Cosmic meaning?

[iambiguous]

futureone:

There is such a thing as both stupid questions and stupid people.

On the other hand, run that by those who embrace any number of “schools of philosophy” …

List of philosophies

…just to see how many of them deem you to be a stupid person with stupid answers.

And given my own experiences participating in internet philosophy forums [going back 25 years now] there’s the fact that any number of those who call other people stupid are really just insisting that if others don’t think like they do that’s what makes them stupid.

Or, perhaps, ignorant?

And, if it all revolves around ignorance, some [like Satyr] can set you straight here: AGORA

On the other hand, if, after a few posts, you still don’t/won’t toe the clique/claque line…?

futureone:

If someone asks “what is the meaning of life” it is probably because they don’t have the tools to properly form a question. So really what you are trying to figure out is what is the question they are asking. Half the confusion comes from trying to understand what it is they are asking.

Actually, it’s the tools they use to provide answers that most interest those of my ilk.

There are questions like “what does it mean to have an abortion?” And questions like “what does it mean to be arrested, charged with first degree murder, found guilty and thrown in prison for killing an unborn human baby”?

The actual experiences themselves involve any number of objective facts able to be confirmed as applicable to all of us. It’s only when others provide reasons for justifying their moral convictions, that I often shift gears, becoming considerably more “fractured and fragmented”.

To wit: back to the beginning: morality

So, in regard to abortion, how were your own experiences different? How were your own value judgments accumulated over the years other than as the embodiment of dasein?

Then this part:

There are two ways in which we can come to a point of view pertaining to value judgments. On the one hand, we can spend hours and hours and hours actually thinking about the pros and the cons of the behaviors we derive from our particular value judgments. We can then try to have as many different experiences as possible relating to those behaviors; and we can discuss them with as many different people as possible in order to get diverse points of view; and we can try to acquire as much knowledge and information about these behaviors/value judgments in order to be fully informed on it.

On the other hand, based on my own experience, most folks don’t do this at all. Instead, they live in a particular time and place, are indoctrinated as children, acquire a particular set of experiences as adults, accumulate a particular set of relationships and acquire particular sources of knowledge and information – which, over the years, predisposes them to particular intersubjective points of view.

Futureone:

Its like, if 1. someone solves what consciousness is, if 2. someone definitively proves how the universe began to exist, and if 3. someone explains gravity, quarks and atoms, then they’ve got it made. They are complete and they’ve answered the big questions.

That’s not the part I focus on myself. Instead, I flat out acknowledge how my own set of moral, political and philosophical prejudices are embedded existentially – ineffably? – in all that I simply do not grasp in regard to connecting the dots between “I”, the human condition and the existence of existence themselves.

Most around the globe will ascribe all of this to a God, the God, their God.

But in a No God world [if that’s the case] look at how philosophers over the years have provided us with any number of [at times] hopelessly confliciting assessments of meaning, morality and metaphysics.

[Demon]

You made me laugh.
The Demon knows what meaning is — and what the meaning of human life is.
But even if I explained everything, gave you precise definitions — would you actually understand any of it?

Let’s test that. I bet you couldn’t even repeat it back in your own words.
Here we go:

Meaning

Meaning is what exists in any act of thinking.
Specifically, it is a two-way connection between the object of thought and everything else possible in the Universe —
(essentially, a connection to the mind of God, as the personal consciousness of the Universe).

By the way — remember those confused alchemists, the ones who were searching for the Philosopher’s Stone?
Those degenerates were simply trying to find meaning.
Because once you understand the meaning of “creating gold” —
you could produce gold even from a finger… say, by just asking someone for a loan.
Simple, right?

Now for the hard part:

The Meaning of Human Life

It lies in the acquisition and formation of the Spirit.

Spirit

Spirit is the force that defines essence —
It grants the right to exist, the right to be.

• Acquisition of spirit comes through knowledge, learning, and understanding.
• Formation of spirit comes through rights —
  for example, the right to rule, or the right to teach.

So…
Did you understand anything?
Of course not.

[Demon]

@iambiguous

That’s not t

futureone,
Reason and faith are incompatible.
Believers neither understand nor accept anything truly rational.
And for reason, faith is just… laughable.

So what’s the point of explaining it to you?
But duty calls… what can I do — I’m the Demon.

[futureone]

@iambiguous

That’s not the part I focus on myself. Instead, I flat out acknowledge how my own set of moral, political and philosophical prejudices are embedded existentially – ineffably? – in all that I simply do not grasp in regard to connecting the dots between “I”, the human condition and the existence of existence themselves.

Most around the globe will ascribe all of this to a God, the God, their God.

But in a No God world [if that’s the case] look at how philosophers over the years have provided us with any number of [at times] hopelessly confliciting assessments of meaning, morality and metaphysics.

If you want to be a zombie that’s your choice.

Morality is objective, doesn’t require God to define it. There is objective atheist morality.

Maybe if I say it a third time you’ll get it this time. Have you ever heard of a game called Halo? In it there is a species called the Flood. This is an example of evil. Good and evil is absolute not an opinion. The Flood are miserable and they want to change every species in the galaxy into their miserable species. This is an example of evil.

Anyone who would deny that is equivalent to someone closing their eyes and then declaring color doesn’t exist, or is a human construct. Or someone born blind saying that color doesn’t exist, is a human construct. Or someone failing calculus class saying that Calculus is just a human construct for mathematicians.

Morality is a function an evolved function its one of the things that separates humans from animals. And you are saying because its an evolved function, that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t exist, because lower animals don’t have it. Because you don’t understand it it doesn’t exist. Its like someone who’s bad at mathematics trying to say mathematics is a human construct and it doesn’t matter.

[iambiguous]

futureone:

If you want to be a zombie that’s your choice.
Morality is objective, doesn’t require God to define it. There is objective atheist morality.

Okay, but you skipped the part where you bring your philosophical abstractions down out of theoretical clouds and note how they are pertinent to your own interactions with others given conflicting goods.

This part:

furureone:

If someone asks “what is the meaning of life” it is probably because they don’t have the tools to properly form a question. So really what you are trying to figure out is what is the question they are asking. Half the confusion comes from trying to understand what it is they are asking.

Me:

Actually, it’s the tools they use to provide answers that most interest those of my ilk.

There are questions like “what does it mean to have an abortion?” And questions like “what does it mean to be arrested, charged with first degree murder, found guilty and thrown in prison for killing an unborn human baby”?

The actual experiences themselves involve any number of objective facts able to be confirmed as applicable to all of us. It’s only when others provide reasons for justifying their moral convictions, that I often shift gears, becoming considerably more “fractured and fragmented”.

To wit: back to the beginning: morality

So, in regard to abortion, how were your own experiences different? How were your own value judgments accumulated over the years other than as the embodiment of dasein?

Then this part:

There is such a thing as both stupid questions and stupid people.

Me:

On the other hand, run that by those who embrace any number of “schools of philosophy” … en.wikipedia.org

List of philosophies

List of philosophies, schools of thought and philosophical movements. Absurdism – Academic skepticism – Accelerationism - Achintya Bheda Abheda – Action, philosophy of – Actual idealism – Actualism – Advaita Vedanta – Aesthetic Realism – Aesthetics – African philosophy – Afrocentrism – Agential realism – Agnosticism – Agnostic theism – Ajātivāda – Ājīvika – Ajñana – Alexandrian school – Alexandrists – Ambedkarism – American philosophy – Analytical Thomism – Analytic philosophy – A…

…just to see how many of them deem you to be a stupid person with stupid answers.

And given my own experiences participating in internet philosophy forums [going back 25 years now] there’s the fact that any number of those who call other people stupid are really just insisting that if others don’t think like they do that’s what makes them stupid.

[futureone]

@iambiguous

Okay, but you skipped the part where you bring your philosophical abstractions down out of theoretical clouds and note how they are pertinent to your own interactions with others given conflicting goods.

i am talking about philosophy. you are talking about politics

i am saying in terms of philosophy there is absolute morality and ethics. Whether any of that applies to situations in the real world is politics.

[iambiguous]

Okay, in regard to the morality of abortion, where does, philosophically, absolute morality and ethics end and politics begin?

Or choose another moral conflagration that is of particular importance to you.

I’m just trying to bring your philosophical assessment down out of the theoretical clouds.

[Kallikantzaros (Silenus)]

Mary refuses to accept what morality is: rules disciplining individuals to group interests.
She refuses to accept that morality evolved, and requires no god nor a philosophy, because we see it in action in many species.

In regards to abortion, her favorite woman’s issue…how does abortion impact the welfare of the group?
If abortions become a lifestyle option for women, how will this impact the group’s ability to replenish its human resources and its ability to compete with other groups?

Lefties, like miss Land, need an authoritarian power to stand against…if not god then men that insist that abortions should be regulated…for no reason at all, according to her and her ilk.

All value judgments, including moral/ethical ones, have an objective.
In the case of rules concerning sexual options - choices - the objective is the group’s welfare.
But women, like Mary, cannot get it through their skulls that abortions and other modern sexual practices have a negative impact on the collective, and that this is the only reason there are ethical rules regulating them.

The funny thing is, Mary doesn’t even believe in free-will, so this abortion option is what?
An expansion of a woman’s freedom?
Not for Mary, because she and her sisters have no free-will, and will do what has been determined for them to do.
A cosmic objective?
She unknowingly believes that the cosmos has her interests as its objectives.

[iambiguous]

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?
Jeffrey Gordon wonders what it would mean to have meaning

Experiencing Meaninglessness

These many confusions [above] are indications of a deeper perplexity, I think. We need to return to the origin of the question in our experience in order to uncover the source of these difficulties and to see the true nature of the problem of life in its original presentation, its primary meaning.

You want complexity? Consider abstractions like this and explain their relevance given actual moral and political conflagrations.

The question of the meaning of life is less likely to be conceived in wonder than in a mood of disquietude. It is not asked seriously in a spirit of disinterested intellectual curiosity or grateful life-affirmation. Rather it emerges when one’s sense of the meaningfulness of life has been deeply shaken – when one fears that life, or at least one’s own life, is without meaning.

How is it even possible to go from the cradle to the grave in this world and expect to find an essential meaning? On the other hand, I am still one of the very few in this world who is convinced that there isn’t one. At least not in regard to conflicting goods. Then those who couldn’t care less about it. Those, for example, who spend much of their time embodying pop culture, mindless consumption, and the hope that someday their own fifteen minutes will arrive and they too can be celebrities. On YouTube, or tictok, reality TV, or some other “social media” platform.

The typical intonation of the question may be more revealing than the words. “What can it all mean?” may have more in common with a sigh than with a grammatical question. It’s an announcement that the foundation of one’s sense of meaning has been undermined. The question declares that the bulwarks are crumbling, that they seem now to have been the fabrications of a remarkably comprehensive self-deception: How could I have believed that this repetitive, pallid daily routine had the slightest significance? What besides the mere fact that this life is mine had convinced me that its victories and losses counted for something?

Tell me about it. On the other hand, for many of us, in regard to family and friends and work and school and politics and the arts, and sports and everything else that keeps us grounded existentially in meaning from day to day to, along with those comfortably ensconced in one or another religious faith, this frame of mind might pop up from time to to time, but few will dwell on it…philosophically?

To wit..

If the nihilistic condition becomes more severe, these questions cast a pall over every observation and every encounter. Why is that woman so elegantly dressed, so punctiliously made up? What foolish vanity possessed her in her elaborate preparations? Why is that man chasing the ball so intently? Can he really believe that any importance whatsoever attaches to his returning the serve? Why are those people laughing so gaily? Is there not something false, desperate, in those guttural eruptions?

For any number of men and women? No, no way. They take their day to day interactions as meaning enough for them. And since millions upon millions interact with each other given the reality of subsistence itself, nihilism is often understood by them in very different ways.

[futureone]

@iambiguous

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?

Are you familiar with the concept of a “question that is poorly posed”?
.

1. What is the speed of darkness when it forgets its name?
2. If apples could vote, what would be the population of the sun?
3. What is the square root of a sandwich divided by the velocity of green?

Notice anything wrong with these questions?
.
.
(I purposefully asked for an AI to generate some questions that are poorly formatted and impossible to answer by any genius.)

When someone asks “what is the meaning of life”, what they are doing is posing a poorly formatted question that nobody can answer.

What they are really trying to ask is one of three (or four) things:

1. What is the cause of consciousness? Explain the engineering of consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness.
2. Give concrete proof or disproof of the big bang and explain why there is something instead of nothing. (Optional: explain why there is god and not nothing.)
3. What happens when we die?
4. (Optional) What is the motive for god to create us and the universe?

Those are the three (or four) big questions and when someone asks “what is the meaning of life” it just means they lack the vocabulary to formulate what they are feeling into a properly formatted question.

[iambiguous]

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?
Jeffrey Gordon wonders what it would mean to have meaning

Camus writes of a man in a telephone booth whose animated dumbshow he observes from a distance. Why, he asks, is this man alive? Is not the entire human scene undergirded by a thoroughgoing tacit conspiracy of interlocking deceptions?

Why, one might ask, are any of us alive? And, in fact, short of embracing one or another One True Path, who really knows? In other words, who here can actually demonstrate substantively how and why the human condition came to be? How far back need they go? How far back can they go?

In Heidegger’s Being and Time, das Man is the conspiracy of the nameless, the everyone and no one, to assure a universal tranquillized flight from the anguishing demands of authentic individuation.

Either that or you are indoctrinated as a child to accept one or another One True Path and are then able to sustain it all the way to the grave. Also, the part where many, historically, place the emphasis not on the individual but on society…on the social parameters of the community. For example, the National Socialists.

Is not the principal accomplishment of das Man this most fundamental social contract – the unspoken compact we enter into to protect ourselves from the isolating and crippling realization that there is no significance whatsoever in either our individual or our collective presence on this earth?

Then those who defend a “fundamental social contract”, as well, but insist that they have either discovered or invented the only truly rational – and thus virtuous? – FSC there can possibly be?

It’s just a matter of which particular font is selected to “prove” it. And, as always, either God or No God.

Granted, this mood sustained over days and weeks, or incorporated into one’s manner of being, is an extreme state. But is there anyone for whom this kind of alienation is wholly unfamiliar?

Sure, but I suspect that such moods are then subsumed in the fonts chosen above. Any number of experiences may well shake one’s faith in the font, but the only alternative is to find another objectivist font [as I did over and again] or to embody the alienation all the way to the grave through distractions [as I did/do over and again.]

Still, most of us most of the time dismiss such thoughts as expressions of a passing perversity. What, then, allows this mood to entrench itself when it does? What are the conditions for a preoccupation with emptiness and futility?

How can this not be embedded and embodied existentially in dasein? I still vividly recall the conditions that reconfigured me into accepting it.

[iambiguous]

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?
Jeffrey Gordon wonders what it would mean to have meaning

Our premonition of the meaninglessness of life is a case of our capacity for disinterested reflection serving a personal will for release. Weary with life, we wish to withdraw from it, and intellect furnishes an irrefutable justification for doing so.

The “tired of living, but scared of dying” frame of mind.

On the other hand, it’s likely that those living very different lives will experience this in ways that may not always be easily communicated. We might have very different reasons for withdrawing. And the chances are for those who do withdraw, it will be a circumstantial quagmire that precipitates the tug of war, and not an “intellectual” perspective.

[quote]The significances with which we invest our daily agitation are of strictly human invention; they are not shared by the dog in the chair falling into the slumber of boredom, nor by the feverish soldier termite protecting its hive against assault, nor by the placid angel strumming its harp in the clouds.[/quote]

Are we perhaps the only creatures in the entire universe able to experience this? Then the part where some will wonder if they are actually experiencing it at all. Autonomously, in other words.

Still, if there are placid angels strumming their harps up in the clouds, that introduces God into the picture. And tell me [if there is one] that doesn’t change everything.

[quote]And my deeply felt personal significances begin with the birth of my consciousness and end with its dissolution – never to be shared, never to be repeated.[/quote]

Except, of course, no one really knows for sure what exactly “my consciousness” encompasses. Either going back to God or to a No God universe in which “somehow” matter was just able to become self conscious of itself as matter. Spooky to say the least.

[quote]It is also my distinctly human point of view that allows me to perceive what is pitiable in another’s situation, what is triumphant in a person’s self-overcoming, what is humorous in someone’s pretensions. And it is my individual subjectivity that enables me to experience without mediation the urgency of events in my own life.quote

No, in my view, it is our own distinctly individual point of view as mere mortals in a No God universe that is most crucial regarding human interactions. Some things are clearly applicable to all of us. But other things are not.

[abc1231 (Jupiter123)]

There is no sound logic in being an atheistic psychotic who has lost touch with reality.There is no sound logic in claiming that there is only the material and then making the claim that you exist and are an illusion when an illusion is immaterial.

[iambiguous]

Happiness & Meaning
Why You’re (Probably) Wrong About The Meaning of Life
Lewis Vaughn asks what it’s all about.

After tragedy and heartbreak – after the war is lost, after the pandemic takes someone you love, after climate change destroys your home, after your life seems to be rendered nonsensical by illness, personal failure, or injustice – deep questions may linger like a bruise: What is the meaning of all this? Does life have any meaning or purpose at all? What is the meaning of my life?

That’s often how it works. You go about the business of living your life when, out of the blue, you tumble over into a circumstantial quagmire…a brand spanking new calamity that prompts a rethinking regarding any number of conclusions revolving around what it means to think, feel, say and do, well, you tell me.

In other words, is there in fact One True Path that makes all this go away?

Oh yeah:

List of religions and spiritual traditions

List of political ideologies

List of philosophies

Only, as many objectivists will insist, it’s not yours. It can’t possibly be because it’s theirs.

Easy answers to such questions drop casually from the internet, books, and media. The meaning of life, we’re told, is pursuing pleasure or happiness, or giving and receiving love, or finding your passion, or doing something great, or living out your purpose, or being involved with something greater than yourself.

Of course, here, even to the extent objectivists agree their own answers are the correct ones, they have to come up with all manner of “proof” that the other answers are, at times, not only incorrect, but [for some] dangerous.

“Or else”, for example.

But these commonplace answers are only partly right, and the questions are mostly wrong. So say a host of contemporary philosophers who have been studying meaning in life. They argue, contrary to the skeptics of previous generations, that human lives can indeed be meaningful, although perhaps not in the ways that many people assume.

Yep, here we go again. Essential meaning vs. existential meaning. Demonstrably objective truths in either/or world vs. “one of us”/“one of them”/“my way or the highway” moral, political and spiritual prejudices in the is/ought world. Meaning in terms of how we understand our interactions subjectively/subjunctively from day to day and then those who insist that what they believe “in their heads” is how all rational men and women are, in fact, obligated to believe the same.

The “lucky ones” here being those who reject moral and political and spiritual objectivism, but happen to live in a community/nation that tolerates it. No “or else” in other words.

Today, however, here in America, Trump and MAGA seem intent on bringing us all back to the 1950s. Though, sure, that may all be a con job in and of itself enabling the ruling class in America to reconfigure its foreign policy to match the strongman mentality of the BRIC nations.

[iambiguous]

Happiness & Meaning
Why You’re (Probably) Wrong About The Meaning of Life
Lewis Vaughn asks what it’s all about.

For most of the twentieth century, philosophers ignored or dismissed the question of life’s meaning, even though many lay people assume that philosophy is mostly about the meaning of life. A lot of those dismissive philosophers insisted that the question is nonsensical because ‘meaning’ typically refers to words and symbols, not to objects, activities, and lives.

On the other hand, words and symbols are often used in order to communicate what objects and activities have come to mean to us, in order to convey further what life itself means to us. Instead, as always, in my view, effective communication really comes down to that which you are able to convey to others through actual day to day demonstrations derived existentially from day to day social, political and economic interactions. The things all rational men and women are able to agree regarding and the things that precipitate fierce communication breakdowns.

To them, asking ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is like asking ‘How heavy is the color blue?’

Here though, from my frame of mind, distinctions have to be made between essential and existential meaning. The laws of nature, mathematics, demography, the empirical world around us, the rules of logic, facts about our lives etc., seem to encompass that part of human interactions where facts and figures can be conveyed in objective descriptions.

Others thought that answering the question is in principle impossible, or that even if answerable, no one knows or ever will know the answer.

Then the part where we run that by any number of these folks:

List of religions and spiritual traditions

List of political ideologies

List of philosophies

Note how many of them make little or no distinctions between the either/or or the is/ought worlds. Then note how despite the fact there are hundreds of conflicting objective moralities from which to choose around the globe, each one claims to be the one and only true path.

However, over the past four decades this icy pessimism about meaning in life has been thawing. A growing number of thinkers have been probing two areas: (1) What the meaning of life question means – what we’re really asking when we inquire about life’s meaning: and (2) What, if anything, makes life meaningful – what things can give meaning to a person’s life? Along the way, philosophers have debunked some myths that have led countless people to believe that their lives are meaningless.

What I’m asking, of course, is not what one believes the meaning of life is but what actual empirical and experiential evidence one has accumulated in order to establish that the assessment reflects the optional account…morally, politically and philosophically.

Given a particular set of assumptions at the existential intersection of identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political economy. After all, from the cradle to the grave, our day to day interactions with others are bursting at the seams with meaning. Instead, the conflagrations flare up regarding whose meaning shall reign given any particular community out in a particular world awash in both contingency, chance and change and conflicting goods.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Your play is revived… did you know?

168K views · 1.3K reactions | What is the meaning of life? Keanu Reeves and...

[futureone]

High iq take but slightly incorrect in my opinion.

When I was a kid was when i wondered “what is the meaning of life” but i liked being alive.

As an adult i no longer even care what the meaning of life is, i just want all life and the universe to go away permanently.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Why don’t you rebel and enjoy the marrow out of it despite all the bullshit?

[greenfuse]

double post oops

[MagsJ (Surya Loka.. triumvirate)]

.
Double post? I don’t see even a single post.