LMS: I originally wrote "it is one that professional philosophers comparatively tend to avoid." I still think thats true. Certaintly professional philosophers have had plently to say about the meaning of life, but it is less important than the popular image of philosophy would have it. And even some of the philosophers you pointed to as addressing it, tended to avoid phrasing the question as "what is the meaning of life?". (Which isn't to say that no philosopher has ever considered that question, phrased that way; some have.) -- SJK
This much is true: philosophers do not ask the question, specifically, "What is the meaning of life?" nearly as much as someone without a college education might expect. Re "it is one that professional philosophers comparatively tend to avoid." I don't really quite know what that's supposed to mean: compared to whom? The average person? That would be quite obviously false. Anyway, the rest of what you say here is true enough, but that wasn't in the original article. Don't save the details for the talk page! :-) --LMS
Someone added "Unfortunately, the actual question itself remains unknown despite much effort by the mice to calculate it." IIRC, the mice knew what the question was, and then built planet Earth to calculate it, but then by the time it came up with the answer 42, they couldn't remember what the question was... -- SJK
- afraid not. They built the computer Deep Thought to calculate the answer, and after working on it for 7.5 million years Deep Thought grandly pronounced that the answer was 42 - and it was only _then_ that the mice realized that they didn't know what the actual question was in the first place, since the answer didn't make any sense on its own. They built the Earth to calculate the question, so that the answer would make sense.
- Earth was destroyed by a Vogon demolition ship fifteen minutes before it was supposed to output the question. An early readout of the almost-complete question was "what do you get if you multiply six by nine," but it's not known how close this would have been to the actual question had Earth been able to finish its computation as planned. The arrival of the Golgafrincham colonists on Earth may have corrupted its program in unforseen ways too.
- Unfortunately, LMS is probably right that this is too "serious" an article to mention these particular deep truths here. Perhaps a "the exploration of the meaning of life has been the subject of a number of many works of fiction, including..." :)
- In reference to the popular comedy book series The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the meaning of life is sometimes said to be 42, but this is not actually correct. Rather, 42 is the answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe and everything. Unfortunately, the actual question itself remains unknown despite much effort by the mice to calculate it.
I removed the above; no offense intended, but this is not a humor website, and references to the wisdom of one work of fiction on this question are, basically, not justified here. --Larry Sanger
Damn it! Why'd you have to spoil the fun? :)
One might also mention the
Monty Python movie of the same title.
[Monty Python's The Meaning of Life]--mercifully, the movie title is different from the title of the page... --Humorlessly,
LMS
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