put a life-sciences payload on the surface of Mars.
His updated version of the Viking LR (labeled release) experiment will have him awarded a Nobel Prize for finally confirming the presence of life on Mars, Dr. Levin will go down in history along with Newton and Galen and Hubble and others as changing humanity forever, and I will be remembered as the chump who spent his Powerball winnings.
Gil Levin is indeed still alive, but he’s in his 90s. Last I heard, he was working with Barry DiGregorio, part of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return. And yeah, he does deserve the Nobel prize for finding bacterial life on Mars. If Wolf Vishniac was also still alive he’d deserve to share the prize, but they don’t award the Nobel posthumously.
Last I heard, he was working with Barry DiGregorio, part of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return.
Of course, there would be someone against the more effective approaches to gathering science about Mars. I wonder how many decades or centuries it would take for unmanned probes to gather enough information to assuage their concerns one way or another.
I think that caution is appropriate. Send people to Mars and have them do the analysis on-site.
I guess my thinking here is that sample return to Earth is important even if you have boots on the ground at Mars. All the fancy gear and the near totality of relevant scientists are on Earth and will be for quite some time. There’s really only one way to leverage that power.
To twist the old saying, if the scientists can’t go to Mars, then Mars must come to the scientists.
Let’s increase your odds Rand. If I ever get a billion dollars I’ll invest in your space venture.
Which reminds me of the comedian that answered a knock on his door. It was two Jehovah’s Witnesses that asked him, “Wouldn’t you like to live forever in paradise on earth in perfect health?”
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To which the comedian immediately replied, “Not if I have to live with you!”
My problem is that life is meaningless. My expectation is to return to dust and eventually be forgotten by everyone that ever knew me.
Benefiting others would give my life some meaning, but I don’t see much chance of that. I’m just not that significant. I mostly just try to ‘do no harm.’
On the contrary, you have been trying to figure out how to establish a Mars colony. If you succeed, you might get your name on a building on Mars. Life has whatever purpose or meaning that you choose to give it.
I’d say put his name on an elementary school, but I hope they would be smarter than to start that nonsense there. Maybe, “Here’s an ebook, kid. Read about the guy who started our colony.”
Perhaps they’ll name a crater after me? If I went first, I might create the crater? Can’t let Elon have all the fun.
I may be going about it the wrong way. Perhaps I should be arguing that the universe (and everything in it) belongs to all mankind and nobody should hold title to any of it.
Then just let the pushback (if there is any?) do my work for me?
It appears my computer is screwed up? I hate to have to reinstall everything. I’m very upset that ghost no longer works on windows.
Are you on Windows 7 or later?
If you are still booting into Windows, there is a Windows Repair utility for straightening it out. If you cannot boot Windows, there is booting into a recovery disk having the Windows Repair utility.
Remember the Tim Allen in “Galaxy Quest” — Never give up! Never surrender!
A quick search shows that something called SSR 2013 R2 will work on Windows 10, and is apparently the replacement for Ghost (and, more importantly, seems to read Ghost files)
Dingdingdingdingding! Winner!
Life may be intrinsically meaningless, but it only stays that way if we let it.
My wife’s happiness is my meaning. It’s not much to the universe, but what’s the universe ever done for me?
If I had a large chunk of money to put into some philanthropic effort, I think I’d put it into mathematics, and specifically into theorem proving software. There’s been progress in this field and I think the payoff from a larger investment could be huge.
I’d recommend at first automated proof validation instead. It’s an easier problem and a key obstacle to widespread, accessible theorem proving right now is that there’s no good language, including English, for automated proof validation. You can’t just scan in a paper or load it as a PDF and have any proofs validated. I thought about funding such a thing, but I don’t have either the cash flow or the time to make this happen on a regular basis.
The issue there is generating these proofs. It’s not really practical unless there’s a way of automatically producing them (either because they require too much detail to be produced by hand, or because any readable proof will have gaps that require proof of straightforward facts.)
Ultimately, I’d like to see a system that can read papers and books from the entire math literature and elaborate the proofs there into the kind of formal checkable proofs you describe. The goal here would be to extract all the interesting proofs from the literature, additionally providing the provers with a huge base of theorems, tactics, and less formal knowledge to learn from.
A key problem is working in reverse. Suppose you have a machine proof of a conjecture. How does that help the mathematician trying to make sense of the proof? We need something we can understand, not merely something that we can prove.
But sure, if a machine can prove something, it likely can provide a shorthand, list of landmarks and milestones to make the proof more comprehensible (and some of these may be important results in their own right) just like many complex human proofs do today.
For example, the first proof (year 1976) of the four color theorem (that planar graphs, that is graphs that can be embedded in the plane and are equivalent to a map of contiguous countries, can be colored with at most four colors) involved the generation and testing of a large number (well over a thousand) of graph objects.
The problems from the very beginning were that the methods of the proof both depended on computer programs (meaning that one eventually needed a proof that the computer program worked as well) and only provided limited understanding of the complex proof as a result.
Research into the proof itself has occurred off and on over the decades since. As I recall, it was determined, for example, that some cases were counted multiple times as well as other errors in the original paper. And the proof has been cleaned up enough that it probably could be proven by hand with someone willing to put the time in.
The proof was cleaned up (and the algorithm used to generate the cases sped up from quartic to quadratic time, I think), but the biggest advance was at Microsoft in 2005 when the proof was converted to a form understandable by the proof assistant Coq and mechanically verified.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52574
Even if you’ve considered it before, I’d urge you to take a good, serious, and final look at Christianity before your time on this world is over.
For a good introduction and apologetic: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Should-Believe-Christianity-Big/dp/1781918694/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1488932375&sr=8-1&keywords=james+anderson+christianity
For more sophisticated and in-depth treatments of the basic topics, see that book’s bibliography.
If God exists and has spoken and given us hope of life beyond death, there aren’t many options worth exploring beside Christianity.
I too used to be Christian. I abandoned it because I found the beliefs too immature, delusional, and unhealthy for righteous living.
Even if you’ve considered it before, I’d urge you to take a good, serious, and final look at Christianity before your time on this world is over.
Why? Has Christianity undergone a significant upgrade since Rand last checked? Even if we ignore the pigs in pokes promises, irrational assertions, and other wishful thinking masquerading as edicts from God or similar absolutes, we still have the fundamental problem: a dysfunctional, one-sided relationship where we project all our hopes and fears onto an ominously silent target who has never given an indication that they exist in this way much less want to be this switchboard/father figure.
I don’t believe that is healthy for us in a variety of ways. First, it allows for people to project their own beliefs as if they were the beliefs of God, particular the ideas of sin and claims that certain behaviors (such as homosexuality) are somehow more sinful than other behaviors. I consider this the ultimate blasphemy, though admittedly God has never given us an indication that he cares one way or another about blasphemy.
Or an anti-technology/progress stance based on the assertion that one is “playing god” (but on that, since we’re made in God’s image, how can we play otherwise?). Believe in things we can’t possibly understand (such as the idea of God being a “perfect being” – is existence an attribute of a perfect being? Nobody will ever be in a position to understand that question much less answer it with any degree of authority). Or worship. God doesn’t need it, and I don’t see it doing much for us either.
The key way such beliefs are unhealthy is that there is no reason whatsoever for us to believe in God, even as a placebo. If he is as you think he is, then he has gone to great pains to make himself invisible to us. Yet we’re supposed to believe as the key tenet of Christianity that this is the most important thing period to do.
To the contrary, I think we should respect his wishes: live as if this was our only lives, strive as if these were our only chances, and try to make this world a better place rather than assume we’ll be going on to some place even better. For it just might be true.
If God exists and has spoken and given us hope of life beyond death, there aren’t many options worth exploring beside Christianity.
“If”. And there are plenty of religions aside from Christianity. Wikipedia spews huge lists of them. For example, the religions which believe in a single all-powerful god (which by definition is God) are fairly numerous with in addition to Christianity: Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Baha’i Faith, Zoroastrianism, and some forms of Hinduism.
**Why? Has Christianity undergone a significant upgrade since Rand last checked? **
As good scientists and engineers, it is often good to re-evaluate our previous conclusions when circumstances dictate that we might want to re-visit them. Perhaps our data was bad or incomplete. Perhaps we made an error in reasoning or logic somewhere along the way. Perhaps we did not consider alternatives with sufficient time and sympathy. We can take bad turns in life or fail to exercise sober judgement.
**a dysfunctional, one-sided relationship where we project all our hopes and fears onto an ominously silent target who has never given an indication that they exist in this way much less want to be this switchboard/father figure.**
Well that would be a bummer, if it were true. Of course, Christianity holds that God has not been silent, but revealed Himself “through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son.” (Hebrews 1)
**I consider this the ultimate blasphemy, though admittedly God has never given us an indication that he cares one way or another about blasphemy.**
Sure. Unless, of course, Christianity is true. (You might want to take this opportunity to realize that your reasoning is circular).
**Or an anti-technology/progress stance based on the assertion that one is “playing god” (but on that, since we’re made in God’s image, how can we play otherwise?). **
On the contrary, technological progress is part of the cultural mandate to fill, subdue, and rule over the earth as God’s viceroy.
**possibly understand (such as the idea of God being a “perfect being” – is existence an attribute of a perfect being? Nobody will ever be in a position to understand that question much less answer it with any degree of authority). **
I would think that God can tell us what He is like with some degree of authority. As for our level of understanding, well, we can apprehend many things that we cannot fully comprehend.
**Or worship. God doesn’t need it,**
Who says otherwise? Your level of understanding of Christianity is infantile.
**and I don’t see it doing much for us either.**
Worship exists firstly because God is worthy, full stop. Yet God also builds us up spiritually, feeding us through His preached Word and Sacraments (baptism & the Lord’s Supper). The church is a hospital for sinners.
**The key way such beliefs are unhealthy is that there is no reason whatsoever for us to believe in God, even as a placebo.**
There are plenty of reasons, and there are also plenty of arguments for God’s existence (notice there is a difference between reasons and arguments). You can start with the book I mentioned above if you want accessible, non-technical arguments. I’m partial to the transcendental argument from morality, that is that only God’s existence can underwrite moral realism. There are also ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, and so on. For some it is more intuitive than others, many of us engineers look at creation and clearly know that there is a Designer behind it all (though we tend not to be philosophically sophisticated to formulate or articlulate this).
**If he is as you think he is, then he has gone to great pains to make himself invisible to us. **
Yes and no. God is immaterial, so He has no spatio-temporal properties. We wouldn’t expect Him to be optically visible. Yet we see His handiwork in creation: “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse”. But the point of Christianity is that God has also revealed Himself in the more explicit, saving deposit of propositional “special” revelation – we call it the Word or the Gospel for short.
**live as if this was our only lives, strive as if these were our only chances, and try to make this world a better place rather than assume we’ll be going on to some place even better. For it just might be true.**
Even for the sake of argument, if it is true, who cares? Then we are just atoms bouncing around, headed for the grave with no hope.
**Wikipedia spews huge lists of them. For example, the religions which believe in a single all-powerful god (which by definition is God) are fairly numerous with in addition to Christianity: Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Baha’i Faith, Zoroastrianism, and some forms of Hinduism.**
It depends on how broad your definition is, but if you believe God is not only the only true God, creator of all things, and all-powerful (in classical theism God is absolute in power, wisdom, justice, etc.) but also absolute-personality then you really only have Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Although it is not really a religion, you could throw deism in (God exists but hasn’t spoken to us).
I apologize for the lateness of the reply. I had forgotten about this conversation.
This is all your opinion, not God’s. And it is completely indistinguishable to me from someone engaging in wishful thinking.
And you complain about circular reasoning while engaging in it? Let us note that most of Christianity can be true, yet I still be right about blasphemy. Blasphemy is essential only for stamping out rival belief systems, which is pure human bias.
Who cares? No hope for what? Classic sign of wishful thinking. My point here is that my beliefs don’t collapse to nothing, if reality and the afterlife fail to meet my expectations.
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I find it a little bit ironic that Rand goes dark immediately after a post on death and meaning….
The lizaroids musta got him!