The answer to your first question might be pure physics - beyond us at the moment.
The answer to the second, as I said, might be because that is how the universe works, or there may be no why - no more than the why of a roll of two dice.
But the answers won’t help with your real why question, I think.
Even those who do kick the can down the road with appeals to God do no better. Sure why is because God intended it to be that way, but why does God intend it to be that way?
All cause and effect can ever do is explain properties of the universe in terms of other properties. You can never get an ultimate “why” from doing this.
No, I did already ask this question. I said this, a couple of posts ago:
“We know much of the mechanics of our universe, but why does it have its properties and how does it exist at all? Those are the ultimate questions”.
This is getting painful. My point is simply that we cannot, at this time, answer the most fundamental philosophical questions of existence.
It’s worked very well for me in the past. Often, common-sense philosophical beliefs like “the meaning of life is to experience pleasure” fall apart when you walk someone through to the logical conclusion of such a belief.
That is what I was attempted to do, when you jumped in, ignored this thought-experiment and claimed my only counter-argument was “frankly, no”.
:smack:
Please try to read my posts. I realise you’re at the stage of the discussion where everything I say you feel you need to “come back” with something, but a lot of your replies are not addressing what I’ve actually said.
I’ve made no claim about what is or could happen in the future.
I suggested that the “ultimate win” for mankind is if we all jacked into machines that triggered our pleasure centres (and, later I implied: can keep us alive indefinintely), if the meaning of life is solely to experience pleasure.
What would actually happen if these machines were available for purchase is irrelevent to my argument, although I agree that not everyone would get one, and those that do may hope to not spend all their time on it…
What, even obviously self-destructive acts?
You are falling into the common trap of confusing “doing my own will” with “doing what makes me happy”.
My will is a combination of my personality, instincts, environment and, sure, the carrot and stick of there being pleasant and unpleasant feedback in the brain. But those feedbacks affect our behaviour, they don’t dictate it.
To use one of the motivations from your list, say “security”. There are certain instincts that make a person desire security. And it’s an end in itself; we don’t desire it to make us happy at some future time, we just desire it, now.
“We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Stranger
Depends on the question. When you ask why the universe is not different than it is, I can answer this by saying “because people with two blue-eyed parents simply can’t have a brown-eyed kid, because that’s simply not how it works.”
Or are you asking me to explain why the matter and energy that spurted out of the big bang spurted this way, instead of that way?
You know what? You’re right. I can’t tell you how to mix a big bang in your kitchen. I concede utterly.
However I can answer that the question of why we’re alive. (You know: the thread topic.)
If you mean “why aren’t we inert rocks”, it’s because the dominos didn’t fall that way. Causal events led to chemicals arranging into self-replicating critters with self-replicated all the way up into being us.
If you’re asking “what is our purpose in life”, it’s (observably) to maximize happiness - within the constraints of our sometimes twisted idea of what’s will make us happiest.
Okay, I’ve gone back and carefully reread that entire section again, and your argument still isn’t prior to the “Frankly, no.” (Everything before it is the setup - it’s the question, not the answer.)
The answer, your counterargument, is after the “Frankly, no.” Argument by assertion: “Frankly, no. The meaning of life is not solely to experience pleasure. IMO.”
And you know what? I concede. Because as I’ve been saying all along, it’s not about “pleasure”. It’s about “happiness”, or as I said in my first post in this thread, “seek happiness, avoid misery”. As this is rather overtly not the same thing as masturbating every possible second, we apparently are not in disagreement at all.
I read all your posts. Do not intimate that I don’t. It’s a bullshit ad-hominem tactic just short of calling me a moron and I don’t like it.
Look, we agree that not everyone would log into the machine all the time. And, rigidly speaking, it’s because “pleasure” is not the ultimate goal. But happiness is, and that fact is why not everyone would log into the machine all the time.
Technically we may be in agreement about everything - but I doubt it. I suspect you disagree that all humans do everything in their pirsuit of happiness. However you have not provided an argument against that. Just against sheer mindless pleasure being the only human goal, which is not the same position as the one I am arguing.
Sigh. Yes. Even obviously self-destructive acts. Becuase people always do things because they have some reason (perhaps a stupid reason) for doing it, or at least because they consider them to be a better idea than the alternatives they can think of.
Okay, I’ll bite. What do your think is your will, other than the calculation of what seems like a good idea to you at a time? If you take all that away, what is left? What drives you when you remove all your motivations?
Security isn’t an end to itself. People desire security because they feel insecure without it. This bothers them. This makes them nervous and less happy. So they seek security to stave off the fear and uncertainty - the unhappiness.
Notably, not everyone cares the same amount about security - and this is directly related to the level of distress they feel about being insecure. People who don’t care about security, who aren’t bothered by a lack of security, don’t pursue security as much as people who are bothered more by the lack of it.
I have to agree completely with Aelita Daystar. “Purpose”, “meaning”, “point”, etc. are just human concepts, we made it all up. If you’ll pardon the circularity: “meaning” has no meaning, other than to people; “purpose” has no purpose, other than to people.
What’s the purpose of a rock? What’s the point of an atom? What’s the meaning of an electron? Those questions are exactly as “meaningful” as the OP.
I’ve never asked that.
I asked the fundamental questions of existence. Obviously those questions are unsolved. And if you’d acknowledged that before we wouldn’t have had to go on this elaborate tangent.
Well, I’ve been correcting your attempts to put words in my mouth so long it’s easy to lose sight of what started us on this tangent. It was because Voyager suggested the meaning of our life is the same meaning that stars and dark matter exist.
But the thing is, we don’t know why the universe exists, or even if there is a why. That was my only point.
Sigh.
I was trying to counter the suggestion that the meaning of life is to experience pleasure with the retort “So, would the ideal life be one where we manually manipulate the brain’s pleasure centres?”. Of course, in itself it is not a formal argument because for one thing, Voyager might bite the bullet and simply reply “Yes”.
However, it’s nonsense to suggest my whole argument was simply “Frankly, no”, as you did.
Yeah, we are.
For the purpose of my argument, as long as happiness is a set of brain states, it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking happiness or pleasure.
But let me put it this way, with regard to why people behave as they do:
I’m saying that people have multiple motivations. In a sense, you’re agreeing, but you believe that all these motivations come under the umbrella of “seeking happiness”.
However, it’s nonsense for any usual definition of happiness.
Someone who’s depressed and therefore self-harms, is not seeking happiness, unless you’re willing to redefine happiness to an absurd degree.
So, if I give an example of you not reading my posts, are you implying that you are a moron? You should be careful, you might get a moderator warning. 
**Mijin: **We know much of the mechanics of our universe, but …how does it exist at all?
**Mijin (separate post): **I’m talking about the ultimate questions: how is it possible for anything to exist
**begbert2: **As to “how is it possible for anything to exist”, well, that is a different question - and different from the one you asked a moment ago.
That’s close. My point was asking why rocks exists keeps us from making the error of believing that our consciousness makes us somehow fundamentally different from a rock - from the viewpoint of the universe, at least.
If I were a Zen master I’d be hitting your knuckles with a stick. You missed my point totally. I was not saying that pleasure was in any way the meaning of life. I was saying that since there is almost certainly no meaning, we should enjoy the life we have - and enjoyment covers far more than simple pleasure. As Groucho maybe said, sometimes you have to take it out. To repeat: we don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know why we’re going, we don’t know who if anyone is driving, but we can still enjoy the scenery along the way.
I’m done exchanging macho posturing with you (for the moment, anyway; I reserve the right to get macho later), so I shall restrict my responses to things that are on point.
I suggest you have no idea why depressed people self-harm. Suicide, for example, happens when people decide that they have an inescapable negative happiness - that is, where death is perceived as an increase in happiness. And so, they might seek that happiness, if they don’t have other considerations that make them less happy about the idea of suicide (such as fear of pain or concern for mourning family).
And I will concede that “happiness” may not be the best word for it, but there is certainly a metric that people use to decide whether to do one action over another. And unavoidably, this has to do with what is seen as good from the person’s own perspective. (It’s unavoidable because people have no other perspecives than their own.)
You claim that people have different motivations that can’t be placed under one umbrella. This is, obviously, nonsense - these differing motivations are themselves compared with one another. Often one motivation must be selected at the expense of another. Without a common metric of comparison it would be impossible to make decisions about such things! Yet we do. So, underlying all motivations, there is a single metric, which humans use to do their comparing of all aspects of all options and select the one that ‘rates highest’. You may call this an ‘umbrella’ if you wish.
Again, “happiness” may not be the best word for this. But it’s almost certainly pretty close. People definitely do seek some form of emotional optimization when they make their decisions, after all.
fuck bitches, get money!
They always charge me. 
(Unless I finish all the pimping missions first. :))
Scotty Mo is this guy.
hater
That’s close!? I pretty much repeated what you said verbatim:
Good. I was getting tired of firefighting.
Where did that come from? I’ve made no suggestion about why people self-harm.
Hmm…I’ll have to think some more about this example. But anyway, what about the first example, the self-harmer. What emotion are they going for?
I never claimed that the motivations could not be placed under a single umbrella. Just that “seeking happiness” is not an umbrella that covers them all.
No, this is the key point that I’m disagreeing with. We don’t do things for an emotional state. “Improve emotional state” is not a good umbrella either. I don’t just do things to have a good feeling.
Let me put it this way. Say I create an artificial intelligence. And say I embue this intelligence with feedback about certain actions. Damaging its body for example, will feel “bad” to it.
Can we say that this intelligence is always motivated by “emotional optimisation”? No, of course not. It rather depends on how this machine has been set up.
Of course, the machine will always act out its own will, but calling that “emotional optimisation” is meaningless at best.
To the casual observer: This may appear to you as a late-night, freshman bull session. Which it is. In its defense it is as also a beer-fueled, semi-formal, philosophical debate on what our forefathers indulged in this for the past several thousand years. You thought your many-times-great grandfather passed out at sundown and woke up at sunrise? First, his bladder was no bigger than yours, and after an evening drinking homebrew he was probably up a couple times between finally passing out and his wife dragging him outta bed.
Second, research has shown that modern hunter-gatherers do not sleep through the night, but spend part of it Poking the Fire and Bullshitting, a practice familiar to any well-advanced Boy Scouts out there.
Thirdly, we have the kids who sneak around the fire like their dads. They hear the stories, and they pass them on, be they about Gilgamesh or the guy whose claw was left in the teens’ car roof.
We have a duty to pass these stories along. It is what makes us Human.
If you sat around the dorm having deep discussions about the ultimate purpose of rocks, people would think you were loony - or ask where you got that weed. Rocks just are. They just were before us, and before any other possible intelligent life. You got the same part, just not the no meaning part.
No, I understood exactly what you were saying.
You were saying that we are here for the same reason as stars and nebula and whatever, and from that the reader is supposed to conclude “Ahh, no reason at all…”.
I was simply pointing out that we don’t know, for a fact, that there is no reason for it all being here.
For example, some speculate that perhaps our universe is a simulation. In which case the reason stars are there is to fulfil whatever the objectives are for running the simulation.
Apologies if I’m late to the party, but here’s my answer for the OP.
Fantastic. Welcome back SentientMeat.
Brought a tear to my eye.
Very nice.
You suggested that “someone who’s depressed and therefore self-harms, is not seeking happiness”. I concede that you didn’t bother to suggest why else they might self-harm…
And pardon - I figured that suicide counted as a form of self-harm. Beyond that, I am not conversant with the rationales of people doing it. But I bet you ten units of generic internet cred that they have some reason…which is pretty much all my argument takes, see?
Why not?
“No, of course not?” Why not? “Meaningless at best”? Why is it meaningless? You’re really fond of making these negative assertions without either backing them up or even arguing for them.
Seriously, if you agree that we have an overarching optimization method, but disagree that it can be emotional, then what is it instead? Certainly you must agree that emotions and inclinations and preferences influence decisions, which demonstrates that emotions feed into the assessment somewhere along the line. So at what point does it cease to be emotional and move to, well, whatever sort of assessment you think it actually is instead?
I dispute that you “don’t just do things to have a good feeling”, unless that’s intended to be an incomplete snip of my position. I propose that people seek happiness and avoid misery, with “misery” being a may-not-be-the-best-word-for-it word for the sum total of negative reactions to things. You don’t go to work to get a buzz, true. But you go to work to avoid the negative expectation of being unable to eat or shelter yourself. You do it to avoid guilt, fear, to avoid feeling like you’ve let your family down, whichever. Whatever your reasons, though, inevitably they’re from a personal perspective, inevitably they’re based on a generic cost/benefit value-assessment, and in my observation, they’re based on an emotional preference/aversion reaction to what you expect the outcomes of the actions to be. You like this outcome. You don’t like the sound of that one. That’s what I see going on. If you disagree… then what’s going on instead?
And, if you’re going to keep arguing this, I’d appreciate it if you took the effort of proposing alternate explanations, rather than just popping out with kneejerk "No, you’re wrong!"s all the time. Sure it’s easier to refute without taking a stand or making an argument, but it puts me in the position of trying to guess why you think I’m wrong and what you think is actually going on, so that I can have something to argue against.
