~ The Meaning of Life ~

[marjoram_blues]

I cannot think of any sound basis to think that there is a Grand meaning, and all the evidence seems to point to the fact that there is no grand meaning.
When you figure this out you are truly liberated. Just accept it.

I really hope that after all I have written, here and elsewhere, that this is directed to a you plural; a generalised 'one'.
Otherwise, I have wasted my time here. That wouldn't surprise me...

Yes indeed. One is free, when one accepts the impossibility of finding a Grand Meaning.

I think this is true even if there is one (which I doubt). Suffice it to say that no one has any warrant to think they truly have the answer.
Finding the answer is what Camus called philosophical suicide: accepting a set answer such as religion or even science, when it gives you a series of easy answers to answer your anxiety about the lack of cosmic justice for example.

Thanks again - had no idea bout 'philosophical suicide'. Inter-resting. Can it ever be a silent cry for help...

[Hobbes' Choice]

I really hope that after all I have written, here and elsewhere, that this is directed to a you plural; a generalised 'one'.
Otherwise, I have wasted my time here. That wouldn't surprise me...

Yes indeed. One is free, when one accepts the impossibility of finding a Grand Meaning.

I think this is true even if there is one (which I doubt). Suffice it to say that no one has any warrant to think they truly have the answer.
Finding the answer is what Camus called philosophical suicide: accepting a set answer such as religion or even science, when it gives you a series of easy answers to answer your anxiety about the lack of cosmic justice for example.

Thanks again - had no idea bout 'philosophical suicide'. Inter-resting. Can it ever be a silent cry for help...

What is "it" exactly?

[marjoram_blues]

HC: Suffice it to say that no one has any warrant to think they truly have the answer.
Finding the answer is what Camus called philosophical suicide: accepting a set answer such as religion or even science, when it gives you a series of easy answers to answer your anxiety..

MB: Thanks again - had no idea bout 'philosophical suicide'. Inter-resting. Can it ever be a silent cry for help...[/quote]

HC: What is "it" exactly?

MB: 'philosophical suicide' - are you not following my thread of thought?
I'm thinking about people who sustain a dogmatic belief. Think theist v atheist arguments. Do you never think that sometimes they protest too much. And come here to be 'saved' ??? Some kind of a doubt must creep in sometime...but to change their minds would mean killing off their whole way of life...

[Bill Wiltrack]

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There is no doubt in my mind, in life...all life, there is a beginning a middle and an end.

Everyone reading this will die.



I contend, we will never experience death.


Consciousness is different, than our bodies, our minds, and our emotions.



We can never experience death. Our lives repeat over & over again, more or less in the same weary path.


Someone evoked Einstein within this thread. Einstein stated, not in so few words, that time is like a landscape. All time exists at the same time.



And this makes sense. There is a youtube video of a TED talk that involves our developing ability to take snapshots of traveling electrons.



The video, and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, artistically explain, in a way that I can't, that time, all time, exists simultaneously.

We experience slivers of time, as if we had blinders on that only allow us to see only what is exactly in front of us but if we could see further - beyond ourselves, we could better understand this fourth dimension.





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Here is where your sense departs your reason

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............................................................................... How so?




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[Bill Wiltrack]

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I think what I am attempting to characterize is that mankind's' greatest achievements in the arena of reason and logic points to the fact that we exit in eternity in the here & now. Our problem is, we cannot experience the here & now.

It is our fragmented relationship to our own consciousness more than logic or reason.


...our experience deceives us when it comes to our relationship to eternity.




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[Hobbes' Choice]

MB: 'philosophical suicide' - are you not following my thread of thought?
I'm thinking about people who sustain a dogmatic belief. Think theist v atheist arguments. Do you never think that sometimes they protest too much. And come here to be 'saved' ??? Some kind of a doubt must creep in sometime...but to change their minds would mean killing off their whole way of life...

It is just that you switched from a subject to an "it". "It" could have been "answer", or the "grand answer", or "philosophical suicide".
Philosophical suicide is a thing people tend to fall into. When you come into the world questions press on you, but all around are the answers. For most people in the world, questioning the answers is not encouraged. Most answers are just absorbed without much thought. More or less by osmosis. Kids get into the next craze, or just follow the people around them. Gangs, sub-cultures, religions. It all depends on where you live.
Maybe the majority are never even aware that they have a philosophical life to loose; never realise they have a choice, and grab the next best thing they can find.
The ones that come onto this Forum are so cock sure that they know the one true god. Jaded Sage and attofishpi are currently thrashing it out over tow distinct, and idiosyncratic views of god, based on nothing more than their feeling about it.
People do change. People can throw all that tradition out. They can rebel. Often they just thrash around until they find another fallacy to fit neatly into the hole that the last god left behind when they abandoned him. Christianity mutates to Paganism or Buddhism or even Islam. Its out of the frying pan into the fire.
I think you have to take a more distanced view. The view from anthropology and history seems to offer a perspective that disallows any strict adherence to a particular world view. So various and disparate are the ideologies of humans it seems ridiculous from that POV to accept any one, over the other. Go back further. Take a paleontological view point.
I simply go back 10 million years to the pliocene before there were any modern humans. Where is your god now?
What was Allah doing then?

[marjoram_blues]

The ones that come onto this Forum are so cock sure that they know the one true god. Jaded Sage and attofishpi are currently thrashing it out over tow distinct, and idiosyncratic views of god, based on nothing more than their feeling about it.
People do change. People can throw all that tradition out. They can rebel. Often they just thrash around until they find another fallacy to fit neatly into the hole that the last god left behind when they abandoned him. Christianity mutates to Paganism or Buddhism or even Islam. Its out of the frying pan into the fire.

So, even if they currently hold a particular view, as long as they are open to consider other possibilities, their minds are still alive. There is an active thinking/arguing process ( critical thinking/philosophy) to arrive at some other hot spot. This can't be the same as 'philosophical suicide', can it ? Please direct me, if you would be so kind, to this place in Camus' belief. Thanks.
{ I know I could google but I'd love to be taken to your favourite spot }

[Bill Wiltrack]

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..................................................................THE DEVELOPMENT OF GOD & PHILOSOPHY




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[Hobbes' Choice]

The ones that come onto this Forum are so cock sure that they know the one true god. Jaded Sage and attofishpi are currently thrashing it out over tow distinct, and idiosyncratic views of god, based on nothing more than their feeling about it.
People do change. People can throw all that tradition out. They can rebel. Often they just thrash around until they find another fallacy to fit neatly into the hole that the last god left behind when they abandoned him. Christianity mutates to Paganism or Buddhism or even Islam. Its out of the frying pan into the fire.

So, even if they currently hold a particular view, as long as they are open to consider other possibilities, their minds are still alive. There is an active thinking/arguing process ( critical thinking/philosophy) to arrive at some other hot spot. This can't be the same as 'philosophical suicide', can it ? Please direct me, if you would be so kind, to this place in Camus' belief. Thanks.
{ I know I could google but I'd love to be taken to your favourite spot }

If a man decides not to shoot himself in the head, but choses to shut himself in the garage with the car engine running, he is still committing suicide. He might congratulate himself for a less messy choice, but he still has given in to the allure of the easy answer.
I just think that most people are doomed to believe.
When you say Camus' belief, I think it more appropriate to say is ideas. I tend to take the word "belief" as a thing taken to be true regardless of truth value, and often flying against common sense. I try to believe nothing.

[Obvious Leo]

"Belief is the antithesis of knowledge"....Bertrand Russell.

Hobbes. You and I share a very similar world-view when it comes to questions of belief. The journey of the self through life is an evolutionary process, which means that at every stage of this journey we are simply a work in progress. The notion of a final answer to all our questions is the myth which Camus refers to as a capitulation to belief and philosophical suicide. When we choose to believe it means we've given up.

[Hobbes' Choice]

"Belief is the antithesis of knowledge"....Bertrand Russell.

Hobbes. You and I share a very similar world-view when it comes to questions of belief. The journey of the self through life is an evolutionary process, which means that at every stage of this journey we are simply a work in progress. The notion of a final answer to all our questions is the myth which Camus refers to as a capitulation to belief and philosophical suicide. When we choose to believe it means we've given up.

Excellent.

But that is why I remain skeptical about the claims of anthropogenic global warming.

[Obvious Leo]

But that is why I remain skeptical about the claims of anthropogenic global warming.

This is a point on which we'll have to agree to differ because I reckon this is an example which illustrates the point I'm making. It has become fashionable in many sectors of our society to regard scientific claims as those which we are free to believe or disbelieve in accordance with our own conceptual taste or in accordance with our own personal comprehension of the scientific issues under scrutiny. I've many times made the point myself that the scientific method is itself extremely vulnerable to confirmation bias and group-think but this doesn't mean we should be chucking out the baby with the bathwater. We can't discard a scientific theory until such time as we've devised a better one to replace it and that our planet is getting warmer is beyond dispute. Our decision-making processes still need to be informed on the basis of the best available evidence and the best available evidence suggests that this warming is due to a major disruption in the carbon balance which is occurring too rapidly for the biosphere to adjust to. There is no doubt that our fossil fuel emissions are largely responsible for this carbon imbalance and the global warming question thus needs to be addressed as a risk management exercise. Although it remains possible that the climate scientists are wrong it would be foolhardy to take no action on the grounds of this assumption. One journalistic wag, whose name I forget, put it rather nicely.

"What if global warming is a hoax and we're cleaning up the planet for nothing?"

[Hobbes' Choice]

But that is why I remain skeptical about the claims of anthropogenic global warming.

This is a point on which we'll have to agree to differ because I reckon this is an example which illustrates the point I'm making. It has become fashionable in many sectors of our society to regard scientific claims as those which we are free to believe or disbelieve in accordance with our own conceptual taste or in accordance with our own personal comprehension of the scientific issues under scrutiny. I've many times made the point myself that the scientific method is itself extremely vulnerable to confirmation bias and group-think but this doesn't mean we should be chucking out the baby with the bathwater. We can't discard a scientific theory until such time as we've devised a better one to replace it and that our planet is getting warmer is beyond dispute. Our decision-making processes still need to be informed on the basis of the best available evidence and the best available evidence suggests that this warming is due to a major disruption in the carbon balance which is occurring too rapidly for the biosphere to adjust to. There is no doubt that our fossil fuel emissions are largely responsible for this carbon imbalance and the global warming question thus needs to be addressed as a risk management exercise. Although it remains possible that the climate scientists are wrong it would be foolhardy to take no action on the grounds of this assumption. One journalistic wag, whose name I forget, put it rather nicely.

"What if global warming is a hoax and we're cleaning up the planet for nothing?"

I did not say global warming was a hoax. You are the idiot that thinks the climate ought to be in equilibrium. That is not scientific - its bullshit. If you really believe in climatic equilibrium that it's YOU that is the climate change denier not me.

There is hysteria on both sides of the argument. I don't see your hysteria as any more convincing than anyone else's.

[Dubious]

That the one thing I could never understand...

If we know what a greenhouse gas is and what it does, it's purpose and effects in nature and if it's true that we're pumping billions of metric tons into the atmosphere every year how can there not be dire ramifications for which WE are responsible? It doesn't make sense! Nature works on a slow torque level based on how we're conditioned to perceive time. You can seemingly get away with it for a whole number of years before the first symptoms of imbalance assert themselves. Continue and escalate the processes which generated it and you're in for dire consequences. How can it be otherwise? Having taken so long to build momentum it may be impossible to stop even if WE no-longer contributed an ounce.

The Earth itself is a body which contains all the others on it. If, starting from a good state of health, YOU start polluting YOUR body what will be the consequences 20 or 30 years down the road if you haven't got the sense to stop soon enough? Guaranteed misery followed by premature death?

[Hobbes' Choice]

That the one thing I could never understand...

If we know what a greenhouse gas is and what it does, it's purpose and effects in nature and if it's true that we're pumping billions of metric tons into the atmosphere every year how can there not be dire ramifications for which WE are responsible? It doesn't make sense! Nature works on a slow torque level based on how we're conditioned to perceive time. You can seemingly get away with it for a whole number of years before the first symptoms of imbalance assert themselves. Continue and escalate the processes which generated it and you're in for dire consequences. How can it be otherwise? Having taken so long to build momentum it may be impossible to stop even if WE no-longer contributed an ounce.

The Earth itself is a body which contains all the others on it. If, starting from a good state of health, YOU start polluting YOUR body what will be the consequences 20 or 30 years down the road if you haven't got the sense to stop soon enough? Guaranteed misery followed by premature death?

So tell me what concentration of CO2 is capable of contributing 1 degree of celsius to the global temperature?