Since joy is merely what follows when a goal is attained, saying that “the purpose of life to pursue joy” means that it does not matter what kind of goals you are pursuing so as long you can attain them. It merely indicates that people are degenerating in the sense that they are losing those tendencies that were cultivated by their ancestors. You can say they no longer have customs. If you have customs then you can’t pursue any kind of goal. Customs impose restrictions on what you can do and what you cannot do. Without them, anything goes. Wanna be a homosexual? No problem. Wanna do drugs? No problem. Wanna fuck around? No problem. And I don’t think that people “freely choose” to degenerate. They degenerate for a complex set of reasons that remain largely unknown to us. It’s a necessity. A necessity that people may and often do dislike but still a course that has to take its place. Everything has a beginning and an end.
I don’t agree with a lot of this.
For example, joy does not always follow when a mentally ill person obtains a goal, they just may say “Now what, I accomplished this and I still will die, my life is futile.”
Also, customs are somewhat irrelevant to a social genetic degeneration. What you have to pay the most attention to is dating/mating habits, and aesthetics taste. For instance I think Bandai Namco has very good aesthetics. But some scrub on the street, may prefer to play Need For Speed Nitro which is vomit inducing.
Also, the reason for social degeneration is not unknown, but obvious. Females are the deciders of the gene pool. If females lose taste, then the gene pool degenerates. And partially this is exposed with fast food. If a female enjoys McDonalds over Whole Foods she is a degenerate and will likely breed degenerates.
Also, legal systems. Legal systems enforce degeneracy. When it is illegal to fight someone or punch someone in the face, noone has any respect or kindness. And normally, people like this would be exterminated or killed off. But somehow they make it to the gene pool because noone is allowed to fight them.
Lets say the girl of your dreams decides to date this skinny, pathetic weakling runt over you. What can you do about it? Nothing, she will block you on Facebook, protected by the Legal System. And you cannot physically attack or threaten the pathetic weakling who stole your girlfriend.
Nor can you use your intelligence to outsmart a female who doesn’t want you.
Generally, most females are not interested in intelligent males, since most females crave power and control, not someone who can outsmart them. Thus intelligent males are forced to outsmart females. However this is prevented in modern times. Thus the amount of intelligent people being born and successfully breeding is rare/low.
Neitzche, Tesla, etc were intelligent and could easily have got a female to fall into their trap. But since traps are illegal in the Legal System, most intelligent males just go around aimlessly getting rejected over and over, since they are not allowed to use their intelligence to trap a female.
By trap a female, I mean something along the lines of David Bowie in Labyrinth.
Drugs. The war on drugs has the opposite effect, it makes people rebellious. People do not want to feel like they have no choice. so they choose to do drugs. A more effective technique would be “drug shaming”, ie. “You can do drugs, but if you do you are a fucking retard and not my friend and you ought to be euthanized”.
However there is hope I think, with improves in genetics technology.
Also, there are two social forces I should point out.
Feminine, and Masculine.
Yin and yang is actually incorrect, feminine is not chaos.
A better analogy would be Cat and Dog.
Cat, feminine.
This is power and control, manipulation, beauty, meekness, “The Future”, revenge, and creativity. Evolved.
Ie. this is White.
Dog, masculine
This is scatterbrainedness, mediocre taste, atheleticism, loudness, “The Now” and lack of imagination. Animal.
Ie. this is Black.
In terms of dating, modern females seem to be attracted to “The Dog/Black” and not the “The Cat/White”, and this is the cause of social degeneration.
I see need as weakness. What drives the opposite of weakness, strength? Need. And what is need based on? Perceived weakness. If it is not weakness, then tell me what the need is based on? You talk about goals, so why does one have to make goals in the first place?
You can have to same goal and different means. Why does one choose to work for money, and the other to steal it. I say, same goal, different means. You’ll probably say different means because of different goals. (I think you are seeing presence of additional goals too, which determine means).
Well, I don’t think of the second part as a “goal”, but simply as one of the means excluded in reaching the first goal. I don’t think most people have conscious hierarchy of goals in that sense. For instance, if a person’s goal is to have some money and stealing it is one possible way to get it, is the only thing that would stop him from stealing a conscious presence of a higher goal? I suppose you might say that a thief does not have a superseding goal that tells him to respect other persons earnings, making it okay to steal his money, and making stealing his functioning highest goal.
So, to bring it back, basically I see that we may be saying the same thing, except you’re also, for some reason, adding supplemental goals to the decision making process. For me, the means give a clue to the goals, usually. However, even deciphering goals through means is not always so simple because you can have the same means and different goals, too. For instance, Al Capone, the famous gangster, is known to have founded the first soup kitchens during the Great Depression in 1930s. What was his highest goal, or his primary drive, improving his own image or helping the unemployed? (same with rich giving to charities)
youtube.com/watch?v=yCMEzxJpQTs
I’d say it acts as a distraction from reality, which provides a sense of relief. Same with fiction and fantasy.
You can say that need is based on a perceived negative consequence (e.g. death.) We need to do certain things (e.g. eat food) in order to avoid perceived negative consequences (e.g. starving to death.) You can say that a need is a perceived weakness in the sense that perceiving a negative consequence means perceiving that we cannot prevent the perceived negative consequence without taking some sort of action. What you’re comparing here is your potential against the kind of potential that is required in order to prevent the perceived negative consequence without taking some sort of action. As a consequence, you call yourself weak because your potential is below the required potential.
However, saying that every need is based on some perceived negative consequence is strange. Consider that needs are usually organized in a hierarchy. There is a need that is at the top of the hierarchy, the master need, and there are all other needs that are somewhere below it on the hierarchy. Hunger, for example, is subservient to survival. We need to eat because we need to survive (i.e. prevent perceived death at some future point in time.) We agree that we eat because we perceive that we are weak but would you agree that we want to survive because we are weak?
On a more fundamental level, yes, it would be the same thing. I could say that, temporally speaking, we are constantly falling behind. An organism has to eat again and again, to sustain itself, until the day it eventually can do so no longer and it dies. The desire to survive, I mean, just to be, comes from having one’s being/existence constantly challenged by ever changing environment. It’s a forced reaction and also part of its fundamental process, its nature. I think it is this sense of weakness or falling behind (temporally speaking) that is the motivating factor. Usually it would be expressed through instinct of fear, or aversion behavior (in lower species). Of course, we also want leverage and we can make it easier for us, to the point where we even feel “strong” (temporarily), but even so, we cannot completely escape it because we evolved as part of this process, or as reactionary process (negative entropy) that has to keep up.
What happened is that you obtained one goal (e.g. you had sex with a hot lesbian) but failed to obtain another (e.g. you did not prevent your death at some future point in time.) The pleasure that you feel as a consequence of your success in relation to the first goal is overshadowed by the pain that you feel as a consequence of your failure in relation to the second goal.
It’s similar to how men often think that getting rich will solve all of their problems (i.e. help them attain all of their goals.) So when they get rich and realize that money isn’t enough they get depressed. Despite their enormous success (getting rich, you have to admit, is a huge success.)
Physical needs such as food and water are not weaknesses but necessities because without them one would simply die
The needs that would qualify as weak would be psychological for some of them are not actually necessary for survival
Need is also a form of strength in the sense that it is a sign of the ability to perceive, and by extension prevent, unwanted events.
It is a more positive form of strength with regard to actively pursuing goals that give purpose or meaning to ones life
The need to have purpose or meaning is psychological rather than physical but is still a need that it is better to have
Void of need, there is no life. No one can survive the accomplishment of all need. To remove all need is to die.
Need is not a “weakness” as much as a utility or resource, without which one cannot exist.
Okay, question then: Why did life develop sexual reproduction? And why does each life form have a life span limit?
I agree that our potential/ability varies through time. It goes down (e.g. when we run out of nutrients) and it goes up (e.g. when we replenish these missing nutrients.) And I agree that it ultimately disappears completely. We all die in the end and death is a very low degree of potential/ability – you can do very little when you’re dead.
But . . . need does not always coincide with weakness. When you’re very hungry, you feel weak and you are weak. Your potential drops. But not every need is accompanied by low potential. Not all degeneration is a gradual process. Some degeneration is abrupt. And not only that, some degeneration is merely expected to happen in the future rather than actively happening in the now.
Suppose that we predict that the Earth will be hit by an asteriod at some relatively close point in future. What happens? You feel the need to do something about it. You are not weak at the time of feeling this need. You are as strong as you usually are. You are merely predicting that you will be weak – in fact, that you will be dead – if you don’t do something about it. Furthermore, it is your current potential that determines how much you can do in order to prevent the undesirable from happening. If you’re weak, you won’t be able to do much about it. If you’re strong, on the other hand, it might be just a routine to you.
What sense does it make to say that you’re weak if you can prevent the negative event from happening? In fact, that’s precisely the manner in which strength is demonstrated. By successful defensive action. Simply being passive, which is what it means to be free of needs, is not a good strategy.
Who are you asking? And the query “why” has two forms; “for what purpose” and “by what cause”.
In general, life seeks anentropic harmony (surrounding itself with what is compatible to itself) yet is limited, thus ends up having the qualities it has; growing, multiplying, and perpetuating.
I’m looking at it from a continuous temporal sense, as a continuous process. The word strong is not a good term because it does not apply to all situations equally. I could could come up with many examples where the word strong would not apply, especially if example also involves the use of technology. (Maybe capable is a more appropriate word here).
Why did man develop tools and technology, the same one that he uses to achieve goals, like stopping an asteroid in your example? Was it not because he is weak? And I’m speaking on a more fundamental level here. And does technology, then, make a man strong because he can do more things? No, I say nothing has changed in any fundamental way. If anything, I would say that a man, unawares, is becoming weaker as he’s becoming even more dependent on his technology (while thinking he’s stronger).
It was a follow up open question. My view is that it was life’s “incapability” (or weakness if you will) to keep up with the entropy that forced it into sexual reproduction. Death of all individual life forms is another evidence of this. As a process, life struggles to keep up, on genetic, or molecular level, and has to continuously “update” itself. In that sense, life is not some willfull independent force, standing on its own, as some may perceive it, but quite dependent reactionary phenomenon.
I wouldn’t even say it seeks, but reacts.
Would life exist if there was no entropy?
Topkek
Could you agree that if it causes good, then it wasn’t evil?
In the same sense (although merely semantics), if it causes strength, it wasn’t a weakness.
Why didn’t the Buddhists develop technology? They perceived no need for it. Their capabilities and success was their weakness. Those who were incapable and suffering developed technology to overcome not merely their suffering, but a great deal more.
If not for the “weaknesses” in the European peoples, their current strengths would never have developed. So were they really weaknesses or deceptive strengths? If you were in a position to change their abilities, would have them be like the Buddhists or more incapable such that they developed?
Over-mothering denies a child the ability to develop by providing for too much success (it also creates spoiled whiners). The strength of having a protector mother can be a more serious weakness (the same with governments).
And if there was no entropy, the entire universe wouldn’t exist. Entropy is required for stability, harmony, and anentropy. There must be something to motivate and/or pursue.
Entropy increases over time until a system can no longer perform any more work as there is no more available energy to do
so. When the Universe reaches maximum entropy heat death shall occur. And one can think of biological entropy in humans
and animals increasing over time until they can no longer perform any more work and so that is the point at which they die
That part is just a fairy tale. The universe can never run out of energy.
I wouldn’t call that entropy as much as over-developing complexity. The animal body uses up its resources in its attempt to find anentropic harmony after which it can no longer reconfigure or defend itself against ambient entropic forces. Animals are overcome by their environment. Through offspring, they “try, try again”.