There is no point to life. Animals exist because they evolved and survived by following internal programs that lead them to happiness, but that doesn't mean you should try to evolve or survive or grant yourself happiness. Many people come up with a reason for the point of their own life but that doesn't mean it actually exists or that their own meaning is the same meaning for someone else.
What can bring you lasting happiness ?
Many things, food, family, shelter, pictures of Megan Fox. Maslow created a pyramid that explains what helps give us happiness at different levels. All someone really needs to do is believe they are happy and they will be happy but it may be very difficult to make yourself believe you are happy without having things you want. I think understanding yourself and other people will help a lot and I know many people will disagree with me on this but in reality almost all other things can be bought with money so knowledge and money should get you pretty far.
What are your most important values ?
This is vague, in order for something to be important you first need a goal so that you can assign weights to different values. Since life has no goal and therefore no value is more important than any other I guess I will pick the values that differentiate me from others and are positive attributes, which would be intelligence, treating others as I believe they would treat me, and being trustworthy.
What is good and what is evil ?
The normal concept of good and evil do not exist because we live in a universe where only one future can happen due to hard determinism. In the absence of free will most will agree there is no good or evil. Since I still like to engage in discussions about the topic I often use a form of utilitarianism which defines good as that which brings the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people
What is Wisdom ?
Understanding how and why things work.
What philosphers or philosphical doctrines do you especially like and why ?
I like Spinoza, Einstein, and Hawking a lot because of their understanding about hard determinism and how the world really works which I consider like a pinnacle of a TOE although most people wouldn't consider Einstein or Hawking philosophers I find almost all very intelligent people have a certain philosophy and understanding of it. I like certain thoughts of a large number of popular philosophers.
I`m especially interested in your own philosophical cogitation but any quotations of famous philosphers or ones you like are very welcome.
I hope I don't butcher this but my favorite is from Nietchze "Now that God is dead and we have killed him there will not be a river wide enough to wash away all of the blood." I like it because Nietchze understood that people can be fragile and if they have already grown up with a social framework like do not kill because god doesn't like it and you do something to disrupt that pillar of beliefs like convincing to them god no longer exists they may fall into distress.
Here's a couple more “I contend we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” - Stephen Roberts
"The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills." - Bertrand Russell
What the fuck is this debate about? WE WILL ALL FUCKING DIE OUT ANYWAY. Jesus fucking christ, please stop arguing over the shit. We will all die, and so we need to make the best out of our lives, enjoying every moment as much as we can with our families, friends, girlfriends, whatever. We will all fucking die....
ALSO, WE'RE PRETTY EVIL BY NATURE. I HEAR DARWINS APPROVAL OF THIS TOO.
On July 20 2010 13:12 Maji wrote: Technically you cant asume that it cant be known, who says eventually you wont know how it all came into being yourself, I stand by my statement.
You can prove that it can't be known by perception.
Everything you know now before you where born you knew it is simply that once the correct choice is made the correct amount of effort the knowledge is given, We have said before all knowledge is waves this is correct your brain has a deep connection to the universe you occupy you dont realize it yet as a species.
You can say that but you have literally no evidence whatsoever.
While you seek proof of everything the universe will reframe from giving you it, it is only when faith is shown will the proof be given to crystalize it within your experience.
You can not anticipate truth it must be aloud to flow into you, hence to seek proof is to prevent truth the intent must be correct in order for the universe to give you the answer, it is only when the one seeking allows the creator to show them after much effort does the answer get revealed, all effort leads to a eventual revealing but only if the receiptant is open to the answer if your cup is full it can never be refilled.
On July 21 2010 16:41 Maji wrote: While you seek proof of everything the universe will reframe from giving you it, it is only when faith is shown will the proof be given to crystalize it within your experience.
Nonsense.
You can not anticipate truth it must be aloud to flow into you, hence to seek proof is to prevent truth the intent must be correct in order for the universe to give you the answer, it is only when the one seeking allows the creator to show them after much effort does the answer get revealed, all effort leads to a eventual revealing but only if the receiptant is open to the answer if your cup is full it can never be refilled.
Prove it.
You're just spouting nonsensical claims about the nature of things with no reasoning, evidence, or logic. This is worse than trying to read Hegel.
On July 21 2010 16:41 Maji wrote: While you seek proof of everything the universe will reframe from giving you it, it is only when faith is shown will the proof be given to crystalize it within your experience.
You can not anticipate truth it must be aloud to flow into you, hence to seek proof is to prevent truth the intent must be correct in order for the universe to give you the answer, it is only when the one seeking allows the creator to show them after much effort does the answer get revealed, all effort leads to a eventual revealing but only if the receiptant is open to the answer if your cup is full it can never be refilled.
Prove it.
You're just spouting nonsensical claims about the nature of things with no reasoning, evidence, or logic. This is worse than trying to read Hegel.
Your lack of understanding shows us your current intelligence is to low to understand complexity of design. Hence we will leave you to your lower distortions.
its a painful thing when you wake up one day and realise you're a nihilist and how empty everything in this universe seems. maybe im just going through a rough patch but i just cant shake off the idea that all of this is nothing.
On July 21 2010 17:27 Telcontar wrote: its a painful thing when you wake up one day and realise you're a nihilist and how empty everything in this universe seems. maybe im just going through a rough patch but i just cant shake off the idea that all of this is nothing.
its a painful thing when you wake up one day and realise you're a nihilist and how empty everything in this universe seems. maybe im just going through a rough patch but i just cant shake off the idea that all of this is nothing.
it only feels 'empty' when you deliberately try to put meaning to it. If you just get over the whole 'meaning' thing, it doesn't feel that empty.
On July 20 2010 13:12 Maji wrote: Technically you cant asume that it cant be known, who says eventually you wont know how it all came into being yourself, I stand by my statement.
You can prove that it can't be known by perception.
Please go on. I would love to see some guy on the internets prove the pursuits of thousands of years of the world's most intelligent minds futile
What is the point of life ? -> Figure out how you would like to define point -> Figure out how you would like to define life
What can bring you lasting happiness ? -> Figure out how you would like to define happiness -> Figure out how you would define lasting
What are your most important values ? -> Figure out how you would define important -> Figure out how you would define values
What is good and what is evil ? -> Figure out how you would define good -> Figure out how you would define evil
What is Wisdom ? -> Define it, theres your answer.
Really, all these questions are simply questions of definition and language. People are just making things complicated when most arguments belong in an entirely differnt topic.
But hell there is only 1 philosophy topic on this forum so might as well express it all here. I understand =]
On July 23 2010 06:41 shammythefox wrote: Please go on. I would love to see some guy on the internets prove the pursuits of thousands of years of the world's most intelligent minds futile
You can't know anything via perception except that you have perceived X.
You might be able to prove that, had we been present at the time of the big bang (or whatever) we would have perceived a big bang, but that doesn't get you any closer to proving what actually happened.
Doesn't prove anything futile unless you insist on clinging to beliefs about an objective reality.
On July 21 2010 17:27 Telcontar wrote: its a painful thing when you wake up one day and realise you're a nihilist and how empty everything in this universe seems. maybe im just going through a rough patch but i just cant shake off the idea that all of this is nothing.
I quit thinking about things for a while when I did this lol. It did get better for me so I hope it does for you too.
On July 21 2010 17:27 Telcontar wrote: its a painful thing when you wake up one day and realise you're a nihilist and how empty everything in this universe seems. maybe im just going through a rough patch but i just cant shake off the idea that all of this is nothing.
I quit thinking about things for a while when I did this lol. It did get better for me so I hope it does for you too.
Nihilism is by its very nature sad, but its sort of countered by existentialism. Try reading about this.
In terms of general doctrines, I'm basically in line with existentialism, that there's no external meaning and that it must be supplied by an individual for oneself and that the key to a good life is to find whatever harmonies one can in the face of inner obstacles.
What I want to post really, though, is a specific theory I've been tossing around in my head for a while now. The initial line of thought was sparked by debate on the the question "Does God exist?" but it extends to encompass the questions of free will, a soul, causality, etc.. My answer I'm playing with is a very specific agnostic answer. I don't have a ton of philosophy study under my belt, so many things might be said better or could be summed up easier by a student of philosophy. I also have no idea with how rigorous it is, but it seems plausible to me and it keeps me happy while also being aimed at truth rather than ignorance, so I find it very harmonious. But I want to hear what people think.
I will consider God an entity that exists outside of the universe's physical structure and is not bound by any law which governs substances inside the universe, including any laws that are beyond our ability/too complex to comprehend but still do follow a distinct, necessary cause -> effect relationship.
The first thing I want to do is to outline two broad conceptions of the God question and say that they are necessarily the only possibilities. The first is a strictly mechanistic, atheistic universe. Without the existence of God, certain infallible laws of nature govern the interaction of everything in the universe. If they didn't, basically no question could ever be answerable. Why is the sky blue? If it's not because of universal properties of matter and electromagnetic waves, and not because of God's will then why does it consistently occur every time similar conditions exist? Or even not consistently occur despite the same conditions if that ever happened? There would be no reason. Every single thing that happens, every event then, is a direct result of the condition that existed before it (though the condition that exists is a very, very complex thing, taking into account the entire state of the universe at any instant) and the interaction of that condition with the laws of nature. What this does is validate scientific reasoning, and it has consequences for the impact on our human lives.
In this conception of the universe, we are only matter, matter that is classified as alive, animal, mammal, of a certain species, etc., and nothing beyond that. A consequence is that nothing special separates us from animals, we just evolved along a path that led us to develop higher mental capabilities than other animals on Earth, but beyond that, a more applicable consequence is that our entire experience is a product of physical reactions. Since in this version of the universe, there is nothing which can defy any law of the universe, we cannot have any sort of immaterial soul because there has to be something that led to that soul existing and having the characteristics it does, and if some causal path led to its creation, then it's also an explainable part of the universe (albeit one that eludes our present explanations) and is governed by laws (that we might not understand), and it must also be present somehow inside the universe (in another dimension or something? who knows, but it definitely is not immaterial, and it's a product of causes). Any impulse or thought a person has, and really the whole totality of someone's experience, then is not something created by a soul that can't exist. It is instead either a product of the brain and the bio-chemical reactions that take place there, the causes which govern this material other thing that's not really a soul which might exist in some other dimension (Descartes thought it was somewhere in the brain didn't he?). Therefore, there can't be anything which could really be conceived as free will, can there? There's no input of anything that's really "me" in any decision I make if it's all just matter following laws at a molecular level in my brain. (See this.) In humans, our brains may have developed in a way to give us the illusion of free will, or a self that is not purely physical but the mechanistic, atheist universe has no room for those to actually exist.
A further extension of this relates to predetermination. If the course of the universe is truly a chain of necessary cause and effect, then knowing the state of the universe at any point in time and the laws which govern it, the events that follow could be predicted 100% accurately. Or alternatively it is based on an interaction of necessary cause and effect and pure randomness (any sort of quasi-randomness is predictable with full information of the state of the universe).
I believe all of the above to be consequences of atheism and I challenge anyone to provide an account of atheism that does not have the characteristics I outlined.
Now I will talk briefly about my personal struggle with atheism. Once I learned a bit of science, particularly about the brain and how physical aspects of the brain link to thoughts, feelings, moods, etc., I could not for years dispel the idea that the above was the true nature of the universe. The idea depressed me, and it absolutely felt wrong, but no idea I came up with was more reasonable. There are some definite hangups in it though. First, there's the prime mover problem. The first thing to start the chain could not have happened based on some cause, it had to have just happened spontaneously? Or alternatively the chain has gone on forever or is somehow circular? None of these are compelling, none answer the question of why? Why does something exist instead of nothing? The main answer to this objection without undermining anything else of the above is Deism. There was one exception to the laws of nature, that God exists and created everything and the laws they follow, but that that is the final end of the influence of God. I group Deism with atheism in this theory I'm developing though because both give the same answers to the questions of predetermination, souls, free will and other relevant questions.
Beyond this though, the main hangup was an utter rejection of the idea of not having a self and not having free will. Why do I even have this illusion of self if I also have the capability to rationally dispel that illusion? And despite the fact that it's harmful to my well-being to dispel the illusion (I cannot be happy and live well without some self-efficacy), my impulse is entirely to try to, to discover truth? Am I that defective of an organism?
Therefore, in order to protect my well-being, enter myself. I will now presume that I do have a true self, one which is in control of itself, can have true whims and freedom and is not subject to a rational, explainable cause and effect which would stop it from being truly my own. How could such a soul exist, how could it come into being? Nothing in a universe governed as above, by causality, could create something like that. Only something that itself transcends causality could cause this soul. So this transcendental something must exist (hello God) to cause a soul to exist. Now this raises all sorts of hairy questions. What has and what doesn't have a soul? When does the soul link with a body? When is the soul created (suppose God created every soul that would be necessary forever at the beginning of creation and they live out in soul-land somewhere and whenever something is brought into existence a soul, somehow chosen, links with it and is brought into the universe)? Are they recycled? Are they ever destroyed? It's impossible to know, but I believe many consistent stories are possible, especially since the entire thing is dependent on the existence of something that follows no rules of causality and the universe we know.
Now the mere fact that God (the transcendental something) exists and is not bound by the logical laws of our universe suggests that it could potentially do anything, and thus achieves the all-powerful status which is commonly assigned. The concept of the will of God also fits as it's the only real way we can conceive of why anything regarding the non-explainable something happens. You can never explain why it happens, therefore it's arbitrary, and the model of arbitrary we have is in our own free selves, when we want something, we say it's our will. Therefore the reason we assign to the outside, unbound arbitrary reasoning is that it is that something's will.
Since this arbitrary will is free to interact with our universe, this undermines the idea that even excluding or taking into account matters of our free will, causality can be assumed. It might be true that God will never interfere with the universe's workings other than in creation and the method souls access the world, but it's by no means necessary or can be assumed. Therefore the foundations of any sort of science or rationality cannot be valid.
This presents another conundrum, as if this is true, then my entire essay I just wrote is 100% bunk since it relies on logical building, we have no reason to trust science or not fear that God might decide (in the nebulous unexplainable way impulses happen) one day "Experiment over" and eliminate the universe for no explainable reason.
The bridge that I eventually developed, the main idea of this whole entire post, is an attempt to solve the seeming dilemma here. On one hand, I'm a slave to the necessary actions of tiny particles, while on the other I'm free but nothing can be trusted, not even the fabric of the universe. And I absolutely have no way of discovering which one is true or of saying one of them is definitely false. So in a weird bit of insight I looked to ideas we seem to have adopted in quantum physics (I'm also not a real student of quantum physics, so please correct misconceptions I might have) because there seemed to be oddly similar dilemmas there. Namely that of quantum superposition and the uncertainty principle, the fact that given a state of being which is unobservable, the interaction between them is not to assign it to one or the other (only appropriate upon observation, which is impossible) but to describe it by a complex in-between state that is only removed by assigning or requiring it to be assigned to one or the other. In this way the nature of the universe can be correctly thought of as either one, or as a complex hybrid which allows it to take the natures of each when necessary to understand certain things (as in the wave/particle duality).
Most of your post looks like a bit of word salad to me.
I would point out that it doesn't appear to be actually true that the physical world is deterministic at small scales.
I think you are trying very hard to rationalize a concept of "free will" that is unclear and unnecessary. Your line of reasoning is something like "since we must have free will, God must exist to give us powers outside of the physical universe." I sure don't see enough evidence for the former to justify the latter.
I am personally pretty satisfied with the anthropic principle as a reason why something exists rather than nothing, and I don't understand how postulating a God gives you a reason, since then the question just becomes why God exists instead of nothing.
EPT
