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Why life is absurd

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: Why life is absurd

#71

Post by q845712 »

i think she's wrong that time is the only absurd thing:

i've often wished i could hibernate; there's a ton of victorian art that shows a clear obsession with humans flying like birds; i spent many childhood afternoons trying to hold my breath longer (so i could stay underwater); there's been tons of fiction, philosophy, science and engineering put into talking to animals...

however, most of all, i agree with all the comments above suggesting that the notion of permanence itself is absurd, our insistence on a hard-nosed materialist viewpoint is absurd, our insistence that we're smart enough to understand the universe is absurd (we're little smarter than our dogs and cats, who we're sure can't possibly understand the universe)

Re: Why life is absurd

#72

Post by cdahmedeh »

Life is absurd because of our imminent death. For some reason, we have the greatest troubles in accepting that everything is transient. After pleasure comes eventually pain, after relaxation comes work, after life comes death... We live here as if our lives on Earth are eternal, while all evidence has shown that it is not.

Even more absurd is the unfairness of the whole joke of life. I'm lucky with an education and a good job giving me a chance to focus on experiencing nuanced pleasures instead of fighting to survive. Being mentally ill does give me share of anguish, but mine is nothing compare to the poor, unfed and terminally sick. Their life is even more absurd: a passage through a brief but painful passage through anguish, suffering and hopelessness.

As an ex-Muslim, I have trouble adjusting to this: meaning is just a human construct. Things don't have meaning on their own, we assign them a purpose ourselves. Religion gave me re-assurance of eternal afterlife where I get a second chance to live a life without the evil and suffering of this existence. However, it did have a fatal flaw: it was false hope.

Now, life went from a short journey into another realm to a serious emergency. Now, I have to make of what I was lucky to own; but it can all go away in a single accident. After being a pattern-seeking religionist, everything is just starting to seem so random...

Re: Why life is absurd

#73

Post by mynameisvlad »

nosuchthing wrote: post #56
pron wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I don't see the OP trying to anthromorphize it at all. It's merely looking at the universe as it is. If you or I, or hell, even the entire human race, suddenly ceased to exist, it wouldn't be felt even outside our planet. Mars' orbit wouldn't change, a nearby star wouldn't suddenly go supernova, etc. We are such an incredibly small part of the universe that we don't really affect anything outside our planet.

Re: Why life is absurd

#74

Post by bitwize »

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour. Sit next to a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute. That's relativity." --Einstein, attributed

Re: Why life is absurd

#75

Post by hyperliner »

I don't think that life is absurd. There are, however, some absurd aspects to it:

- why would anybody waste their time, given that life is so short? The problem I guess is that "waste" is relative. Who wasted their time? Me in school, or my buddies partying?

- it's absurd that your luck is pretty much determined by where and when you were born. It's absurd that some people think they are so accomplished and scored many runs but without realizing they were born on third base

- it's absurd that the probability is high there is no God. why would something so mathematically amazing as the universe generate something so brutally absurd as conscious life?

- I think it is absurd that I just wasted 5 minutes of my life thinking about this instead of tucking my kids to bed or reading them a story for bed time.

Well, I guess life is in fact absurd. My original premise is invalid.

Re: Why life is absurd

#77

Post by arnarbi »

padolsey wrote: post #7
jqm wrote: post #3

Absurdity is a relative state. When philosophy starts trying to bullshit with semantics, I completely loose interest. That's this article.

Yes, but the author explicitly explores the semantics she pushes in regard to other limitations: our size relative to the universe, our inability to fly, etc. With everything taken into account, it is indeed odd that the thing that seems uniquely absurd is our longevity. Why aren't we perturbed by our lack of gills or our inability to walk to the moon? The point of the article is to explore this absurdity. You knew t…

I was surprised, because this was on the HN front page.

> The point of the article is to explore this absurdity.

I think the point of the article was just to sound smart. It doesn't really explore anything, nor provoke thoughts or insights.

Re: Why life is absurd

#78

Post by aikah »

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…

> morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.

One could argue morals should be based on the survival of mankind. Because that's the only positive goal of it, to survive as long as possible,though, ultimately mankind will come to an end,that's inevitable. On the other hand, as long as there is energy,artificial intelligence could outlast us.It would be mankind's testament and ultimate legacy. I always thought that, if we were to find another alien civilization,it would be through the AI they designed or in form of pure data. And it's probable that it would be available as binary data too.

Re: Why life is absurd

#79

Post by forloop »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #70
forloop wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.wikip…

nothing you said changes the incentives in front of researchers. Grant money is there in the billions for cancer research, obesity research etc. There is essentially no grant money there for basic longevity research. I say this having spoken with people trying to get funding for basic longevity research.

Maybe there's just less longevity researchers. The absolute funding makes little difference from an individual career perspective–even if it does have a large effect on the field as a whole.

I've linked to a page of academics from top institutions[0]. If you're at Harvard researching longevity, then you're doing OK career-wise, imho.

If you sell your company for $720 million, you're doing OK career-wise, imo.

Demonstrably, you're incorrect.

[0] http://www.elysiumhealth.com/team

Re: Why life is absurd

#80

Post by will_work4tears »

zaroth wrote: post #29
pcmonk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think human intelligence hits an asymptote due to mortality. There's only so deep an individual can go, and a limit on how much you can replace depth with breadth. I don't know exactly what you mean by "human intelligence", but in general we get deeper not by stretching vertically, but by moving vertically, if you follow the metaphor. Many software engineers today don't even have a passing familiarity with the de…

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…

Your comment really inspires me take another read of the I, Pencil short story[0].

[0] - http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

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