Life’s Meaning
The meaning of life is to know enough to ask the question, what is the meaning of life? Therefore the meaning of life is “to know." If the meaning of life, is other than to know, then life has no meaning. Therefore, the meaning of life must be, “to know.” Is that inductive or deductive logic?
Inductive logic is a system of reasoning that extends, and/or antedates, deductive logic, to include less-than-certain inferences (often personal preferences or intuitions). In a valid deductive argument the premises logically entail the conclusion. Such entailment means that the truth of the premises provides a guarantee of the truth of the conclusion. This can be a useful stabilizer set of rules that places a container or frame around knowing in the larger sense. Without the restraint of deductive logic, chaos ensues, but with too much such restraint knowing stultifies. Thus there are goods and bads sprinkled about in the entire body of scientific methods.
In a good, (as opposed to bad) inductive argument the premises would be looked toward to provide some degree of support for the conclusion. Such support means that the truth of the premises will indicate with some degree of strength that the conclusion is true. In true deductive reasoning, given true premises the conclusion will always be true, whereas in inductive reasoning false conclusions are easier to come by.
If the logic of good inductive arguments are to be of real value, the measure of support they articulate should meet some conditions: One important one is:
Criterion of Adequacy (CoA):
As evidence accumulates, the degree to which the collection of true evidence statements comes to support a hypothesis, as measured by the logic, should tend to prove that false hypotheses are probably false and that true hypotheses are probably true.
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that allows for the possibility that the conclusion is false even where all of the premises are true. The premises of an inductive logical argument indicate some degree of support (inductive probability) for the conclusion but do not entail it; i.e. they do not ensure its truth. The weakness of Induction is is seen in the following arguments:
- All of the ice we have examined so far is cold.
- Therefore, all ice is cold.
or
- The president looks uncomfortable
- Therefore, the president is uncomfortable.
Thus inductive logic is not as reliable as deductive logic. This weakness shows up the “fallacy” in all “logical” arguments, or proofs. In short, Deductive Logic is supposedly objective, while Inductive Logic is supposedly subjective, yet each embrace the virtues and deny the weaknesses of these characterizations of each other. On one level everything is, or can be, subjective. On another level everything is, or can be, objective. Logical systems of all sorts are useful tools for us to think with, but only a fool would trust any of them to deliver “truth.” Truth is as opposed to Lies, and has to be the goal that various logical systems may help or hinder.
An example of this inadequacy of logical systems is when we test it on the most fundamental of questions facing humanity. For example, what is the meaning of life, what is life, and when does life begin or end, if it does?
Assuming we know the meaning of life, then what is life? Is life the “life force”, or is it the “alive body”? Is it electromagnetic energy or is it something else? The answer must be, it does not matter.
Everyone can agree that if life is present, then whatever it is within itself, or indeed, is, is “alive”, and if it is not present, whatever it is within, or indeed, is, it is “not alive”. But the term “not alive”, cannot apply to something that never was “alive”. So let us dispense with the argument that discussing the beginning of life need not include a definition of life. It must.
Large segments of society have concluded (mostly for matters of convenience) that whether life is, or is not, is defined by whether it begins in the womb or whether it begins when it is severed from its host mother.
This rudimentary dichotomy of thought is what drives the opposing camps of thought regarding life (called Pro-Life and Pro-Choice) into conflict with each other. Common ground can be found, only if the question asked, and the answer provided, are not inductive.
Simple deductive fact proves that referring to life in the womb as beginning at conception is wrong. Life is not created at conception, but was conceived at creation. To whatever, or whomever, the reader attributes the “creation” of life, matters not at all.
To form a “new” life, at conception, life must have already been alive. It takes two lives to make one new life and both of those lives must be “alive” or no new life can be conceived.
Life began at creation, whether one subscribes that creation of existence to have been by Divine intervention, or through random happenstance in a chaotic (scientific use of that term) environment. First, life lives. Second, it has been living since life did not live, whenever, and if ever, that condition ever existed.
Take one half glass of water. Take another half glass of water. Pour them both into a third glass. You have a new glass of water, made up of water, from two sources. That is what happens with life. For it to procreate, “new life”, it must already exist as life, that is both parts of the new whole. A whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but it is made up of them.
The only difference between the new life merged and formed at conception, and the lives that came together to form it into a new life is, every single life involved, all the way back to the creation of life, have had to already be alive to to create that new life.
The new life is a singularity, but it is made up of the life of its parents, and their parents and so forth going back to Creation. And it is no different a life at the moment of conception than it will be at the moment of death. The only difference is volume and weight. Neither one is involved in any discussion of what life is, as those criteria also apply to things not ever alive.
There is no believable grade scale by which to judge when could a life not be a life. If it is not already a life previously, and continually, it cannot be a life now.
Current flawed thinking ignores this very simple logic, and is based on the societal assumption that the question of the beginning of life could never be a binary condition such as there is either life, or there is not life. The condition of life not being alive is not compatible with the idea that life was ever alive, as without life, there can be no new life. If there is such a thing as life, it has always been alive.
The idea (held for our own convenience) that the beginning of life is housed somehow for a period of time in the womb is not tenable. It is not therefore, an issue of whether a fetus is a person, it is a fact that any new life that is human, is just as much a life before conception as it is after conception, and after after it ceases to “know.”
For life to conceive, to form a ‘new’ life, life must have already been alive. It takes two lives to make one new life and both of those lives must be alive, or no new life can be conceived.
On the other hand: the act of abortion is NOT automatically murder! The logic of this is pure. Even though anything can be argued against anything else, this specific logical set is indeed balanced. Both sides, the right to life, and the right to choice, are right. They are also, both wrong.
Now, if people would just use their heads to contemplate the whole totality of life, instead of focusing on the process of either conception or birth there would be no argument between the opposing sides. Life does not begin at conception, it began a long time before that, for if not, there would be no conceptions.
This does not exhaust the subject by any means but it can, and does, shed some light on it.
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