Avoiding all things based around “professional” opinions, it seems as though we need to look at things from a personal perspective to really get a feel on what “happiness” is. Happiness, for the purposes that we’re looking at it in, is a very subjective thing. Something that makes one person happy, may not necessarily make someone else happy, so it is hard to even put a definition on what we’re talking about here. This being said, there seems to be an understanding, even without a strict definition, of what happiness is to people.

This personal touch can be seen nicely when looking at the poll that is shown below. When asking about happiness in this way, we were trying to see if there was any obvious correlation between whether or not a person is happy and if their lives are religiously based or not. While the answers here are obviously not a great way at looking at lives having meaning, it is a good bridge between happiness and meaning through religion. 61% of the respondents claim that their religion plays a large part in defining who they are as a person and 16% say it might, so using the information from the question above that, EVERY person who claimed that they were religious says that it at least might make them who they are. It is hard to make a connection with religion and meaning without going into detail what we have discussed in the earlier parts of class and even in other groups’ projects, but what might be the most shocking is what people actually find to be meaningful in their lives.

When asked what makes people the happiest, the largest response numbers came from those saying that spending time with family and friends. On the same lines as that, ‘quality time with loved ones” was ranked as the most meaningful by the respondents. The fact that the thing that makes people the happiest and the thing that has the most meaning to people were basically the same thing is a hard thing to ignore. It is understood that the pool of answers here was limited to only 100 responses and makes it hard to draw conclusions, it seems that there is a connection between the two.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that came from our survey is the 7^th question: What is more important for you to have in your life? Even though humans have been looking for the meaning of life since the beginning of our existence, more people in our survey answered that they would prefer happiness over meaning. This response was shocking in numbers, but not necessarily in the realistic sense. When it comes down to it, human lives are so short that it makes sense for people to desire happiness over meaning because it makes them feel better. If it happens to be religion that provides the reassurance that our lives are meaningful, then it seems as if happiness comes along with this.

Immortality is one of the major topics that accompanies the question: What is the meaning of life? When discussing immortality, it seems as though there are as many views on this as there is on other large topics like politics and other social issues. Our group has decided to take advantage of this and has looked at different sources and opinions in order to gain a more in depth knowledge of who believes what in certain circumstances. We have used people of different religions, different ages, and even a few movies to see the differences in thoughts. To determine who picked what topics, we each chose what interested us each the most and who had easy access to different sources of information. The following part of this website that discusses religious views on immortality was conducted by a student with friends of different religions and the section of age groups was conducted by a student that interviewed many different people to see if their views change with age.

In lecture, we spent about two weeks discussing various philosophers and their thoughts and opinions on what immortality would do to humans and if they would be changed if they knew that their lives would never end. To avoid the monotonous ‘reading an essay’ feel, here are the basic views of a couple of the more influential ones, followed by fun graphics:

Schoeffler: assumptions and thoughts on what a “doomsday” scenario would do to the human race.

• Almost all activities would have no importance
  • Music
  • Art
  • Philosophy
  • Every-day tasks
• People would care for each other more
  • Taking care of other people would be more important than ourselves
• Nothing would be enjoyable
  • Even the REALLY AWESOME stuff
    • Fine cuisine
    • Adrenaline-inducing activities
      • Roller coasters
      • Sky diving
      • Bungee jumping
      • Scuba diving
    • Even sex!

Susan Wolf:  It might be all gloom-and-doom for a while, but soon we would realize that maybe it’s not so bad. She had SOME of the same views as Schoeffler, but not as terrible.

• We would inititally freak out! (as would be expected in this situation)
• But then it’d be ok!
  • It would free up time to do whatever makes us happy
    • Art
    • Science
    • Performing
    • Gardening
    • Reading
    • Video Games
    • Other hobbies
  • We could be VERY wasteful with:
    • Time
    • Money
    • Resources
      • Because it WOULDN’T MATTER!
    • In a direct quote:
      • “the sorts of activities least likely to be affected by the doomsday scenario are those that are explicitly focused on the care and comfort of others.”
        • Helping others be as comfortable in their final bit of time
        • Everybody else is in the same situation, so why fight?

In light of the recent political tensions and presidential candidates, I thought it’d be fun to make bumper stickers for these two, as if they were running for office:

In order to get some of my own feedback, rather than simply depending on the writers’ whose information is included later on, I conducted a survey of my floor of my building on campus to see what people thought about living forever. I simply made a post on my floor’s “GroupMe” page that there was a survey near the elevator that I’d appreciate their participation on. I purposely didn’t disclose any other information because I wanted to see what people thought of the idea of immortality without the influence of my thoughts. From the results, while disappointingly lacking, it seems that people don’t like the idea of living forever (or at least the small sample size that I used). I think this might because there are too many open ended questions that need to be answered. Some of these that come to mind for me personally are:

• Will I retain my mental capabilities?
• Will I remain physically capable?
• To what point will I progress? (mentally and physically)
• Can other people I care about live forever with me?
• Can I choose those people?
• And SOOOO many more with time to think and contemplate the decision.

In the remainder of this blog, please keep an open mind and think about what your answer would be if someone were to ask YOU if you’d like to live forever.