The Meaningless Life - Thought Experiment
| Philosophy : Thought Experiments Sissy was feeling pretty bored today. He wished he had kept his mouth shut five years ago when he was cheeky to the emperor. And it had cost him dear. He had been condemned to what the emperor had called 'the meaningless life'. Forever more he had to spend his day drawing ten lines on a piece of paper. And the room was now full of hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper, all with ten lines on. And he daren't look in the store cupboard - an endless raft of paper and pens. His jailor called in on him, and smugly commented to poor dejected Sissy how pointless his life was. Whilst he had his meals provided and a relatively comfortable bed, his fate was worse than that of the tortured souls who were sentenced to death. And most agreed. Yet Sissy had somehow come to find satisfaction in a thought he had: was his life really any less meaningful than anyone elses? Were those who drove chariots up and down the street all day for the emperor achieving anything? How was the world better off because of them? And were even the cooks in the emperors kitchen who made the seem meals day in and day out really having a meaningful life? Sissy grew quite content in the fact that all life was meaningless and pointless, it was simply more obvious in his own case because of the precise repetition of what he had to do each day.
 Questions about thought experiment:
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