Attitude to Life.

My attitude to life is summarized in this quote from Cloud Atlas.

Our lives are not our own. 

From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. 

And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Meaning we are all tied to the universe, part of the universe. We are but waves in the sea. Beautiful, powerful, dynamic but fleeting nonetheless.

There is no self, no person. The self is one possible grouping that is socially useful. The self is only a way of thinking about ourselves. It's a mental shortcut. Not only this, we are locked into this mode/mould of thinking by our language - I, you, me, he, she, it.

It's all too obvious. The truth is hidden in plain sight. 

What are the consequences of this belief? 
I realize that at the cosmic scale, nothing matters. Humans tend to place meaning on everything, but in reality, meaning is in our heads only. And even if it is in our heads,  Meaning demands context. Out of a context, meaning disappears. 

I realize that we're all part of a system. We are but the system acting on itself. 

I realize that we do not see everything. We cannot see the whole truth, and that is what we have to live with.

I realize that I don't have free-will, but to live out my potential, I may have to acknowledge this and move on as best I can. In the moment, before I can compute the logic leading to my actions, my actions are spontaneous to me. This is the so-called free-will. So if an entity is capable of calculating my moves faster than I do, then in the eyes of that machine, I do not have free-will. But since I cannot predict my next action faster than I can decide and perform that next action, I can rightfully believe that I have free will. But this doesn't make it so, because a local truth is not necessarily a global truth. This may be what has been causing the confusion about "do we have free will?".

On the same note, therein lies a solution to the "Sleeping Beauty problem". Can SB rightly believe a "local result" to be the global truth, while knowing the global truth, and is capable of logically proving the global truth? My answer would be no. Often, there is no way of determining the truth with a single result. 

Perhaps there is one takeaway, and that is the universal truth may be "the real truth", but it's not the whole truth. The whole truth is that there is a universal truth independent of observer, observers may not be able to see this universal truth and a statement of truth doesn't exist without an observer.

Truth is not relative and not local. The very statement "truth is relative" is an attempt at declaring a universal, absolute truth.

...

So no. We are not free. But we are the products of local results. We are influenced by only a subset of reality/the universe. So it is our nature, and reasonable, to act as such. 

Trouble is, what is local wants to become global. And that sometimes comes at the cost of what is global.

That is why seeking truth and spreading truth are highly regarded. And why truth is ultimately preferable.

Life is its own meaning. It is what it is. And that's all there is to it.

Good day!