Qeustion

[MrCoffee]

What is the meaning to life?

[Teuthida]

42.


Someone was bound to say that eventually.

[MrCoffee]

Ok new question:

eer whos got a new qeustion?

[Dyne]

42.

No, that's the answer to life, the Universe, and Everything.

However, Life, the Universe, and Everything is not a question. Nobody knows the REAL question.

Therefore 42 is not correct. A hypothetical question is "How many roads must a man walk down?"

[DimHalo]

If you were doomed to an eternity of rolling a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down as soon as it was at the top, what would you do?


*caution: this question spawned from a college student transforming into a high school teacher. BEWARE*

[MrCoffee]

why are we alive? why do we exist, what is our job?

[Teuthida]

Why are we alive? A little mistake.

Why do we exist? Same thing.

What is our job? Depends on the person overall but try to stay alive as long as possible and reproduce.

[Dylflon]

http://justswell.net/blog/mr-butlertron.jpg

Where are my bitches?

[GameMaster]

Mr. Tethuida, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop?

http://benedictblog.com/images/howmany9.jpg

[KillerGremlin]

I wonder how many people actually lick suckers...I personally suck on them.

If you were to lick a sucker, you might be at it for a few thousand licks.

[Teuthida]

According to the official Tootsie Roll website, Tootsie Roll Industries has received over 20,000 letters from children claiming to have solved the riddle since the commercial first aired in 1970. The typical range of responses is between 100 and 5,800 with an average of 600-800. There is no official number, as everyone's saliva and licking method is different

According to Tootsie Roll Industries, there have been several scientific or pseudo-scientific studies attempting to answer the "How Many Licks?" question, including the creation and testing of two unique "licking machines" by engineering students at Purdue University and the University of Michigan.

The more you know. *star*

[MrCoffee]

"How many roads must a man walk down?"

But this will only give us a number, such as 42...or continous until man gets it right. I want a qeustion that gives me an answer, or gest me closer to the answer.

[Teuthida]

Depends if they're paved or not.

[MrCoffee]

Depends if they're paved or not.

no that doesnt help at all! See i need to know why not how many, even if some of the roads are paved that just adds in more irrelevent information. I could careless about numbers and how many roads, I want to know why. what is at the end of the right road.

[Swan]

TO live...

[MrCoffee]

heh good answer...someone else defend me im going to bed lol

[Teuthida]

no that doesnt help at all! See i need to know why not how many, even if some of the roads are paved that just adds in more irrelevent information. I could careless about numbers and how many roads, I want to know why. what is at the end of the right road.

Fine. You really want to know? A guy in a hotdog suit hanging out flyers. That's it. He'll offer you a sandwich but I would advise you refuse it. He's been at the end of that road for a long time by himself and I hear has gone a bit crazy in the head. Last person to accept food from him got gonorrhea. I really don't want to know what it was he ate.

[MrCoffee]

ROFL ok thanks...where can i find this guy?

[Vampyr]

If you were doomed to an eternity of rolling a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down as soon as it was at the top, what would you do?


*caution: this question spawned from a college student transforming into a high school teacher. BEWARE*

This is actually one of my favorite questions ever, and is the source of my philosophy on life.

The answer to the meaning of life is actually in this question. What is the meaning of life? There isn't one. Just like there is no reason for Sisyphus to keep pushing that rock up the hill. But, even thought I realise the meaningless-ness of life, I continue to live anyway, just like Sisyphus continues to push the rock up the hill, no matter how many times it falls.

I live life and enjoy it, in all of its meaningless glory.


Albert Camus is most famous for this analogy.


The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than fu tile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopu s would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of h is deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods w as necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screw ed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmou nted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the on ly bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discover y. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eage r to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The strugg le itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

[Canyarion]

The goal in life is to get into the Black Project here on GT. :)

[DimHalo]

Albert Camus is most famous for this analogy.

.


That is what I was working on when I posted the question, LOL. We are teaching that writing in French V at the high school.

[Dyne]

The goal in life is to get into the Black Project here on GT. :)

Black Project? What Black Project :sneaky:

(It was renamed Think Thank.)

[Canyarion]

Well who ever said you could achieve your goal in life?

[Teuthida]

Whenever I hear Sisyphus I think Red Bull.

[Canyarion]

When I hear that, I think syphilis.