With any luck my genes will still be around then. I’m a lot more worried about 50 years from now. when there is a good chance my kids will still be around and a very good chance of my grandson being around.
Feeling good and feeling good about yourself may not be equivalent. You might get smashed and feel good, and then feel terrible about it. Or you could stretch yourself, in a race or something, and feel terrible but feel good about yourself.
That we do things that in someway make us feel better seems trivially true.
I realize this is a rather personal suggestion, but consider that you may have depression, and may be well-served talking to a psychologist or psychiatrist. These things are often grossly underdiagnosed, and if you’re feeling like life is pointless, and you’re feeling depressed, you may have some chemical imbalance in your head that needs looking at.
Or maybe you’ve just hit nihilism without learning about positive/optimistic nihilism. Here’s a quick primer. I don’t expect there to be anything for my conscious mind after I die. So what I can do is do what makes me happy now.
Yep.
As dumb as humans seem at times, and as many backward steps as we take, our progress is incredibly fast compared to the lifespan of our planet.
As long as we don’t blow ourselves up, or cook the planet, we are going to do amazing things. We could make at least one corner of this uncaring, unfair universe into a virtual paradise.
So for me, that’s how I bat away existential angst: in my private life I’m free to pursue whatever goals but in my work I am doing my very, very tiny bit to aiding progress.
I would claim that given the parameters of the question, people’s feelings and emotions are valueless. Conciousness is interesting, but valuable? To whom exactly? If feelings and emotions had value, then why aren’t we doing our best to crank out 20 kids each and fill the world with value? Of course, we find that ridiculous, because we recognize that simply having more emotions in the world doesn’t do much of anything. If there’s one guy with emotions or a trillion with emotions, there is no cosmic bank saying ‘You’re almost out of emotions, better stock up.’ There’s no difference in value between someone who spends their life perpetually gleeful and someone who suffers from depression.
We know full well what emotions are. Chemical releases that ensured our ancestors’ survival by encouraging certain behaviors. The ‘value’ behind fear is that you don’t go petting bears. The ‘value’ behind happiness is that you eat enough not to die or rub your genitals on someone else’s so there is some sort of perpetuation of the random system. Nothing more than that. Having ‘fear’ or ‘sadness’ or ‘happiness’ are simply states of being that are no more than biological ‘check engine’ lights. Delighting in the pain of others just means that your ‘check engine’ light is wired a bit differently. There’s no inherent reason to make sure that everyone else’s ‘check engine’ light is a certain color, nor is there a reason to make sure that yours is. There’s no inherent reason not to experience suffering. You can say that you don’t ‘want’ to, but wants themselves are simply biological nudges and there’s no inherent reason to follow them.
When you say, “Our meaning is to follow our happiness” or “To bring happiness to others,” what you’re really saying is “Our meaning is to flood our systems with serotonin, dopamines and opioid peptides.” That’s a great meaning, but there are a lot easier ways to do that then going to the Louvre or hang-gliding. To go back to ‘heroin addict,’ if your true purpose is to bring happiness, then you should flood municipal water supplies with heroin and cause everyone to OD in a glorious fireworks display of pure joy. Jim Jones should be our greatest hero. He made a lot of people happy and when the suffering was going to come, they all drank the Kool-Aid.
The reality is that humanism is a failed philosophy, but we cling to it because we don’t have anything else. Humanism is the volleyball from Castaway. The only value it has is that it’s all that’s there. It’s not solipsism because I’m not debating that there is a volleyball, I’m only questioning why you or I should care. And if the only response is ‘It releases more oxytocin into my neural gaps,’ then I’m having a real hard time calling that value.
And hey, counter-question: what would be the point of living if we were never going to die? Immortals never seem to do anything worthwhile. Vampires just keep repeating high school.
Progress is an illusion. All that it means is ‘I changed things.’ The idea that things are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ is simply Chronological Snobbery. You can say ‘Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to live then,’ but they could just as easily say, ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to live in the 21st century.’ There are lots of people that do say that they would rather live in the past and quite a few that want to live in the future. There’s no inherent value to choosing any particular time and place. You might have ‘reasons’, but the valuation of those reasons is entirely subjective. Sure, you can point to things that we have done that are widely revered, say antibiotics or decline in infant mortality, but you can just as easily point to things which are pretty horrific, say extremely common large-scale mass genocide or nuclear weapons or global warming. And honestly, you could point to those positives and see why they have caused problems or point to the negatives and see why they have provided solutions. When we substitute ‘time’ for ‘place’ you can start to see the foolishness of this idea. Right now, I live in West Virginia. West Virginia by most metrics is ‘worse’ than most other states. We have poorer health, a worse economy, a large drug epidemic. We have twice the number of fatal accidents as the US average, we’re 1 and a half times more likely to die of diabetes. Our infant mortality rate is obscene and I could point to dozens of statistics that show how much ‘worse’ things are here. I can also tell you that I would much rather live here than anywhere else. I am very well traveled and I spent my summers as a child and teenager living near Chicago, so I’m not trapped in some ignorance bubble. I just love it here, flaws and all. The ‘progress’ that other states have made in dealing with these issues does not appeal to me in the least. There is no reason to believe that our ‘man from the Year 1000’ would feel differently.
You also run into the ‘unintended consequences’ problem. Let’s look at the people who were doing their ‘very, very tiny bit’ by working on the research into opioid painkillers. I think that it’s reasonable to suspect that they thought they were doing the world a favor. They were working to eliminate pain, what higher purpose could there be? Of course, we realize now that the flood of opioids onto the market caused wide-scale loss of life and devastation of communities. Those people doing their tiny bit in retrospect were monsters, but their intentions were good.
‘Progress’ also causes us to confuse means and ends. If ‘good’ is the ‘progress of humanity,’ then you can use this ‘progress’ to justify all sorts of unethical behavior. The Nazi Medical Experiments as an example. They led to a number of ‘advances’ in the medical fields (not a huge number, but one could conceive of a world in which they did.) would this justify their existence? It’s the Ra’s al Ghul problem. If you believe that the ‘best’ thing for humanity is a world in which humanity is in much reduced numbers, then your ‘best’ option is to begin whole-scale mass homicide to achieve what is ‘best’ for humanity.
The OP explicitly does, so for the sake of this argument yes. If we want to include transcendence, it becomes a much different argument. Someone touched on it earlier, but I decided not to respond since it wouldn’t serve the OP’s purposes.
Not at all. I base it on a number of metrics. Poverty rates, disease incidence, life expectancy and so on. If your few anecdotes about one specific place show that there has not been progress, then the same data collected globally showing a vast improvement should be enough to convince you of the opposite position, no?
I think this is too far from the topic of the OP. You have not argued that humans cannot achieve some kind of better future nor that work towards achieving that is worthwhile. And that’s the part that’s relevant to this thread.
You are just saying that some people have done terrible things possibly thinking they were serving progress. Well sure, and they were wrong. And the reasons I think that, and how society can come to such conclusions, is a topic for another thread.
The point of living if we are all going to die, is something that each individual has to ask for themselves. What drives one individual, might be the the totally opposite for another. There are so many activities to engage ourselves in while on this journey. I’m enjoying myself, and as long as I have reasonable good health, and others to share the journey with, there is so much to do, and so little time to do it all.
Some may need the transcendental woo, but many can go through life just fine without it. In the end, what’s the most plausible worse case scenario when we die? That we enter a endless dreamless sleep. Is that so bad? It could be far worse, imagine if the Christian heaven was actually real. Can anyone imagine a more boring place invented?
There is plenty of rottoness in this world, each of us have parts of good and bad, but the ability to want to do good just for the sake of doing good is pretty much innate in the majority of us. Some people are better than others. Some places are better than others. Seek out such people and places and find like-minded individuals that enjoy activities that you enjoy.
Unless one has a major case of clinical depression, what gloomy thoughts you share now, will surely pass. You don’t see mass sucides going on, all have found something to occupy their time and don’t seem in any hurry to end it.
No, I’m not denying that these metrics certainly exist, but they are simply opinions about ‘better’ vs. ‘not better.’ Achieving these metrics is no different than gaining a level on a video game. You might care, but then again, you might think you just wasted your time. Saying ‘Look how much my Fortnite character has ‘improved’ since I began playing. It has an awesome glider and a cool outfit now.’ is essentially the same statement. It’s good that you’re happy about it, but it’s still just a bunch of pixels in a world without meaning. If the Fortnite servers shut down tomorrow, what good were these accoutrements?
My mom was a coal miner’s daughter in the 50s. She was 1 of 7 kids and they were broke as jokes. They didn’t have running water. They frequently didn’t have enough food for everyone. They would eat cabbage and beans for every meal for a week sometimes. If you asked her, “Is the world a better place now or when you were a kid?” She’d tell you that it was better then. Now you can argue that it wasn’t and you can point to your metrics and explain that poverty sucks or what have you, but that’s simply you expressing an opinion and one that is not universal. In her mind, the world has not ‘progressed’ for the better and simply you screaming that it has doesn’t make it so.
What I’m saying is that even if we imagine that progress is our purpose. That it is an objective ‘reason’ then pursuing that objective is futile. We don’t know that our efforts are moving toward this objective or actively hurting it. It’s just as possible that killing ourself tomorrow results in the same amount of ‘progress’ as endlessly toiling at our research stations and it’s possible that offing yourself results in ‘more’ progress since your efforts could be pushing us away from the objective goal of ‘progress’ whatever that is.
And even IF we somehow could predict the outcomes of our actions, that can lead us to decisions that most people would consider horrific. Torturing 100 children to death to ‘improve’ our scientific knowledge and saving thousands becomes an objectively ‘good’ thing to do since it serves our objective master of ‘progress.’
I’m saying that the idea that ‘progress’ is our purpose is seriously flawed and simply Chronological Snobbery. It posits that today is better than yesterday because it simply must be and then we use confirmation bias to prove it. It’s simply cognitive biases.
The point is to make things better. If those that invented beer had just said “Why bother” , then those that followed wouldn’t have the opportunity to say “Not bad…but I think I can make something better than that slop” and, after centuries of people each trying to outbrew the other, I wouldn’t have been sipping a glass of Three Floyds Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout last night while envying those who will be sipping something even better after I am gone until(eventually) there will come a beer so good a single sip will be the means to immediately enter Heaven where St. Budweiser will greet you with “Welcome! Would you like to try a bottle of the good stuff?”
As mentioned above, there is no such thing as ‘better.’ ‘Better’ is simply you saying ‘I like something.’ and it’s a valueless statement. In your example, Carrie Nation might say, “Wow, those inventors of beer destroyed the world. They have made the world into a nightmare. Would that they had died in their mother’s womb!” and she’s just as right as you are.
To get into something that we’re all familiar with, Donald Trump. If you ask his base, then he has made the world a better place. They’ll say it with all sincerity and that he has saved the world from the regressive Obama era. Obviously, I disagree with that assessment. I would say that he’s a throwback to a worse time, but the problem is that they’re just as objectively right as I am. In their world, a Civil War that destroys everyone that votes against Trump might be an objectively good act that makes the world ‘better.’ I would disagree with that assessment, but at heart, it’s a disagreement of opinion, rather than some sort of objective assessment that relies on purpose.
While there may be those that think that [del]horse piss[/del]Coors Light is no worse than Pliny The Younger IPA, I tend not to listen to their philosophical musings. If one really believed that there was no such thing as “better”, then that person wouldn’t give a shit about what they ate(or even if they ate), what they wore, what they did etc.
What about if you asked her if it’s better to have running water than not? Or if it’s better for her family to have enough food, and enough variety of foods?
It’s better to ask questions on specifics like that rather than the whole world, as the answer to that question can be based on a number of misconceptions, and also certain (religious) people are invested in the idea that everything must be going down the tubes.
Also, of course, if you ask many people whether the world was better, say, 40 years ago, they have a hard time separating out the state of the world from the part of their own life that that time occupies i.e. that they were young.
But this is essentially saying all motives, all reasons are ultimately subjective, not just for progress. And sure, if you want to say that, but as a matter of practicality we’re all wired up similarly enough that as a society we can agree that, say, dying of smallpox at 20 is worse than not.
Firstly I never claimed it was our purpose, I said it gives me purpose and may be helpful for the OP.
Secondly, how can you just repeat the assertion that I am just claiming that humanity is progressing apropos of nothing? I listed reasons, you can disagree with them, but it’s very bad form to suggest I didn’t give any reasons.
People BELIEVE that things are better. No doubt about it. We all have opinions on such matters. The belief doesn’t make it so. As mentioned, quite a few people BELIEVE that Trump is the greatest President of all time, that doesn’t make it so.
I don’t expect there to be anything for my conscious mind after I die. So what I can do is do what makes me happy now.