191–200 of 236 posts
I am always curious why one continues to believe the beliefs that lead to pain, suffering, and unhappiness. Even if correct is being miserable worth it?
It's morally repulsive to me to believe something just because it makes me feel better.
> In lieu of meaning, I mostly adopted the attitude of Alan Watts. Existence, he says, is fundamentally playful. It's less like a journey, and more like a piece of music or a dance. And the point of dancing isn't to arrive at a particular spot on the floor; the point of dancing is simply to dance. Vonnegut expresses a similar sentiment when he says, "We are here on Earth to fart around." Ikigai[0] is worth exploring…
Work sets you free, right?
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As it says: It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just happens that a species that survives and reproduces will continue to live. Without a creator, there is no real “purpose” at all. Everything came from nothing, will end as nothing, and is ultimately irrelevant. Everything. As a Christian, I sometimes look over into that chasm and wonder how atheists bear it.
The one argument about religion I find especially hard to understand is that of needing some higher entity to give your existence meaning. It sort of comes off to me as a lighter way of asking how you can be a moral person without the threat of eternal suffering in the afterlife (not to suggest that you actually mean that). I consider myself agnostic, practically an atheist, I just don't really like associating mysel…
This is a very common argument that comes from a misconception of what theists argue. There's a difference between knowing what's good or bad, and doing it. What theists argue is not that only who believes in God can do something good. They argue all human beings know something good or bad because God imbued humans that ability, regardless of what they believe in, or whether they want to do it or not.
Interestingly, Christianity is unique regarding this matter. While most, if not all, religions say you have to earn it in order to go to the desirable afterlife (heaven/paradise/etc.), Christianity says no one, whatever good things they do, can earn it. Only because of God's grace they can be saved. Also, we love because God loved us first. We do good things not for earning an eternal life, but for an act of gratitude that God has saved us.
If physicalism were true, and abiogenesis happened without any intervention of "higher being"(s), and Darwinism were correct; then life wouldn't be meaningless. Neither would its purpose be determined by each individual. Life would have exactly two objective purposes: to survive and to reproduce. It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just happens that a species that survives and reproduces will cont…
Exodus (bible OT) contains a phrase (in the voice of god) that is remarkably precocious of its purpose: asserting, through unconventional grammar, a certain essentially existentialist claim completely unique to its speaker. έγώ είμι ό ών ( pardon the abuse of the acute accent, I can't get this IME to reproduce the grave) which is translated as "I am that I am," means something dynamically close to "I am the IS." or "…
Which is where Aquinas and others get / build on the concept of 'God as verb'. God is not a thing or a being (not even the Supreme Being), but rather God is to be: Being itself. See Aquinas Summa contra Gentiles, XXII.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_contra_Gentiles
Search for ipsum esse subsistens (Subsisting Essence Itself) if you wish to go down this rabbit hole.
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>> As far as we know , we and our societies take the prize for being the most complex structures the universe has yet evolved. > This is where I end up in a lot of my own musings on the subject. Another point I typically make is that we KNOW that the immense diversity and complexity that exists on Earth will end in the future, unless some intelligence is able to spread life outside of Earth. "Knowing" is NOT a group…
I say that "knowing" is very much a group activity, in fact, it's the only way one can even approach certainly that what one "knows" isn't just a hallucination or a dream. We can only "know" by verifying that what we experience is consistent with the experience of others, this is the essence of repeatable scientific experimentation and peer-review in science... which is the group effort of improving the extent and ac…
If you look at your sentence structure, you should be able to see the assumptions you are making. I think you're baking in the idea of knowing being a community activity when you say 'we can only "know"'.
Reality is personal - it is not a group activity. An individual may do things with groups, but they remain an individual, with one mind, one body, etc. I don't think this is debatable.
You seem to think I'm arguing for solipsism, when I say 'knowing is not a group activity'. If that's what you think, you are wrong - I am no solipsist. I'm simply stating the plain, verifiable reality of the matter - I'm not pretending to be beholden to some collectivist illusion.
Some questions and answers to consider.
Where does 'knowing' occur? In one's mind, surely. Can one person know, and another not know? Of course. Can one explain to another how one can verify an idea? Quite possibly. If that person then verifies the idea for themselves can they say that they know? Yes. Can some people say that "we know this or that" without any of them having verified any of it? Well, people do say this all the time, but it is simply nonsense - either an individual knows or does not.
It is perfectly possible to say that one knows this-or-that but this-or-that could really be an unverified belief. While language allows this misuse, I would argue that this is a form of a lie - 'believing' is not 'knowing', and to say one knows something that one has not verified is a form of lie.
Finally, an individual (one mind, one body) is not a "we". (Although if you use speech in a special way like the Queen perhaps you can argue the point.) "We" is simply a means to describe a group that we are included within. There are times when it is fine, meaningful to use "we" eg "we four went for an ice cream". This is a true statement. But what does it mean to say "we know human society is complex"? Its simply a nonsense statement - a group has no mind. The mind is with the individuals in the group. To say otherwise is to pretend there is something more to a group than a convenient linguistic handle.
I really don't think I'm saying anything that isn't self-evident. But perhaps this is hard to see if you suffer from this commonplace group delusion, which seems to be foundational to many individuals' view of reality.
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> So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so? I’m not sure how “higher beings say so” gets you to objectivity, especially when the very nature of our understanding of any such being would be anything but objective. Mostly what you’ve touched on there is that “good” and “bad” are rather inadequate descriptors o…
> There can be multiple competing objective functions But my whole point is that there can only be one ultimate objective function: to maximize the chance of survival. There might be some other objective functions derived from the ultimate one, but none can be standalone. Other standalone "objective functions" can always be asked "Why is it desirable?" For example, why is minimizing suffering desirable? Pain is just…
Evolutionary mechanisms do not bestow some "ultimate" or unquestionable truth/goal of which all others are subservient or branched from, it is merely an explanatory framework for biological continuation we've observed in the world, and like other similar explanatory frameworks we generally would do well to avoid attributing "purpose" where all we can see (if we can even see that) is "is." It certainly is likely an attributable factor for much of what we value as we are products of said process, but we do not owe it primacy any more than a computer off the assembly line owes the assembly line its purpose.
To be honest I'm now a bit confused on your position, as you explicitly brought up points in your previous post that elucidated some of the cracks in attempting to treat survival as the "one true goal":
> But when you think about it, there are "good" things that aren't advantageous (or even are harmful) to survival, and there are things advantageous to survival that are considered "bad" by most people. Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics.
And I could posit other thought experiments or examples or such, but perhaps first I should ask how this line of questioning doesn't lead you away from survival as the ultimate objective function.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so? I’m not sure how “higher beings say so” gets you to objectivity, especially when the very nature of our understanding of any such being would be anything but objective. Mostly what you’ve touched on there is that “good” and “bad” are rather inadequate descriptors o…
> There can be multiple competing objective functions But my whole point is that there can only be one ultimate objective function: to maximize the chance of survival. There might be some other objective functions derived from the ultimate one, but none can be standalone. Other standalone "objective functions" can always be asked "Why is it desirable?" For example, why is minimizing suffering desirable? Pain is just…
You’ve only realized that life is optimized for survival and reproduction. While that’s not wrong, there’s no intrinsic meaning in this.
Ultimately, meaning and purpose are what you make them. The beginning of spacetime being equal to zero at the Big Bang is the quintessential example of a concept beyond conception. This concept similarly falls into that category.
If physicalism were true, and abiogenesis happened without any intervention of "higher being"(s), and Darwinism were correct; then life wouldn't be meaningless. Neither would its purpose be determined by each individual. Life would have exactly two objective purposes: to survive and to reproduce. It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just happens that a species that survives and reproduces will cont…
When you say "survival" in terms of Darwinian evolution, you're really talking about survival of specific genes. Why should we choose to be beholden to the primal "desires" (if you'll grant me the intentional stance) of our genes? We are the AI that our DNA invented that turned around and overthrew it. The planet is ours now, not our DNA's. There are many other things that evolve too: ideas, memes, viruses, and many…
While objective, paperclip count is notorious for not really aligning with our intuition of good vs. bad; I'm pretty sure we can do better. But this illustrates the point that the problem is really about picking from the infinitely many objective measures that, objectively, do already exist.
Humans exist; that is objectively true. Humans have preferences; that is objectively true. Humans take pleasure from some experiences and experience pain from others; that is objectively true, albeit a big simplification. It's objectively true that humans dislike having rusty nails jammed into their eyes. It's objectively true that humans enjoy eating nice meals when they're hungry. We should seek to perform those actions which minimize the number of rusty nails jammed into eyes and maximize the number of times humans can enjoy nice meals when they're hungry. Obviously there are trillions more considerations, but nowhere has subjectivity even entered the picture yet.
What I'm saying is that we can pick, or define, or refine, a truly objective measure; one that is much better than paperclip count. You could say "well there's subjectivity in picking which measure we use " -- only because we have imperfect knowledge of the universe and its future. If we had perfect knowledge of all the likes and dislikes of all humans that will ever exist, all sources of pain and pleasure and suffering and contentment and sadness and happiness, all their values and goals and desires, and how all actions affect all of that, then we could simply integrate their effects over time. Yes, we have to weight them appropriately, and find a good NPV discount rate, and all that, but with perfect knowledge, we could easily find one that's at the very least on the Pareto surface. That's our metric.
So our subjectivity comes from imperfect knowledge. But that's OK -- we accept that we have imperfect knowledge. There's a huge difference between "there's no objective measure of good vs. evil" and "it's really hard to pick an optimal measure of good vs. evil, and to know which actions maximize the net present value of that metric over the course of the universe." The former gives you nothing; the latter at least orients your moral compass toward something that humanity can all work toward together.