Something Instead of Nothing

I get that you get too agitated by being called out on your bullshit to be able to write. But Im not gonna listen to another one of your Forrest Gump emulations.

Forrest Gump was a goddamn hero you sonofabitch. Don’t you forget it.

Forrest Gump aside, let’s get this started: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=195495&start=25

Forget about it biggs… we ain’t doing the astrology debate again. It’s such a no brainer we shouldn’t have had to do it the first time.

Still, it relaxes me to go back and forth with minds that baffle me. Or minds that think things that make absolutely no sense at all to me. But minds that don’t seem to be afflicted with any, uh, “condition”.

Besides, when you are waiting for godot – to die, in other words – nothing is really off the table.

Which philosopher said life should be spent preparing to die? Was that a philosopher or one of those zen guys?

But thinking about my mortality still seizes me with the same indescribable feeling of absurdity. Really think about what that entails; dying, and never ever ever living again. Total annihilation. Like you were never even there. A cosmic blink of an eye. And it doesn’t even matter that it didn’t even matter.

This is so irrevocably fucked up you cant even call it good or bad. It’s just an absurd fact. THE absurd fact. The great leveler of all other facts.

Being optimistic, sure.

Why Does the Universe Exist?
By Derek Parfit

Suppose we could actually answer questions like this? And, if you conclude [as I do] that, in our own lifetime, the odds that we ever will are staggeringly remote, why would you waste even a minute more of your time in pursuit of them?

Exactly: Because that is just one more example of the same sort of question.

We are endowed by nature with a brain able to ask them. Some do, some don’t. And, to me, the rest is no more or no less the embodiment of dasein than the quandaries we confront in the is/ought world.

And, presuming some measure of autonomy, what can possibly be a greater mystery that minds can grapple with than these two: why something instead of nothing? why this something and not another something altogether?

If nothing else you can take some sort of comfort in knowing that until we have the answers to imponderables on this scale, the ones we pursue that are considerably more down to earth are not likely to produce answers not enveloped in that intellectual grand canyon between what we think we know about anything and all that would need to be known about everything in order to be sure of anything and everything at all.

You know, for those among us – the objectivists – foolish enough to actually believe that doesn’t matter.

Of course aren’t we all basically still in the same boat here? Because there does not appear to an explanation – scientific, philosophical, theological – for the existence of either God or of existence, this speculation in and of itself is just another manifestation of that. Especially given that we don’t know beyond all doubt if even asking and answering the questions themselves are or are not but an inherent adjunct of this overarching “causal law”.

Just like a hedonist seeks pleasure and avoids pain,
a lover of truth seeks facts and avoids contradictions.
A lover of truth may spend his or her whole life seeking truths.
This can be fueled by the hope that it is not an act of futility.

I love that message dan~

Here’s the deal:

Unceremonious dedication to non contradiction…

This is the path of the smartest. Everything else bores them. Stupid people have rites, rituals and marriage — holy places (all that bullshit!)

Smart people rise above the trash for actual meaning.

Of course in the is/ought world history is replete with the agonizing consequences of those who insisted, still insist and almost certainly will always insist that others were obligated to love the same truths that they do. Let’s call them objectivists.

You know, until we can figure out why there is something instead of nothing, we seem to be stuck with the somethingness that we have.

Shit iambiguous, I’ve explained this to you a million fucking times! I know you have me on ignore (some cowardly shit if I’ve ever seen)

Existence exists because of logic! Truth tables to be specific!

What is the existence of existence? (Existence when it’s itself) Existence… duh!

What is the non existence of non existence? (Non existence when it’s itself) Existence … duh!

Nothing remotely metaphysical there, just the most basic logic!

I actually hate you iambiguous. I’ve posted some super-genius shit since you decided to put me on ignore and you’ll never have to respond to it to expand your own mind for once in your whole fucking life.

Nothing has no power to enforce itself.

(Simpler even than yours ec)

Promethazine, that you use your brain strictly for other things than thought does not mean thought is a no-brainer.

Except if that nothing is really something

In that event they are more than merely logically related.

For that , more than a definitively nominal aspect needs to be experienced., to be understood.

Note to others: you tell me.

You know, after consulting with the stars. :wink:

Well if “nothing” is “something” then obviously logic is a ridiculously foolish thing no one should be using.

Considering that logic is pretty cool and works very well, nothing is everything but something and thus has no power to enforce itself, and thus doesn’t exist.

What he said. Only the other way around.

Both directions work fine.

You know, going back to his own assessment of that and all that would need to be known in regard to assessing the existence of existence itself. As something instead of something else or nothing at all.

Hell, even astrologers are not exempt from mysteries this profound.

Or, rather, so it seems to me.

Well, if only “here and now”. :-k

Why Does the Universe Exist?
By Derek Parfit

And then the well known objections to those well known objections. Regressing infinitely back to…to what? From my frame of mind the mind itself becomes by far one of the biggest mysteries of them all. Existence actually reaching the point where it is able to become aware of anything existing at all. Existence able to ponder why it does exist rather than not exist.

Come on, how on earth can the minds of any of us not be dumbfounded by questions of this sort? And not feel this spooky sense of reality being, well, spooky.

Einstein grappled with it as best he could: zmescience.com/other/featur … -15102017/

How would one definitively distinguish a God and/or a universe that exists of necessity, as opposed to a God and/or a universe that exists because He and/or It ought to? That distinction is a bit ineffable from my frame of mind here and now.

Anyone care to take a crack at it?

Once the idea of something existing because it ought to exist…or because it’s a good thing that it does…then the idea of teleology comes into place. As though existence has a meaning behind it or a purpose that it pursues over time. Then tumbling once again into the sheer inexplicable parameters of it all.

Bottom line [one of them]: whatever conjecture might be put forth only elicits further conjectures regarding what brought that about.

Next up: dasein.