Life, the Universe, and Everything Else I Don’t Care About

“Life.  Don’t talk to me about life.” –Marvin the Paranoid Android

Welcome one and all (but mostly the one) to another exciting edition of Philosophical Fridays!  Here, I attempt to bring you the big topics of discussion that nobody else is willing to cover because the media is way too self-involved in the irrational and ridiculous.  Who cares who the President will be come January 20^th, 2013?  Whoever it is will just continue to screw up the country anyway.  Besides, the world’s going to end in December.  Just ask the Mayans.  Sorry, they’re dead.

That’s enough politics.  I hate that topic anyway.  (In case you don’t know what politics are, here’s a word breakdown: ‘poli’ from the Greek word for “city” and ‘tics’ from the Greek word for “annoying bloodsucking insect that gives you Lyme disease”.)

For today's topic of dicussion, I would like to talk about that old phrase, life, the universe, and that third one that I oft forget.  Firstly, what is life?  Let's allow those geniuses out in Oxford to give you an incorrect idea:

Life
Pronunciation: /lʌɪf/

1) [mass noun] the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death
2) the existence of an individual human being or animal
3) the period between the birth and death of a living thing, especially a human being
4) vitality, vigour, or energy
5) [mass noun] (in art) the depiction of a subject from a real model, rather than from an artist’s imagination

Well, that was utter crap.  Any definition that uses words to define a word from their same language is automatically biased and is part of what I like to call Heisenberg's uncertain verbiage principle in which by simply speaking a word, you have thus changed its definition to whatever you feel it should be at the moment.  This is the underlying principle to linguistic dynamics and is the cause of such atrocities as the birth of Ebonics from English and the entire country of France.

I’d like to say that life is a big ball of wibbly, wobbly stuff, but that is time, and I don’t want to get my definitions crossed.  I will instead say this: life is that little thing all around you that you accidentally became a part of, back during the halcyon days, when you were an ætherial nothing and decided conception was a good idea.  And you’ve continued apologizing for that momentary lapse of judgment and missed opportunity at foresight ever since.  Sadly, nothing you do will ever be enough to make up for your brief blemish on the history of everything, but you’re welcome to keep on trying.  Life is what gives purpose to attorneys, so shame on you.

Often, one finds one wondering one thing, like how many times one can use one in one sentence.  Other times, one finds oneself questioning the meaning of life.  What is the meaning of life, you might ask, because I have just pushed that thought into your head?  Thanks to the modern miracle of science (fiction) and the long-standing human tradition of the satirical comedy, we now know that the ultimate answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything is ‘42’.  It has also been surmised that the question, to which 42 is the answer, is ‘what is 9 multiplied by 6?’  It is when you grasp that the answer is 42 and not 54 as you have previously been taught in that inconsequential institution allocated "Earth designation: school" that you can finally come to terms with the fact that there is something seriously wrong with the universe.  It’s at that moment that you finally understand that you will never understand anything, thus creating a paradox; that is the meaning of life.

What does the universe have to do with it all?  Well, it’s sort of the place where it all has to happen, isn’t it?  If there wasn’t a universe, there would be no life, at least not as we know it.  And if there was no life, well, there wouldn’t really be any need for a universe.  Why even have a place for things to happen if you aren’t going to have living being to eventually come along and mess it all up?  Intelligent design at its finest, people: billions of years of evolution just to have intelligent beings rip gaping black holes in the fabric of the cosmos with large hadron colliders (which brings me full circle to point one about not worrying about the upcoming election; December 22nd is coming).

All of this is especially disturbing and mind boggling for the die hard atheist who just read that last bit, sat himself in a corner, and is rocking himself softly to the sounds of his own humming notes.  The universe must serve some purpose because otherwise it wouldn’t have this obsessive need to be observed.  Shit happens, and it can only happen if there is an observable reason for it to happen.  There is no reason for anything to happen in the universe, thus creating a paradox; that is the meaning of the universe.

Everything else is just filler, so make of it what you will.  Personally, I find it all to just be one giant distraction, which is why it all has to be so flashy with the colors, lights, smells, sounds, and those random whirly effects that you sometimes get with fast moving pinwheels.  Certain foods taste sweet not so that we will eat them and perpetuate our own biology, but rather so we will enjoy eating them, providing a distraction to our own biology which is tied directly to our mortality.  Everything is a paradox; that is the meaning of a paradox.