I mean, it's just doing what it is doing, and you can tell because of the way that it is. I think purpose has way too much baggage. It's a model loaded with very human meaning.

Not true. It has evolutionary meaning, and if you look at the fossil record, a trained eye starts to see lots of patterns across all complex phenomenon. The second law of thermodynamics, information, principle of least action and other forms of optimization, etc. Aesthetics can be objective if you take the time to understand science and be quantitative.

I didn't say there weren't patterns, I'm just saying purpose implies design intent. Are you implying design intent to all of those things?

Of course, taken at face value by humans, the word "purpose" is full of pitfalls, but then again so is every word in the English language. But most of the time we are expected to define the really important words rather than just inferring their meaning (although this hardly ever happens in practice!)

At any rate, the burden is on me (or alternatively, Humpty Dumpty) to define how I mean it, and so I will argue that WLOG you can start by equating it with utility in the evolutionary sense, and then I will dodge any further justification by simply asserting that we can recover all the other useful ways to talk about purpose, by layering more and more abstraction, on top of a sufficiently coherent and detailed understanding of life and how it mathematically sits within the laws of the universe.

That depends on whether or not you believe in an Almighty creator, but in the end if you replace the word God with "blind watchmaker", you can recover all the old metaphors of creation without intent, but unchanged for the most part.

"God the Father" and all that jazz is more or less psychological projection onto the universe of metaphors about creation as it exists in families within our heads, but it still makes enough sense to talk about it so long as we don't take it literally when we ought not.

Likewise, I didn't mean to imply that by saying things about "purpose", that the more tenuous statements we might eek out of this contention make sense. For example, I wouldn't argue that people should naively try to look to biology to find purpose in their life, even if a literal interpretation of what said would imply just that. Rather, I would say that you'd need a bunch of knowledge about science before you should try to encode intuitive notions of your own particular purpose into an analytical theory.

Okay, right. Anyway, going back to your observation that I seem to be in despair both in regards to the plight of humanity and our nature, this is exactly correct insofar as this is a paradox I spend a lot of time thinking on or trying to experience things relevant to. It is, however, only occasionally despairing, and is usually amusing. This is based on the idea everything is the way it is 'supposed' to be (to keep going along using the same sorts of words to describe things that just exist) because if it weren't, it would be another way. This includes everything other than life as well obviously. This also includes me not liking the way that our society works. This also includes most life not replacing itself with it's successor, and just ending. But if this life breaks down without replacing itself, but constitutes some of the matter reorganized into life that does, is that the same thing? (on drugs)

TL;TR of the stuff I wrote before your last post: humans are more constrained by biology than they realize--enough that they are not completely free to assign purpose to anything, let alone themselves, without first being able to describe the reasons why they exist instead of the innumerable dead evolutionary lines. It's a sparse set for a reason--you are a narrowly crafted bundle of enthalpy that tightly hugs its narrow ecogical niche, and this very much applies enough to constrain the thoughts you will likely think, compared to the space of possible thoughts among all possible beings.

This is definitely the implication that I was responding negatively to, since this is usually what 'purpose' in science is used for by people trying to justify their ideology in science.



So, it seems that knowledge about science is something easily articulated (at least, we have the means through math and less so language) but intuitive notions about at least my own purpose have always seemed ineffable and pointless to express in math or language, even if there are fruitful comparisons to be made. But then there is a possibility for an analytical theory expressing these intuitions when informed by science? Can you elaborate?

I agree, I just see us likely rapidly approaching joining the ranks of dead evolutionary lines, and I'm trying to figure out the good meanings there I guess but 'replace yourself' seems not relevant to any human meaning in the face of that, even though there is plenty of the unnamable implicit meaning that we are talking about embedded throughout whatever spacetime actually is. I'm nearly positive fungus is involved.

Indeed!

[quote=Horace Walpole]
I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel — a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.
Letter to Sir Horace Mann (31 December 1769)
[/quote]





Sometimes life doesn't have to be aware that it is playing a part in replacing itself--for example, the teeny-tiny Mitochondria inside each of your cells, which are a foreign organism (bacteria) that have been in a symbiotic relationship with multicellular life for a very, very long time.

There are other extreme examples (e.g., stupid people who exist only as a warning to others).

Maybe our purpose in life is to produce wicked cool artifacts based on the high tech that end up wiping us out, for the pleasure of science fiction writers of some future organism that evolves out of the next niche that chance allocates for intelligent organisms to emerge.

Or maybe a small number of teenage mutant homo sapians will forage about a post nuclear war and / or inhospitably hot world, inventing myths in order to explain why there are abandoned buildings everywhere showing evidence of a golden age.

Is it a consensus that mitochondria and chloroplasts originated in invasive organisms? I have only ever seen it portrayed as a likely and highly regarded hypothesis in my classes.

I think that our best bang for the buck is probably in memes yes. We should get more down in stone though. I am obsessed with the late bronze age collapse, because something about people thinking Troy was mythological for a long time but then discovering it existed is fascinating. That's how extensive that collapse was, that what was real was rendered mythological. Maybe we will be viewed as purely a natural process that produced useful and plentiful materials, like the deadfall that created coal, except probably in the form of plastic. Maybe the whole reason for us is plastic, because that is what we do, produce plastic and spray it everywhere. All that evolution just to make sprite bottles.

There are very loose themes and analogies that we can draw lessons from when we look at the order that emerges organically in any complex adaptive phenomenon.

One immediate example of a common thread that emerges at various levels of abstraction is game theory.

In fact, if you go back in this thread to one of Jon`C's posts, you'll see that he mentioned it in order to contrast his sentiments against what he saw as a pessimistic attitude you took toward consciousness as an evolutionary misstep. In another post on this site he also pointed out that language requires cooporation.

In fact, a major theme of creating a new organism out of populations of smaller ones (like cells -> multicellular organisms) is that by synchronizing their ends toward the goal of a single entity, they overcome the prisoner's dilemma, a key part of game theory, which in fact originated in economics, but was applied to biology.

Heh, I guess you saw this, then.

Just want to point out again, that was just a quote from true detective.

and yes i steal almost everything witty I say from Carlin

I mentioned Danny Hillis in this thread already, who had this to say about this kind of thing:


For more information on this effort see the Wikipedia article on the Long Now Foundation.

That's stupid. You can't say whether we should exist. Such a statement is absurd on it's face. We do exist by natural law, and will continue to do so.



Humans will go extinct someday. Why is that a bad thing? There's nothing to be afraid of in death.



Ah, so you're not a nihilist. You clearly believe in quite a bit.



I like On Truth and Lies but I also dislike it. And I dislike it because Nietzsche never published it. He wrote it in his middle (Human, All Too Human) period, his most nihilistic phase, and clearly didn't see it fit to publish. And it says things he never says in his published works. So, enjoy the essay, but be careful when using it to represent Nietzsche's thoughts. I think it's best to regard Nietzsche's opening to Thus Spake Zarathustra:



Which is one of the best cryptic insights Nietzsche offers. Forget Ptolemaic or elliptic orbits, or whether Earth or the Sun orbits the other, what's important is that the sun serves us, we make use of it and give the sun purpose. This might be a Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche (though Heidegger's readings themselves of Nietzsche are.. odd): but abstract formulations about what the sun is doing are all secondary abstractions, we arrive at them through much deliberation. What's most primal to us isn't pessimism derived from a long string of reasoning about worldly causation, but figuring out what's purposeful to us. It's when we lose ourselves to these stupid-ass abstractions that we make ourselves miserable. Instead we should focus on living.


Spook: not all people see the **** of life and can't take it. In fact, in much of Greek culture you can find icons of people who could face life in all of it's hardships and be strong and beautiful in that. For one, I don't think that adage is from Sophocles, but it's a myth of Silenus. Sophocles wrote Oedipus the King which gives the exact opposite message: Oedipus never curses life, and even resists his curse with full strength and heroism.


A good way to understand Nietzsche is to see his views as the opposite conclusion of Buddhism. Buddhism teaches that life is suffering, so to escape the karmic circle one must achieve nirvana, extinguishing their life forever. Which is a pretty intrinsically nihilistic doctrine in my view. Nietzsche agrees that life is suffering, but the opposite is the conclusion, that life and its suffering, desires, and hardship, in the views of a strong person, is a massive gift. Which, in fact, it is, regardless of whether you have realized it.

Reductivist accounts of life through biology or other physical causations are pretty much the worst sorts of accounts. They do not get at anything fundamental to life, because they're a learned abstraction. You aren't born with that pessimism, somebody taught it to you.

No, Socrates was a pessimist himself. In many ways unexamined life is optimal.



You don't always philosophize your way to answering a problem, often you philosophize your way to seeing it's not even a problem at all. Yes, in actual life you compromise with ****ty things. That's really not that bad. It seems absurd to me to worry about that.



Your purposes come within yourself. It's not something that you'll ever comprehend or make complete sense of.



Human meaning is all there ever was though. It's a fundamental mistake to make logical rigor, subject-object thinking, chains of causality, physical accounts of the world, any abstract layer more important than the realm of human meaning. Logic serves us, science serves us, causality serves us, that's how it is and that's how it has always been. Forgetting that is a mistake.

Ah, but I never sought to produce an account, but only to reach a point of view (but which perhaps may yet be useful still, since by having seen things from this point of view, other accounts may now smell rather funny and cause me to reject them).

Instead, one may simply benefit from experiencing the aesthetic sensibility that systematically pursuing a scientific point of view which seeks to uncover the various facets of intertwined subjects, like complexity (which draws from biology, mathematics, and physics), engenders. If you try this, you realize that the apparent infinite regress of this attitude never actually translates into actual reductionism, since invariably you end up matching a pattern of thought about some topic, which may have begun by analytical means, to a non-analytical frame of mind (there are many brilliant books written by scientists that mostly use English and drawings), and it actually becomes impossible to even try to press on in a reductionist fashion, because by then all you are left with is aesthetic sensibility and no effective algorithms (so that if you do try you'll simply end up spouting the kind of word salad that my posts sometimes devolve into).

OTOH... building something, or debugging it? Absolutely. Nature is full of lessons if you take a systems point of view that you cultivate over time, and fancy yourself as a pragmatist / inventor / hacker who seeks to improve the state of affairs we find ourselves in not by thinking for its own moral or philosophical sake, but by conducting enough thought experiments from an artistic point of view that you gain confidence that you can materially improve things by rebuilding some of the pieces you reasoned about in a sufficiently novel combination that you shift the dynamics away from whatever disaster we're headed for.

I've been accused of pessimism before because I tend to talk a lot about existing forces as seen among their possible alternatives, but I only do this in order to understand their subtlies in enough detail so as to appreciate what it might take to replace them with something actively hostile to the assumptions made by the emergent architecture which I seek to avert.

If you want to understand what makes complex systems tick in enough detail to replace them, you're going to have to muck around in assembly code. If that makes me a reductionist, whatever, but if we're talking about humanity, anything of consequence is gonna rest upon biology.

You can talk about the Greeks meant this time or that time until you are blue in the face, but meanwhile, CRISPR, etc.

Now tell me I can't succeed in making a difference materially with engineering chops and a philosophical outlook (I don't mean reading some kind of canon, I am not well read at all in philosophy, and given OTOH the amount of time I've spent meditating on ideas on my own terms, I consider that to be a good thing, although maybe I'll read more irrelevant ideas of dead people for fun when I retire?) and tell me who's the pessimist.

Ah, the fact that you haven't read much philosophy and consider old thinkers irrelevant might help explain why your posts are sometimes incoherent.

I don't get this comment. Yeah, we have a wide and deep assortment of fun and useful intellectual playthings. But CRISPR can't help you decide how to live your life.

Because among probable worlds, we ought not assume that the one we can build isn't our last chance to experience something truly remarkable, and at the very least better than what horrors we may face while stuck in the bodies of insects thousands of times over.

Unless you are talking about poorly thought through references of mine to the work of philosophers, I imagine that you believe that studying philosophy forces one to clearly express his thoughts in a form comprehensible to others (although personally I don't see how this is important, except insofar as it might enable me to more clearly express myself to individuals such as yourself, who do happen to be steeped in the writings of philosophers), or more radically, that by studying philosophy somebody like me could somehow become aware of the incoherence of my own thoughts as I understand them myself (which I would reject as utterly absurd).

Which is why my post is not about how to live life (although this topic does seem to be the source of your own interest in philosophy).

I know it's an unpublished work. And you're damn right I enjoy it. I'm certainly not going to get hung up on the fact that it wasn't published, because that doesn't matter at all.

I'd add also that I never claimed it was "representative" of Nietzsche's thought. Your post seems like a recitation of completely irrelevant information that you heard in a class recently.



The final lines of Oedipus are completely in the spirit of the quotation I cited above:



Also, I completely disagree with your reading of Oedipus, to the extent that I'd say you missed the entire theological underpinnings of play (which are, I also believe, the most important part). Oedipus may "resist" his curse, but his "resistance" is futile. At the play's climax, he rips out his eyes and becomes physically blind out of recognition that he had been intellectually blind all along: he had been "blind" to the fact that he had already fulfilled the prophecy, a prophecy he actually brought about precisely because he tried to prevent it from happening: killing his father and marrying his mother. Ripping out his own eyes is the moment where he recognizes that he had always been blind from the start of the play (that is, not physically blind, but ignorant that he had already fulfilled the prophecy), even though he had tried to avoid his destiny. He was destined to be blind all along, despite his efforts not to fulfill the prophecy - and, in fact, through his efforts. Oedipus blinding himself is the realization of the plan of the gods, or divine justice -- a realignment of human intention with the divine plan. Oedipus may try to avoid the fulfillment of the prophecy, but it's impossible to actually defy the "will of Zeus". Oedipus' attempts to do so are acts of impiety. And all of that, of course, is despite his "heroism". Even though he was clever enough to solve the riddle of the sphinx, he was not wise enough to be pious, and not wise enough to examine himself. So, no: Oedipus Rex contains a very fatalistic, deterministic view of the world. Another quote from another of Sophocles' play makes his specific variety of pessimism more explicit:



Zeus guides all things that happen towards their ends, with complete indifference to human suffering.

(Also, it sounds like you're following Nietzche's critique of Plato and his belief that Plato rejected some of the central insight of the tragedians too closely. Oedipus is not entirely life-affirming. He absolutely curses himself, and wishes he were dead: )



(I refuse to clean that up. Embarrassingly, it's already too much like a freshman's essay.)

My post has nothing to do with toys or amusement.

I am talking about biology and philosophy, and which of the two are more worthy of contemplating if we are to understand the course of life on Earth enough to change it.

If you need philosophy to decide how to act morally, fine, but I don't see much point in that when there are much easier clues about where things are breaking down and what kind of scientific grunt work we'll need to debug it.

I will add: I have never seen a more pretentious post as this on this entire message board.

You may not have read my entire exchange with Spook, but your "in many ways" here is going to have to be disjoint from my intended definition of "optimal" (which ought to have been inferred from my discussion on cooperation as an alternative to defecting). Namely, the *******s to whom I was referring can only be locally optimizing, whereas the entire point of my post was to lament that such a globally damaging strategy is so fecund on account of its effectiveness as an evolutionary strategy for the individual organism (if not the would be super-organism). In other words, cooporation is hard, but it's so important that biology finds ways to do it, and thus we ought to be especially upset at those who would construe failure to avoid selfish behavior as a virtue ("greed is good", etc.)

Completely agree with that sentiment.

I've spent a lot of time with philosophy and with academic philosophers. And I've seen that, in some cases, the more one reads philosophy, the more narrow minded one becomes, thinking about the world only through a fairly constrictive set of rote patterns, and without much emotional sensitivity. Academic philosophy just like any profession. If you are a businessman, you'll likely think of the world through an economic lens. If you're an academic philosopher, you'll likely think about the world through limited worldview that makes up that occupation.

Philosophers, like psychologists, don't really have any sort of "expertise" that makes them better able to understand people or the world, despite their all the thinking they do about such things, and they certainly aren't better equipped to have strong personal relationships or make sound choices or be empathic. The Greeks and the Romans recognized that cleverness and wisdom are different things. Many who are steeped in philosophy are clever, not wise. And there are many who don't read philosophy who are both.

Okay, as I explained several times, that is a quote from a television show that I posted because that is what people assume I mean when I complain about our society. And I don't.





My issue is nobody will accept that as a possibility. Isn't everything supposed to wind down into entropy at some point?





I would imagine that's probably why I said I don't identify as a nihilist.








This is what I'm getting at.




Thanks for explaining my position to me. Like Diogenes, I am whining about the fact that on the whole, civilization has ruined the simple gifts of the gods. In other words, it's not so much that life has tragedy, but that we have decided (or are built to) double down on tragedy.




Yes, that's what I said. However I still don't like the way humanity chooses to live because like Eversor (EDIT:Jones, whoops) says the micro strategy is right now leading to macro destruction(EDIT EDIT:?And many other reasons, but this is the one under discussion). I guess you could characterize this as more suffering than is optimal or necessary at that scale. This messy conversation got started because I commented that some people get angry at me when I express my views, which are at their core that there are bad things happening and we must not avert our eyes for our own sake. Unfortunately I made the mistake of posting a quote from a television show that you all seem to think I actually believe. Here are some resources for those of you struggling with this.

Also thank you for this, this is exactly my kind of ****. I am like a third of the way to my first million, which I will use to create land art from stone. I'm checking this **** out though because I ****ing love Ely Nevada.

That was more of a bad joke, but it is true when I see phrases like:



I have no idea what you mean by "artistic point of view" in relation to thought experiments, whether it's an important clarification or I can read your post ignoring it, or if I should think to figure it out, which makes it harder to understand your post.

You can relax, I'm not trying to personally fault you.



Saying nobody can be happy until they're dead is not saying it's better to not be born, but point taken.



The play never gives him an out, he wouldn't have not done those things whether he had given up either. And yes, his resistance was futile. It's still admirable that he resisted.



Re the quote about Zeus, I don't see how viewing life as a cruel march toward death negates anything I've said. I take your points, though, my reading is too biased.

That's fair, maybe I was just a bit confused as to what the point of your posts to Spook was. From a distance it sounded like you were either saying only biology matters.



I see. If we're to concern ourselves mostly with the survival of the species, then I agree, figuring out how to do this is imperative. It's also, as you said, hard to get people to care about things outside of their immediate lives.



From what I've seen, academic philosophers spend their time entrenched in whatever views they hold that got them tenure and spend their careers defending them long past the expiration date. But again, it was just a bad joke. I'm sorry if it offended anyone.

Point taken, sorry I misread.



I could be wrong but I think most people deep down know it's true, they just don't want to think about it. And yeah I believe that's what physical models predict.



I don't see the same importance of dwelling on the grand-scale badness of our world and the future. Why is that important to you?