A Goodreads user asked Tentatively, A Convenience:

What is the meaning of life?

Tentatively, A Convenience “The Meaning of Life”
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
October 6, 2016

Wow! I’ve actually been asked a question on GoodReads after writing here for 9 years. Thank you! The question is “What is the meaning of life?” The questioner, John, spelled all the words in their usual manner & followed conventional grammar. As such, he left me little obvious room for responding to the question as if it were in several discrete parts: What is the? What is the meaning? What is the meaning of? etc.. John has “liked” my verbose criticism of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans so he’s obviously open to wordplay.

Given that I’ve always found the question “What is the meaning of life?” to be an absolutely ludicrous pseudo-profundity, I find it hard to believe that any intelligent person would ask it seriously. Therefore, I suspect John of asking me this as a way of challenging my abilities to come up with a good punchline. But, 1st, why am I critical of the question? Generally, I’m critical of it because its usual implication is that there’s a central purpose to life such as ‘Life only has meaning through serving God’s will' or “Life only has meaning gleaned through repeated witnessings of Monty Python’s movie entitled “The Meaning of Life”'.

Apparently, even defining “life” to produce a meaning for it as a word is problematic:

“Life is a characteristic distinguishing physical entities having biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased, or because they never had such functions and are classified as inanimate. Various forms of life exist such as plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria. The criteria can at times be ambiguous and may or may not define viruses, viroids or potential artificial life as living. Biology is the primary science concerned with the study of life, although many other sciences are involved.

“The definition of life is controversial. The current definition[according to whom?] is that organisms maintain homeostasis, are composed of cells, undergo metabolism, can grow, adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, and reproduce. However, many other biological definitions have been proposed, and there are also some borderline cases, such as viruses. Biophysicists have also proposed some definitions, many being based on chemical systems. There are also some living systems theories, such as the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that the Earth is alive; the former first developed by James Grier Miller. Another one is that life is the property of ecological systems, and yet another is the complex systems biology, a branch or subfield of mathematical biology. Some other systemic definitions includes the theory involving the darwinian dynamic, and the operator theory. However, throughout history, there have been many other theories and definitions about life such as materialism, the belief that everything is made out of matter and that life is merely a complex form of it; hylomorphism, the belief that all things are a combination of matter and form, and the form of a living thing is its soul; spontaneous generation, the belief that life repeatedly emerge[s] from non-life; and vitalism, a discredited scientific hypothesis that living organisms possess a "life force" or "vital spark". Abiogenesis is the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. Life on Earth arose 3.8–4.1 billion years ago. It is widely accepted that current life on Earth descended from an RNA world, but RNA based life may not have been the first. The mechanism by which life began on Earth is unknown, although many hypotheses have been formulated, most based on the Miller–Urey experiment. In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms living on Earth.” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life

I tend to think that everything is “alive” in the hylozoistic sense. I don’t however, think of things as having “souls” or “spirits” - including humans. I think of us more as being temporary arrangements of matter that produce characteristics dependent on the nature of the conglomerate. Some arrangements of matter produce energy flows that produce consciousness. I have no method for determining whether some forms of matter have what I would recognize as consciousness or not. As such, I tend to think of matter that doesn’t appear to me to have consciousness or the ability to move independently of forces outside of itself as being “inanimate” but not necessarily not alive - stones, for example.

Since I’ve found that the more consciousness a thing has the higher my likelihood of interfacing with it on a satisfactory level is, the purpose of my life has often tended to be to seek out such positive interactions & to avoid the ones where humans of apparently lower degrees of consciousness propel objects of apparent inanimateness at me - such as stones or bullets. Thus, the meaning of life, in the sense of ‘purpose’, might be to “dodge the bullet”. Otherwise, I think that life is meaningless - which I have no problem with whatsoever given that I can still enjoy the heck out of it anyway. In fact, I’m not sure that a Meaning of Life might not just ruin the whole business for me by oversimplifying things.

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