I'd have to take the Nihilistic stance that life is without any objective meaning. It appears to me that any meaning, morals, or values that somebody claims are inherent to the universe are merely their own human abstraction; this post included. Yet, that shouldn't (and doesn't) stop anybody from prescribing meaning to things and living "full" lives and achieving happiness. There are two facts that I strongly believe in: We're stuck being humans, for better or worse, and the universe will continue to be indifferent.
I'm sorry but without concrete definitions this entire discussion is stupid. (Retroactively defining words to make your position tautological is not valuable either.)<p>The entire article consists of a remark that life is a self-replicating chemical reaction.<p>A more interesting question to debate might be whether this replicating property is an acceptable definition for life, (i.e. can there exist systems that aren't replicating but can be considered life, and how might these arise independently of replicating life?), or what happens when you apply various definitions of life to other systems than the physical universe.
A pithy statement, but a pretty weak argument. Given the entire purpose of the field of philosophy, this paragraph or so doesn't resonate especially strongly.
One thing that I don't get is what was before and what is the source of Big Bang. So Big Bang, boom, expansion, star/planet formation, red shift, evolution, selfish gene, humans - I get. But where did the Big Bang came from? Fluctuation from nothingness? Why? From something else? Why? Something existed before and produced the Big Bang? Where this thing that existed before came from then? Doesn't make any sense.
You could argue that intelligent life is something that our ecosystem has evolved in order to resist mass extinction due to meteorite impacts. Last time round with the dinosaurs there was no answer but maybe next time we'll be ready. It just about makes sense if you think on then scale of whole ecosystems and meteorite impacts and many planets.
Like this? <a href="http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html</a><p>I was thinking about this too the other day. Life seems to (more or less) be a set chemical processes that accelerates entropy in a given universe.<p>Say if you were the designer of the universe and started the big bang. If someone told you to calculate how long it would take until all energy is evenly distributed - (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe</a>), the simple way you would calculate this is just to calculate how many generations of stars your universe would support.<p>But if some sort of life (like us humans) arises and populates, say, 10%, of the star systems, entropy would happen a lot more than you originally estimated! Entropy is accelerated by life!<p>In my conclusion, it seems that the ultimate goal of all energy/matter - not just life, is to express itself through the second law of thermodynamics - (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics</a>). To use up itself and become static again. That ultimate death is your ultimate goal.
--this is the meaning of life - there is no other--<p>he must be a happy person - he found the meaning of life - and he knows that there is no other<p>either he is a total --fool-- or he knows something that we do not know