Paradox of the Will

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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In order for life to be meaningful, you have to be susceptible to death - you have to be mortal; for if you were immortal, your body would never weaken, therefore you would not need to eat, sleep, or breathe, or work, or learn - you would not have the drive to work or learn, since the goal of both is to improve your ability to prolong your life - to save up skills and resources that will be of use to you and help you survive later on - but being immortal one would survive later on no matter what anyways, there would be no basis in their mind for doing either.

Every action we make is out of an attempt to avoid death (by prolonging life) – simply put, if we weren’t able to die, we’d have nothing to do.

Thus, there can be no better situation for ourselves than the one we are currently in. If we were in any higher of an existential level than that of a human being, meaning would collapse - but any lower of an existential level would be that of an animal, having no greater intellectual pursuit, no willpower, and no ability to view oneself as something greater than our born role.

To be here and now would seem to be a blessing that has no equal - yet we always seem to find suffering, as if it were secretly our goal to find unresolvable suffering, to justify a sense of powerlessness and righteous indignation - but in doing so we find that our trajectory through the existential has begun it’s decline towards our physical end: dying. While it seems that stubbornness hastens this descent, surrendering to grace can lift one out of it, rejuvenating the spirit.
Although surrendering to grace doesn’t elude physical death altogether, it eludes spiritual death - and in doing so, we rise above the cycle: whether we elude physical death no longer matters, as our approach to it is as though we are already above and beyond it - as if the soul is aware that the path does not end with physical death, therefore the unavoidable is accepted; be it that our physical body may be laying in a hospital bed, damaged past the point of recovering, our ability as humans to embrace the spiritual - be it making ammends, asking for forgiveness, getting to tell those you care about that you love them before you go, or looking back on your life and wanting to give thanks for all the good times and to everyone who was there for you, in doing so, you have beaten the ‘cycle of suffering’ (in Buddhist terms) more or less in all philosophical and religious perspectives.

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Not really. Did you really fall for that line, or are you merely trying to further promote it?

What if what causes your immortality is your own actions in living? What if by odd coincidence, what you do to stay alive is what is keeping you alive. And by always doing those things, you stay alive eternally. You still have needs and desires. You have a “full life” of things to do even though you know that because you are going to continue doing those things, you are going to live eternally.

That is not to say that everything you do to keep living is “the same old thing”. There can be a nearly infinite variety of things to do that always sum up to the prevention of death. There is still plenty of things to choose from. Each choice you make limits the next choice of course, but it is an endless things, so you can go through all possible combinations.

Life has no need for even the possibility of death. It merely has to have a need and opportunity to act without critically failing. Life merely has to have hope.

3

You should probably set out your reasoning for this definition of immortality a little clearer.

How do you explain suicide then?

Suicide.

Patently false. Ask a child born with AIDS if that’s the best they could have been born into.

What is a born role?
You seem to be equating meaning with staying alive in your first paragraphs, yet then attribute it to ‘intellectual pursuits’ here.

Suffering doesn’t necessarily equate to dying. Somebody could suffer a great deal but not actually come closer to dying themselves through that suffering. For example, suffering the loss of a loved one.

I don’t know what you mean by surrendering to grace. Why surrender?

Now you’re just throwing random terms out there. Spiritual death?

Oh, you’re operating on the assumption the soul exists. That makes sense.

So the point of life is to die knowing you’re going to die and then just go on living as a soul anyway? Wow.

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Life & Death (II)

Will to Live

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As usual, I don’t know what you’re talking about or why you brought it up; you seem to do that a lot, and to many different posters here - you start out by saying “I disagree” and don’t really give a reason, then go off on your own topic.

I’m talking about hypothetically considering being literally physically immortal… Not poetically ‘immortal’, or metaphorically ‘immortal’ or whatever it is you’re going on about…

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The paradox of the will is that if the will were somehow able to magically obtain all that it sought, there would be nothing left for the will to do; the will would have caused itself to cease to exist.

Basically, if everything for us was completely optimal, and our will completely sated, everything would be meaningless - our mind would literally be doing nothing at all. We’d be like a boulder or a statue, as they don’t need to eat, or sleep, or breathe - they are already whole and complete in themselves and have nothing that needs doing in order to stay whole, and therefore remain inert.

The Will to Live is a sort of ‘carrot on a stick’; if it got everything it wanted, it would undo itself – therefore, the best possible scenario for us is to be imperfect so that we can get lost in experience itself.

7

It’s pretty simple. Can you not see anything but your own thoughts?
You said “In order for life to be meaningful, you have to be susceptible to death - you have to be mortal; … therefore you would not need to eat, sleep, or breathe, or work, or learn.”

I said “What if what causes your immortality is your own actions in living? … you stay alive eternally. You still have needs and desires.” And explained why and how.

Animals in the forest do not stay alive because they are susceptible to death. If they were not susceptible to death, they would behave pretty much the same, never knowing or caring why.

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Peachy, if acquiring all that the will desires is depleted, and that ‘all’ is defined as the sum of all sets within the limits of it’s (the wills) application of the content of that sum, and the process of ‘what is beyond that limit’ is ever recurring , then, the paradox becomes solvable as the Möbius Strip of the knowledge of acquisition.

Except visualize a much much larger concept where revolution may take an insurmountable time.
Therefore the will can never be de-powered,it has the potential energy of the universe behind it!

9

I’ve made all those points on this forum before though; I think what I was getting at was an approach to morality and spirituality in the second half of the first post.

To me, it almost seems like finding a derivative in calculus; by doing a little ‘algebra’ so to speak with logic, we can deduce that morality is the key to ‘transcending suffering’, and in a sense ‘beating death’… It seems that what would be known in Buddhism as ‘not following the middle path’ (and in Christianity as ‘sinning’) literally accelerates us towards death, and is also precisely where a fear of approaching death originates. You could perhaps say that fear is actually guilt or shame, or perhaps a sense of defeat and malaise resulting from the failure of Selfishness to prolong itself and its inability to rely solely on itself.

Thus, selfishness and the sinful element become trapped when a person faces death - their path ends; since with death comes the end of the physical self, which selfishness and the sinful element are bound to - thereby ending with it as well.

What will continue after death is selflessness and the spiritual - a holy element.

It also seems as though Christianity and Buddhism both advocate this same phenomenon – they point out that having morality isn’t just good manners, but is intrinsically present in the nature of human experience and required for people to overcome suffering (on a large scale, this means civilization’s ability to literally build itself out of suffering) and for people to be able to face death.
‘Sin’ accelerates a descent into an undesirable life, while morality (which Christianity focuses on more-so) and moderation (which Buddhism seems to focus on more-so) accelerate an ascension towards enlightenment.
Although, it might be that ‘sin’ is not an element in and of itself, but is rather a lack of its opposite; when moderation hasn’t been learned and fine-tuned yet, and morality may exist in spiraling layers with a ‘voice of reason’ not yet standing out.

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The analysis You present is a rescission, a reaction to the failure of the differential to escape (exit) the conclusions brought on by the nihilistic process, the one from which, no satisfactory answer has been give signaling some sort of plateau, from which such assertions maybe made, where then difference can not be separated between the societal and personal disintegration.

My example with the Möbius Strip, as gross as it was, gross in the sense of implying at least a potential toward such a plateau, may set the stage for the realization for an ‘optical’ approach, with such apparently far out notions as the economy of the ID, and mathematical models applied to the ego-superego. In this view, redemption is still possible within the constrains set by the tension, resulting between an opposition between Nihilism and traditional morality.

This tension, when seen as a sort of matrix, with a re chargeable grid generated by such opposition, may be seen not as an object illuminated by diminished light (of reason), but as an effected and subdued object, one which, is able to filter the harshness out of the blinding light.

At the end,where there are still unresolved issues to be concerned about, i am convinced, that the white light we are supposed to see as we enter into, will not be a reminder of our stark abandonment of the principles surrounding the mechanics of Karma, but an entrance into a different , naturally subdued light.

11

This is wild speculation and wholly counter intuitive. Many who think that their life is meaningless do so for the very reason that they are in fact mortal.
And since the only experience of life we have is a mortal one you have no warrant at all for making the wild claims about lack of meaning the an immortal may or may not have. In fact you blow your entire pitch by suggesting wrongly that immorality also means there is not need to maintain a physical presence in the ordinary way that mere mortals do. Worst still you attribute meaning to the maintenance of the body which is utterly absurd.

It is equally possible that to attain continued immortality might entail eating and so forth. Even if it did not there is no reason why an immortal human, were such a thing even possible, would not also be moved by his passions as we all are to enter meaning into his everyday life to some several purposes.

More absurdity. Most of my daily actions have absolutely nothing to do with this end. And there are many which fly against that aim.

As the rest is a faulty consequence of your above faulty meaning it needs no other response.

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I know, that’s why it was hypothetical

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Are you talking about Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence or something? That’s a whole different discussion now, but just a few things that shed a lot of doubt on the notion of Eternal Recurrence:

  1. Universe Experiences Heat Death Due to Entropy - This seems to be the popular scientific consensus (but its merely the most popular theory) as to what the fate of our universe will be. Things are going to fly apart off into nothingness and never interact again – although, you could make some sort of argument involving galilean invariance that distance and time are relative, so a universe experiencing heat death could actually just be the start of another big bang. One man’s dying universe is another man’s beginning of a universe… maybe

  2. Just Because Something is Happening ‘Forever’ Does Not Mean That Recurrence is a Mathematical Guarantee – there’s a specific example for this, I can’t remember how it goes, but something like if you have 3 discs, one spinning at pi (3.1415…) rotations in a given time interval, one spinning at pi/3 rotations, and the last one spinning at cosine of 5/pi or something like that, the 3 discs will never re-align to their starting positions with each other… ever. The universe could not be recurring like clockwork then I’m afraid. The only way is if the universe keeps dying and starting new big bangs each time, where the singularity of the big bang possesses a finite set of initial starting conditions. So then the universe would by cycling through the various initial starting conditions, eventually repeating.

One sort of hypothesis I like is that our underlying conception of a ‘cosmological constant’ is wrong, and our universe isn’t experiencing accelerated expansion it just appears to be; gravity keeps everything held together and galaxies continuously flow along rivers in galactic superclusters. There might not even have been a big bang then - the universe simply is; it always was and always will be - because it exists right now and matter/energy can not be created or destroyed, and an object in motion stays in motion, the universe is just a giant network of galactic superclusters flowing eternally.

The reason then that it appears the universe is experiencing accelerated expansion is because the spacetime in the empty ‘pockets’ between galactic superclusters is tremendously warped. No clue about that though.

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Name any human action and I will break it down for you why it ultimately deduces to survival

This all being hypothetical of course (being physically immortal isn’t actually possible), I think your mind would probably try to put you through the motions of eating anyways, although you probably wouldn’t enjoy it.

Our modern society has, miraculously, centered itself around human enjoyment; ‘entertainment’ in a survivalistic sense comes from when all of our bodily needs are currently met, and we are able to expend energy on our curiosity, and perhaps ‘practice’ different skills. So, in modern times, you would not notice this basis for all action; although, as soon as one of your bodily needs are not met, I can assure you, it will take priority whether you want it to or not.

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[quote=“Peachy Nietzsche”
Name any human action and I will break it down for you why it ultimately deduces to survival[/quote]
suicide

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Suicide.

This should be funny…

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Thank you for your absurd and meaningless reductionism.

Any moron can do that, does not make it a good idea, nor true.

You can break down any human action and reduce it to fatalism, religion, and the need for a poke in the eye. That does not make it relevant or convincing.

19

Now we have to consider what is a living thing:
sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, all are seen as an extension of our self in a genetic sense (whether the genetic code gets carried on or not determines whether the genetic code gets carried on or not).

I don’t want to be disrespectful to the topic, but committing suicide could serve to prove a point that extends beyond one’s own well-being to help/save genetic relatives of the suicidal.
That’s a topic I don’t want to talk about though so I’m not going into it any further.

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If that’s the route you’re going to take then making an argument never had a point to begin with; if I can’t reduce things to their essentials without it being considered ‘meaningless reductionism’, then neither you nor I can communicate at all.