Well, the voting is all over the place there! I think leaving philosophy to super-intelligence is the best option. We humans just don't know enough yet to tackle this sort of question effectively.
For what's its worth, I considered this sort of question intensively for many years, and I did reach some tentative answers. It was psychologically horrible (I never want to go through that again and I feel I did some mental damage to myself), but it proved humanly possible to reach some answers. Of course, these answers of mine are only on a preliminary (non-technical) level, and would need super-intelligence to fully develop and verify.
Summary of my approach: Consider a logical language (computer scientists call this an 'ontology') capable of modelling reality in general. It turns out that infinite recursion (a language with fully reflective power) requires 3 and only 3 different levels of descriptions - the object level, the meta-level, and the meta-meta level. This 3 level stratification of reality is reflected in 3 broad domains - teleological, physical and mathematical. Each of these 3 levels in turns splits into 3 different sub-levels. A total of 27 (3^3) independent base concepts is all that is required to fully encapsulate reality. That is, a language consisting of an 'alphabet' of 27 concepts is sufficient to fully model all of reality!
Summary of my conclusions: There do exist universal virtues that are platonic in nature (they exist in Plato's world of forms that cannot be located within space and time - because they are universally true). These virtues emerge naturally from modelling of the 'teleological' domain. As stated above, more detailed modelling of this domain shows the 3-level split, and 3 general 'virtues' or ethical imperatives appear to emerge in a natural way as an indirect result of this:
(1) BEAUTY
(2) LIBERTY
(3) PERFECTION
Beauty appears to be the most abstract level (applies to all value systems) , Liberty is next level-down (applies to political/social values), and Perfection appears to be the base level (applies to individual values). But in principle Liberty and Perfection are derivatives of Beauty.
Therefore, I concluded that the purpose of the universe is the creation of beauty.
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Well, the voting is all over the place there! I think leaving philosophy to super-intelligence is the best option. We humans just don't know enough yet to tackle this sort of question effectively.
For what's its worth, I considered this sort of question intensively for many years, and I did reach some tentative answers. It was psychologically horrible (I never want to go through that again and I feel I did some mental damage to myself), but it proved humanly possible to reach some answers. Of course, these answers of mine are only on a preliminary (non-technical) level, and would need super-intelligence to fully develop and verify.
Summary of my approach: Consider a logical language (computer scientists call this an 'ontology') capable of modelling reality in general. It turns out that infinite recursion (a language with fully reflective power) requires 3 and only 3 different levels of descriptions - the object level, the meta-level, and the meta-meta level. This 3 level stratification of reality is reflected in 3 broad domains - teleological, physical and mathematical. Each of these 3 levels in turns splits into 3 different sub-levels. A total of 27 (3^3) independent base concepts is all that is required to fully encapsulate reality. That is, a language consisting of an 'alphabet' of 27 concepts is sufficient to fully model all of reality!
Summary of my conclusions: There do exist universal virtues that are platonic in nature (they exist in Plato's world of forms that cannot be located within space and time - because they are universally true). These virtues emerge naturally from modelling of the 'teleological' domain. As stated above, more detailed modelling of this domain shows the 3-level split, and 3 general 'virtues' or ethical imperatives appear to emerge in a natural way as an indirect result of this:
(1) BEAUTY
(2) LIBERTY
(3) PERFECTION
Beauty appears to be the most abstract level (applies to all value systems) , Liberty is next level-down (applies to political/social values), and Perfection appears to be the base level (applies to individual values). But in principle Liberty and Perfection are derivatives of Beauty.
Therefore, I concluded that the purpose of the universe is the creation of beauty.