I don’t know what 1 means really.

2- Truth is relative but some truths get closer to “inter subjective” (a number of people believe the same thing) than others which is all you can hope for.

3- No. All relative.

4- Apes evolving, No real reason it just happened, I don’t know but it looks like we’re not going anywhere with what we’re doing to the planet.


Also I think you should add the question “What’s the purpose of philosophy” or “Why do you discuss philosophy”. For me it’s a form of recreation.

I would be prepared to give you some kind of answer but you have asked 3 of the biggest philosophy questions ever, and some others. I don't know if you were asked to devise questions. If you were, I think you could perhaps narrow it down a little, or else a full answer might almost involve writing a book, at least.

1. God is ultimate reality.

2. Truth is absolute, although our limited ability to perceive the whole truth at once explains why it can appear relative. We can know absolute truths by at least two means:

a) genuinely irrational truth implodes upon itself and cannot be (or, at the very least, cannot be recognised).
b) we cannot simply decide to do anything we please and hence, there is an absolute beyond our individual preferences and perceptions that determines what we can or cannot do.

3. Morality is absolute, with the need for discernment. It is wrong to deny the truth but it might be less wrong to lie to a murderer on the hunt for innocents. When one discerns the level of a moral decision, they do it in relation to the absolute standard which is the highest goal: God, from whence they come.

4. We came from God and we are here to overcome our fallen nature; to learn to Love Him and our fellow man so that we can be purified. Where we are going is the life that He has prepared for us, and the details of this life will depend on each person and how He judges them.

I hope this counts as an appropriate set of answers and if you have any questions, by all means fire away.

1. What is ultimate reality to you? God? Matter? Something else?

2. Is truth absolute or relative? Are at least some truths absolute? Where do these come from?

3. Are moral values absolute or relative? Are at least some moral values absolute? If so, where do these absolute moral values come from?

4. How would you answer the three great philosophical questions of life: Where did we come from? Why are we here? and Where are we going? — jjstet

1. Reality bound by physics and its rules - With me experiencing it through my limited senses and brain processing it. Everything else is outside of our reality and can't be observed or measured from us or methods of us.

2. Truth is absolute if the facts of that truth are not filtered through opinions. How we form truths is based on language and the collectively decided meaning of that language to mean the same to all involved with stating that truth.

3. Relative. Humans have formed a narrative by which we live by. Nothing of our emotional experiences of reality can be formed as absolute truths, so no truths of moral can be formed. If going by the psychology of ourselves, the inductive conclusion can be formed that we have some basic moral values of well-being that are very common in every culture and place in time, but exceptions exist that go against it. So we can only form moral values as being high in probability, meaning, we can find moral values that guide us through that they are the most common in people based on our emotional nature. Most don't kill because most don't like killing others - a common moral value that's guided by our actual experience. Only through narratives in culture can the act of killing start to go against the initial state of not liking it.

So the only absolutes we can find are themselves relative but can be found through probability. But these basic ones cannot form answers to complex moral questions, where things get so relative that we cannot use just probability to find answers.

4. We are the product of universal extreme randomness forming complexity. Just like the chaos of atoms in a cloud can form the shape of a cat, it is indeed chaos in the right structure that forms something we experience as something more. As humans are pattern-seeking animals, we must act against our pattern-seeking instincts to see reality for what it is; entropic chaos that enables a chance at complexity.

We are not here for anything, we simply just are. Don't fall into the pattern-seeking trap creating narratives that aren't there.

We are going into the future and speculations are fiction more or less based in educated predictions. A personal hope is that we expand into the universe and become a truly universal civilization or entity. But statistics point to oblivion before any of that has come to pass, either by self-destruction or losing all attributes of being human, becoming something else, either through evolution or self-evolutionary augmentation and manipulation.

1. What is ultimate reality to you? God? Matter? Something else? — jjstet

Randomness – not mere chance or unpredictability. (re: void, no-thing, oblivion ...)

2. Is truth absolute or relative? Are at least some truths absolute? Where do these come from?

Neither. Truths are propositional: they are discerned, or inferred, by defeasible and discursive-dialectical-dialogical reasoning.

3. Are moral values absolute or relative? Are at least some moral values absolute? If so, where do these absolute moral values come from?

Neither. Moral values are naturalistic: they are (codified) priorities, or instructions, for preventing, minimizing or relieving typical – foreseeable – conditions from which all members of a natural species – e.g. our kind – suffer, and that are derived from both our natal-familial-social 'bonding' experiences (i.e. positive & negative reinforcement) and reflective conduct (i.e. conscience, judgment).

4. How would you answer the three great philosophical questions of life: Where did we come from?

We come from no-thing (nowhere).

re: planck-era vacuum fluctuations (i.e. spontaneous symmetry-breaking); zero-minimum entropy; mitochondrial eve's womb, etc

Why are we here?

We are here-now for no-thing (products, or detritus, of natural selection ... )

re: accelerating entropy (i.e. 'arrow of time'); facts – e.g. philosophizers – are necessarily non-necessary (i.e. radically contingent); 'existence precedes essence', etc

Where are we going?

We return to no-thing (nowhere).

re: extinction; maximum entropy ... oblivion

Also I think you should add the question “What’s the purpose of philosophy” or “Why do you discuss philosophy”. — khaled

:up:

[The] purpose of philosophy, especially for those who recognize that they (we) are congenitally unwise, may be (YMMV) to strive to mitigate, to minimize, the frequency & scope of (our) unwise judgments, conduct, etc via patiently habitualizing various reflective exercises (e.g. discussing philosophy, etc.) And in so far as 'wisdom' denotes mastery over folly & stupidity (i.e. misuses & abuses, respectively, of intelligence, knowledge, judgment, etc), I translate philosophy as the love of 'opposing folly & stupidity'.

edit ...

1. Nature
2. Depends what you're talking about. "Human beings can exist" doesn't depend on anything afaik. Other facts, like the distance to the Sun, are certainly relative.
3. Relative, but universally biased.
4a. Other apes.
4b. Evolution.
4c. To our graves.

1. Reality. Anything else is in reality, therefore not reality.

2. Truth itself nothing in itself. Better to have asked about true, but you didn't.

3. Is pain absolute or relative? Ans., both absolutely relative and relatively absolute. And so with moral values.

4. Answering strictly, nowhere, no why, nowhere.

(I am giving short answers as perhaps that is what you are seeking.)

I. Ultimate reality is beyond matter. It could be seen as a force and has been called God by some but this description is problematic in some ways because, sometimes, people project human qualities on it.

2. It is hard to know for certain if there are absolute truths beyond the relative ones.

3. Morality has a certain amount of relativity but some acts, such as murder and rape are harder to describe in that way.

4. We are here as a result of evolution. We are here to live as well as we can, for our benefit and that of others. We are here to create pathways for future generations and lifeforms.

1. What is ultimate reality to you? God? Matter? Something else? — jjstet

Probably nature.

2. Is truth absolute or relative? Are at least some truths absolute? Where do these come from? — jjstet

Don't know what you mean by absolute or relative. Assuming relative means context dependent and absolute means context independent, I'd guess all truths are relative, since the events which make accounts accurate occur in a context.

3. Are moral values absolute or relative? Are at least some moral values absolute? If so, where do these absolute moral values come from? — jjstet

Using the same split; relative, and for the same reason.

4. How would you answer the three great philosophical questions of life: Where did we come from? Why are we here? and Where are we going? — jjstet

Nature. No reason. No idea.

An exercise for a philosophy class is like playing against a chess player who has just learned the rules. The game quickly turns into mutual nonsense.

1. What is ultimate reality to you? God? Matter? Something else? — jjstet

1. I don't know. I don't think in terms of the ultimate. It's important to recognise what you cannot know.

2. Is truth absolute or relative? Are at least some truths absolute? Where do these come from? — jjstet

2. Truth is a word with many senses; and for that reason, it's not particularly useful.
There is binary truth: true/false.
Logical truth: if A then B.
Scientific truth: knowledge built from the bottom up, striving toward truth - it never presumes to attain.
Conventional truth: Paris is the capital city of France.
Truth as correspondence to reality: it is raining.
Conditional truth: it will rain tomorrow.
But absolute truth is beyond my knowing, and if it is relative; from another perspective, it is not truth.

3. Are moral values absolute or relative? Are at least some moral values absolute? If so, where do these absolute moral values come from? — jjstet

3. Morality is a sense; fostered in the human animal by evolution in a hunter gatherer tribal context. Morality was beneficial to the individual within the tribe, and to the tribe composed of moral individuals. Morality became explicit when hunter gatherer tribes joined together to form civilisation. There are no absolute moral values.

4. How would you answer the three great philosophical questions of life: Where did we come from? Why are we here? and Where are we going? — jjstet

4. Life on earth is the consequence of physical forces acting upon chemical elements. Human beings are a consequence of the evolution of life by means of natural selection. The occurrence of human intellect makes us special. Our ability to look back at reality and experience it, to understand it, is only the second addition to the universe in 15 billion years. (Life is the first.) We matter because we know; and knowledge can secure our long term existence in the universe.

1. "Ultimate" is a (transcendental) illusion. (The) reality "beyond" (every) reality is as nonsensical as ... north of the north pole.

2. Propositional ... Discursive practices.

3. Ecological (i.e. mal/adaptive conduct) ... Discursive practices.

4a. Nowhere.

4b. The only answer to "Why?" that does not beg the question, or infinitely regress, is There is no why.

4c. Nowhere.