Can life exist without purpose?

You're looking at it.

Should clarify: if you mean 'do all things that live have a purpose' then yes, that is most fundamentally to survive. If you look at it this way then of course life can only exist with the overall purpose of survival. Duh.

But more interestingly, must there be an overall purpose to the whole life thing for it to exist at all? If there was, it would be beyond our comprehension. But because we can't comprehend it, does that mean there is as good as no purpose? I say yes. We survive to breed so that the next generation may survive to breed so that the next...

Um... How would you explain Paris Hilton? : )

Evolutionarily speaking, yes the meaning of life is to survive. However, this is natural meaning (because it does not require an external maker, with intention. If there is no previous intention or aim, then the only meaning is natural meaning. Life just happened, therefore it has natural meaning). Natural meaning is, I think, that the consquences are equivalent to the meaning. So you life could mean continuation of the species, but can also mean other things. (This is more philosophy than psychology, and my definitions will not be precise, I'm sure.)

Also, evolution is not perfect. Not all human behavour works to continue the species. It might off once, but what worked when we were basically monkeys armed with sharp rocks does not translate well to basically monkeys armed with nuclear weaponry.

(Evolutionary psychology in my view does tend to depend a little too much on interpretation, and reduced the importance of both people's perceptions and cognitive factors (we're not perfect either) and pure random chance. It does not work as a stand alone theory, and requires cognitive and behavoirist back-up. Or the nature-nurture interaction, in effect).

Not life with true value.

To the unbelieving materialist, man is simply an evolutionary accident. His hopes of survival are strung on a figment of mortal imagination; his fears, loves, longings, and beliefs are but the reaction of the incidental juxtaposition of certain lifeless atoms of matter. No display of energy nor expression of trust can carry him beyond the grave. The devotional labors and inspirational genius of the best of men are doomed to be extinguished by death, the long and lonely night of eternal oblivion and soul extinction. Nameless despair is man's only reward for living and toiling under the temporal sun of mortal existence. Each day of life slowly and surely tightens the grasp of a pitiless doom which a hostile and relentless universe of matter has decreed shall be the crowning insult to everything in human desire which is beautiful, noble, lofty, and good.

As long as present-day races are so overloaded with inferior and degenerate strains, race intermingling on a large scale would be most detrimental, but most of the objections to such experiments rest on social and cultural prejudices rather than on biological considerations. Even among inferior stocks, hybrids often are an improvement on their ancestors. Hybridization makes for species improvement because of the role of the dominant genes. Racial intermixture increases the likelihood of a larger number of the desirable dominants being present in the hybrid.

No. Everyone has something they want in life. We're all selfish creatures to some degree. For some of us what we want to do is simple, for some of us we try our whole life for what we want, and sometimes never get it. The reason we have purpose is because we are brought up to want to be something, anything that we love. From the day you are put in school, you didn't decide to learn, you are made to learn, and made to have purpose. Sometimes, just short-term purpose. Finishing tonight's homework assignment, but even that's part of the big picture. We are made to strive for SOMETHING. Even is you don't go to school, or have no job, your purpose is simply to survive. And most of us do because we don't know the other option. I've found that what most people want in their lives is Love. Beautiful love. For me its the love of music, but also most of us strive for the love from another human being that we can stay with. No life is without purpose, because we are made to think, we are made to need, to want, to get, to find what we each need to live, that in itself is purpose.

Life's inherent purpose is to survive at least as long as is required for replication of form and function, so it seems that life could not exist without such fundamental purpose.

i wonder to i think so