beth
@23snjkc
@23snjkc
If you assume that meaning in life is something that is sometimes actually realised in individual lives, it makes perfect sense to try to find examples of those lives in which it is realised so that you can then start identifying some general features of meaningful lives.
As we interact with multiple versions of the others and increasingly sophisticated AI, we’re scripting a modern mythology where machines become more than tools — they become characters in our story.
we should embrace it
collectivity? The relationship of an individual to history and time? What kinds of public roles seem important and privileged?
hilosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations.’ This provocative remark comes from the paper ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’ (1953) by Margaret Macdonald.
Humans are meaning-making creatures. We live with biases that look real to us and cause us to make meaning, and we have brains that look for patterns, which is why you might see Jesus on a slice of toast.
Life narrative inextricably links memory, subjectivity, and the materiality of the body. As Paul John Eakin argues in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, "our lives in and as bodies profoundly shape our sense of identity" (xi). The ability to recover memories, in fact, depends upon the material body. There must be a body that per
... See moreThe digital realm, therefore, becomes a playground for our minds to project, interpret, and reimagine our identities.
Life, as it happens, is also an endless cycle, one of both cruelty and joy, of things that we value for no other reason than that they bind us together and hold stories of who we once were.
Things are not always the enemy.
The consensus view is that the two questions are fundamentally distinct and theoretically separate – you can have a meaningful life in a meaningless universe, and vice versa.