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Audiobook
Published April 5, 2016
But at this point you might be getting a little distressed. We've seen reasons to doubt the existence of God and freewill, the afterlife, and now persons. How can life be meaningful if none of these things exist? Well, we're going to be talking about the meaning of life in the last lecture, and we'll see that things really aren't so dire as they may seem.At this point the lecturer begins the three lecture series on, "What is the nature of mind?" In Lectures 23, 24 and 25 we learn that it's difficult to defend the concept of mind being different from the neurological functions of the physical brain. But if one accepts the concept that the mind and brain are the same it makes it difficult to say that an electronic cyborg that mimics human thinking doesn't also have a mind.
But for now it's important to remember that wanting something to be true is no reason to think that it's true. You may want life to have meaning, but if your philosophical investigations drive you to the conclusion that if does not, well the fact that you want something to be true is not a good reason to reject the findings of philosophical investigations. Rejecting them anyway can only reveal that you are more concerned with protecting cherished beliefs than with having true ones.
But there is another question relevant to life's meaning that we have yet to consider, the question of consciousness. For many the meaning of life may be derived from experiences we have, and so we must now ask, how exactly do we have experiences? How does the brain produce the mind? And what exactly is the nature of mind?"
. . . taking this course should in no way push you toward the conclusion that your life is meaningless. In fact, I would like to argue that taking this course has helped make your life just a little bit more meaningful.________________________
Think back to the first lecture and when we talked about Plato’s cave and learned about the intrinsic value and good of true belief, about how in and of itself not to be duped and to really know how the world is. We then discussed how to accomplish both, how to reason carefully, find the best explanation, and not to fool yourself into thinking that you know something that you don’t. We then went on to explore some of the biggest questions in philosophy and were careful as we could be along the way. So don’t you have at least a little more knowledge than you did before, a little bit better understanding of the way the world is, and doesn’t that make your life just a little bit more meaningful, to be closer to the truth? Isn’t that why you bought the course in the first place?
Now that’s not to say that we settled every question, but even if we never find the answers, even if our quest for knowledge is never complete, isn’t there intrinsic value in the search itself? Wasn’t Socrates right when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living? Thus hasn’t searching for the answers to the big questions of philosophy made your life just a little more meaningful?
1. How Do We Do Philosophy?What is Knowledge?
2. Why Should We Trust Reason?
3. How Do We Reason Carefully?
4. How Do We Find the Best Explanation?
5. What Is Truth?Can Religious Belief be Justified?
6. What Is the Best Way to Gain Knowledge?
7. Is Knowledge Possible?
8. Do We Know What Knowledge Is?
9. When Can We Trust Testimony?Does God Exist?
10. Can Mystical Experience Justify Belief?
11. Is Faith Ever Rational?
12. Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?Do We Have Free Will?
13. What Is God Like?
14. How Could God Allow Moral Evil?
15. Why Would God Cause Natural Evil?
16. Are Freedom and Foreknowledge Compatible?Could There Be an Afterlife?
17. Do Our Souls Make Us Free?
18. What Does It Mean to Be Free?
19. What Preserves Personal Identity?What is the Nature of Mind?
20. Are Persons Mere Minds?
21. Are Persons Just Bodies?
22. Are You Really You?
23. How Does the Brain Produce the Mind?What is Morally Right and Wrong?
24. What Do Minds Do, If Anything?
25. Could Machines Think?
26. Does God Define the Good?How Should Society be Organized?
27. Does Happiness Define the Good?
28. Does Reason Define the Good?
29. How Ought We to Live?
30. Why Bother Being Good?
31. Should Government Exist?Can We Answer the Ultimate Question?
32. What Justifies a Government?
33. How Big Should Government Be?
34. What Are the Limits of Liberty?
35. What Makes a Society Fair or Just?
36. What Is the Meaning of Life?