Does this statement have meaning, however defined? More fundamentally, what is it about our species that allows such a statement to be considered?
Posted Jul 25, 2016, 7:42 AM UTC
Seen from the perspective of the universe, the individual's life is nothing. Seen from the perspective of the individual, it is everything.
This sums up my thoughts on the matter very succinctly, thanks!
I agree that we are meaningless, yet this should liberate us from every pretension, every desire to be something we are not, to deny our very animal nature, our very place in this ecosystem. We believe we are so important, that we are the center of this reality, and in doing so we have destroyed the only thing that mattered to us: A chance for a peaceful, contemplative, and finally happy existence.
Most middle class-and-above humans live inside their heads, in the idealized world they created and try to fulfil by having the latest cellphone, the latest car, at any cost (to the environment and to themselves); a fool's errand if there ever was one. And the rest of humans live by collecting the scraps that the former group throws at them, pursuing riches or just damning this life for being so unfair.
See the pattern, everyone is the center of their own life, everyone values their pathetic existence so much, that everything else lacks in comparative value to them, while it should be the other way around. If everyone saw the whole as the most valuable creation there has ever been, no matter how small or isolated this blue ball is, there would be no overpopulation, no capitalist exploitation, no extravagant lifestyles, no city would be a graveyard, I could go on and on...
To finish this, I would like to quote one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written:
"Repugnant is the creature who would squander the ability to lift an eye to heaven conscious of its fleeting time here".
TL;DR: Embrace your frugality and free yourself from all pretension.
I used to write about the world in people's minds on r/collapse. It's hard to explain, but people have the illusion they're seeing the world "as is", but what's really going on is that the world is already modeled in their minds. Brains have an "embodied simulation" of their environment.
When people go about their day they operate relative to this simulation. They navigate the world based on what's already in their minds, not everything that's going on in the world. The brain "saccades" the environment looking for verification of its programming. This is why people can navigate so effortlessly in familiar environments. The brain selectively searches for what it expects, and if it finds it (e.g. your culture operating as normal) then there isn't much, if any, conscious registering of your navigating, and you autopilot through life. A few neuroscientists I like are Karl Friston and Mark Solms and they describe a lot of this.
What's frustrating is that if people were exposed to the universe, our nature, and our place in it, then our problems would be a long way towards being solved. As you noted, the idea is to free yourself now - get away from the harmful reality that society tried to program us with. I like to imagine what it'd be like to be raised with a healthy model from the start, so that one didn't have to go through the difficult process of escaping the neurological ruts in one's mind while having to build a new perspective. Current society is basically neurological slavery.
Tool expresses sentiments much better than I can.
Could you elaborate on the neuroscience? If it is not much of a hassle, could you post some links for me? I am usually inclined on psychology; I like how the subjective bleeds in to everyone's life, even though everyone is basically the product of some elaborated genetic RNG, but I never did understand or even considered science explained these behaviors with the grace that you have expressed.
Sure. I'm just a layman though with an interest in understanding the mechanisms behind things. Also, these ideas can make human beings seem “machine-like”. On the other hand, Mark Solms says the brain isn't a computer, but I think he's just contrasting what computers normally do with the affect-driven changes the brain relies on. That is – the brain doesn't change its “stored programming” unless the environment is presenting some unexpected stimuli, or “surprise” as he calls it. Then you feel conscious of the situation and can deal with. Computers don't have feelings as far as we know, so his criticism makes sense, but I would argue that since feelings correlate with particular matter configurations in the brain and their transformations, the brain could still be modeled computationally where the “feeling” isn't generated in the simulation, but the effect of this subjective information channel, however it's being generated, is maintained.
Here's one video by Solms. The idea I like most in this video is the nature of the ego. You simulate objects and activities in your mind, like musical instruments. If you play guitar enough you can mentally practice and actual improve to a degree. Same thing with sporting activities like shooting baskets. Not only can you feel a guitar in your mind, you can feel yourself. For example, you can think of your big toe, have a sense of where it is in space, and then move it. Of course, the sensation of the big toe isn't “down there” in the toe. It's in your brain. You brain has a sensory-spacial map of your body. The ego is this model of yourself.
However, consciousness isn't generated in the cortex, where the ego model is represented. Consciousness seems to emerge entirely from the brain stem. That means you can only sense yourself as an object when the brain stem “shines the light of consciousness through it”. That's just a conceptual metaphor I use to understand this.
The brain makes it seem as if the ego, the model of yourself, is what has consciousness. This is a fascinating illusion. When you're conscious of yourself, you have the ego-model in short-term memory and the feeling a consciousness accompanying it. This simultaneity creates the illusion that it's the ego model responsible for being consciousness. You can ask why, if thinking about a tea cup, the tea cup doesn't feel conscious. But if you simulate what a tea cup looks or feels like, you're just activating, on a weaker level, the sensory apparatus that embodied the tea cup to begin with. You sense a tea-cup with your body, and the recreation of these sensations is what you know as a tea cup. Once again it is you who is conscious, not the tea cup. On the other hand there have been experiments where consciousness can feel displaced. (Sorry for the TEDex talk, but it's a summary of all the experiments I would refer to for consciousness displacement, and neuroprothestics is an interesting field. There's also probably a lot of debate still going on about these phenomenon.)
This is getting long so here's a video by Karl Friston. A cool idea here is the way the brain filters information, and there's a good analogy with video compression. If you have two frames of video, you don't need to store all the information for both frames. You could store all the information of the first frame, and then only the pixels that change for the second frame. You don't need all the data of the second frame because much of it is a copy of the first. The point is that only the information that is different is used.
The brain does something similar. When it encounters expected information it ignores it. It's only the unexpected information that gets passed up through our hierarchical neuroarchitecture because it's the unexpected information an organism has to pay attention to. This kind of efficiency makes a lot of intuitive sense.
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An empty dead void is less significant than the only known living planet
Insignificant to whom? Measuring significance only makes sense if their is an external observer judging and comparing things by value.
I think Camus had it right. The universe may be indifferent, and perhaps human existence is locked in an existential dilemma, but the important thing is to fight and never give up. Life is too short to focus on all the negativity, and modern society in itself is a festering cesspool of vanity and excess, but there is also a lot of beauty.
I've taken a break from all the news, this election, the wars, the resource crises, the corruption, the strangulation of justice...and I've begun to focus on myself and my family. There is nothing more comforting to me than spending time with my wife and daughter. We don't have a lot, but we do have enough. I don't hate humanity, but I do loathe humans.
Coming from a decidedly anarchist political leaning, the realization dawned on me long ago that you can't change the world unless you change yourself. We are all in this together, after all.
I don't hate humanity, but I do loathe humans.
I say something similar - that I love people but I despise our species. I've been trying to get away from collapse stuff and focus on math and writing, but the habit is ingrained and I need to break it.
Not giving up is something I struggle with because I've spent a lot of time trying to model what humans actually are. That's why I chose the name I use. I don't see how we can avoid entropic behavior. This would be fine for a while if we expanded into the solar system, but we won't. That means our entropy will have catastrophic planetary consequences. I'm not sure how to hope for us if this is correct. On the other hand, I fantasize about other species in the universe making it - overcoming their basic evolutionary programming and either reaching amazing technical heights or living in perpetual well-being because of total self-understanding.
But every living being creates entropy, that's what life is - converting energy into entropy.
Entropy isn't bad, it's just a thing that's happening. You can't build a moral system based on entropy; at least I've tried and failed doing that.
I agree with everything you've said, except the idea that entropy can't build a moral system. It can't directly, but indirectly it could create an excellent way of living and progressing.
All living things create entropy, but the existence of living things means that over the lifespan of the Earth there has been a tremendous decrease in entropy because the energy from the sun has been stored in complexity. (There's more to it such as the metals forged in the heart of a star that make our toys and tools.)
Human are greatly exceeding the available energy budget to create an unsustainable civilization. Our current complexity burned through 300 million years worth of stored energy in a few centuries. That should strike a person as insane.
We can either live sustainably and advance slowly or not at all, or burn non-renewable resources toward an asymptote of depletion beyond which technological advancement into the solar system becomes impossible, and we're stuck on Earth until the oceans boil (and certainly orders of magnitude sooner than this). The asymptotic approach would make sense if the intent was to create the infrastructure to harvest the solar system. We seem too incompetent to do this, however, because we can't get past the neurological barriers responsible for parasitic, short-term thinking.
Any of these options greatly reduces or eliminates exploitation, which means community-based life based on intelligent, local management. It would take a long time to explain this, but sustainable practices necessarily mean a better world, because these practices can only be implemented with community monitoring, instead of having small groups of people develop the land with shopping malls because they're trying to increase the tax base, or other unsustainable consumer-based nonsense.
Also, community-based living with a sense of place is what we were evolved to thrive in. Alienation drives consumerism. Sustainable living allows humans to be healthy, social animals. I could also make a lengthy neurological argument about optimizing our subjective state space, which involves living in harmony with our bio-social imperatives.
Our current complexity burned through 300 million years worth of stored energy in a few centuries. That should strike a person as insane.
Especially if you consider that most of that energy is used for trivial stuff like heating or transportation.
Ignores anthropy, only gives credit to entropy...
In space no one can hear you scream. But they can watch TV show broadcasts and they will be pissed if Game of Thrones is left incomplete.
I've resisted watching more than a few seasons. I'm tempted to go back because that red dress witch lady is pretty fine.
Well, your death is insignificant, too.
Indeed, and to be fair I'd off myself if I didn't make the mistake of having a kid. Collapse wasn't on my radar in my early 20s. Death is the biggest mercy I can think of. It helps me fall asleep at night knowing that someday one sleep will be the last, and all the time the universe has left will pass in an instant, unconscious blip.
Also, I wrote this post when I was drunk and had forgotten about it. I woke up wondering why I had 15 replies. I thought I'd said something stupid on r/worldnews. I'm just mentioning this for amusement. Drunk dialing on reddit is a thing.
Enjoy yourself :)
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A collapse here on Earth is significant because we deem it to be so.
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Even the Earth would find a collapse of the human civilization insignificant.
I'm sure roaches philosophize too in their own way
Well it's significant if you have young children and care about their future. Since things will happen near term as well. you could end up starving or homeless in the future for collapse reasons. If you're willing not to give a shit about that, then i admire your stoicism.
More fundamentally, what is it about our species that allows such a statement to be considered?
Our capacity for abstract thought is so generalised that it can override our value systems
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unless you live here
Does this statement have meaning, however defined?
Yes.
More fundamentally, what is it about our species that allows such a statement to be considered?
Well, first off. There's no logical reason to think that size is related to meaning, value, etc. Many of the atheist/skeptical/scientism persuasion often say, "Look at how big the universe is. Why do we think we are so important?" Well... bigness or size of environment is not a logical criteria for value. Otherwise, an elephant is more important than a human because it's bigger. Or babies are less important than adults because they are smaller. That's a bias of our species (bigger is better!) that makes us think this way.
Two, humans project their consciousness out into the world. We can't imagine non-existence because we invariably imagine ourselves as the observer of our non-existence. When we think of extinction, we still think of us or something similar to us observing it.
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When I was a young religious kid, I asked my dad about Armageddon and the end of the world. His answer always ended up being "every day it's the end of the world for someone." I think that applies here, too.
This is interesting to think about on a multiverse scale. Every "day" (e.g. Earth day) there's a higher-technology capable species going extinct.
I don't think humans will make themselves go extinct except indirectly. In the sense that our minds had the ability to create an advanced technological society, but the more primitive brain functions won out. After the resources for modern technologies are wasted and there's sufficient ecological breakdown, we should go on living more simply for quite some time.
The earth is all we know, so it's significant for us.
The universe may as well be an entirely abstract concept.
This is a bit like telling someone that's just broken their leg that children in Africa are starving. Except it's more like 'stop whining, there's a star in Andromeda that's collapsing into a black hole'.