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Will_Newsome comments on The Meaning of Life - Less Wrong
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Is the hole really biological? I was raised in an atheist family and never took religion as a serious possibility. It may be the reason that the phrases "meaning of life" and "purpose of life" were almost incomprehensible to me. Any suggestions that "meaning of life is X" I have interpreted as "you shouldn't just enjoy your life, since you must do X", and I have always felt quite strong negative emotions when the topic was discussed (which wasn't too often, fortunately).
Of course, my anecdote doesn't disprove the general existence of a biological god-shaped hole, but it would be good to investigate how much atheists who are not interested in philosophy really consider the question of "meaning of life" as meaningful or important.
Hm, I'm one of those always-been-atheists who's also always been interested in the whole 'purpose of life' thing. Now that I think about it though, most of the people my age (teenagers) who I talk to (say, 15 people out of 20) have the same attitude as the one you express in your comment: basically, not really caring about religions or gods (or barely nominally caring) and when prompted with philosophical questions quickly exclaiming that they just want to live life and have fun. Updating on this evidence and taking into account that memetic explanations should trump biological ones in the first place, my hypothesis was probably heavily skewed towards a careless genetic explanation based off a pet theory. Interesting biases to have uncovered. Thanks!
Do you remember how did you get interested in it? Did the question appear spontaneously to you, or did you acquire it from reading and then find it interesting? And in what age approximately? (I hope you don't find the questions too personal, however it's always interesting to find people with different intuitions.)