dgillesp wrote:

Doc Smartass wrote:

"Greywolf" <greywolf@cybrzn.com> wrote in
news:11c3qcbk3e2ame9@corp.supernews.com:

It's a refrain I hear time and time again. My pat answer to that is:
"Yah, I'm here for a reason: To suffer!" (I'm playing!) But deep down
inside I want to believe that there *is* some kind of purpose for me
being here (other than to just perpetuate the species [or else I
really "would" be a failure]). I'd like to see what others have to
say about widely held view.

"Life only has what meaning one gives it." would be my reason.

Which it seems to me, makes for a very lonely and disconnected
existence, kinda like living in a bubble totally unrelated to the unity
that may reside in the universe.

Yeah, not having an imaginary skypixie does let one get lonely.

But the skypixie is still just imaginary.

--
Jim

Visit the Selectric Typewriter Museum!
http://www.selectric.org

georgann (forgiven since 33 AD) wrote:

I wasn't THAT deep. Did you notice the reference to both Nietzsche and
Zarathustra?

These are the "philosophies of men" referred to by Paul - the
highly intellectual Jewish-Christian that intellectual atheists love to
hate
the most.

It's a refrain I hear time and time again. My pat answer to that is:
"Yah, I'm here for a reason: To suffer!" (I'm playing!) But deep down
inside I want to believe that there *is* some kind of purpose for me
being here (other than to just perpetuate the species [or else I really
"would" be a failure]). I'd like to see what others have to say about
widely held view.

"Katt" wrote:

Someone was going on and on in another thread about us all supposedly
being here to 'perpetuate the species'. I was gonna explain it all to
her/him; but, frankly, I think you're a nicer person than s/he is. So
I'll
do it here.

People are actually very confused about this topic - probably because of
an inherited fondness for over-arching teleologies whose collapse tends
to
panic them into accepting that one set of quantities is really the same
as
another, very different set of quantities...

First up, we should stop speaking of 'species' here: as I've said
before,
the *individual* is the unit of 'selection', and the *gene* is the unit
of
'inheritance'. A 'species', though, is a vague and fuzzy concept in
Darwinist terms, since it's a group rather than an individual, and as
such
isn't genetically specifiable, and isn't selected. People love the idea
of
a 'species'; but that's a problem with the human mind's fondness for
black-and-white thinking, and doesn't mean that a 'species' is a
fundamental quantity in the Darwinist universe.

Second: even if we drop the notion of a 'species' in favour of something
more 'modern-synthesist', we *still* don't have any evolutionary
justification for saying something like 'the purpose of life is to
perpetuate the [individual's genes]'. To speak of 'the way that life
came
about' is *not the same* as to speak of 'the purpose of life'; and you
can't turn what is a 'because'-type reason into an 'in-order-to'-type
reason. There is, in fact, all the difference in the philosophical world
between, on the one hand, us being alive *simply because* there has come
about a set of replicators which behave in a certain way, and, on the
other, us being alive *in order to promote* such behaviour. 'Purposes'
of
the kind you refer to do not exist in evolutionary terms, because
*there's
no teleology to bring them about*: things happen because the things that
make them happen have already happened.

And so to the Meaning Of Life. Or, rather, to 'the meaning of *your*
life'. As for what a person's *individual* purpose/meaning/reason is,
this
again is something where people confuse two separate issues. For the
meaning of *any individual life* is decidedly a separate issue from that
of whether 'all human beings' (or 'all apes', or 'all animals', or 'all
of
the universe', or whatever else...) are 'given' some 'meaning' or
'purpose' by a 'god' of some kind. Frankly, I think the idea of a 'god'
is
an infantile fiction of almost indescribable idiocy; I don't regret its
demise in the slightest, and I'm not remotely bothered that its removal
takes the idea of a 'god-given purpose' with it. And, as I said, the
question of the meaning and purpose of *an individual's* life is
entirely
separate from this 'removal'.

I believe the proper realisation of this fact is due to Nietzsche -- who
managed to rescue his civilisation (those parts of it that were
awake...)
from the depressive reaction provoked by the work of those giants Kant
and
Schopenhauer, after whom the notion of a grand, supernaturally
guaranteed
'meaning' was essentially untenable to anyone sufficiently honest (and
smart!) to face their reasoning on the issue. So let me do as
Zarathustra
would do, and simply ask you: What is your way? What is your path? You
now
know what and where you are -- better than any creature in the whole of
Earth's history has done! You know the millions of years of merciless
struggle that you came from; you know the nothingness to which you will
return; you know something of the achievements (and the weaknesses, and
the crimes...) of those who came before; you know many of those who are
now around you; and you know that people will go on being born long
after
you are nothing more than bones in a box. So: what are you going to do?
How much meaning -- and *what kind of meaning* -- are you going to
create
from all your 'inherited wealth'...? What do you stand for? What do you
stand against? On what do you unleash your sacred anger? And does your
joy
and your laughter justify life itself? And are all these choices *good
enough* to justify everything that has gone into your breeding...?

HTH...

Katt.

Greywolf wrote:

Wow. That's a lot to chew on. It is very deep, and I must admit that some
of
it is over my head (but I'll go over it later and try to understand it
better. I say this because some of what you've written strikes a chord.
(I'm
a nihilist by nature I guess.) But for the time being I will just say
that
aside from Man feeling that we're soooo special. There seems to be
something
that compels us to go in different directions in life and I was wondering
if
there is something in our genes that causes us to be as diverse as we are
(for survival purposes?) or was there some part of our mind that we are
not
cognizant of that "makes us what we become for a specific reason. But
that
is starting to go down the pre-determinism path. And that, I guess, leads
us
back to the question: "Are we (pre-determined to be) here for a *reason*?
My
opinion is, "No we're not."

As for use of the word "species," I agree. The word species is not as
cut-and-dried as it's made out to be.. But it suffices for this thread.

Greywolf

georgann (forgiven since 33 AD) wrote:

I wasn't THAT deep. Did you notice the reference to both Nietzsche and
Zarathustra? These are the "philosophies of men" referred to by Paul -
the
highly intellectual Jewish-Christian that intellectual atheists love to
hate
the most.

<snip>

georgann (forgiven since 33 AD) wrote:

I wasn't THAT deep. Did you notice the reference to both Nietzsche and
Zarathustra? These are the "philosophies of men" referred to by Paul - the
highly intellectual Jewish-Christian that intellectual atheists love to hate
the most.

"Ben Goren" <ben@trumpetpower.com> wrote in message
news:42c24ee3$1_1@spool9-west.superfeed.net...

Katt wrote:

[. . .]

People are actually very confused about this topic - probably
because of an inherited fondness for over-arching teleologies
whose collapse tends to panic them into accepting that one set
of quantities is really the same as another, very different set
of quantities...

[. . . .]

Most well put. The entirety of the post, that is, of course.

Cheers,

b&

--
BAAWA Knight of Blasphemy
God can never prove that this sentence is true.

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I know this really doesn't fit in with the rest of the thread per se, but
I was going over Katt's message and for some inexplicable reason started
mulling over something you've been gently prodding me to explore for a
while now: cognitive dissonance. (And hell if I know how I somehow related
the two.) I promptly decided to go online and check out, "The 2001
Principle: Cognitive Dissonance" and I'm being blown away by what *both*
you and Katt have had to say. This is pretty heady stuff and I see that
there is a lot of damn important information to be gleaned from further
study. Wowie, Zowie!

Greywolf

I know this really doesn't fit in with the rest of the thread
per se, but I was going over Katt's message and for some
inexplicable reason started mulling over something you've been
gently prodding me to explore for a while now: cognitive
dissonance. (And hell if I know how I somehow related the
two.) I promptly decided to go online and check out, "The 2001
Principle: Cognitive Dissonance" and I'm being blown away by
what *both* you and Katt have had to say. This is pretty heady
stuff and I see that there is a lot of damn important
information to be gleaned from further study. Wowie, Zowie!