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[ProgramGamer]

Basically, how many other people are like me and have way too much time on their hands to reflect on the implications of life?

[MrBones]

yes

[JWK5]

Your body is host to entire populations of bacteria and microorganisms, a good majority of which are dependent on your survival. Your own body parts are not actually one living being but a collection of living beings held together functioning in harmony for common survival. Any given choice you make has immediate effects on more lives than you can begin to fathom, not to mention potentially those of the people connected to you or around you.

Sentience is definitely not insignificant to the universe, but it seems the universe can become fairly insignificant to the sentient.

[autumnspark]

Your body is host to entire populations of bacteria and microorganisms, a good majority of which are dependent on your survival.

Are they dependent on our survival, or are we dependent on their survival? Or, maybe a bit of that stuff called symbiosis.

[JWK5]

All of the above, and some are parasitic (and in many ways, so are we).

[jamesprimate]

i read this book blindsight by peter watts, where the premise was that sentience may be insignificant even to intelligence. just a certain evolutionary path that happened to us, and not necessarily an advantageous one at that.

[Netsu]

Without sentience there would be no sensation of a universe. We evoke light out of photon quanta and sound out of density fluctuations, we are the only way the world can experience itself. Trees grow leaves which allow them to gather energy from the sun, and the world grows life which allows it to have experiences.

And there is no purpose to it, nature has no sense of purpose, everything happens just because this is the way the universe works. Every part of it is significant because all parts together are the one whole.

[Mittens]

And there is no purpose to it, nature has no sense of purpose

The fact that no sentient being can go through life without wrestling with a purpose or reason for their own existence is so me, a small piece of evidence that one must exist. As you said, nature has no sense of purpose, so where do we all get the concept from? It's as though we somehow, intrinsically know of a reality beyond nature.

[kriyo_funions]

Of the opinion we place too much significance in conceptual understandings of our world and not enough in the felt and intuitive sense of the world.  That it's through our felt sense that we form our relationships, opinions and concepts of life and living, all of which only get recycled and old.  It's the wiring that happens on the felt level from an early age that engenders our most basic habits, attitudes and ways of carrying ourselves.  There are ways of rewiring ourselves according to neurobiology and neuroplasticity, if we learn ways of working with our somatic / right brain experience of the world, it's only at that level do we make fundamental changes in our lives.  The area of study is new scientifically but it's also pretty ancient in eastern spiritual traditions.  

[Netsu]

And there is no purpose to it, nature has no sense of purpose

The fact that no sentient being can go through life without wrestling with a purpose or reason for their own existence is so me, a small piece of evidence that one must exist. As you said, nature has no sense of purpose, so where do we all get the concept from? It's as though we somehow, intrinsically know of a reality beyond nature.

This is the curse and the blessing of a human brain.

Evolution has shaped us into beings that are able to think about past experiences and that have an overwhelming tendency to divide the world into 'events' and to look for causal links between them. This has proven to be an advantage, this is how we survive. By making assumptptions about what will happen when we take a certain action.
We try to predict the future all the time, 'is there trouble behind that corner?', 'is it safe to go to sleep here?', so many things that we do are set to accomplish a certain result - we do them on purpose.

But the the side effect of this is that people forget that this is not how the world works. For example it is such a common misconception that evolution has a purpose - giraffes grew longer necks so they can reach higher places, when in reality it's the exact opposite, all giraffes have long necks because the ones with short necks died.

And we apply this mode of thinking to everything because this is comforting, it's comforting to think that whatever happens, happens for a reason, and that we have some sort of control over it, a free will.



But there is also a deeper problem, the problem of people feeling like they are here on probation, like they came into this world from somewhere else and are trapped in this body. Like they are somehow separate from the world around them, confronting it from the inside. We look for causal links between events because we are programmed to divide the world into 'things' and 'events', forgetting that everything that happens anywhere in the universe is just one continious process.

Nobody wonders why rocks exist, or why do they roll down the hill when you push them. It just happens, this is how the world works. So why do they wonder about themselves all the time?

[oahda]

Nobody wonders why rocks exist, or why do they roll down the hill when you push them.

Someone did. And now we have geology and physics. And people still do wonder, and go on to learn from and possibly themselves become geologists and physicists.

[Netsu]

I mean in a metaphysical not physical sesne.

And I know there are people who wonder about rocks metaphysically, but there are extremely little of them compared to how many people occupy themselves with reason for human existance (which is almost everyone it seems).

[J-Snake]

And there is no purpose to it, nature has no sense of purpose, everything happens just because this is the way the universe works

so that you can follow a purpose.

Nobody wonders why rocks exist, or why do they roll down the hill when you push them. It just happens, this is how the world works. So why do they wonder about themselves all the time?

Because we can. This as much a part of reality as known physics.

But the the side effect of this is that people forget that this is not how the world works. For example it is such a common misconception that evolution has a purpose - giraffes grew longer necks so they can reach higher places, when in reality it's the exact opposite, all giraffes have long necks because the ones with short necks died.

While Darwin's theory seems to be plausible on this level (natural selection) it can be misleading to follow it throughout. The same goes for Lamarck, and we still cannot deny that training affects the genes, it's not just pure randomness in mathematical terms. And the same goes for the laws of thermodynamics, according to which growing and self-healing systems would not exist. The catch is that all that is not enough to prove or to disprove the happening of life. Regarding thermodynamics for example: It just implies that there has to be some compensating force which can make it all happen. For instance a fridge can keep cold in a warm environment by constructed force (something "unnatural" can be natural, so to speak). And people have been giving unknown/mysterious forces different names all the time; some call it physics, some call it coincidence of inner workings, some call it god etc.

[Netsu]

My only point was that it's the cause that drives the universe, not the purpose. At least as long as you believe everything to be deterministic.

[J-Snake]

At least as long as you believe everything to be deterministic.

For me it's just as valid to expect a non deterministic universe. If you consider the whole picture of things there are not more clues for one or the other. So the choice is yours, if you really have to choose.

[Netsu]

I agree.
Although so far the only arguments for non-determinism that I know of are scientists going "we can't see any consistency in this phenomenon so it must be random", same way people might have thought lightning bolts are random, or controlled by gods.

[J-Snake]

There is the theory of Quantum Mechanics, for example.

[ProgramGamer]

Wow, you guys turned this question into a really interesting discussion, keep it up!

I'll kick it a notch further. Is life really worth living if, when we die, all of our memories and feelings are erased from the universe forever?

[Netsu]

There is the theory of Quantum Mechanics, for example.

Yes, that's what I'm talking about.

Wow, you guys turned this question into a really interesting discussion, keep it up!

I'll kick it a notch further. Is life really worth living if, when we die, all of our memories and feelings are erased from the universe forever?

That's really up to you.

Everything is constantly changing into something else and there is no constant thing to hold on to. Your life, including your memories and your feelings is part of this great enormous process called the universe, and it's very likely that this process will never end.

Is it worth it for a wave to rise above the ocean if ultimately it will crash into the surface of the water again and disappear? In the end another wave will always come after it, and how boring would an ocean be if there was no movement in it.

[Mittens]

Wow, you guys turned this question into a really interesting discussion, keep it up!

I'll kick it a notch further. Is life really worth living if, when we die, all of our memories and feelings are erased from the universe forever?

It's not the least bit worth living unless our consciousness is able to continue beyond death

Is it worth it for a wave to rise above the ocean if ultimately it will crash into the surface of the water again and disappear? In the end another wave will always come after it, and how boring would an ocean be if there was no movement in it.

This metaphor requires a higher entity to observe this ocean across time as a whole, someone for whom the waves are purposed to be not boring. If this being is unable to record the life of any particular wave then it is the same as if that wave never even began to exist, the wave would only be able to know better if it continued to exist.
If in the metaphor it is only the waves who live then no one wave can ever observe, remember or create meaning from the past and future waves in the ocean.