Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 by Scalzi John

Author:Scalzi, John [Scalzi, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humour, Writing, Politics, Biography, Anthologies, Science
ISBN: 9781429967716
Amazon: 1429967714
Goodreads: 8103661
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2008-09-13T07:00:00+00:00

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Today’s reader request, from Karl:

I would like to know what you think about the question, “what is the meaning of life?”

Is it a good question? Does it have an answer? Do you know it? Is it a stupid question for people that are too anal?

Oh, goody! I finally get to use my philosophy degree.

It’s not a stupid question. I’m not one of those people who subscribes to the theory of “there’s no such thing as a stupid question,” because there is, and I submit that in most cases you’re doing a disservice to the person asking the question by not pointing it out. However, this is not one. This does not automatically make it a good question, of course. Like many questions, what makes it good (or not) is the intent behind the question and the willingness to actually consider the response to it. Whether it’s a good question, in other words, depends on you.

The thing that gets me about the question “What is meaning of life?” is that generally the implication seems to be that there is just one meaning to it. That doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like pointing to a multi-hued striped shirt and asking “what color is that shirt?” You can answer by naming one of the colors of the shirt (thus ignoring the rest) or perhaps use technology to find a chromatic mean to all the colors of the shirt and describe that color through the use of Pantone strips or even angstrom units (which tells only what color the shirt would be if you mashed all the colors together—not the same question). If I were presented with a striped shirt and asked to name its color, I would say “You phrased your question poorly. Try again.”

“What is the meaning of life?” is to my mind phrased poorly; it implies all life has the same meaning, which would imply, among other things, that you have the same meaning to your life as your cat or a mat of blue-green algae—and no more meaning to your life than either. Both of these propositions may actually be true—but as with describing a striped shirt by naming one color, that’s not all there is to it.

Also, of course, it implicitly suggests there is meaning to life—which simply may not be the case. “Meaning” is the handmaiden of causality, and while the religiously-minded take comfort in the idea of an agent of universal causation (usually called “God”), as a matter of science, causation is a tricky thing. This is due in no small part to our current limits in understanding the universe. We can get to a near-infinitesimally small fraction of a second before the Big Bang to a point called Planck’s Time, but beyond that point the door is shut; our physical models of the universe fail. Beyond Plank’s Time lies god or randomness or some intriguing combination of the two or something else entirely. But it’s not inconceivable that our universe exists without causation (go see Dr.

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