Quite the opposite...It is with our lives that we endow meaning... How much meaning do the dead endow???

So what came first??? Being or meaning, chicken or egg???Was being always here waiting to be discovered, and will it always be here even when we are not... Get a grip...Our being is the same being all life on this planet shares... The sun has set, and the stars have risen over the same life from the beginning... We are conscious of being as we are conscious of life, and as long as we have life, but then, it does not matter, so it does not mean.... We cannot carry meaning beyond the grave, and with our lives we have meaning until death does us part...So rather than looking for meaning where it is not, let us concentrate on getting all the meaning available with our being, and then like Faustus, we can say: enough...

I don't think that we are reading off the same page here.

Of course we endow our lives with meaning through our actions and our words. But the history of thought of which conceptual ideas and frameworks are part thereof survive the death of the individual who creates them.

What else is the history of philosophy?:brickwall:

And as for how much meaning do the dead endow, well just consider the blood soaked 20th Century.

Yes, being came first. Meaning came from the boredom of being without meaning. So being created it in order to have meaning. But with meaning came lots of ansgt, such as what you are displaying, so maybe the pendulum will shift back to lack of meaning. I don't know.

Rich

Again; not!!! Life is meaning... It is in relation to life that all things have their value, positive and negative, valueable and worthless... We can give nothing meaning, and perhaps many notions having no substance... When we find concepts of meaning, it is because they have some relation to reality... We do not make concepts any more than we make symbols... We find a certain relationship, like the reflection to the image, and that is our concept, some times reflected numerically, and sometimes reflected rhetorically... But we make nothing... We find the relationship of reality to life, and there we have its meaning...

This is simply absurd. I do not understand where you are coming from, how can you say we give nothing meaning, sorry we attribute meaning to all our actions what else is function of the examined life?
A person has a perception of the world they then fashion that perception into an idea the idea becomes a concept that is embraced by others through the process of discourse. What don't you understand about this?
"we make nothing" obliviously as I said before we are not reading off the same page.:brickwall:

We give zero, as a numerical sign for nothing- meaning... Tecnically, knowledge is judgement, and only judgement over what we can know, which is to say: finite reality can be conceived...But then, we have no finite love, or justice, or truth as a reality, and yet out of a need for our life we name these quasi notions, and judge them all the time, out of the meaning of our own lives...

We find the relationship of reality to life, and there we have its meaning ..

Knowledge is a process of acquisition by observation. We are social animals we exist and interact with other sentient beings in society. Our thoughts which are formed by the process of perception then attain shape in language, we engage in discourse and this enables the fabric of concepts and ideas to circulate between people.

We only have a finite perception of our reality, we are not Gods we happen to be human beings, our brains can only comprehend so much.

Love is an affection an experience of both body and mind it is a feeling. Not an abstract idea.

Life has no intrinsic meaning. :poke-eye:

I understand what it means to you. I am just suggesting that everyone finds different meaning. For me, just being is enough doing things during the day. Sometimes I invent some meaning to give me more drive, but it is not always necessary. Being came first, and then I had to invent some meaning (which changes over time), to make it interesting. For example, I don't remember having much meaning when I was born.

Rich

If, what you say is true, that everyone finds different meaning, why do we all meet in the supermarket on Saturday and Sunday...Why do we all go to work on Monday until we are found to be an impediment to making profit...Why do we have so much in common and so little to each of us that is unique...

Life has no particular meaning...Life is all meaning...

I don't think we are all robots doing exactly the same thing all the time. I know lots of people who do none of what you describe, so I wonder hy you believe everyone is doing what you suggesting? It is interesting that you view people in a such monolithic manner, while I see them as individuals doing everything in a different way. But we do share relationships since sharing is one aspect of joint observation and creation.

Rich

The common notion of "being" as some sort of fixed static material reality is wrong.

The universe is composed of process "becoming" not "being".
Being is a concept (elements of the past that have been incoporated into the present and may continue into the future).

Everything is in flux: moments or droplets of experience.
Those perceptions or memories of the past that temporarily perist constitute "being".
Any notion of "being" as fixed or permanent is an illusion.

See Plato's forms or Aristotles "essence" or Hume's "I".
Hereclitus "you never step into the same river twice".The concept persists but the river changes.

What is "being"? Can one answer this question without a tautology? And if not, why?


Feel free to interrogate the assumptions behind these questions. I don't really mind how you approach the whole matter, as long as you can in some way satisfy my curiosity

"The most important thing is to find out what is the most important thing".
[Shunryu Suzuki]

Grasshopper, (sorry couldnt resist.:bigsmile:) Enlightenment is not any particular stage that you attain.

As a westerner I find that the moment of satori could be expressed by the metaphor of jumping a fence but in the moment that one jumps the fence one realises that the fence isnt there in the first place. All life is illusion or is it illustration?

Is Zen a state of being? How and why do differing states of consciousness affect being. Is being constituted by thought and process of thinking?

Life certainly is not real because it is not eternal; but then, what is????

Life is not real? Cut me and I bleed. :brickwall: