Purpose.....

[Faith_in_Fate]

Im Greatly confused on the purpose of being on earth or of living... why do we live..? is it to serve a God... is it too die... i havent an idea this is an answer i have been looking for, for a great time... its unclear... the Bible doesnt really tell... please answer...

[Goat]

Goat

You deny with such such force that you don't allow yourself to see in a new way.

Totally irrelevant to reality, unless you can demonstrate it via repeated experiments, and to be able to make predictions. As it stands now, it sounds
like psuedoscience, i.e. trying to dress up fraud in scientific terms.

We are in the infancy stage of remembering what was known back in ancient Egypt and that is the law of three forces. Open minded scientists are working on it now but it will be IMO at least fifty years before people can stop denying and become open enough to begin to understand. As I said, scieentists like Dr. Basarab Nicolescu understand these things far better then me. You have a choice. You can insist on denying or you can be open to learning. If you truly try to remain open to the following article rather then deny, you may actually begin to understand what I am referring to.

http://nicol.club.fr/ciret/bulletin/b12/b12c3.htm

I'm not anything special. I just have the need to turn inwardly towards the enterance of the cave rather then remaining attached to the wall in denial.

I find it totally bullshit. It is trying to make connections with things that are not connected. He is trying to apply principles found in QM into spirituality and religion, without any evidence or reason. He is trying to apply the very weird observations in QM, and making metaphysical and religious applications to it. I do not see any reason to think that is more than wishful thinking.

In other words, if this is a sample what he is promoting, I think he is a nut case.

[Nick_A]

Goat

You deny with such such force that you don't allow yourself to see in a new way.

Totally irrelevant to reality, unless you can demonstrate it via repeated experiments, and to be able to make predictions. As it stands now, it sounds
like psuedoscience, i.e. trying to dress up fraud in scientific terms.

We are in the infancy stage of remembering what was known back in ancient Egypt and that is the law of three forces. Open minded scientists are working on it now but it will be IMO at least fifty years before people can stop denying and become open enough to begin to understand. As I said, scieentists like Dr. Basarab Nicolescu understand these things far better then me. You have a choice. You can insist on denying or you can be open to learning. If you truly try to remain open to the following article rather then deny, you may actually begin to understand what I am referring to.

http://nicol.club.fr/ciret/bulletin/b12/b12c3.htm

I'm not anything special. I just have the need to turn inwardly towards the enterance of the cave rather then remaining attached to the wall in denial.

I find it totally bullshit. It is trying to make connections with things that are not connected. He is trying to apply principles found in QM into spirituality and religion, without any evidence or reason. He is trying to apply the very weird observations in QM, and making metaphysical and religious applications to it. I do not see any reason to think that is more than wishful thinking.

In other words, if this is a sample what he is promoting, I think he is a nut case.

Well if he is, he is a very highly qualified and respected nut case. Naturally I believe he is right on and also know that the majority will side with you which is why it will take at least fifty years for the obvious to become more commonly accepted. Once it is, ideas such as human meaning and purpose within a cosmological structure will do much to unite science and religion for their mutual benefit. Of course the question is if we can survive the next fifty years where scientific technological advances without the human spiritual perspective that opens us to inner morality, can easily lead to our mutual destrution.

[Goat]

Well if he is, he is a very highly qualified and respected nut case. Naturally I believe he is right on and also know that the majority will side with you which is why it will take at least fifty years for the obvious to become more commonly accepted. Once it is, ideas such as human meaning and purpose within a cosmological structure will do much to unite science and religion for their mutual benefit. Of course the question is if we can survive the next fifty years where scientific technological advances without the human spiritual perspective that opens us to inner morality, can easily lead to our mutual destrution.

I am sure he is very knowledgeable and passionate in his field. His problem is that he is trying to give connections from his field into everything else, and it just plain does not apply.

And the claim the ancient Egyptians knew all about that,.. well that is just wishful thinking right there. That sounds like shade of 'chariots of the gods', and more evidence to me of mental instability in our time rather than some advanced knowledge back then.

[Nick_A]

Goat

Research the mathematics within the Great Pyramid. It is all there. You have no idea what was known and understood including the relationship between three forces as described by Dr. Nicolescu.

[Goat]

Goat

Research the mathematics within the Great Pyramid. It is all there. You have no idea what was known and understood including the relationship between three forces as described by Dr. Nicolescu.

The mathematics of the Great Pyramid is very easily explained. To measure out the sides, they used a small wheel, and counted the number of revolutions. No big mystery about that. Using that method has the side effect of introducing the
number 'pi' into the base, but it is just an application of the measurement method, and nothing of high significance.

It's a very simple and physical explanation, and no need for this pseudoscience that you are proclaiming.

[QED]

Hello ollagram88. It's a lovely sunny Sunday morning here. I hope you find yourself in similarly pleasant surroundings.

here's the meat of where i'm getting at. you speak of this Z-axis, this plane of "spirituality" or "divinity" that need not be theistic. indeed i would agree.

however,

Agreement that, for want of a different term, God is sufficient but not necessary? Does what follows make God necessary I wonder...

since when did this idea become PART of the collective? we are the product of billions of years of moving atoms, organic molecules, life-sustaining physiological systems, and adapting interactions to the natural world. eventually came the ability to rationalize.

we don't necessarily invent truths, we discover them. it's mathematics. everything out there is ours to discover. you can't invent the proof, only discover it.

to say zeus causes lighting is not the truth, it is a fabrication. we can systematically show how lightning really occurs.

however, zeus, along with any concept of the "spiritual" were not just meant to be truths. these are mythological stories. while humans were wrong to explain natural phenomena via these fabrications, mythology served another role: they were stories of purpose, meaningful ideas that spread to humans like a disease.

that this spirituality evolved in humans is just like the altruistic genes that influence our moral tendencies; altruistic genes that evolved and spread because those who had it were more likely to survive and reproduce. except now we speak of the social evolution of spirituality, not a gene but an idea that spread and lives with us today.

my case here is the following: spirituality/God and the concept of "life" go hand in hand. from a scientific standpoint, life is just organic make-up (an abstraction in itself). however, how we humans come to define "life" is different.. our definition is from the same concepts born out of our mythology, the first forms of art that were "inspired by the Gods" or some other higher purpose.

I'm not seeing that all important necessity yet,

concepts of achieving greatness, unconditional love, etc. are the products of this this spiritual evolution. while many reject the notion of God or supernatural, higher being/existence/idea/equivalent, the fact remains that what we know to be "life" comes from our fabricated inspirations from fabricated gods. what we know to be "life" is the product of being thrusted into spiritual evolution.

I would caution against seeing all concepts as indications of real Platonic realms from which they are extracted. I think this is where we differ. There probably is something to be said about mathematical "discoveries" -- too much of the world seems to be conveniently modelable in mathematics for there to be such a coincidence. But we can't assume as a corollary that every concept results in a direct correlation with some external reality. Mathematics probably has a direct relation to the deepest structure of matter so is excused for being more than just a mental invention. But what relations can we establish between nobility, virtue etc. and the external world?

now if i were to throw new-born babies isolated on an island, gone would be all the social ideas that have evolved from man. and so those babies would have no concept of "life' as we humans today see "life." they would have no inherent notion of achieving greatness or unconditional love.

Evolutionary psychologists would most probably disagree. Mono-zygotic twins reared apart show us a huge range of genetic predisposition. There isn't such a thing as a blank human slate. Your experiment would probably surprise you with just how much we all bring along with us.

the tendency to believe in a God might be in their genes, but the concept is not there yet ingrained into their conscious experience, that social evolution into spirituality has not yet occurred in their isolated little island. their means of living are their instincts and the social concepts that evolve from square one.

But if these evolving social concepts are guided by emotional qualities inherited from the monolithic human genome then there will still be strong correlations with all other human society. I fail to see how you can have established anything that necessitates something other than social atoms here.

we, on the other hand, continue to live in an evolving society influenced by "God." i live for passion, unconditional love, greatness, etc... at one point in my life, i lived for strictly "truth." i rejected passion, love, greatness as merely abstract concepts whose existence were easily reduced to atoms. however, my knowledge of those concepts, and the fact that i had to either accept or reject them, are evidence of their power and influence in our forever-evolving society. in this way, those concepts are practically real. and so is "God," the originator of such meaningful concepts. i'm not just some complex physical machine that needs food and sex to survive. i'm a complex physical machine that needs to wrestle with notions of passion, greatness, love - MEANINGFUL THINGS - to survive, as the result of socially evolving concepts creating this idea of God or spirituality.

I don't intend to demean your virtues in any way, I see all movement on the vertical plane as worthy developments in our continuing evolution. There are enough pigs already wallowing and enjoying the mud, it's naturally engaging to see where we can take things beyond the mere carnal. We've had plenty of tastes of some of the magnificent things that atoms can be manipulated into, and even though our appreciations are mostly rooted in our carnal desires there is nothing to keep us chained to that treadmill. God may be sufficient for all this, but I still fail to see the necessity.

[ollagram88]

I would caution against seeing all concepts as indications of real Platonic realms from which they are extracted. I think this is where we differ. There probably is something to be said about mathematical "discoveries" -- too much of the world seems to be conveniently modelable in mathematics for there to be such a coincidence. But we can't assume as a corollary that every concept results in a direct correlation with some external reality. Mathematics probably has a direct relation to the deepest structure of matter so is excused for being more than just a mental invention. But what relations can we establish between nobility, virtue etc. and the external world?

oh, i'm not trying to say that this is proof of a concrete external reality. but our "invention" of it (i say invention because science, i think, would say we invented the concepts of God, spiritual existence, etc. due to evolutionary reasons, and so is our most reasonble explanation at the moment) inspired us.

my reading is admittedly shallow on the topic, but from what i gathered, we saw the emergence of extremely similar gods throughout old cultures, expressive "myths" of the human condition and existence, sprouting about throughout cultures - our first written evidence from the babylonians i think. you could almost say proof of "God" is a correlation argument, that every historical inspirational/meaningful act, piece of artwork, etc. (meaningful as i have previously described the meaning of life in my previous posts) has pointed to some divine inspiration. proving "God" however, is really not my point, and at the moment, not really something i'm totally concerned with as it's an empirically impossible issue as far as i know.

but the emergence of incredibly similar myths has perpetuated humans, found in old pieces of mythological art on cave walls, the similarity of what purpose pagan worship served to pre-modern societies.. etc. in the East, later philosophies and perspectives might have de-emphasized the human-like God concept, stressing above all the values, but regardless, it was "God" that originally inspired meaning into human life. like the East, the literal "God" is not necessarily the focus - especially today when atheism is relatively rampant - but rather, the focus are the values (that in turn make our life meaningful).

Evolutionary psychologists would most probably disagree. Mono-zygotic twins reared apart show us a huge range of genetic predisposition. There isn't such a thing as a blank human slate. Your experiment would probably surprise you with just how much we all bring along with us.

oh, i don't deny the power of our genetic predisposition either, and am aware of the twin studies that show huge correlations. one of the reasons i cherished my social psychology class is because it confirmed my intuition that our genes determine much of our personality, attitudes, tendencies, morals, etc., whenever it brought up twin studies or talked about evolutionary psychology. but a baby on that island can't possibly learn English in his "society", correct (at least not in his lifetime)? i too would say that these socially-defined concepts of what it means to "strive for excellence" as characterized in the odyssey nor appreciating tragic love as characterized by romeo and juliet are not possible either. such meaningful ideas are what our spiritually-evolved society characterizes as life with meaning beyond killing the wooly mammoth.

God may be sufficient for all this, but I still fail to see the necessity.

i don't think the God concept itself is necessary - my original post might have led my writing to point to that idea probably because what i wrote was excerpt of a blog for whom i knew many were religious, and i did not want to offend. if so my mistake!

what i meant to emphasize was that, while science is busy "explaining away" everything we know to be life (as you have also shown to me yourself), stripping our emotions and experience down to atoms and telling us that God might be just a delusion.. i think it's important equally important to understand and not forget what we cherish as meaningful to our lives - to keep us from becoming spear-throwing machines whose acts of kindness are merely stripped down to "i'm only nice because it increased my chances of survival". our society is founded deeply upon meaningful values because humans have evolved a spiritual side to them. if we all go around saying "romeo and juliet is crap, there's no such thing as love, it's just your body releasing chemicals" - what's going to become of us?

i stress this because science really IS explaining everything away. it cuts down meaningful things, God especially, and it gives us insight to where these ideas come from (which can be great), but in terms of helping our life have meaning or directing our existence, it either accomplishes nothing or the reverse. this is where God comes in - and maybe not a literally divine figure or existence - but AT LEAST the CONCEPTS and meaningful IDEAS that sprouted from our notions of God from thousands and thousands of years ago that shows our longing for something meaningful and spiritually divine. this takes me back to my original original original point: science can't give us purpose (not now at least) - it was religion that gave us purpose.

i'd like to throw this out, too, where i WOULD like to "toy with the possibility of something God-like" (for lack of better words) ... science might go so far as to say "your life really doesn't have meaning" but i really don't think even science has the upper-hand on that answer. i would even suspect much of what science might seem to know.. it is still really in the dark, a point which has been brought up before (and this is mostly to do with complex physical phenomena). and just because something is not testable does not make it false or impossible, we just might never know (although it may seem arguable that the flying spaghetti monster is equally legit, the flying spaghetti monster did not appear in old cave paintings either). now excuse me if that is an illogical statement, i'm just a sociology and econ major but at the very least, i'm not ready to crown science king just yet, just a worthy contender.

[QED]

my reading is admittedly shallow on the topic, but from what i gathered, we saw the emergence of extremely similar gods throughout old cultures, expressive "myths" of the human condition and existence, sprouting about throughout cultures - our first written evidence from the babylonians i think. you could almost say proof of "God" is a correlation argument, that every historical inspirational/meaningful act, piece of artwork, etc. (meaningful as i have previously described the meaning of life in my previous posts) has pointed to some divine inspiration. proving "God" however, is really not my point, and at the moment, not really something i'm totally concerned with as it's an empirically impossible issue as far as i know.

but the emergence of incredibly similar myths has perpetuated humans, found in old pieces of mythological art on cave walls, the similarity of what purpose pagan worship served to pre-modern societies.. etc. in the East, later philosophies and perspectives might have de-emphasized the human-like God concept, stressing above all the values, but regardless, it was "God" that originally inspired meaning into human life. like the East, the literal "God" is not necessarily the focus - especially today when atheism is relatively rampant - but rather, the focus are the values (that in turn make our life meaningful).

Some would see the consistency across all cultures and times as evidence that the divine is truly "out there" such that it can whisper into ears and be seen fleetingly. Of course another common factor would be that we are talking about the same basic "model" of Homo Sapiens in each case. But you're right to mention the values as the proper focus. I would like to point you to a very well researched book called The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. The subtitle is "Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom" and it pretty much covers the entire discussion we're having here.

I can't really see any disagreement between us now, social atoms result in social creatures and the space of all possible social interactions has certain "sweet spots" that can be sought out to make life most satisfactory. To consider that purpose might be imposed from beyond this network would seem to me to be utterly redundant. I think that if we ran another big experiment in which an entire human civilization was isolated in some equivalent to a "Faraday Cage" for God, the same outcome that we have today would prevail there in time.

[ollagram88]

The Happiness Hypothesis sounds interesting. Thanks for the heads up

To consider a "purpose imposed from beyond" really does seem absurd... but I figure, something is either intentional or not intentional, it's a duality.

So all of this is either by chance, or it was meant to be...?

[Nick_A]

I'm surprised that this question of purpose doesn't appeal to more people. When I first read the following excerpt years ago, I thought the author exaggerted a bit. Surely people have contemplated this question. Apparently not. Live and learn. Anyhow, I'll post it here for reference and for anyone having thought in this apparently obscure line of thought:

Individuals and societies, scientific and non-scientific, are trying to pierce the veil that hides the future. it is obvious to all that mankind is in a serious crisis and even some doubt if we can survive. In all these studies, we can find scarcely anywhere recognition that the first question to ask is whether or not the existence of this earth and of mankind with it serves any useful purpose. This is strange because we are constantly asking this question about subordinate entities such as human organizations, activities, and constructions. Indeed we congratulate ourselves upon our utilitarian attitude and are ready to sweep away and obliterate whatever serves no useful purpose; and we are proud of man's ability to turn natural resources to useful account.

Life on earth is a highly improbable state of affairs. it is a mechanism so ingenious in its capacity, not only to maintain its very own existence but to evolve to more complex and improbable states, that it really is astonishing that no one else asks what purpose it serves................

......................This should be a natural question, but when we ask why it does not occur to every thinking person, we penetrate to the depth of our human situation. We are so much concerned with our subjective problems that we do not stop to ask ourselves the objective question: "What do I exist for?" For more than two thousand years philosophers have been trying to answer such questions as "What is reality and how do we know it?" They put aside the question "Who made it and why?", either taking it to be unanswerable or handing it over to the theologians to make good the deficiencies of knowledge by revelation and faith.

Theologians agree that the first part of the answer has been revealed: life on earth and man himself have been created by God. The second part, Why? , is put aside as inscrutable. A skeptic might echo the words of Anatole France: 'If God did it, he committed an act of supreme imprudence'. The comment seems even more relevant today than it was eighty years ago, Those outside the religious tradition and especially those who doubt or deny the existence of God, are left without an answer and generally are satisfied to reject questions of origin and purpose as meaningless. It is accepted that the purpose of creation must be tied to the existence of a creator, God and Purpose seem to stand and fall together; yet, if God needs nothing, he cannot be said to have purposes either. There is something deeply unsatisfying here. If we turn to the Eastern religions and philosophies, we find that they pay little attention to purposes and so do not think it necessary to account for anything whatever.

Buddhism, in all its forms rejects such questions as futile and insists that the aim of existence is man's own need to escape from duhkha, which does not mean suffering so much as the conditioned state of incarnated self. the one significant exception is the old religion of Zarathustra, which taught that both life on earth and man endowed with intelligence were created to be allies for the good spirit Ahura Mazda in the struggle with the powers of darkness..............................................

Only a few think this way. I guess it takes a bit of humility to ask why we are useful when we find it so easy to judge the usefulness of others and other things. But asking what objective purpose one serves unrelated to society seems like an obvious question.

Who knows if we will ever acquire the collective humility to seriously ponder this question. I doubt it since it is so satisfying judging others and the usefulness of other things. Why be bothered to ponder such deep questions.