I will just respond briefly, but first I want to assure you that you are not alone in your existential quandaries--many people face them, perhaps especially adolescents trying to find o make meaning in a difficult and confusing world, as well as philosophers who have been motivated to try to answer these questions for centuries (or to explain why they are not answerable or are being asked in the wrong way, etc.) I will suggest the latter sort of move, that while your angst is surely genuine, what seems to be motivating it may be a bit off base. You seem to be taking a sort of reductionistic view that suggests, if it's all just atoms in the void or energy in motion or neurons in the head, isn't it all meaningless. But always consider what you are contrasting your view with. Would it all be more meaningful if we were non-physical souls embodied in a material world? Why? You point out that "I AM my brain." Right. So, what you care about, love, and desire and find meaningful is, in some sense, based on...

There are two ways to read your questions: 1. Would we be better off never feeling negative emotions because they were never called for--i.e., because we never experienced the sorts of events that make grief or anger an appropriate reaction? Or... 2. Would we be better off never feeling negative emotions regardless of what happens to us? I am inclined to answer 'no' to the second question. While some (e.g., Stoics and Buddhists, at least on an oversimplified reading) suggest that we should approach negative events with a level of detachment that make grief, anger, or despair inappropriate, and the wise or enlightened person will reach a point where she can avoid feeling such emotions, I find that approach inappropriate. I think it would be both mistaken and almost inhuman not to feel grief at the death of one's child or not to feel some level of anger at the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 (whether despair is ever appropriate is trickier). So, I do not think we would be...

This is an important question, since it might be that one of the reasons we worry about whether we have free will is that free will is required for life to be meaningful. If so, then any threat to our free will would also make life meaningless. (Actually, as I write that sentence, it makes me wonder if a person's life can only be meaningless , in the ordinary sense of that word, if it has a possibility of being meaningful--is a worm's life meaningless or does that word simply not apply?) But is free will required for life to have meaning? As usual (with philosophical questions like this), a lot depends on what we mean by 'free will' and 'meaningful life'. My own view is that a theory of free will needs to be about the powers of control that matter to us, so it doesn't make sense to define free will in such a way that losing it would not matter and such that having it would not matter. If, for instance, free will is defined as some magical ability to exist outside of the natural order of...

I hope so. And I think so. Especially if we understand philosophy in a general way to involve careful reflection on what we should be doing with our lives and how we should structure our relationships and societies, I think it can help us live better lives. While reflection isn't always good (e.g., in the middle of making a tennis shot or a guitar solo), surely it is often necessary in order to see how our ideas of what it means to lead a good life and create a good community are consistent with each other and with what other people in our community think. And when we see that they are inconsistent , we can consider how best to reconcile them to find what might be called reflective equilibrium . Another way of putting these points is to say that, whether we know it or not, we all have a philosophy (a set of ideas of which we are more or less aware) that guides our decision-making and personal interactions. It seems that trying to figure out what our philosophy is will make it more likely...

To answer your second question first, you are correct that what is natural is not always good (though of course we need to know what we mean by "natural" and "good"). For instance, if we mean by "natural" what humans have strong desires to do, presumably in part because of our evolutionary history, then it will be natural for humans to eat pretty much as much sugar and salt and fat as we can (in the environments in which we evolved, sugar, salt, and fat, all of which are crucial for survival, were scarce enough that there would be little selection pressure to limit consumption of them). But if by "good" we mean what will keep us healthy and alive, then in our current environment, our natural desires to eat so much sugar, salt, and fat are not good. What is natural is not good. Similar arguments might be given for a variety of desires or behaviors, which humans plausibly have developed in part because of our (natural) selective history, and which we would not call good: promiscuity, racism...

I would suggest reading a wonderful essay by Thomas Nagel titled "The Absurd" (try here ). One point it makes is that if our lives would be absurd or meaningless if they are fleeting (or if human existence is fleeting and small), then they would just be more absurd if they were longer (e.g., eternal) or had a larger place in the universe. In this case, says Nagel, size doesn't matter . Rather, what matters is whether our lives have meaning from within (e.g., from within our human cultures and relationships) rather than from some external (impossible?) point of view. And there looks to be every reason to think that our lives do have meaning from within--that the projects we engage in and the love we give and receive and the experiences we have, at least if they are good, are important, significant, meaningful , far from absurd. (Oh, and what makes them count as good is also determined, I think, from within our system of social and personal relationships, which...

As usual with such a philosophical question, much depends on how you define the key concept, happiness . One conception of happiness identifies it with a type (or types) of feeling(s), such as contentment, joy, excitement, and pleasure. These are the feelings a happiness pill would presumably supply. And some utilitarians pick out this sort of happiness as what should be maximized. Some then object along the lines you suggest: utilitarianism seems to entail that we should want to take a happiness pill (and if things would keep running smoothly, for everyone to take happiness pills)--or for us all to enter a Matrix that would keep us all happy--but there seems to be something wrong with living on such a pill (or entering such a Matrix), so there must be something wrong with utilitarianism. This objection works against egoism as well (the view that all we want is pleasure). Perhaps the intuition here is that only 'authentic' happiness is truly valuable, the sort of happiness that one derives...