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| | The point of existencePage 2 of 3 (1, 2, 3) | 23
The universe is now aware of itself through our consciousness. All of the atoms in your body came from a star. And now they can think about how much they love drugs and how much they hate capitalism.
Lol, totally awesome man. You should definitely start a blog and rant from time to time if you haven't already. I'd subscribe if you did! | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/18/2012 9:35:11 AM | | I hate to sound flippant and disrespectful, but My View, from where I sit, and after observations of human behaviour compiled over the ages, I have to say that the point of the existence of most human beings appears to be the tops of their heads. | |
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A_Gent
| | Joined: 8/18/2011
Msg: 28 | |
| The point of existence
Posted: 7/18/2012 2:45:22 PM | Thank you, Oblio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGFlACG6qvI
An animated story of an unusual kingdom in which everything and everybody is pointed - except for a young boy named Oblio(provided by Mike Lookinland, an actor best known as young Bobby Brady on the television series The Brady Bunch). Despite his round head, Oblio has many friends. But an evil count, jealous that Oblio is more popular than his own son, says that without a pointed head, Oblio is an outlaw. Along with his faithful dog Arrow, Oblio is exiled to the Pointless Forest. There, he has many fantastic experiences (including encounters with a 3-headed man, giant bees, a tree in the leaf-selling business, and a good-humored old rock). From his adventures, Oblio learns that it is not at all necessary to be pointed to have a point in life. Music composed and performed by Harry Nilsson ("Me and My Arrow"), who also wrote the story. Ringo Starr narrates.
"I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it.'" – Harry Nilsson | |
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A_Gent
| | Joined: 8/18/2011
Msg: 29 | |
| The point of existence
Posted: 7/19/2012 9:43:04 AM | Fill in the blanks:
people, things
Love ________. Use ________ | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/19/2012 9:49:55 AM | @ A Gent
Liked your posts. It's nice to see at least some of you guys are getting the point. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/19/2012 11:21:53 AM | What if the point of your existence was to ponder the point of your existence?
Your ego doesn't count for much in the grand scheme of things, so let's eliminate personal ego from the question and rephrase it as a statement to ponder.
"The point of existence is the pondering of existence."
Could we not say then that in pondering existence, we give meaning (the point?) to it? Let's rephrase, incorporating the concept of meaning:
"The meaning of existence is the pondering of existence."
Now "existence" is just a word that means "to be", and in my book, "to be" is to live, so let's change "existence" to "life" and ask a question about it before we write the answer:
"What is the meaning of life?"
"The meaning of life is the pondering of life."
It seems to me that anyone who ever asked the question is answering it at the same time (but probably doesn't know it), so questions like "What is the meaning of life?", "What is the point of existence?", etc. are really unprovable axioms from which we can easily derive the answers as theorems. They are the questions that answer themselves. (Which seems paradoxically self-referential, but that can be easily resolved when we allow questions to be "statements" called Godel sentences and we can do that by assigning an arbitrary truth value to questions (which normally have no truth value).
I once said that "The cosmos was created when God imagined his own existence...NEVER underestimate the power of your imagination." At the time, even I didn't know how close I was to the TRUTH. (more on imagination later*)
It would seem that the best way to proceed then is to answer first and then derive the true-by-default axiomatic questions that they answer.
Example:
A: "We are the imaginations of ourselves."
Q: "What do we imagine ourselves to be?"
If the answer is "true" by default, so must the question be "true", as the question is logically derived from the answer.
If the answer is true, then what we imagine ourselves to be is what we are AT ANY POINT IN TIME (since time doesn't enter into it at all, an arbitrary point in time may be selected without affecting the truth of the statement.
May it not be said then, that we WILL be what we imagine we'll be in (say) five years? Doesn't what we imagine ourselves to be in the future become a self-fulfilling prophecy? I'd say that's a point everyone should ponder.
The logic of the above is only off the top of my pointy head and may easily be faulty...I can't be bothered to dot the "i's" & cross the "t's"; logic was not my intention. My intention was to make a point. I'll continue now...
Every day of your life is an act of creation. Your life is quite literally your own creation. If you don't like what you're creating, re-create it; imagine a better life and create it for yourself (but don't hurt anyone in the process…it wouldn't be fair to their own creation). Just think…you have the Godlike power of creation in your dinky little hands and all you have to do is imagine it's there, so quit sitting on your ass grumbling about the mess everyone else is making and get to work creating a better world. Little ol' you has the creative power of a God; don't waste it with pointless questions about what the point is; YOU ARE THE POINT! | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/19/2012 7:23:29 PM |
"The meaning of life is the pondering of life."
I think we agree, although I phrased it a bit different for her in that "The meaning OF life is to find meaning IN life" of course, there will be those who discover deeper meaning through pondering and those who discover deeper meaning through feelings and experiences, through causality, dreams, enforcement, agreement, intent and acceptance. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/19/2012 8:19:13 PM | I think we agree,
I think we do too...for the most part, but words are a funny thing and often lose meaning in the conveyance from mind to mind (entropy). For instance, part of my point is that meaning is CREATED, not discovered, and you might have missed that. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/20/2012 3:09:30 AM | | That was succinct, and so non-plused that the contrast to the post is kind of funny. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/20/2012 3:34:12 AM | I agree with you. Your statements describe man purposes for things like the idea of love being merely natures way of insuring the continuation or survival of the species and that makes a lot of sense.
However I think it only covers 1 part of what we are as humans, the physical machine. We are something else. The soul or spirit or observer, or energy, all of these and probably more we can't articulate completely. Perhaps we will spend the next 100's of years exploring that part of ourselves, since as you said we seek or "crave excitement and change," and the machine is the machine.
A society based completely on love from my perspective would be boring but then again we tend to resonate to like things and being human is to be dark and light. Absent one or the other we would be something else. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/20/2012 8:51:13 AM | To OP:
I have to accept that POF decided to place both the science and philosophy under the forum heading, even if I don’t like it… The idea that the pure objective truth can be polluted by something as subjective as philosophy makes me nauseas. But, I can do nothing about it so I must accept it.
But “Knowledge”, who is my true mistress, has called upon me to defend the ageing feeble discipline of philosophy from the wicked misclassification of your post. The meaning of life, which is a valid philosophical question, is not what you are asking. You are asking what is the meaning of YOUR life, and that my friend is not philosophy that is self loathing. If you have come to the point in your life were you need some justification to live may I suggest calling or googleing a suicide prevention line. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/20/2012 2:21:23 PM |
The idea that the pure objective truth can be polluted by something as subjective as philosophy makes me nauseas.
How is the pursuit of knowledge subjective and knowledge itself objective? Where does your knowledge come from if you never pursued it? Were you born with it?
But “Knowledge”, who is my true mistress, has called upon me to defend the ageing feeble discipline of philosophy
How can knowledge defend its pursuit (the seeking of it)? Wouldn't you already have no further need of philosophy and therefore no need to defend it?
It is extraordinary to claim to have objective truth (Which is commonly labelled TRUTH). Are you making such a claim? If so, you know the burden of proof falls upon you.
I will accept that you know the TRUTH upon proof of claim that you do. Failure to prove your claim will make you look like a fool to everyone. (Hey…don't blame me, I'm just telling you the objective TRUTH.)
(OP take special note of the following)
The meaning of life, which is a valid philosophical question, is not what you are asking.
Glad you "straightened her out on that, but I'm curious...How can you possibly KNOW?
You are asking what is the meaning of YOUR life, and that my friend is not philosophy that is self loathing.
Thanks for telling her what she was really asking and telling her how much she hates herself for asking "meaningless" philosophical questions like why any of us might be here at all. (Good thing she wasn't your little daughter asking why the sky was blue…You'd probably have her put into a mental health facility for her own good to heal her sick mind.)
If you have come to the point in your life were you need some justification to live may I suggest calling or googleing a suicide prevention line.
I tried that myself...It didn't work...I'm still here and more philosophical than before...Why didn't your suggestion work for me? Oops!...I forgot…we aren't supposed to ask questions or think. Our brains are only there to help us to do as we're told and scurry about living a drone-like existence, never questioning the why of things. Oh well, I'm sure us stupid unKNOWing "philosophical" types will catch on eventually, after all, we have you as a sterling model of what we should be. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/23/2012 12:51:14 PM | I’m not going to get into an internet argument with a POF forum knight in shining armor. So I will just reply this one time and not waste my time any further.
How is the pursuit of knowledge subjective and knowledge itself objective? Where does your knowledge come from if you never pursued it? Were you born with it?
I think that you assume that philosophy actually is the pursuit of knowledge, it’s not, the subjective truth is that you want it to mean “the search for knowledge” the objective truth is that it’s a “search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means”. Look it up if you want it’s on Merriam-Webster. Born with knowledge, kind of like “genetic memory”, that simple statement tells me that you probably and older gentleman who has convinced himself that he knows everything that he refuses to learn about new discoveries. Genetic memory is an interesting natural occurrence, there is a lot of good research going on in the field right now, take some time to learn about it.
How can knowledge defend its pursuit (the seeking of it)? Wouldn't you already have no further need of philosophy and therefore no need to defend it?
It is extraordinary to claim to have objective truth (Which is commonly labelled TRUTH). Are you making such a claim? If so, you know the burden of proof falls upon you.
I will accept that you know the TRUTH upon proof of claim that you do. Failure to prove your claim will make you look like a fool to everyone. (Hey…don't blame me, I'm just telling you the objective TRUTH.)
See the statement above where I explained why your definition of philosophy was wrong. I don’t understand why you think it is extraordinary to clam to know the objective truth, the earth is round, it orbits around the sun, we are all made up of the same five basic elements, and there is a sun. I don’t see how the burden of proof would fall onto me to prove these things. Just because you can watch a few YouTube videos about “burden of proof” doesn’t mean you should be throwing it around when you clearly don’t understand what it means. Your last statement confuses me also, how can you say that I am a fool for calming objective truth but then insert you can tell me objective truth with no evidence of your own.
Glad you "straightened her out on that, but I'm curious...How can you possibly KNOW?
I don’t clam too. But I don’t have to know everything about something to state what it is not. That’s part of understanding something, comparing it to things that you already know to get a closer understanding of what it is. I have never seen a giant squid but I assume that it doesn’t look like a car. Besides how do you know that I don’t?
Thanks for telling her what she was really asking and telling her how much she hates herself for asking "meaningless" philosophical questions like why any of us might be here at all. (Good thing she wasn't your little daughter asking why the sky was blue…You'd probably have her put into a mental health facility for her own good to heal her sick mind.)
I don’t see you disagreeing with the fact that this post was just a desperate attention grabbing stunt not a valid question that required an educated answer. But you did blind me with your shiny armor and white horse. I like how you pulled out the “if it was your own daughter” statement that almost made me feel bad… almost.
I tried that myself...It didn't work...I'm still here and more philosophical than before...Why didn't your suggestion work for me? Oops!...I forgot…we aren't supposed to ask questions or think. Our brains are only there to help us to do as we're told and scurry about living a drone-like existence, never questioning the why of things. Oh well, I'm sure us stupid unKNOWing "philosophical" types will catch on eventually, after all, we have you as a sterling model of what we should be.
This hurt me a little I’m not going to lie. My personal feelings toward philosophy should not be confused with me quest for humanist and knowledge. I just feel that philosophy is and antiquated and unempirical way to find the objective truth. Philosophy is like the old nursing home bound grandfather of the sciences, really, not even a sciences anymore, he is funny and tells good stories but has a tendency to pop in his pants and drool. | |
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A_Gent
| | Joined: 8/18/2011
Msg: 39 | |
| The point of existence
Posted: 7/23/2012 3:20:42 PM | "We must learn to honor excellence in every socially accepted human activity, however humble the activity, and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity. An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
--John Gardner, "Excellence"
Easy on scorning philosophy big fella .... it tells you were to look for the truth, how to recognize it when you find it, and what to do with it. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/23/2012 10:33:02 PM | HelpIcantbreathe:
This hurt me a little I’m not going to lie. My personal feelings toward philosophy should not be confused with me quest for humanist and knowledge. I just feel that philosophy is and antiquated and unempirical way to find the objective truth. Philosophy is like the old nursing home bound grandfather of the sciences, really, not even a sciences anymore, he is funny and tells good stories but has a tendency to pop in his pants and drool.
I disagree. I think that there are many valid philosophical persuits, especially when it comes to human relations, ethics for example. Philosophy also plays a major roll in advancing scientific theories. You should look up some of the quantum philosophies. Einstein was a participant/contributor to them. It's quite fascinating really.
As well, philosophy is not strictly subjective it also concernse itself with objective matters. An example in ethics would be universal moral truths, among many others. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/26/2012 10:02:39 PM | [Quote]I think we do too...for the most part, but words are a funny thing and often lose meaning in the conveyance from mind to mind (entropy). For instance, part of my point is that meaning is CREATED, not discovered, and you might have missed that. [/Quote]
I think I did miss that. Whats your definition of the difference between created and discovered?
Is this a perception vs reality debate? I'm not sure I understand the difference in this case? | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/26/2012 11:51:23 PM | @ mozartfuldodger
Whats your definition of the difference between created and discovered?
With regard to "meaning"(or "the point" if you prefer), what is discovered is what's already there and may be internal or external; what is created initiates from within and wasn't there before we created it.
Is this a perception vs reality debate? I'm not sure I understand the difference in this case?
It is impossible to know that we live in a "true" objective reality. All we have is our perceptions to go on ("There is no spoon." might be a true statement; we can't know.)
The difference between created and discovered meaning is a little like the "virtual spoon" mentioned above. Meaning can't be discovered because we can't know if it is real or illusory (what meaning could a holographic spoon have? The image isn't "really" there, so what importance could we attach to its discovery?) On the other hand, that which we create is real to us, even if we are holograms ourselves. It is part of our reality without regard to whether that reality is subjective or objective.
Perhaps I can best illustrate what I'm trying to say with a (true) story. My grandmother died some 37 years before I was born. My grandfather (who never talked about her) died when I was too young to start asking questions about her. My mother was born 6 months before she died and could tell me very little about her. I spent years of my life with no memories or concern about her. She had no "meaning" to me.
One day I got interested in genealogy because most of my family was dead except for my brother & myself and I felt kinda lost. I felt adrift, with no landmark, beacon or star to guide me. I felt that getting to know my roots would anchor me and help me get my bearings. I felt that knowing where I came from would perhaps point me in the direction I should head. I didn't explicitly see genealogy as a metaphor in my search for meaning in life, but that's what it was. Genealogical research was helping me find it. My long-dead and forgotten ancestors seemed to be somehow resurrected from the grave as I learned more about them. Their lives became a part of my life. Where I had felt lost and alone, I found I was becoming found and a part of something much greater than myself. Loving my long-dead & forgotten ancestors was second nature to me and to spite the irrationality of the feeling, I felt deeply loved in return. Didn't I deserve it? After all, I was the manifestation of the sum total of them all. A piece of all their dna was in my dna, so in a very real sense, they were all with me, always, to spite the fact that perhaps nobody else in the world even knew they ever existed, they existed still…in me. I felt honored, and loved and a sense of belonging I'd never felt before but would feel to the end of my days.
Of special interest to me was my grandmother. I eventually found pictures, her wedding dress, a locket she wore for a picture I found of her, from which a large pencil sketch (which I also have) my grandfather had commissioned shortly after her death. Obviously, he loved her too. That he never talked about her was probably a wish not to conjure up the sad memory of his loss upon her death. I found her gravesite and went to it. It didn't have anything more than a numbered marker and even that was buried slightly underground by the passage of time. Nobody had been to her grave in many years, probably several decades. I'm not a religious man, but I found myself kneeling and weeping at the sheer poignance of finding someone so totally anonymous, yet so important to me. I identified with her completely, for what was I but another unknown and anonymous soul, still "living" but only now truly learning to live because I found such meaning in the virtual rapport.
I shared all of the information with my brother, but it didn't interest him. he saw no meaning in it for him and mere words could never communicate the meaning that I had found from the exact same information and lineage. This told me that as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, real meaning is in the soul that feels it.
It might be something that is always there and only remains to be discovered, but I'm inclined to think that what is there is only the fuel. It cannot ignite unless we strike the match to create the fire of meaning that burns in our soul for the rest of our lives.
It seems there is a spoon after all. You have only to create it and it will really be there for you…and only you. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/27/2012 10:56:21 AM |
Sorry to break it to you, but the universe is indifferent.
The point of your existence is what you make of it.
This.
There is no purpose to your existence to start with. Great! You are a free agent within the confines of your situation. You decide how to answer your own question. | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/29/2012 9:54:42 AM | [Quote]It seems there is a spoon after all. You have only to create it and it will really be there for you…and only you./
I guess I kind of get what you said. You discovered things about your grandmother, and those discoveries created meaning, so therefore you "created" meaning through discovery.
I think Michelangelo (not sure if it was him) said that he didn't create a sculptor, but merely revealed it by removing the parts around it. A matter of perception, but I think both views are okay.
I chose to use the word "Find" meaning in life, because I viewed it as an individual journey as opposed to objective. because individuals exist in linear time, they only know before and after, and even with the power to manifest reality (i.e. dreams) this power still uses before and after as a reference. Something always comes from something else, so there is no true original creation/manifestation to an individual experiencing linear time, only new perceptions. These perceptions are the reality of the individual and may be shared by others and are true as far as they are perceived.
In the case of your brother, he did not believe that there was meaning, so it was not real to his perception. Perhaps if she turned out to be one of the best in the world at something he was passionate about. then I believe he would have found meaning.
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/30/2012 7:14:15 AM |
you "created" meaning through discovery.
Exactly…just as we can create a warming fire when we discover the fuel. We have the choice of striking the match (being interested in fire (meaning) itself), or not (not needing a fire to warm us).
This is why "What is the meaning of it all?" is such an important question. If you never ask it, you have no "match" (not that it would make any difference if you didn't care enough to ask in the first place).
I side with Socrates on the matter:
"The unexamined life is not worth living." | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 7/30/2012 9:58:42 AM | There's something to be said about what the term "Collective conscious" in how it could apply to existence.
In some people's view, the universe is a dream - a world created by our spirits and agreed to by all before we descended into it. From a speculative view, this could make sense. The things science is discovering about what we call the paranormal realm seem to be pointing to an even smaller and smaller veil between reality and possibility. Multiple dimensions, quantum mechanics, new theories about the birth of the universe (some think we erupted from a giant black hole and that it's happened before - science is now trying to prove this theory), energy phenomena, etc...
Collective consciousness implies that we all have the ability to see the past and the future, that we all have access to everything because ultimately we are all a part of the same consciousness.
If this is to be believed, then it seems the point of existence is to experience and pro-creation is an approved method of entering this world that we all agreed to and not necessarily the reason for existence itself. The question, then, is really "What is the point of YOUR existence?" | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 8/2/2012 2:23:43 AM | If a patient [should ask] Frankl,
"What is the meaning of life for me?"
he is likely to get a Socratic answer:
"What is the best chess move?"
> AARON UNGERSMA
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all,
there is only the meaning we each give to our life,
an individual meaning,
an individual plot,
like an individual novel,
a book for each person.
> ANAIS NIN | |
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| The point of existence
Posted: 8/2/2012 7:36:08 PM | The answer to "What is the point of existence?" lies in the learning.
The point of existence is the lesson learned by climbing up the infinitely high mountain of becoming. Enjoy the climb, because that is what you will always do.
That you posed the question at all shows that you have already come a long way (some people never even make it this far). Thankfully, the lesson taught by the question never ends, and you won't stop learning until you stop breathing.
"The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates | |
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