Is Life an Absurd Game?
Scientific objectivity and the question of life’s meaning
You’d be forgiven for suspecting that the question of whether life has a “meaning” is somehow as empty, confused, and irrelevant as much of the rest of speculative philosophy.
A lot of philosophical writing isn’t just unreadable but comes to nothing in that it makes no difference to what happens in the world. Scientific breakthroughs can lead to technological revolutions that shake the earth, but philosophical progress is, at best, neoshamanic in that it’s part of the author’s “spiritual” or artistic self-exploration.
Standing between religion and science, philosophy is about understanding our place in life. Instead of accepting myths, dogmas, and speculations on faith, philosophers test them with reason, yet they can’t test them in a foolproof way with scientific methods because philosophical issues are more open-ended than empirical hypotheses.
The sheer fact that the question about life’s meaning is philosophical is already a turnoff to average folks. What difference could any such abstract issue make, and what could that age-old question even mean?
It’s tempting to think the question is about a function or a purpose. Aristotle promoted this interpretation when he compared organisms to artifacts. There’s…
