The Meaning of All This

I'm the kind of guy who's really interested in existentialist thoughts and theories. I've actually come up with a few of my own, but I'm going to start by going through a bunch of other popular "Meanings of Life" that I like. Repeat. These are not mine.

• To die having succeeded in your purpose. (which begs "What is your purpose? Some personal quest or journey or some quest or journey you've been given, as if by God or another outside force?")
• To leave a legacy, such as a work of art or book. (This is obviously dealing with time as something immediate, and not grandiose. The universe is 14 billion years old...nothing anyone can leave will last for as long as the universe has been around)
• To be without questions.
  
• To keep asking questions.
• To explore, and expand beyond our frontiers. (The "manifest destiny" of this particular question.)
• To learn from one's own or others' mistakes.
• To seek truth, knowledge, understanding, or wisdom.
• To seek the meaning of life. (Kind of like: "The reason I'm eating the sandwich is so I can eat the sandwich.")
• To live in peace with each other, and in harmony with our natural environment.
• To love and to be loved in return.
• To turn fear into joy at a constant rate achieving on literal and metaphorical levels: immortality, enlightenment, and atonement.
• To achieve a supernatural connection within the natural context.
• To achieve enlightenment and inner-peace.
• To become God, or God-like. (This one is strange to me. But interesting.)
• To experience existance from an infinite number of perspectives in order to expand the consciousness of all there is.
• To produce useful structure in the universe over and above consumption.
• To reach Heaven in the afterlife (Whatever your picture of Heaven may be.)
• To simply live until one dies. (There is no meaning of life.)

Now, those are all reasonable answers to the question "What is the Meaning of Life?" And so are more absurd answers, such as the number 42. I like to think of myself as just one part of the universal consciousness: if there are aliens existing at this moment on one or any number of other planets, they are too most likely dealing with the same question. For civilizations that have grown before us, thousands or millions or billions of years ago, they most likely went extinct before ever pinning it down. However...there is a lot of play within the question itself. For when you include all other civilizations, all other species of cellular or other organisms that could be considered beings with higher consciousness, the term "life" becomes variable.

The dictionary's first entry on the word "life" includes two seperate thoughts.

1. 1. The property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism.
   2. The characteristic state or condition of a living organism.

Note, however, that the definition does not describe WHICH property or quality distinguishes a living thing from something dead. Life, in our terms, is not something we can readily apply to organisms that are unfamiliar. Aliens and other life forms possibly need different things as we do for their existance. For their thought.

So perhaps "Meaning of Life" would better be defined as "Meaning of Consciousness" or "Meaning of Existance." Personally, I think the question is more "Meaning of Consciousness" as civilizations such as ours ask the question of ourselves versus of all life. "Meaning of Life" is usually interpreted as "Meaning of Life For Myself, A Human on The Planet Earth," and so cannot fully incorporate all life - everywhere. Also, I think the question is less a question of existance as it is a question of our place in that existance. Our body of self-aware observation and thought within the grand scheme of things.

Hence: Why are we conscious? Of our surroundings, our selves, our place in time and space? Why do we think, hypothesize, and test? An answer might be "human nature." But do we not assume that if aliens exist, and have visited our planet, (big assumption) that they will be much more advanced than we are? Do we not assume that they will have thought, hypothesized, and tested? Human nature is only called human nature because humanity is the only group we have observed with such properties. Perhaps it is really just nature. Cosmic, galactic, universal.

I don't know really where I'm headed here. There is no conclusion, there is no answer, not really. There is only thought, conjecture. There is only idea, discussion, consciousness.

We are here. Now what are you going to do about it?