The Meanings of Life

生命的意义

A really unbounded, big question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

一个真正无穷无尽的大问题：生活的意义和目的是什么？

That’s a big question. Because it’s a big question, I’ll give you three answers.

这是个大问题。因为这是个大问题，我会给你三个答案。

Answer 1 : It’s personal. You have to find your own meaning. Any piece of wisdom anybody else gives you, whether it’s Buddha or me, is going to sound like nonsense. Fundamentally, you have to find it for yourself, so the important part is not the answer, it’s the question. You just have to sit there and dig with the question. It might take you years or decades. When you find an answer you’re happy with, it will be fundamental to your life.

答案1：这是我的私事。你必须找到你自己的意思。任何人给你的任何智慧，无论是佛陀还是我，听起来都是无稽之谈。从根本上说，你必须自己找到答案，所以重要的不是答案，而是问题。你只需要坐在那里，深究这个问题就行了。这可能需要你几年或几十年的时间。当你找到一个令你满意的答案时，它将是你生活的基础。

Answer 2 : There is no meaning to life. There is no purpose to life. Osho said, “It’s like writing on water or building houses of sand.” The reality is you’ve been dead for the history of the Universe, 10 billion years or more. You will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so, until the heat death of the Universe.

答案2：这对生活没有意义。生活没有目的。奥修说：“这就像在水上写字或用沙子盖房子。”事实是，在宇宙的历史上，你已经死了，100亿年或更长时间。你将在接下来的700亿年左右死去，直到宇宙的热死。

Anything you do will fade. It will disappear, just like the human race will disappear and the planet will disappear. Even the group who colonizes Mars will disappear. No one is going to remember you past a certain number of generations, whether you’re an artist, a poet, a conqueror, a pauper, or anyone else. There’s no meaning.

你做的任何事都会褪色。它会消失，就像人类会消失一样，地球也会消失。即使是殖民火星的那群人也会消失。无论你是艺术家、诗人、征服者、穷光蛋，还是其他任何人，都没有人会记住你已经过了一定的世代。没有任何意义。

You have to create your own meaning, which is what it boils down to. You have to decide: 你必须创造你自己的意义，这就是归根结底的意义。你必须决定：

“Is this a play I’m just watching?”

“这是我刚看的戏吗？”

“Is there a self -actualization dance I’m doing?”

“我是在跳自我实现的舞蹈吗？”

“Is there a specific thing I desire just for the heck of it?”

“有没有什么特别的东西是我想要的，只是为了好玩？”

These are all meanings you make up.

这些都是你编造的意思。

There is no fundamental, intrinsic purposeful meaning to the Universe. If there was, then you would just ask the next question. You’d say, “Why is that the meaning?” It would be, as physicist Richard Feynman said, it would be “turtles all the way down.” The “why’s” would keep accumulating. There is no answer you could give that wouldn’t have another “why.”

对宇宙来说，没有根本的、内在的有目的的意义。如果有的话，那你就直接问下一个问题吧。你会说，“为什么是这个意思？”正如物理学家理查德·费曼(Richard Feynman)所说，这将是“乌龟一路向下”。“为什么”会不断积累。你能给出的答案都不会有另一个“为什么”。

I don’t buy the everlasting afterlife answers because it’s insane to me, with absolutely no evidence, to believe because of how you live seventy years here on this planet, you’re going to spend eternity, which is a very long time, in some afterlife. What kind of silly God judges you for eternity based on some small period of time here? I think after this life, it’s very much like before you were born. Remember that? It’s going to be just like that.

我不相信永恒来世的答案，因为在没有证据的情况下，相信你在这个星球上生活了70年，你会在来世度过永恒，这是非常长的一段时间，这对我来说是疯狂的，完全没有证据。什么样的愚蠢的上帝会根据这里的一小段时间来评判你的永恒呢？我想今生之后，很像你出生前的样子。还记得吗？就会是这样的。

Before you were born, you didn’t care about anything or anyone, including your loved ones, including yourself, including humans, including whether we go to Mars or whether we stay on planet Earth, whether there’s an AI or not. After death, you just don’t care either.

在你出生之前，你不关心任何事情或任何人，包括你所爱的人，包括你自己，包括人类，包括我们是否去火星，或者我们是否留在地球上，无论有没有人工智能。死后，你也不会在意。

Answer 3 : The last answer I’ll give you is a little more complicated. From what I’ve read in science (friends of mine have written books on this), I’ve stitched together some theories. Maybe there is a meaning to life, but it’s not a very satisfying purpose.

答案3：我要给你的最后一个答案有点复杂。根据我在科学上读到的东西(我的朋友写过关于这方面的书)，我拼凑了一些理论。也许生命是有意义的，但它不是一个非常令人满意的目标。

Basically, in physics, the arrow of time comes from entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states entropy only goes up, which means disorder in the Universe only goes up, which means concentrated free energy only goes down. If you look at living things (humans, plants, civilizations, what have you) these systems are locally reversing entropy. Humans locally reverse entropy because we have action.

基本上，在物理学中，时间之箭来自熵。热力学第二定律规定熵只会上升，这意味着宇宙中的无序只会上升，这意味着集中的自由能只会下降。如果你观察生物(人类、植物、文明，你有什么)，这些系统正在局部逆转熵。人类局部逆转熵是因为我们有行动。

In the process, we globally accelerate entropy until the heat death of the Universe. You could come up with some fanciful theory, which I like, that we’re headed towards the heat death of the Universe. In that death, there’s no concentrated energy, and everything is at the same energy level. Therefore, we’re all one thing. We’re essentially indistinguishable.

在这个过程中，我们在全球范围内加速熵，直到宇宙的热死亡。你可以想出一些奇特的理论，我喜欢，我们正走向宇宙的热死亡。在那次死亡中，没有集中的能量，所有的东西都处于相同的能量水平。因此，我们都是一回事。我们基本上是无法区分的。

What we do as living systems accelerates getting to that state. The more complex system you create, whether it’s through computers, civilization, art, mathematics, or creating a family—you actually accelerate the heat death of the Universe. You’re pushing us towards this point where we end up as one thing. [4]

当生命系统加速到达这种状态时，我们所做的一切。你创建的系统越复杂，无论是通过计算机、文明、艺术、数学还是创建一个家庭，你实际上都会加速宇宙的热死亡。你正在把我们推向这一点，我们最终会成为一件事。