Philosophy Paper

This was the last assignment I turned in. Not the final paper, I dropped the class. Turns out I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of why I should give a shit if Plato thought my computer has the Form Squareness... In the face of modern science, that's completely ridiculous. I can see why back then it might of made sence to quantify things any way you could, but now, it's not worth the time.

Does the universe have a purpose? Does life have a purpose?

I think that the idea of a purpose is entirely made up. It’s a thing that people made up as we went along to quantify our existence. We realized fairly early on that we weren’t quite like other creatures on the planet. We tried to explain this. We tried to explain events. “Why did that just happen?” “It happened because of this.” “Well what should I do about it?” Human beings have a never ending compulsion to reason. Whether or not the reasoning methods of a particular person make sense isn’t important.

The simple fact of the matter is that the universe just is. Life just is. You can play out a seemingly endless game of cause and effect to ascertain the “the beginning”, or whatever you want to call it. But it doesn’t change the fact that stuff exists. If you were to ask my mother why the universe existed or if life has a purpose she’d say, “To make you ask questions”. Now this devilishly annoying response, which I’ve been getting for nearly a quarter of a century, might be more profound than I had originally allowed for.

I find it extremely difficult to think that an all powerful being or collective of similar inbred beings, see Greek/Roman mythology, would ever get it in their head to create something for us to contemplate endlessly. I can think of a million other things I would rather do with my time than think of ways to confuse other people, or start wars…

What I do appreciate about my mother’s tagline is that it makes more sense than trying to answer the question of “why does it exist”. More interesting to me is the question of, “Why do you care?” I don’t care if a rock exists or why Chinese people used to think foot binding was sexy. Why does it matter? Contemplating questions of the past makes sense. It allows us to evaluate our experience and learn from our mistakes. But wondering why the universe exists doesn’t really make a lot of sense, it’s an unanswerable question. Just as soon as you think you’ve got it, someone else tells you, you don’t, and you’re back to square one. You can’t truly know you have the answer unless everyone is in agreement, but this presents another issue, “does that rock really exist after all?” Since everyone agreeing is as difficult as getting ten people trying to agree on pizza toppings, we’re all going to go hungry.