Atheism and universal loneliness

wynn

As I am not advocating that Buddha was a god or had any special insight unavailable to any other human, it is irrelivant to the point. He did teach that enlightenment comes from within, I think that is a wise insight, therefore I incorporate that into my world view. I'm sure he said other things that were not so wise, those I would discard as unworthy of incorporation(the same can be said of Jesus, Confusious, Mohammed and any other human).

But that job DOES become a part of who they are, it reflects their interests and what they are curious about, it gives their lives meaning. Just as with a person who wishes to heal people and becomes a doctor(thus giving meaning to their lives, self-chosen meaning)scientists want to know things about the Universe, it becomes their purpose and their meaning. And success brings them happiness. As I said, game, set and match. ALL meaning to be found in this Universe is self chosen, there can be no other source.

To you, maybe. But not to them. And understanding the Universe is the most meaningful of endeavors, it drives away superstition and ignorance that masquerades as truth and replaces it with knowledge that logic can be applied to, evaporating the non-sense supernatural explanations for how the Universe behaves. Such understanding is the basis for your easy and relatively long life, where you have the luxury of contemplating the meaning of existence instead of having to struggle to survive every minute of every day of your short, brutal life(assuming you survived birth and toddlerhood, as most did not). Statistically, if you own a computer(and you do), it is highly unlikely that you have ever gone truly hungry, toiled in fields because if you didn't you and all those around you would die, fought off any large predator or lost a child to same, suffered from any number of now easily treated or cured diseases and parasites, fought other humans in deadly combat over land and resources, had to let old or infirm members of your family die because there was not enough food to last the winter, etc. All of these things were things pre-civilization humans have had to deal with and we would still be dealing with if not for those who made understanding the Universe their purpose in life. And their lives had meaning to me, as I really could not still be alive without those meaningful contributions. And even knowing the atmospheric composition of other planets has infinitely more meaning than contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Your point is non-sense. Not everyone has the job they want, in that case they are not their job. But Einstein wanted to understand the Universe and his whole life is a story of pursuing that purpose. He was a theoretical physicist from his head to his toe, so your generalization is way too broad to be taken seriously. And who told you that you automatically succeed in your goals or fulfill your purpose? This is several times you have brought this bon mot into the conversations on these threads. Purpose does not gaurautee you will succeed in that purpose. Happiness is likewise not certain, even if you succeed in your purpose. Some people can never be happy, it's a mental state that may or may not have anything to do with outside events or circumstances, often because of imbalance in brain chemistry. The Universe could not care less if you are happy, it cannot care at all.

That's an entirely different question. I said the only possible source for meaning, purpose and happiness is from within yourself, I didn't claim to know the path you must take to reach them for that is different for each person(the astrophysicist finds it in knowledge of the Universe, something you say is of no worth). And parts of things often do things that other parts do not do, it's really, really common and simple. You seem to think the end of a stick cannot be on fire unless the whole stick is burning and that isn't necessarily true, we call them "Matches". Matches burn, but not all parts of the match is on fire, yet the burning and the non-burning parts are contained within the match. Not all parts of our Universe have meaning, yet parts of it do because we create that meaning. So the Universe does have meaning even if it is our own self-chosen meaning.

Yes, you most certainly did, as others have pointed out. Your example of the astrophysicist finding meaning and happiness in a field you find useless is a perfect illustration that we create our own purposes and meanings and these can lead to happiness. Universal meaning is non-existent(other than to survive to reproduce), so the only source left is ourselves and our self-chosen meanings and purposes. And those meanings and purposes will be different for each individual. Looking outside of yourself for meaning is a huge waste of time, if you can't find it in yourself you are susceptable to others using you for their own purposes, you become a sheeple accepting what you are told to believe, accepting what others think is meaningful mindlessly. Not often a good outcome.

Grumpy

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I enjoyed that post Grumpy.

 

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Yes, good stuff, Grumps.

 

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Here is one guy's response to people who looked to him as a symbol rather than a person:
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/about-krishnamurti/dissolution-speech.php

 

J. Krishnamurti is OK, but U.G. Krishnamurti is better.

 

Sorry but there is a raft of non sequiturs and hasty conclusions, starting with the very first assertion and continuing throughout.

In general, you've tried analyze a thing without precedent by comparing it only to things that have precedent. You conclude that a complex organism can't exist because complex things "always follow" simple things. You can't make that statement about something without precedent.

In case there is any doubt about the flaw in your logic, note that the above reasoning can be applied directly to the Big Bang itself. If we could only compare the Big Bang to things we've seen before, what would we compare the BB too? We'd be forced to conclude that the BB never happened because it is logically contradictory.

Keep working on it.

 

I would change only one thing.

As we are free to choose for ourselves what brings us happiness, so is Wynn. It is not up to us to decide for wynn that looking for meaning outside herself is a waste of time.

Were we to do so, we would be as guilty of imposing our own personal, unprovable convictions on her as we resist her imposing her personal, unprovable convictions on us.

 

The decision also includes choosing to see a statement as the imposition of a belief doesn't it? I don't feel like statements impose anything on me. I can judge them as relevant or not to me but I don't feel any pressure to adopt someone else's conclusions.

 

Agreed. But it still makes the claimant wrong. It makes wynn wrong to conclude something about our happiness. I don't wish to be as wrong as wynn, so I would not commit the very same crime upon her that I (or at least Grumpy) accuse her of committing upon me (or him).

And if none of us cared about others' thoughts, we would not be here discussing it in the first place.

 

I wonder if we care about others thoughts rather than whether our own seem right and we judge them against others'.

 

In fact, if I think about what I care about in terms of other people it is pretty much limited to how they feel. That may be too subtle a distinction to be useful though.

 

Was this a typo?

What was the beginning order at its highest?

 

I see you removed it.

(A complexity's parts must still precede. Life increases order.)

Meanwhile, I found this stuff in my notes:

We are talking here about the big bang model, which is not about the big bang itself, but about the afterwards. While the big bang is but a placeholder for our ignorance, the afterwards big bang model is on firm empirical ground.

Why did the early universe look like it did—hotter, denser, and smoother? and in the future the universe will have gone from the primordial soup to but a thin gruel of particles growing even colder and more distant from one another. Thus, the past was very different from the future. The arrow of time moves forward.

Higher entropy configurations are more natural than lower ones, for there are a lot more of those configurations to be found. However, if entropy had always been very high, or maximal, there would have been no life. We have a medium entropy.

Why did matter collect into galaxies rather than spread uniformly and thinly throughout space? Out of energy’s dispersion and decay of quality comes the emergence of growth and complexity.

The expectation of order is often expressed in terms of the 2nd law of thermodynamics: the total entropy or disorder of a closed system must either remain constant or increase with time. Now, was the universe always a closed system or was order imparted from the outside by God at the beginning?

Prior to 1929, the ‘necessary’ outside influence was a strong argument for a miraculous creation. Then this stock-market of an idea crashed, for Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, the galaxies moving away from each other. Thus, an expanding universe could have started in total chaos and still formed localized order consistent with the 2nd law.

Of course, due to the 2nd law, the total entropy of the universe must increase as the universe expands; however, the maximum possible entropy increases even faster, leaving increasingly more room for order to form.

The reason is that the maximum entropy is that of a black hole. The expanding universe is not a black hole. Back at the earliest definable moment, the Planck time, the universe was confined to the smallest definable region of space, it having the radius of the Planck length. As must be the case, the universe at that time had lower entropy that it has now; however, that entropy was as high as it possibly could have been for an object that small. Note that this is because a sphere of Planck dimensions is equivalent to a black hole, from which no information can be extracted.

How is it, then that this ‘maximal’ entropy when the universe began can be ever increasing ever since? It is because the entropy of the universe now is higher for its current size, but not maximal, as we said, since it is no longer a near black hole.

There is no time interval that can be defined that is smaller than the Planck time. This is implied by Heisenburg’s uncertainty principle, again showing that no information can escape. Thus, there is no need for a theory of quantum gravity to describe the physics earlier than the Planck time.

The definition of time is: that which is counted off as an integral number of units of the Planck time. This is discrete, but we can, as in calculus, treat it as continuous in mathematical physics since the units are small compared to anything we measure in practice.

So, we extrapolate through the Planck intervals. Because we can do it ‘now’, we can do it at the earliest Planck interval where the big bang’s description begins. At that time, the disorder was complete; it was maximal.

 

OK. What else is on the raft?

 

Is there any point in going past the first assertion? Sine each subsequent one depends on the preceding one, if you fixed the first assertion, you might find a whole cascade of changes to the rest of your list. It might completely change your way of thinking.

 

DaveC426913

She is always free to look where she likes, and I, like every other human, am not perfect, but I would not try to impose my conclusions about these questions on others in any case. I've known many who find their happiness in religion, including family members. We get along well, but they know my views as I know theirs. It doesn't make you a bad person, just(in my opinion)not the person you could be. And I do see problems in their behavior, prejudices and willingness to impose their will on others that I see little of in my Atheist friends. If you don't stand up on your own hind legs(intellectually)there are people(and organizations)in this world who may be able to convince you to accept their leash, and where they lead you may be bad for everyone.

Grumpy

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Dave,

Beings, even supposed ultimate ones, are still systems, and systems are their parts, whether said to be made of 'other' stuff or not. Systems of mind that plan, design, and create cannot be first, as no system could be.

At any rate, agnosticism has a kind of poverty, in thinking that the alternatives must be equi-probable.

Thus, people can still utilize the analysis to decide meaning or not, and in practice, they must, to go one way or the other, lest they surely have a vacancy.

And there is nothing to make the unprecedented 'other' stuff of either.

 

I decided once that pantheism was a more accurate way of describing the situation than agnosticism. Is isn't that I choose to believe or not in a God or even that I am undecided. I don't like to assume words which limit how I can frame what I experience. It wasn't so much that the word offered any utility as that it rejects the premise of atheism/theism.

I had a debate of sorts on the issue at another forum where my opening statement began with the following:

http://secularcafe.org/showthread.php?p=116030&#post116030

But I was sort of on a bender at the time so I don't think it worked for everyone.

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It worked for me though.

 

Yeah, that was a really blatant, craven deployment of a false dilemma by wynn, there. Kind of baffles me that they'd even think it would draw any reaction other than contempt. But, then, here you are, being unduly equinanimous about it...

And the implication that anybody who is hurt by being cheated upon is thereby necessarily some kind of doormat who built their entire life around devotion to their partner is, frankly, offensive.

Also note that "someone who has no investment in their relationship" is someone who is not, really, in any relationship to speak of, and so cannot really be "cheated" on in the first place. So the entire assertion is just bunk. "Cheating" implies betrayal, by definition, and betrayal is hurtful, by definition. It's kind of ridiculous that this would even be up for debate.