I just watched the 1995 movie Ghost in the Shell and greatly enjoyed the beautiful old-school animation and cyberpunk setting. The movie also seemed like it had some other philosophical points it was trying to make that I attempted to decipher on my way to the grocery store to buy more oats.
There are many moments of introspection over the course of Ghost in the Shell (1995), but the quote that I found most interesting was about humanity’s technological advancement. The quote is:
If man realizes technology is within reach, he achieves it, like it’s damn-near instinctive.
This human tendency toward endless progress is also mimicked by the Puppet Master sentient program in the movie. They seek to make their own technological advancement by obtaining the human ability to diversify through reproduction, rather than just copying themself.
While the movie predominantly focuses on technology as the kind of advancement, I find it interesting to consider standard biological reproduction as a kind of advancement too. When humans reproduce, we generally attempt to make our childrens’ lives even just a bit better than our own. And thinking scientifically, reproduction is the purpose of all life. Every organism prioritises self-preservation, at least until reaching the age of reproductive maturity; we all live to reproduce.
But to what purpose is all this advancement and reproduction? This is the age-old question of “what is the meaning of life?”. You can certainly argue that meaning is simply reproduction - surviving as a species solely for the sake of survival. However, I find this circular answer to merely be a facade over the much simpler answer that, there is no meaning.
Many more prominent Nihilists reached this same conclusion long before I did. So I’d like to pose a follow up question: so what if there’s no meaning to life? Why have people cared so much about what the meaning of life is? If life has no meaning or purpose (beyond the continuation of the species, of course), then that means you can create whatever meaning you want for your own life. I think being the master of one’s own fate is an empowering idea.