There's no inherent meaning to life because there's nothing that pre-exists your individual life to give it some prescribed meaning. Each of us, as individuals, must decide for ourselves what our life means and what purpose we should give it. The truth, as far as I can discern, is simply that we, as humans, crave meaning and purpose as a way to reconcile the conflicting duality of our identity: our symbolic self and our material self. Our material self decays and dies; turning into food for maggots. How can we, being constantly conscious of our own mortality, accept that we're tied to something that'll simply die one day and everything about ourselves, aside from what we've made and the memories we leave for others, will disappear forever? Thus, we try to invent some objective meaning to life or some prescribed purpose, yet, in reality, none of that exists.
So the only solution is to create your own sense of meaning or purpose in life, one that you invent for yourself that gives you a reason to wake up and embrace life every day. Or, you can simply embrace that life has no meaning and live with the absurdity of a meaningless world with a mind that wants to persevere past death.
I dissent from this dogma strenuously.
Some materialists have reduced us to butter; that is, they engage in nothing-buttery. To them, we are nothing but highly organized atoms; nothing but random assortments of DNA letters. “This random assortment of DNA is the ultimate justification of our existence.” This is false - it is the equivalent of saying Hamlet is nothing but a random assortment of letters. That’s not what Hamlet is - it’s what Hamlet is materially made of.
Rather, we are the ultimate justification for the random assortment of DNA. It is an empirical fact that we cannot be reduced to mere matter (see:
The Matter Myth,
Beyond Physicalism,
The Waning of Materialism,
Irreducible Mind, and
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False). The four dimensions of materialism are and remain the four walls of a prison. You must fly away from these prison walls like a bird!
The materialists lie. They will tell you that your consciousness is an illusion - yet they use this “illusion” to reach their conclusion. This thus refutes itself - one ought not trust the conclusion of an illusion. Thus laughable materialism collapses into the hilarity of solipsism. Materialism insists that even love, the peak of humanity, is itself an illusion. I say they are wrong - cling to love, for all else will pass away. I do not know a single materialist who really acts as though love were an illusion or who openly say such claims.
Nonetheless, let us pretend they are right and that the great light of love is an illusion. If this be so, then what a worthy illusion to fight for! This dream world I have made up is far better than this dreary, sunless world the materialists live in. It is better to fight for a nonexistent light than for an existent darkness. A philosophy which holds all that it cannot explain can be explained as mere illusions is not a serious philosophy.
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