Half Life

@Prismatic

It’s not just people who’re driven to commit suicide, but people who drink, people who smoke, and so on.
If humans consciously thought about survival all the time, or a lot more than we do and only when it was beneficial to do so, maybe we’d live for thousands of years averagely, so even the average life expectancy might be premature, in that sense.

Yea but that’s annually, the number of people who successfully commit suicide sometime during the course of their lives, is going to be much higher, maybe 1%, 0.5% or 0.2%.

Almost everyone on earth listens to music, or watches sports, or intoxicates themselves recreationally, yet these things either don’t help us to survive, or they at least don’t obviously help us to survive, so then is listening to music the purpose of life?
No, it is one purpose among many, perhaps one of the major ones, but not the only one.
Is enjoying ourselves the purpose of life?
Perhaps, at least it’s probably just as important as survival.

I will agree with you that up until now, our behavior has helped us survive more often than not, or we wouldn’t be here…but maybe even that is stretching it, maybe we haven’t survived so much because of our behavior, but in spite of it, maybe luck was the primary factor, laughs, survival of the luckiest, or maybe our bodily adaptations were the primary factor and not our behavioral ones, and most of our behavior is either neutral, in regards to survival, or even harmful, just not harmful enough to counteract our luck and bodily adaptations.

I mean you have to have some luck, too, right?
A species may be very strong, and smart, but if a giant meteor or volcano erupts in its habitat, if a series of unfortunate calamities befalls it, than it’s game over.
We’re here because of environment too, how do we measure whether our survival had much more to do with our environment or our bodies than our behavior?

And just because up until now most of our behavior has been good enough to get us here, doesn’t mean it will be in the future, because environments change, culture changes, and the species itself changes, not always for the better, kind of like how we might be consuming ourselves into oblivion thanx to capitalism, consumerism, scientism, statism, and their underlying pathologies, some of them instinctive, many of them socially contrived, that make these systems possible.
Maybe that’s what humanity is really attempting to do after all: find an interesting way to commit collective suicide.

Don’t forget contraception, celibacy, sterility and so on…but yea, we reproduce enough, that we’re here, for now, granted.

But it sheds light on the main issue, because it’s unlikely we’d have all these physical maladaptations and not any neuropsychological ones.

Species don’t emerge immediately either.

But we’re not abstract beings, fundamentally we’re concrete, and our concrete, real selves can’t, won’t and probably even shouldn’t attempt to live out an abstraction we’ve derived, or conjured, at least not 100 percent of the time or remotely close.
I mean we do abstract some things, like generally I feel like I like X, so I will pursue X, even when I occasionally don’t feel like I like it, so long as no other likes or dislikes get in the way, or simply because I like being abstract, and perfect.
I concretely, and imperfectly tend to like the aesthetics of abstractions, and perfection, or they make my behavior simpler and easier to understand for me and others or whatever, we can do that to some extent, and do, but not nearly to the extent I think you’re suggesting.

You could say only that which survives has objective meaning, or be an objective, objective, because that which ultimately dies, ceases to exist, and while I see some merit in that, we’re not entirely logical creatures, number one, and number two, probably nothing lasts forever, we will all certainly die as individuals, our species will almost certainly die too, or evolve into another species, one we won’t recognize, or care for.
Altho we can’t be certain, life and the cosmos themselves may very well end, or mutate into something totally unrecognizable.
We can try to slow down change, except when it offers a significant advantage for survival, as much as possible, we can and do sometimes make that one of our objectives, hoping for the best against all odds, but it can’t be the only objective, there are many, often conflicting objectives, and they can all be abstracted, we are not and cannot ever be very much like an abstraction or a series of abstractions, but you can try.

I mean if the only way humans can survive is to gradually evolve back into a worm, would it still all be worth it, the struggle, or would that be surviving at all, since a worm is so different from what we are now?
Conversely, if our amphibian ancestors time warped from the past to the present, what would they think of us?
Would they like us?
They would probably be afraid, or they might try to bite you.

Well, the vast majority of species that’ve ever lived according to big science, died, and then of those that didn’t die, a tiny fraction haven’t, significantly (whatever that word means you or us, significantly) changed, in the hundreds of millions of years sentient life like sharks and turtles have been around.
So what’re the odds of us or something very much like us still being around a billion years from now, hell, a trillions of years from now, a septillion years?
By then life itself will almost certainly have ceased to exist, or mutated into something totally unimaginable.

Also, say the only way for the human race to survive was to place us on life support machines ran by robots, while we’re in a vegetative, comatose state, or the only way to survive was to condemn yourself and descendants to complete slavery and humiliation, torture and torment, a kind of hell on earth, forever and ever, would you?
Wouldn’t such a state not only be painful for them, but a kind of death to everything you value about being alive?
Or a vegetative state?
Wouldn’t that be a kind of death anyway?
So you see, yet another reason why it can’t only be about survival.
I agree survival is one of, if not the prerogative, but it exists alongside many other prerogatives, it isn’t, can’t and shouldn’t be an absolute, a very important consideration, yes, but not absolute.

I mean we’re always doing something to survive, but we’re also always expelling fluids, so should we turn that into an absolute objective or imperative?
Should human beings try to expel as many fluids as we can?
Should we build giant contraptions, fill them with fluids, only to drain them over and over again?
You see how this level of abstracting things hinges on absurdity?

In the main, I say if it feels good do it, I think we should just do what we feel like doing, and then whenever we also feel like considering the consequences and implications of what we do, weigh them out to the best of our willingness and ability to determine the best or at least a suitable course of action, and get back to just doing and being again.
I think that’s really what we do, all we can and should do.

If science is entirely right about evolution, the vast majority of animals throughout earths history managed to survive reflexively, instinctively and intuitively.
There’s such a thing as an organic, bottom up organization to things, spontaneous order.
Our reflexes, instincts and intuitions, many or most of them probably did evolve for a survival purpose, and now evolutionary psychology is going back and finding survival purposes for many, not all, but many, which is what you’ve been pointing out, and I’ve been finding exceptions for, to prove that it is far, far from absolute.

So then, why be so opposed to your intuitions, or our habits, that’ve formed over the course of decades, instincts over the course of millions of years and so on?
Constantly undermining and interfering with your instincts trying to be hyperconscious about surviving is not only painful (and pain can damage the body/brain), but also it’s unnecessarily intervening in processes that’re by/large probably there to help you.
We don’t need to micromanage, so give into what you love, be guided by your feelings, work together with your emotions instead of against them, without knowing exactly why or how they arise, or what their aim is, and you’ll probably end up improving your odds of survival anyway, 9 times out of 10.
Reason needs to do its job and let the emotions and instincts and so on do theirs, instead of trying to do everyone’s work for them.

Your conscious, linear, linguistic, rational self is only a small part of your total organism and its consciousness, don’t identify with it too much.
There is also consciousness itself, behind it, pure awareness, without analysis, like when you’re just watching your thoughts, feelings or the objects of sensation, and also, many processes for analysis going on that can’t be easily translated into words or numbers, or perhaps at all.

You could write an essay on how to shoot basket balls into hoops, and then present it to an amateur to read, but that wouldn’t be a fraction as good as him throwing the ball at the hoop just once, at teaching him how to shoot hoops.
At best the language and linear, sequential thinking can give us a rough outline of things, and their value to us, a skeleton if you will, and then our various subconscious psychophysical processes fill in the fat, muscles and sinews.
So much of our thinking is beyond the faculty responsible for this discussion you and I are having right now.

Also, why try to fix what arguably isn’t broken, the environment and the body have got us this far, why does the mind think it has to suddenly do all the work now, that it can easily and totally transform its nature into something totally superior, for our pleasure or survival, something that took billions of years to evolve, this delicate, fine, symbiotic harmony that exists between things?
That seems pretty presumptuous on the minds behalf.

The constraints aren’t absolute, the homosexual is often able to have sex with the opposite sex, where as sometimes the heroin addict is not able to give up the heroin, and so they die.
It really depends on the individual and how hung up on survival and reproduction they are, and how much discipline and foresight they have, the social and psychological and environmental tools they at their disposal to force themselves to do this, or pull away from that.

Ultimately I think I’m arguing for a balance of all things, as being the point, even pointlessness can be and is sometimes part of the point, if there is one, and even imbalance.
It all is and isn’t.
The way that can be named is not the way.
You can perhaps name part of the way, or parts of it, but you can’t name it in its totality, or it wouldn’t be the way.

Maybe reality will one day cease to exist as we know it or altogether, and so what is all this but a kind of playful dream/nightmare reality is having?
What good is a cat without a mouse, or vice versa?
And so the two go together, they are part of a larger cat-mouse paradigm.
If there were no more mice to catch what would the cat do…he’d be beside himself with anguish.
And so maybe the point then isn’t to catch every last mouse, but to have a good game, put on a good show.
The whole, it’s not the journey, it’s the destination thing, and all that.

So progress, and regress, victory, and defeat…they all go together, it’s all one thing, pretending it’s not, trying to convince everyone and thing watching, or itself, that it’s really this role it’s playing, when really it’s so much more.
And maybe that’s why humanity is making such a mess of things, getting in a huff, trying to catch the last mouse.

Not in any objective sense but you can still give subjective meaning to your life
But it is not compulsory for it is up to every individual to decide for themselves
So if you think that there is no point to your life then for you that must be true

Noted your points but most it deal with the fringes of the core, i.e. re,

I had stated there is no absolute meaning in the teleological sense, like one that is bestow and commanded by a God.

But within all available empirical evidence throughout evolution of all living things to the present, the core meaning of life is survival and procreation and maintenance of the next generation.

You listed many deviations from the above core purposes but they actually have no impact because nature has taken care of that and provided for assurances in terms of operating in large numbers. I stated the suicide rate is 0.034% for every 100,000 people, so the per annum is not critical in this case. Nature has taken care of the risk, even if say 50% decide to commit suicide we still have 3.5+ billion of ensure the preservation of the species. It is the same for the other deviations.

Yes, there were no species earlier, the essence is survival, self-preservation and extension to the next generation [including asexual reproduction] is inherent in living things.

Thus it is critical we understand survival and producing the next generation is the core meaning of life. In addition we need to understand what are the support systems within us that are critical to core. Then we must flow spontaneously with these critical elements.
Note FLOW;
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology

The other is peak experience:

Thus there are feedback, check and control points to guide whether one is flowing along with a meaningful holistic life.

Your counter as above,
since element/process X is part of the survival, then maximixing this input and process will maximize survival and meaningful life;
is a wrong view.
There is always an optimal level of input and a holistic approach.
Note Diminishing Marginal Returns from economics;

Like it or not, all humans are like a “servomechanism” and to be most effective one has no choice but to understand and adopt what the empirical-based meaningful purpose of life [with reasonable room for deviation] to avoid pains and to achieve flow, peak experiences and self-actualization.

As for a meteor that could appear suddenly in sight, fortunately due to the survival impulse, humans has progressed exponentially in knowledge and technology to the extent we have the potential to take care of meteors that come our way in the near future.

As for other threats not anticipated and beyond our means to tackle, we have to accept that possibility but at least we have try our very best driven by the impulse to survive at all costs which is the implicit purpose toward a meaningful life.
We have to apply philosophy-proper to abstract this reality and make it explicit to all humans.

Your OP’s theme and hypothesis is not recommendable for humanity. If that is really so, then we all might as well take poison now and end it all instead of going through a meaningless life that is full of sufferings.

Okay sweetheart, good luck.

While purposes are subjective, they’re also mostly predetermined, by millions of years of biological evolution, by thousands of years of cultural evolution, and by decades of nurturing: environmental, social, and, self conditioning, making decisions and forming habits.
You can’t just dispel all that with a flick of a light switch, on a whim, or some abstract piece of philosophical reasoning, I mean you can try…

And the sum total of these purposes are a big part of what make you, you.

At most all we can do is recombine and direct these purposes in various ways.
We can’t invent lasting purpose in a vacuum, ex nihilo, it has to come out of our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and the world, and these thoughts and feelings themselves don’t come from nowhere.

So we don’t have a whole lot of choice in regards to our purposes…we have some choice.
We’re already here, pretty much fully formed, there’s no such thing as wiping the slate clean, starting from scratch.
If we want to get anywhere, we have to use the momentum in and behind ourselves and the world.

@Wrong

Nihilism can also be collective and impersonal.
That’s not how I define nihilism, what you’re describing is escapism, or wishful thinking to me.
Nihilism isn’t a very important word or concept to me, but I guess I’d define it as a kind of radical ethical or epistemological skepticism or subjectivism.
I’m a nihilist on both counts then, ethical and epistemological, especially the former, but also the latter.
While people can acknowledge their ethics, morals, values, meaning, purpose and so on are subjective, because of the nature of the world, how there’s a flip or downside, often necessarily, to practically everything we value, I also define myself as a realist, some might say pessimist.

A lot of rich and ‘successful’, in their minds and the minds of many onlookers, people are chronically trying to reinvent themselves, their lives and the world.
That’s arguably a kind of ‘nihilism’ in the sense you mean or escapism, wishful thinking, because they’re perpetually discontent and dissatisfied, where as many poor people accept their lot.
The rich and ‘powerful’ have their utopian dreams and schemes too, about peace, prosperity and life extension technologies.
They think they or future generations can bring these things about, that humanity, or at least the elite, is progressing into a kind of divinity or godhood via science, social engineering and tech.
They call themselves post or transhumanists.
It’s arguably a kind of faith or delusion like any other.
These rich, power mad people are always chasing ideas and ideals, revolting against what is.
Always busy, bouncing from one place to the next.
They get cosmetic surgery, they accumulate money and stuff they don’t need or even seldom, if ever use, they live for the applaud and appraise of others and their public image or façade.
The real, or what is, is always something to overcome, a bridge, a means, rarely is it valued for its own sake.

You still did not answer her question.
Isn’t learning progressing or evolving?

As to the second part of that, wouldn’t YOU yourself be one of those who are looking for the one-sided coin ~~ in not also seeing learning as progressing?
Try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, Mr. Gloomy.

@Arc

I did answer her question, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
Sometimes knowing stuff helps us, sometimes it doesn’t.

And in some senses it is, and in some senses it isn’t.
The more I learn, the less important stuff there is for me to learn.
The more satiated we are, the less we do.
The less we do, the less ourselves we are.
Without wonder, there is no philosophy or science.
Without mystery, there’s nothing to wonder about.

I overemphasize the negative, only to compensate, because the positive is typically overemphasized, as it was in her post.

Gloominary, have you had any injections in the last 6 to 12 months, or medications? …just a thought.

*Laughs, no, what’re you trying to say?

Gloominary

I suppose that you did in your own way. You did say OFTEN.

That has also been my experience. I think the phrase “Curiosity killed the cat” works here.
Sometimes knowing stuff can be detrimental.
Think of the I or the Self as a block of wood. The nihilist within me at times needs to whittle it down, to form and shape it in a way where the person can be made more “real”.
We do not really need to have so much excess baggage become a part of us.

Do you mean that you are able to see value in what is important and what is not?
It has also been my experience that this or that is really not that important.
It is like cleaning house. The more junk which we once thought as valuable and important can be thrown away to give way to more inner space insofar as the self goes.
How freeing that can be, right?

Hmm… I am not so sure of that. Wouldn’t that necessarily depend on the individual?
Some could never be satiated and others may be for a time. Balance! I may be wrong here.
We are all different in a way.

But on the other side of that coin, doing less might make ourselves more of who we truly are, not less so ~~ unless you are speaking of plain old laziness and apathy

I firmly attest to that! Without wonder there is no mystery or thirst for knowledge, no real magic within the world (not the witch’s brew).

Well, couldn’t you still wonder about what you already know? Everything is not set in stone.
Consider everything which we have learned which has more or less turned out to be wrong.
If we hadn’t wondered or re-considered, where would knowledge?

Actually, you are not the gloominary which you call yourself albeit there is the candle which surrounds the gloom though I would not necessarily call the darkness gloom.
It can be quite beautiful…the darkness that is.

Dude. I think I figured out why you’ve adopted the username Gloominary. There’s only like 12 days of warm weather in Canada per year. Move to Tallahassee or someplace warm for a while, I’m betting your repost of the same subject will reveal a new vigor for life. Just my two cents.

@Anomaly

While Vancouver Canada, where I’m from, isn’t much cooler than Seattle and hardly receives any snow, we receive twice as much rain as London England, so that might partly explain my gloominosity.

Arc

Precisely, I was thinking that exact, phrase too.

I was under the impression nihilists try to destroy, not refashion into something more streamlined, but whatever, the word nihilism gets tossed around so often, it’s aptly lost much of its meaning.
This sounds more like minimalism to me than nihilism, a minimization of the self, doing away with the excess, frivolous or inauthentic parts.

Right, we only have so much time and energy, so we tend to get more discriminating with how we spend it as we mature, including the time/energy we spend thinking and feeling about things, and identifying with them.

We’re all able to see the value in what is (un)important, some more than others.

What I mean is, the more general knowledge I have, the more important knowledge, or wisdom I’m likely to have, unless it’s all inapplicable book smarts.
There’s more of a limit on how much wisdom you can have than on how much knowledge, for wisdom is about important things, pertaining to your life, where as knowledge can be about anything and everything.
There’s only so much you can learn about your life and how to live it before it becomes trivia, which’s not to say there aren’t always more important lessons to learn here and there, sporadically, where as you can go on studying and speculating about the heavens and the earth, other life forms, or other peoples lives for eternity, and never be exhausted.

Right, as I was saying our time/energy is limited, not only for how much stuff we can do and have, but for how much stuff we can care about, or identify with.
It is all about balance, how many things we give ourselves over to, you can give yourself over to too many things or too few, most people have a tendency towards excess rather than lack.

Right but I said the more satiated we are, these people you speak of are virtually insatiable.

Apathy and laziness is an important part of who some of us are.
If there’s little or nothing authentic or meaningful to do, you should just stay put, and not do much.
This idea that we all are, can or ought to be excited by life, is harmful.
And the more stuff we push ourselves to do, that don’t need to be done, or that we don’t really feel like doing, the less there is to do, which actually perpetuated apathy/sloth in a round about way.
There are limits to how much we can progress as individuals and a society.
People also have different temperaments, some people are melancholic or phlegmatic by nature, not everyone is sanguine, nor should they feel pressured to medicate themselves into being as such.
Doing, for doing’s sake, is very inauthentic, wasteful and, evil.

Yes, but sometimes there’s nothing to reconsider, or everything that can be meaningfully reconsidered has already been.
As we learn and reconsider what we’ve learned, we run out of things to learn and reconsider, or at least it becomes more difficult to discover brand, spanking new things to learn about and reconsider.

I’m sorry I’m not following you.

Gloominary,

Well, I do not know about you but I am able to think in terms of whittling something down as a form of destruction. Technically speaking, this is NOT nihilism but are you able to see letting go and detaching as being positively and realistically lol nihilistic in nature?

I can see that too. But is there not more than one word to describe how we interpret something?
Minimalism is the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from it.
Realistic nihilism? lol

That would certainly depend on the individual. Do you see many adult WEs living their lives in that way?
It is a process.

All? I doubt that. But I do think that we can learn that, step by step, in moments of awareness. But the seeing does not always do the trick. We are half asleep.

What do YOU mean by general knowledge before I try to respond to you here?

As for the first part, why do you think that is, aside from wisdom being about important things?
Intelligence and wisdom ~~ do they not kind of go together? Intelligence is the seeing and gathering in of information and utilizing it. What would wisdom be? Utilizing it
toward the greatest positive advantage for one and/or all?

Hmmm…something about that just does not quite ring true to me.
Human beings are complicated creatures. We are not simple. There is much hidden from us. We are like what is below the iceberg lol. Our psyches themselves are like unexplored space and dark matter.
We grow, we evolve, our lives change in different ways (hopefully) so how can you say that?

Isn’t Life spectacular? There IS a panoramic view there but much of the space which we see is what we see before we exist the tunnel.
We really do have to wake up, do we not?

This is where intelligence and wisdom walk hand in hand, I think.

Balance is beautiful. I suppose that it is okay though to lean a bit far this way or that sometimes. Then we really learn about balance.

Do you think this position for a count of _____, once a day, can embed a sense of all-around balance into our brains and lives?

[tab][/tab]

Do you mean to say that they value these things?

That is a learned pattern. What would you say to these people to wake them up?

Balance again. What would you tell them to do here?

I think that I can see that as happening. Why do you think some people have this mindset? What creates it in them?

But how do we learn to intuit and to balance what are our actual limits and at the same time allow ourselves to be a kind of limitlessness?

Hmmm…I am not so sure about that. I may be wrong here, but wouldn’t that depend on the individual and the circumstances?
For example, if someone has a tendency toward laziness and apathy, it might be a good thing in this case to do for doing’s sake…to just plow through that and do what has to be done. It’s a process and a learning experience. Once has to start somewhere, no?
Even the most interested and energetic people at times get a bit lazy and apathetic. Would you tell them “Well, if you do not want to do it, do not do it”. What if it is something which really needs to be done? Responsibility pawns another day.

Do you mean where there is no consciousness of thought or intention wastefulness and evil (strong word there) can occur?

As for the first, I can agree with you. I sometimes would like to get blood out of a stone.
As for the last, this is true too. Sometimes letting go allows the brain some space to bask in the Sun so to speak and then another seed sprouts up and may be nourished.

Behold my stream of consciousness. I could have expressed that much better.
Can you tell me why you have that username? I am able to see gloominary in a certain way. I do not know what way you see it.

Lol. They can lay one low… and mood at the same time. Sound like you?

Mags, if I’ve personally offended you somehow, it wasn’t my intention, can we move on?

I was being serious.

…you try to help, and see what happens!