Life's worth
 

Asked a mod if I could chance this and he said okay.

This is a thread from a forum about lucid dreaming that caught my attention. Most if not all of the posters in the thread besides myself (Drone on that board) are arguing that life is utterly and completely pointless. It starts as a discussion on if suicide is selfish, then leads off on a couple tangents.

My question is "how much is life worth?" We'll make an effort to keep it as far from religion as possible.

Life is what you make of it, for real.

I mean, looking at it from a pure facts standpoint, we're balls of muscles and nerves that die incredibly quickly in the grand scheme of things. If that's all we could think of, why not just hurl ourselves off a cliff?

Things like instincts drive the base part of our existence, which is what makes us want to live at a deep, deep level.

Reason forms the higher, more logical reason we want to live. We want things that aren't simple needs. Almost everyone wants to live, at some level. We want to experience life.

That's what I think, anyway.

There is no price that one can put on life. From the beginning, humans have potential for great things. Sure, our lives and worldviews are shaped both by genetic predispositions and the attitudes of our caregivers, but in the end, we are responsible for our choices. Of all of the animals on this planet, we are the only ones who have moved beyond mere survival to manipulate the forces of nature themselves, the surface of the earth, and even particles too small to see with the naked eye. The dreamers and the innovators of our species see meaning in life each day, and their discoveries and innovations will continue to set us apart from our fellow animals.

Life has as much value or worth as you, the individual, give it. Humans are meaning-creating beings. Without self-generated meaning we stagnate.

The problem lies in the influence of the materialist-reductionists that have quashed all notions and related phenomenon that deal with the concept of mind. To them, the mind is at best an unstudyable phenomenon and at worst nothing more than a synonym for brain.

In a society such as this, we are encouraged to avoid thinking of meaning and value in terms of mind and instead to think of them in terms of matter and physiology. We are encouraged to not create our own meaning, but rather to latch onto the meaning of others and to find meaning where we are told to--organized religion, materialist-reductionist science, mass media, or what have you.

As an example, consider the colour red. We can, through various instruments, determine the exact wavelength of light that produces the colour red. We can make equipment to respond in various ways when it is exposed to red light. We can do this with precision.

When a person sees red, according to the materialist-reductionists, the light enters the eye, travels through the optic chasm, to the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. From there it passes through the V1, V2, and V4 areas for colour processing before it goes on to other areas of the brain for further processing. That's the process, essentially. I've simplified it a little. But for all intents and purposes, this is it. That's what happens when a person sees red.

What we can't do, even with all our technology, is create a subjective experience of seeing red. If you believe the materialist-reductionists, the subjective experience doesn't matter, it almost isn't real. But subjective experience is everything. Subjective experience allows us to have associations, schemas, and feelings about the colour red when we see it. It allows us to think about what it means to see red; about what the colour red means to an individual when he or she sees it.

Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, while it does have some criticisms, sums up how I feel about this. Life is a process. Life has only so much value or meaning as we create as individuals. If our needs aren't being met, something is missing and there are consequences. One of those needs is creativity. Whether you agree with its place on the hierarchy, or whether there should be a hierarchy at all--belief, creativity, meaning, freedom, responsibility, and death are all needs.

Therefore, my absolutely subjective response is: Life, to me, has the utmost value so long as I am a self-empowered, creative, and growing being.

Alright, I'm going to apologize in advance because the argument I'm about to make (and I've made it before) may seem like I'm trying to objectivize it. This is not the case; this is merely the way I think of it, and I've thought about it a few times in the past.

There are two main camps on the issue of what a human is. One side says that a human has a soul, is a being with free will, is unique, and so on. The other says that a human is simply a bundle of neurons, some bones, muscle, skin, adipose, whatever. Materialists, spiritualists, whatever. In either case, I see no argument for suicide unless it's a very, very special case.

On the spiritualist side, the case is obvious. We are all unique, and killing ourselves deprives the world of another person who can contribute as a whole, even if only in a small way. Every life is important and wasting it is the worst crime imaginable.

On the materialist side, suicide STILL doesn't make sense. Sure, the value of human life is diminished, but from a functional perspective, a person killing themselves means that they can't pass on their genes (which, at its base, is pretty much all life can do) and they can't help others pass on their genes (which is still helpful if a person is, say, infertile; adoption helps).

Plus, if you think about it in terms of "right" and "wrong", all those are at a basic level are behaviours that are reinforced negatively or positively. If a person feels pain, whether self-caused or otherwise, they feel negative emotions. They don't want it to happen again. Pain is thus "bad". If you die, people around you will feel sadness at the death of a loved one. Death is also therefore "bad". And regardless of how much you feel bad about your life and how it works, killing yourself only results in more pain for others. Who is to say that you won't work your way out of the sadness you feel at the time? From an emotional standpoint, your family and friends will never forget you and will wish you are still around. From a functional standpoint, your family and friends will have to give from their precious time and resources to, at the very least, clean up your remains.

So really, I don't see the point of suicide. It's a short-term solution that causes long-term problems - long term problems that aren't even concentrated on the person who decided to enact the "solution". The ONLY possible case I can think of is if a person has a severe debilitating illness that they won't recover from but that's another discussion entirely.

Last I knew black market prices were around $500.

With that out of my system:

The value of life is purely objective. We have the capability of creating it, destroying it, and all the grey areas in between with regards to quality of life.

Society's values aside life is worth as much as anyone is willing to put into it. My life may be worth everything to me, while my friend's life may have marginal value, while at the same time my neighbor puts absolutely no value on my life at all. All of these "values" are true.

Example: Milk at store A is $3.00 a gallon while store B sells it at $3.75 a gallon. The same milk is worth both simultaneously based on what the individual guages its value to be. I may decide it has no value and not purchase it or I may decide they value it too much and steal it.

Think of it as this... do you think they guys that inveted the Internet ever thought that today, that same internet would bring the world together, globalize all economies and eventually (if recent news are precedent of) destroy capitalism itself?

Ofcourse not... but they knew it could be big. The same can be said about the invention of Plastic, the Plane, Bicycle, Ovens, sliced bread!

My point is that, life is as big as your legacy. Some bring revolutions to the world of men. But not everybody is born for that stuff... others, raise their children well, and those children go off generation after generation, maybe, changing the world too...

Life itself is too short for you see the results of the things you set in motion on the long run. So, life is worth a lot, too much even. Yes. ofcourse it is... but its true worth is only as big as you make it out to be. Your legacy.

Maybe a tree you planted, a child you raised, a book you wrote, a speech you gave, a company you founded, a call you made, a donation you did, or a invention you created.

All those things matter, because none of us would be here today the way we are if hundred of thousands of other people in the past hadnt done a bunch of little to major things in their time.

Contrary to what I might project, I have a rather bleak and dark view of life. Life truly IS pointless and meaningless. In the grand scheme of things, YOUR LIFE WILL NOT MATTER. My life won't matter. Even if I cure cancer, it won't matter. Even if I end up setting off a chain reaction in the earth's core that causes it to explode and all human life to be extinct, it doesn't matter. In a billion years, humankind will likely be extinct. We're playing a huge game that has to come to an end at some point, with new players on the field, but even they too will come to an end. For all I know, life itself could come to an end. There is no inherent, universal meaning to existence.

So, why live?

Because it's fun!

You may say I'm hedonistic. Perhaps I am. But I honestly think the best (perhaps only) reason to live is selfishness in indulging yourself. If you're dead, you're done, and you can't experience anything anymore. You can't miss life, there's no "you" to do the missing. So, as much as some people take comfort in thinking people continue to "live on" in an "afterlife," I don't personally believe in it. Grieving at a funeral isn't grieving for them for losing their life, it's grieving for yourself for losing a friend.

But honestly, I believe the poets and writers who say the undocumented life isn't worth living. I'll freely admit that there is no anchor to gauge morality from in the cosmic expanse of the universe. There's no universal right and wrong, merely right and wrong that applies individually.

It sounds hopelessly dark and pessimistic, and I can't even rationalize how I'm okay with such views, but I do have my own moral code, and I believe in being nice to people. I was taught that others have just as much right to everything as I do. I see us all as equals. I adhere to society's conception of morality mostly because I expect others to do the same.

To be brutally frank, I've had more than my fair share of being knocked down and being kicked when I'm down. There have been many times where these occurrences have resulted in me re-evaluating my approach to dealing with other people, and wanting to settle things "an-eye-for-an-eye." Every time that happens, I remember the response to that quote: "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." Or, to paraphrase in a more contemporary form, "Faggotry ends here."

So, I take it like a punching bag and keep on rolling with it. I know that if you zoom out past that little window, it doesn't matter all that much, and my reaction is more important than "getting even." The further you zoom out, the less it matters, until you get to the point where on a scale of infinity, the original action, my reaction, and the reaction it causes, and so on, ALL don't matter.

So, my philosophy on life; everyone is equal. EVERYONE, and yes, even people who commit atrocities.

Even in my most relativistic of moods, I really can't think of a single argument offhand that I could make with a straight face that'd involve a subjective value for life -- I just can't accept that whole "if you think your life is meaningless, it's okay for you to take it" kind of bullcrap.

Our moods and perceptions are subjective, but the meaning of life is not. So while our moods and perceptions about the merit or worth of our lives is fluid, our life still has the same objective meaning -- the same potential, the same inherent worth, the same priceless value. We may deceive ourselves in low moments of our lives into believing that our life is meaningless and thus, "justify our nonexistence," but our basis for such claims is erroneous, a fallacy based on our unstable emotional frame of mind.

Here's what I think about human life in a nutshell: the value of human life can be objectively measured, but the objective measurement of the value of that life is infinite, because our potential in the future is infinite. Even if we do not fulfill the entirety of our potential, we nonetheless have such subtle ripple effects on the nature of our society and the advancement of mankind that, to add all the tiny ways we change other people's lives, we'd find an untold degree of influence and power. Individual human beings are much more powerful then we expect -- we just don't often have the ability to recognize the results our existence has, because it's all buried under layers. We label things "coincidence" and "fate," but the truth of the matter is that every decision everyone makes in life is somehow altered by everyone else's decisions, to the extent that even a routine day for me could change another person's life.

Take Barack Obama for example. You can look at a man like him and ask yourself: who influenced him? Who made him into the man he is today, the (most likely) future President of the United States? Some answers to this question are obvious, like his mother and his grandparents and other family members. Even then, his own mother continually made mundane, everyday decisions that could have changed Obama's life trajectory dramatically. What if she ended up with another man way back when, or if she went to a different school, or if she chose not to brush her teeth in the morning and, in so doing, created a series of ripple effects that led to her leading a profoundly different life?

But then there are thousands -- yes, probably thousands -- of friends, teachers, pastors, mentors, political figures, celebrities, campaign volunteers, and even complete strangers (not to mention future voters!) who have had profound impacts on his life. If Obama didn't meet a woman at a coffeeshop one day, maybe he would have considered an entirely different career in the future! It's the ripple effect all over again...every decision we make, no matter how big or how small, has infinite reprecussions that we can only begin to fathom.

I remember an example from my own life. One day, I was taking the Metro in DC, and I lost my fare card. An elderly woman -- a complete stranger, mind you -- in a random act of kindness, saw that I was struggling to find the card and offered me a dollar thirty five of her own money to pay the fee and get a new card. I refused her offer, as I had enough change myself -- so her offer was meaningless, right?
Not exactly. Later that day a group of tourists (a family, with two children) asked if I was familiar with the area and if I could direct them to the correct metro stop to get easy access to the Spy Museum. They were asian and possibly from a country like Japan or Korea, as they had heavy accents. I could barely understand them. I thought for a moment about feigning ignorance, though I knew exactly where the Spy Museum was, because I had been in a grouchy mood earlier that day. But that elderly women's previous intervention had brightened my mood considerably, so I suddenly felt the need to "pay it forward," to quote that mediocre movie's title. So I spent about ten minutes (repeated myself a couple times and had to speak slowly, as they could barely understand me) directing them appropriately, and they thanked me profoundly. One of them said I was the kindest American they had met yet.

Obviously I tell this story with a bit of selfish motive, as it makes me out into some grandly compassionate human being. But what's interesting is how that spilt second decision, influenced so heavily by a stranger's behavior to me earlier that day, had both positive and negative reprecussions. I was an extra ten minutes late (would have been a little late anyway, but still) to meet up with my then-girlfriend because I took the time to direct the family to the Spy Museum. That didn't work out well for me personally, but in retrospect, the relationship was doomed to fail anyway. But was the exact timing of our breakup altered by this event? What about the lives of the tourists? Was their experience in America dramatically altered? Did their presence at the Spy Museum have any rippling effect in anyone else's lifes? Did they "pay it forward" by helping out an American in need because they remembered that dorky skinny caucasian kid they met earlier?

This is just one example, but you can compound that exponentially, and that is the objective worth of a single human life. Every human life impacts every other life in ways we can barely imagine. Even here on the internet, we've shared ideas and thoughts on NPF that may have influenced our lives. Mirai Gen recommends me a video game. I purchase the game and I love it. One of the themes in the game is so delectably good that I want to write a novel of mine that expounds on it, but takes it in a different direction. I go to a coffeehouse to work on it one day, and meet a beautiful woman. Or, maybe I meet an old friend from high school and we reconnect.
...And then, forty years later, I quote one of the characters in that video game at an opportune moment.

I mean that's the phenomenal thing about life. Every day is a new adventure. You just never know how the puzzle's all going to add up. As a writer I feel particularly sensitive to this because I can not tell you how many great writing ideas I've come across just because I'm daydreaming in the Metro or at a Starbucks or while I'm mowing the yard one day and then something happens, someone does something random and suddenly this only partially-related idea pops up into my head. And that can change the direction of my life for months.

Anyway I'm going on one hell of a tangent here, so let's get back on topic.
The bottom line is that life's value is infinite because, even if we do little from a selfish perspective that brings value into our own lives, even the most mundane of our actions has such an effect on society and the world itself, that it cannot be fathomed. The interconnected nature of our lives means that, by committing suicide, we are not only ending our own existence but altering the existences of thousands of others. For one, this makes suicide inherently selfish, not selfless -- we're taking the "easy way out" for ourselves, while depriving millions of others of our potential contributions, big and small. In addition, this makes suicide inherently and objectively wrong; insofar as our potential alive is inherently greater then it is then when we're dead, we have an ethical responsibility to do everything we can to remain alive so as to maximize our impact. Finally, it means that our lives have objective value, we simply cannot measure the value because there's no mind or computer complex enough to handle all the variables and spit out a number that approximates our degree of influence.

EDIT: I'm glad I posted right after Zilla because we have such interestingly opposite views on this matter.

EDIT 2: Just a generic response to the claim that "our life is meaningless because in the scope of things, we're so insignificant compared to the universe, which has billions or stars and galaxies" argument.
I've never really bought into this argument because it's like, our decisions could have such an exponential ripple effect as to one day subtly influence the nature of man's dominions over the stars themselves. I'm literally not kidding. I really do think that every human being has profound impacts that, when added up together, could change the future...and in so doing, who's to say that hundreds of millions of years from now, those decisions added up together lead to humanity conquering unknown space, creating vast interstellar empires, coming to a complete understanding of the reason for our existence, discovering whatever awaits to be discovered?

To say that "we're so insignificant in the scheme of things" is such a strange argument to me. How do we know how insignificant we are?

It seems utterly selfish to me, because in the end we're rating our "significance" by how much our own lives directly impact the entire damn universe. I mean it's a selfish and short-sighted perspective to presume that life is meaningless because each of us doesn't have complete power over the cosmos. What if my own life is judged by myself to be a relative "failure," and then a direct descendant of mine one day goes out and changes the trajectory of humanity in a profound way, colonizing another planet, discovering a cure for a deadly disease, contacting an ailen race?

In response: It is selfish and short sighted. That's life. Even if humans end up being the master race of forever and we live on to infinity (not very likely; there's probably something out there better than us, and if there isn't, we shouldn't kid ourselves that ultimately, we're all going to die, and the human race is no different than any other species that has ever gone extinct, just that we're on a larger scale), we won't be there to see it, and anything past your expiration date won't matter to you. If your great grandkid wins the Miss Universe pageant, solves the Riemann hypothesis, and ends up subjugating the very forces of the cosmos to human will, you're dead and you won't matter. The Universe IS finite, just massively huge. We have a finite timeline, all of us, every species, every planet, every thing in existance. In the END, we either get smashed into the same condition that occurred before the big bang, or we all go cold as all matter in the universe expands so far as to drain every ounce of energy from it.

Edit: Okay, now I've read your post Solid Snake, and there's a ton we agree on. I most certainly agree on the ripple-effect, and how kindness begets kindness, and all those implications. That's a concise version of why I act the way I do. Just because we humans do have limitations on our finite existences doesn't mean we can't spend our lives trying to make that finite existence the most bitchin' thing ever.

The easiest way to sum up my philosophy is Bill And Ted-ism. "Be excellent to each other, and party on!"

On the topic of suicide, I do disagree. Immensely. While you may be depriving someone of your positive impacts, you may also be depriving them of negetive ones. Here's a darkside to counter your happy-go-lucky example: Say a kid is severely mentally unstable. He kills himself. His parents grieve and vow to never again have such a tragedy affect other parents. They find out what the problem was that made the kid so mentally unbalanced and pour resources and efforts into finding a way to prevent others from going through the same thing. Had the kid not done so, he would have drained his parents' money in psychology fees, endured suffering for most of his life, and may not have been able to recover. In fact, he might be so disturbed that he "pays it foreward" and becomes a cause of trauma to someone else.

What if Charles Manson had committed suicide before he killed people?

What if Osama Bin Laden had committed suicide before he joined Al Queda and committed acts of terrorism?

I'm a humanist, but I'm a humanist that sees that people are capable of both great things and terrible things. In the end, there are far too many variables at play to place value on human life in any amount of time frame except the infinite, where it all amounts to 0.

Like it or not, there will be a time when the ripple in the puddle stops, and the waters are calm once again.