3. Extension of the organism, usually by means of replication.
Insight into the meaning of life has been a central preoccupation of literature from ancient times. Beginning with through such twentieth-century writers as , authors have explored ultimate meaning through usually indirect, "representative" depictions of life. For the ancients, human life appeared within the matrix of a cosmological order. In the dramatic saga of war in Homer's or the great human tragedies of Greek playwrights such as , , and , inexorable Fate and the machinations of the Gods are seen as overmastering the feeble means of mortals to direct their destiny.
The underlying mechanism of evolution is therefore the iteration of the embodied desire within an ever more complex competitive and social environment. Over vast numbers of iterations, this process forces some life-forms along a pathway that solves the desire for survival and reproduction by developing ever more complex and adaptable minds. This is achieved by supplementing their underlying cellular embodied chemistry with a specialist organ (although still based on chemistry) that we call its brain, able to rapidly process electrical signals. Advanced minds can collect and process vast inputs of data by ‘projecting’ the derived output back onto its environmental source, that is by acting. However advanced it might be, an organism is still driven by the same basic needs for survival and reproduction. The creative process, however, leads the organism towards an increasingly aesthetic experience of the world. This is why for us the world we experience is both rich and beautiful.
Within the theology of Daoism, originally all humans were beings called ("original spirits") from and and the meaning in life for the adherents is to realize the temporal nature of their existence, and all adherents are expected to practice, hone and conduct their mortal lives by way of (practice of the truth) and (betterment of the self), as a preparation for spiritual transcendence here and hereafter.
1) There is no meaning of life, we simply exist;
Confucianism deemphasizes afterlife. Even after humans pass away, they are connected with their descendants in this world through rituals deeply rooted in the virtue of filial piety that closely links different generations. The emphasis is on normal living in this world, according to the contemporary scholar of Confucianism Wei-Ming Tu, "We can realize the ultimate meaning of life in ordinary human existence."
places the meaning of life in the context of human relationships. People's character is formed in the given relationships to their parents, siblings, spouse, friends and social roles. There is need for discipline and education to learn the ways of harmony and success within these social contexts. The purpose of life, then, is to fulfill one's role in society, by showing honesty, propriety, politeness, , loyalty, humaneness, benevolence, etc. in accordance with the order in the cosmos manifested by (Heaven).
Anything that is not itself is the other; and the collection of others constitute its environment. The organism must destructively use the other to satisfy its reproductive desire, but on achieving this, it produces an additional other – but now one that also embodies its own selfish aim and the means to satisfy this aim. Therefore, even by an organism satisfying its desire, it makes the continuing satisfaction of its desires ever more difficult to achieve. A partial solution to this dilemma is for genetically-related entities to form a cooperating society.
sees life as an opportunity to understand God the Creator as well as to discover the divinity which lies in each individual. God is omnipresent in all creation and visible everywhere to the spiritually awakened. Guru Nanak Dev stresses that God must be seen from "the inward eye," or the "heart," of a human being: devotees must to progress towards enlightenment. In this context of the omnipresence of God, humans are to love one another, and they are not enemies to one another.
Singer (1993) defend this sort of view of meaning in life.
I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term — as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love — with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul — the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one’s own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one’s own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.
. (2021) 'The Meaning of Life by Richard Taylor'. 23 November.
But what will be the outcome? If, as many physicists now believe, the universe is only information, then harnessing all the resources of the universe in one giant evolutionary process could plausibly provide a useful outcome for a species clever enough to create the universe in the first place. On this interpretation, life will ultimately organise all the physical resources of the universe into a single self-conscious intelligence, which in turn will then be able to interact with its creator(s).
“The Good Cause Account of the Meaning of Life,”
This leads many people to regard a sense of life as the province of some sort of special intuition, as a matter perceivable only by some special, non-rational insight. The exact opposite is true: a sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum; it can be felt, but it cannot be understood, by an automatic reaction; to be understood, it has to be analyzed, identified and verified conceptually. That automatic impression — of oneself or of others — is only a lead; left untranslated, it can be a very deceptive lead. But if and when that intangible impression is supported by and unites with the conscious judgment of one’s mind, the result is the most exultant form of certainty one can ever experience: it is the integration of mind and values.
The other answer is that the meaning of life is the will to power.
Life exists at many levels. Life is also a process through which energy and materials are transformed; but so is non-life. The difference is that the process of life is intimately linked to story it contains, whereas non-life is indifferent to the story we impose upon it. Yet life is only a story, so it can act only through matter. Therefore life is by nature a toolmaker. Its tools are potentially everything that exists, and its workshop is potentially the whole universe. So why do humans risk undermining the life of which they are part? Because they try to impose upon it a story of their own making. Yet humans, the ‘tool-making animals’, are themselves tools of life, in an unplanned experiment.