Funny, i personally think its why life is so good. Without death we wouldnt have any value
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i couldn’t agree more.
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Death is why it has no value. Life could be excellent, life could be shitty, it ends the same way either way, and barring an afterlife, you won’t even remember hat was in that life, so why struggle to accomplish anything or feel guilty about how you affect another’s life, when it makes no difference? The idea of life having meaning because it had a limit is an illusion; it is a means for the mind to distract itself from thinking about what death really means in relation the life that leads up to it. Unfortunately, I stopped being able to distract myself with that kind of talk a long time ago.
Sorry, worrying about my dog the last few weeks got me again pondering death.
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I don’t particularly think that the meaning of any specific life is intrinsic.
What I do or don’t do with my own life has meaning to me while I’m alive, sure, but once I’m gone, I’m not likely to care much about what I did or didn’t do. What will matter though is the impact I had on other people throughout that life, for good, bad or indifferent.
Here on this forum we talk pretty much daily about things that mean very little. The nuances of a computer game are trivial when compared to things like conflict in Europe, the problems of inflation, women’s right to choose vs. fetus’ right to live, and other grand (in scope) topics. We still have them though. We still come to this page every day and discuss minutiae like what outfit works best for a professional assassin, whether a phone is overpowered, or whether day/night effects will be work in a not-yet released electronic dollhouse. What we say and converse about does matter, even minutely, to the people we talk with.
I have an impact on my kids, my co-workers, and the few people I call my friends in ways that I cannot really imagine and that is the legacy of a life. It may not really matter in the long run, but we still talk about the lives of George Washington, Cleopatra, Hitler, and Julius Caesar long after those people are gone. Their lives weren’t pointless, at least in terms of the impact they had on other people.
We may not all be as well known or have as much impact as history’s “greats”, but we do impact, in a small way at least, those around us that we interact with. It has to be enough to recognize that small contribution I suppose.
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If it’s not intrinsic, then it’s not there. Applying meaning to something that didn’t already have one by the nature of its existence is just a fancy way of saying you made one up and are pretending it’s there. That’s how I’ve always seen it and have yet to come across any take that has convinced me otherwise.
The opposite of intrinsic isn’t nothing. Extrinsic value is still value.
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A make-believe value.
What made you this nihilistic
He’s had a really rough few weeks with his dog.
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But hes always been like this
Not always, just for the last 17 years or so after a rather unfortunate epiphany. It comes back now and then in moments of extreme stress. I become the Sulk.
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I agree.
Since my father has lung cancer, I think about death a lot. Way too much than it’s good for me. And since he will die because of this cancer, I don’t want to even think that his life was meaningless, because it was not. Especially not for me and many people who knew him.
Sorry if I may sound a bit angry. But it annoys me when people say, life is meaningless 
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all values are “make believe”; that string in the maze thing from earlier.
Precisely. Nothing actually has any value.
you’re looking for something extrinsic to give us value, but value is something we construct from within; we always have. you have values, they mean something to you, and that’s all that matters.
what do you think ‘value’ means?
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The Heisenberg Parameters of Perfection have no value
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And we’ve reached the looping point, because my response would just be a lengthier version of what I just said. It’s at this point such discussions always get out of control, so I’m hitting the escape pod button. Knew I was asking for a headache with that reincarnation question, but I’m not part of any other groups and have no one else to ask.
There, that’s a good example.
fair enough. still interested in what you think ‘value’ means though.
Value is how much one thing’s purpose affects another thing’s purpose. Food, for example, would seem to have a high value to humans, as it’s purpose - sustaining us - allows us to continue on in existence to serve our own purpose. Yet, as humans have no purpose (unless you consider us to be an extinction event for Earth to reset), that value is false, because that food is not really helping further any purpose at all.