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Why life is absurd

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Re: Why life is absurd

#51

Post by sliverstorm »

marquis wrote: post #8
zaroth wrote: post #6

I couldn't agree more that our humanity places truly absurd limits on our existence. You get, if you're lucky 30-40 years of solid productivity after 20-30 years of training. Maybe enough time to create one or two solid accomplishments before your capacity for thought, and soon enough your capacity for life is extinguished. Also consider the economic argument. On the one hand, the level of investment experts make in…

> levels the playing field for newborns We see the effects of longer, more productive lives already in youth unemployment and property prices. It may not be until the post-boomer generation that we adjust to this. Perhaps there is a historical period where a generation has lived far longer than the few preceding it, from which we can get an idea how society managed?

The historical problem is too many children surviving childhood. The oldest son gets the farm, the youngest gets nothing.

The solutions have been things like:

- subdivide the property (not sustainable)

- The younger son goes to the military, or the frontier, or...

- The younger son courts a daughter in a family with no sons

Re: Why life is absurd

#52

Post by krapp »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #39
rndn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone happen to know whether philosophers have tried to come up with optimal ethics assuming P(universe exists for no reason) is close to 1 and P(god exists) is close to 0? The best we can do is probably to maximize the life span of our species to continually improve these estimates and the best way to achieve that is possibly to minimize suffering. Is it that easy?

The Marquis de Sade did. He said, "If there is no God, then whatever is, is right." And he went on to say that nature made man stronger than woman, therefore man had the right to do to woman whatever he wanted. So that's probably not what you consider "optimal ethics", but given the starting assumption (that there is no God), it seems very difficult to explain why de Sade was wrong.

> it seems very difficult to explain why de Sade was wrong.

If we can't prove unambiguously whether or not God exists (and we can't), much less what the actual Will of that God is (even the religions which more or less agree on the same God can't agree on that), then ethics in the presence of God are in practice no different than ethics in the absence of God.

I think it's difficult to prove the Marquis wrong because it's impossible to prove him right.

Edit: let's just pretend I wrote this from an alternate mirror universe where what I said here made sense in context. I'm not deleting this comment because that's the coward's way out....

Re: Why life is absurd

#53

Post by forloop »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #40
forloop wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Longevity research is currently a career dead end. David Sinclair[0] is wealthy and well known for his work in longevity. He Sold his company to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million. D Sinclair's earlier work was on resveratrol, and there's some more products coming. Well, actually one has arrived—in the US at least: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/ [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sinclair_%28biologist%29

Citing a single outlier does not change the prospects of an academic researcher going into longevity work.

Elysium has 5 Nobel Laureates on their board[0]! Their Chief Scientist is Leonard Guarente of MIT.

Novartis[1], the pharmaceutical company, who ranked number one in world-wide sales in 2013 is working on a longevity drug based on rapamycin.

Elizabeth Blackburn got a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 2009, for her work on telomeres!

Quite frankly: lulz!

[0] http://www.elysiumhealth.com/team [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novartis

Re: Why life is absurd

#54

Post by gphil »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #47

We long for permanence, but death comes anyway. We long for a real basis for morals, but if all we are is matter obeying the laws of physics, morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules. We long for meaning, but that's hard to come by too. It usually comes down to randomly picking something and assigning meaning to it, and claiming that now you have meaning. But if all you are is a machine made of a…

> We long for a real basis for morals, but if all we are is matter obeying the laws of physics, morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.

That's not necessarily true: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#2

Re: Why life is absurd

#55

Post by AnimalMuppet »

krapp wrote: post #52
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Marquis de Sade did. He said, "If there is no God, then whatever is, is right." And he went on to say that nature made man stronger than woman, therefore man had the right to do to woman whatever he wanted. So that's probably not what you consider "optimal ethics", but given the starting assumption (that there is no God), it seems very difficult to explain why de Sade was wrong.

> it seems very difficult to explain why de Sade was wrong. If we can't prove unambiguously whether or not God exists (and we can't), much less what the actual Will of that God is (even the religions which more or less agree on the same God can't agree on that), then ethics in the presence of God are in practice no different than ethics in the absence of God. I think it's difficult to prove the Marquis wrong because…

I think you miss my point. Given de Sade's premise (that there is no God), his conclusion seems to follow. (If you think you can show that it doesn't, go for it.)

And many people accept de Sade's premise. They are then left with his conclusion. (Not necessarily sadism - that's just what de Sade felt like doing. The part that people are left with is "Whatever is, is right" - that is, there is no basis for a "should" or an "ought"; there is no basis for morals.)

Re: Why life is absurd

#56

Post by nosuchthing »

pron wrote: post #28
zaroth wrote: post #6

I couldn't agree more that our humanity places truly absurd limits on our existence. You get, if you're lucky 30-40 years of solid productivity after 20-30 years of training. Maybe enough time to create one or two solid accomplishments before your capacity for thought, and soon enough your capacity for life is extinguished. Also consider the economic argument. On the one hand, the level of investment experts make in…

But why do you think productivity is any less absurd than non-productivity? And why is intelligence relevant to absurdity? Is a butterfly's life any more absurd than a human's? Humans and humanity don't have goals. The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. And it is certainly not our goal to be creative, productive, efficient. We make up goals for ourselves to give subjective meaning to our lives, an…

You seem anthropomorphize "The Universe", as some God-human like creature?

Structure (and the immense variety), life, mutations, and the known universe that exist rather than infinite disorder and an entropic void seems more than just "indifferent".

Re: Why life is absurd

#57

Post by krapp »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #55
krapp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems very difficult to explain why de Sade was wrong. If we can't prove unambiguously whether or not God exists (and we can't), much less what the actual Will of that God is (even the religions which more or less agree on the same God can't agree on that), then ethics in the presence of God are in practice no different than ethics in the absence of God. I think it's difficult to prove the Marquis wrong because…

I think you miss my point. Given de Sade's premise (that there is no God), his conclusion seems to follow. (If you think you can show that it doesn't, go for it.) And many people accept de Sade's premise. They are then left with his conclusion. (Not necessarily sadism - that's just what de Sade felt like doing. The part that people are left with is "Whatever is, is right" - that is, there is no basis for a "should" o…

It seems I got it completely backwards then, I feel kind of silly.

Re: Why life is absurd

#58

Post by jeffreyrogers »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richard Hamming has a talk titled "You and Your Research", in which he discusses what sorts of things you should be working on. The summary is that you should be working on important problems. He then lists three of the most important problems that no one should actually work on, time travel, teleportation, and something else that I can't remember off the top of my head. The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostro…

> The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way. I think that if there's one thing that philosophers agree on, after arguing with each other for a couple of millennia, it's that the point of philosophy is not to find a clever way to lie to ourselves - it's to find out something true .

I think people are getting a bit hung up on my (admittedly poor) phrasing and less on the substance of my comment. Yes, philosophy wants to find out something "true", but reality as a whole is to complex to think about head on. Any philosophy with the goal of being completely factually true has to deal with a lot of information that isn't really relevant, e.g. physical (meaning atoms, etc.) interactions.

Since that is too much information to deal with you have to selectively ignore parts of it. A useful philosophy lets you get rid of essentially all the irrelevant information while keeping and fitting into a mental framework what is relevant. So in a sense it is a lie, but it is one that hopefully preserves the important parts. My argument was that Bostrom's philosophy ignores too many of the important parts by dismissing his critics' viewpoints as unfounded. Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

Re: Why life is absurd

#59

Post by agentultra »

If the poets taught us anything it's that you cannot quantify that which you cannot count and you can't rationalize that which is irrational. We are wholly absurd in this regard; able and enfeebled at the same time. Perfectly capable of realizing that we're trapped in these meat-bags sailing through time to an inescapable doom.

And what do we do about it? Science and engineering life-extending technologies. Write about our memories and discoveries. Make music and art. It's absurd and it seems to work for us.

Re: Why life is absurd

#60

Post by zaroth »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #46
zaroth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good point! To the extent that we can build on abstractions and black boxes we stand on the shoulders of giants. BTW, perhaps s/human intelligence/science & technology. Does this really work about as well (e.g. leaky abstractions but better than nothing) in all disciplines? Learning math is a pretty much a 'climb the ladder' experience. You don't have to literally discover it all for yourself, but you do still h…

I think technology will be easier, not harder. In 150 years your car will be made from carbon only and will have tiny simple motors in its wheels. Plus some magic energy source.

Cars? Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads! ;-)
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