How to decide

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David20hersch
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How to decide

Post by David20hersch »

Greetings!


I'm a young man looking to make big life decisions and am stuck on a particular topic.


Basically what science tells us is that we are destroying nature. We are like cancer ruining the natural homeostasis of this planet (climate change could be made up but i don't think it is). I want to bring back balance to the human picture but what stops me from actually trying to change the world is that I feel like I'm living in a matrix. It makes too much sense to not consider.


It seems to me that people who really believe there is a god don't care about this planet or its problems because they put the responsibility on god to deal with our mess. I don't believe in god but recognize how false this whole world could be. It could be anything.


Is our material world really that valuable or real? Why should I invest what little time I have on this planet to solving a problem that may not even be real or important?


Forgive me if there are any fallacies or if the message is scattered, just trying to figure things out. Thanks!
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Maffei
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Re: How to decide

Post by Maffei »

I understand your dilemma. The notion of investment presupposes a return, but this return depends on a society much larger than an individual investment, and will also probably take much more time than the brief period of your life.

Let us see the logic that governs the predatory actions of nature. For example, if I have an industry and want to use a source of energy with higher productivity by raw material, oil is often the best way out. This use will cause more atmospheric pollution but it would not be my problem, because I would not feel so much of the harm of pollution within my life and would enjoy profit in this life as well.

It made me think that, if I do not see an effective recovery of the environment while I am alive, then my decision to help improve the world can not aim for a reward in the short term. Is there any way to counteract the logic of destruction by having the same mentality as the agents of destruction? See that the contradiction is getting a little more evident.

Would not we then have to give up the will to reward?

Another question, which I think is more important: Would not we have to see the reward in what we do, and not in the result of the things we do?
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Mbw
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Re: How to decide

Post by Mbw »

It is easy to think that your individual decisions are unimportant,
but it is the sum of individual decisions that make society what it is.
The fewer people who make purely narrowly selfish decisions the better society will become.

It sometimes seems that the way society is currently structured favours the self centered,
but I am hopeful that society is (gradually) moving in better directions.
Be optimistic, it may not happen in our lifetimes, but if individuals of good will each continue to do their little bit,
humanity will eventually reach maturity.

Hopefully before we destroy ourselves.
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Weight
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Re: How to decide

Post by Weight »

I would say become a practitioner or compassion, seeing to it that people are out of suffering big or small can help on a grand scale. Do community work, help others. Selfless people bring about the biggest change to the world.
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Atreyu
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Re: How to decide

Post by Atreyu »

Your feelings of futility are warranted. As you are, and being just one person, you really can't make the world a better place.

But what you can do is try to find true happiness. If you focus on that, then you will put yourself in the best position to help out mankind, and you will not be part of the problem, because true happiness is not obtained by ripping people off or screwing up our natural environment.

The problem is that, rather than trying to find real happiness, people instead care more about their social status, ego, what other people think of them, and how much stuff they have. If everyone quit worrying about the whims of their self-important egos, most of Man's social problems would fade away.
Eduk
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Re: How to decide

Post by Eduk »

Maybe I misread the original post. They seemed to be saying they would do something but they aren't sure if it's worth it because they aren't sure if the physical reality which they are privy to is in anyway real. They are not saying they would do something but they are unlikely, as just one person, to make the the difference they would like?

These are two different problems no?

I would like to address the expressed concern. Yes the reality you sense is real so do that thing you want to do. Also if not real then do that thing anyway. After all what appears real appears real, if it turns out we are in the Matrix then adjust your position to what your senses are telling you as you receive new information, not before.

The only real problem with our senses is that they are far from perfect. Hence the need for machinery to measure and consensus to at the very least warn us to double check the machinery. For example if you can see butterflies and no one else can you can run some tests to see who is 'crazy'. Of course you could be deluding yourself still further as to the test results. This gets tricky. It is possible (and happens often) that the majority of people are 'wrong'. It's pretty rare that a majority would be wrong about butterflies but it is perhaps possible. So what to do if your senses tell you there are butterflies and your machinery tells you there are butterflies but no one agrees. Unfortunately this is unresolvable, you must simply make the decision yourself as to what to believe and then simply allow reality (over great time) to 'decide'.
Unknown means unknown.
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Ranvier
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Re: How to decide

Post by Ranvier »

David20hersch wrote: I want to bring back balance to the human picture...
Greetings David!

What you're experiencing is the inherent "logic" of "consciousness. There is so much to be said here to build the context... but in short, your logic tells you that this wold doesn't make sense! You're young, so you only begin this "journey" of addressing this inner "voice" that screams in rebellion to search for answers as to the reasons for the way you feel. The first question that comes to mind is: "if anything makes any sense, then why do we say one thing, do something else, and yet think something entirely different. There is no "consistency" between the word, mind, and action. This will lead you to identify all the reasons that can shed some light on, as to "why" things are the way they are. This will take you to the path of investigation in study of philosophy, history, science, religion, politics, art.. or anything that brings you closer to "understanding".

I recommend instead of the above to begin a search within yourself. Why do you "want to bring back balance to the human picture"? This has nothing to do with the matrix, beliefs, or knowledge but something within you that seeks fulfillment in the "truth" of your own "being". At the risk of sounding condescending, most people are "confused" by their "logic" that stems from the knowledge they gained in life, which is more of a "noise" than benefit in obscuring the only "truth" that counts, which resides within your own insight. Instead of "changing" the world, begin with understanding of yourself to align your words, mind, and action that are true to your integrity. Once this is done, seek out people that have reached the same conclusions as you did but continue to learn from other points of view to keep you "honest" in your own convictions. The truth is, there is little to be done as a single "cell", even with the most profound perspicuity, in being surrounded by the "body" of insurmountable "force" of ignorance. Unless you can accomplish excellence in your own life by producing a masterpiece of art or a scientific discovery that can seduce many to change them from within.
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Sy Borg
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Re: How to decide

Post by Sy Borg »

David, I used to believe this too. Then I learned more about life on Earth and saw a very different situation.

Biological life is currently about four billion years old. The Sun will enlarge and possibly engulf the Earth in about five billion years' time.

However, the Sun's heating beforehand will be such that in about a billion years' time all of the oceans will have boiled off into the atmosphere, forming an extreme greenhouse effect and raising the planet's temperature to over 1,000C. Yet, the Earth's surface will be uninhabitable long before the oceans boil off. Even a 10C increase is considered catastrophic.

The upshot of all this is that, even without human civilisation, complex life on Earth is doomed (without corrective human intervention) in millions, not billions, of years. So life on Earth is in its old age. It is "programmed" to die by our ageing star's degeneration. Humans, of course, are much accelerating the heating process, as you noted.

There's the rub. Without humans, in evolutionary time scales, complex life on Earth is soon to disappear entirely. The entire story - from the geothermal vents, to microbes, plants and animals, humans - all burnt away by the Sun. However, humans or their AI can carry living material to other worlds and speed up their evolution, spreading life around the local cosmos. The Earth's material and information would spread out like microbes, which is basically about our scale in the cosmos :). They could carry on the Earth's story for maybe billions of years! Also, AI or composite human/AIs may well persist and evolve in their own right, which could be extraordinary (even if not something we get to see).

Consider the alternative. Say Trump and co wake up and decide to actually do something about climate change. Meanwhile there's still seven billion people, many of them wasting resources and destroying nature with guns and bombs. It's not sustainable, no matter which way you look at it. "Back to nature" is not the answer either because there's not enough nature to get back to for seven billion. In Africa and South America, dwindling important forests are being burnt away inefficiently. Not sustainable.

Personally, I see the Earth as a super organism, and every now and then it restructures and moves into another stage. That was the case during the Permian extinction, where blue-green algae first introduced significant amounts of oxygen to the Earth, killing 90% of existing microbe species, but in the process making complex life possible.

I am reminded of metamorphosing insects. Once cocooned, structures in the caterpillar's body called imaginal discs start to liquefy all other internal body structures. At first the caterpillar's immune system identifies the imaginal discs as a threat and attacks. They too, alas, are liquefied until the pupa's internals consist only of the imaginal discs plus goop that was once the other organs. The discs use the goop to reform the body with adult structures. In the end you get a butterfly, moth, beetle or whatever - the adult reproductive form. Often these are short-lived and don't even have a digestive system. The simply attempt to mate as much as possible and then die within about a week.

Humanity seems to have many similar features to imaginal discs - using other biological structures to build more sophisticated structures. In each case the new structures act to spread the features of the insect or biosphere as far and wide as possible. Only humans can take the Earth's genetic material to other worlds in a controlled way (some microbes could theoretically be sent into space by a meteor impact, and lie preserved in ice until arriving on another world, but the chances are not great).

Basically our space programs will seemingly operate like seeds in what may well be a fractal dynamic in nature. Will the biosphere make it to "adulthood" and spread its genetic material around or are events happening too quickly, maybe a developmental malfunction on grand scale? Who knows? :D
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Maffei
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Re: How to decide

Post by Maffei »

Atreyu wrote: (...) true happiness is not obtained by ripping people off or screwing up our natural environment.
Religious cruzades, the european imperialism upon Africa in 19th century, many kinds of genocidal totalitarisms, violent militar occupations (from democratic groups or not), all of them don't have killing or devastating nature as the center of their preoccupations or something desirable. Their goal is to reach some state of goodness, progress, truth, necessity... all explicit atrocities in history were brought with some discourse of goodness and notions of balance.
Maffei wrote: Would not we have to see the reward in what we do, and not in the result of the things we do?
That's why I would insist in this point. The search for a goodness that is more justifiable than another is the beginning of separation of "me" and "others" and to all sort of... war and destruction! So how will you reach an ideal of peace using the causational process of war? "Something is wrong and we gotta correct": in this point of view the actual life is always deceiving, far from the "real reality", and if someone says "why don't you just accept it?", it would sound absurd, because you don't want to seem like you just don't care. You gotta tell to others and to yourself that you are not on the wrong side. Here I would have the partial answer to...
Ranvier wrote: "if anything makes any sense, then why do we say one thing, do something else, and yet think something entirely different.
What we use to say, that is, how we use to represent ourselves to the world, don't have necessary conexion to what we think or what we do. And it don't have to have, if we understand it under the view of desire. Each one have desires that are formed without any deliberation, but when he is acting upon it, he says that he is having the action that he chose. He attributes to this action a cause through a discourse, but the discourse is not obeying a rational meaning coeherency: it will be modulated according to the desire that motivates the action. An increase of power of his body occurs simultaneosly with his thoughts, actions and words that are not logically related to one another but each one is related to a single desire.

That's why I agree with Ranvier about looking inside yourself primarily. In a rush to make a decision of what discourse you will adopt, you can ingenuely adopt ideologies that makes sense in itself but don't make sense to YOU, and this is what I think as more effective and honest.
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Re: How to decide

Post by Steve3007 »

David:

I know other people have probably already covered this and I'm late to this party. But like everyone else I like to talk. So here's my two penneth/two cents.
Basically what science tells us is that we are destroying nature. We are like cancer ruining the natural homeostasis of this planet (climate change could be made up but i don't think it is). I want to bring back balance to the human picture but what stops me from actually trying to change the world is that I feel like I'm living in a matrix. It makes too much sense to not consider.
I'm surprised that the thing stopping you is the thought that we might be living in a "matrix". If anything was stopping me, it wouldn't be that. That would be irrelevant. The thing stopping me would be the fact that I'm only one of 7 billion people and so my efforts have only a small effect on a global scale. My answer to myself on that one is to point out (to myself) that no matter what powers I have there will always be a scale on which my efforts are significant and a larger scale on which they are insignificant. On the scale of the entire universe, my efforts are even less significant. On the scale of individual people they are significant.

With that in mind, a couple of years ago I stopped making certain charitable contributions to charities where my contribution is spread widely and started sponsoring the education of one child (in Zambia, Africa). I decided that making a noticeable difference to a single life made more sense to me than making an immeasurably small difference to many lives.

That's my attitude. Make a difference in the scale of world that works for you. Hope that other people feel the same. And sing John Lennon's "Imagine" in your head while you're doing it, if that helps. ("You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one...")
It seems to me that people who really believe there is a god don't care about this planet or its problems because they put the responsibility on god to deal with our mess.
I've hardly ever noticed people who believe in God thinking that. At least not where I live. Most people who believe in god, in my limited experience, have the same concerns about the world as other people. The god concept is just part of the way in which they choose to express their concerns.
Is our material world really that valuable or real? Why should I invest what little time I have on this planet to solving a problem that may not even be real or important?
If this world were a "matrix", then if it conformed to the same patterns of behaviour as a putative "real" world then it doesn't matter. If the digital duck looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck then it's still worth setting up a wild-foul sanctuary for protecting endangered ducks (or not, as the case may be).
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Maffei
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Re: How to decide

Post by Maffei »

Steve and David,

Spinoza brings us a conception of God that may be intersting in this matter. God is in absolute immanence, that is, there's no separation between us and nature (or God) because we are nature too, and therefore we are parts of God. As parts of this infinite whole of matter and thought (for Spinoza, thought is also an aspect of nature) we are strictly necessary to the actual existence of the whole. The whole wouldn't be what it is without every each ir our actions, what gives much more importance to our ethics and to our present moment.

The notions that we are separated or that the scale of our actions is too small give the impression that we are insignificant, but this isn't true, since is not just a sum of our actions that will make things different -- we are making difference right now, participating of the causational chain of the next world. This is one more reason to care more in what we do and not in a satisfactory view of ourselves.
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Atreyu
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Re: How to decide

Post by Atreyu »

Maffei wrote: The notions that we are separated or that the scale of our actions is too small give the impression that we are insignificant, but this isn't true, since is not just a sum of our actions that will make things different -- we are making difference right now, participating of the causational chain of the next world. This is one more reason to care more in what we do and not in a satisfactory view of ourselves.
I don't believe the solution is to think we are significant. We're not. The solution is to act anyway, in spite of the fact that our actions may not change anything.

The reason to "care" about what we do is because we're doing it! The desire to do our best and to make a difference should be enough. And if it's not present, then one will "live" a life that's not worth living.

The journey is what's important, not the destination....
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Ranvier
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Re: How to decide

Post by Ranvier »

Atreyu wrote: The journey is what's important, not the destination....
I generally agree with most of Atreyu's premises but in the following instance, I must disagree:
"I don't believe the solution is to think we are significant".
This is a nice cliche that can be interpreted as "there are many ways to accomplish the same destination but some ways are better than others". Instead, if interpreted as Atreyu suggests, this mantra may lead to the path of Hedonism that may offer the superficial pleasure of the body but maybe meaningless and woven with despair of the consciousness. One must "know" the "destination" first, to make the most out of the "journey".

I'll use this analogy: The car journey has ended in a destination but would it be possible to complete that journey without the steering wheel? What we do may seem insignificant in the "grand scheme" of things but it's Paramount to who one will "become" in the future, as well as the future of others. Let me place it in the perspective of the "time travel", if it were possible, where any or even a most insignificant change to the "past" would profoundly alter the future history in the "compounding" cause and effect. Therefore, everything we do is significant, not only for the personal reasons.
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Maffei
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Re: How to decide

Post by Maffei »

Atreyu, I was speaking about the significance of our actions not as something that we should feel to reach some kind of solution. I'm questioning about the possibility of a factual error of understanding when someone think that can live apart from the world.

We see active and passive forces ocurring in every scale. While one may think the individual is insignificant, leaders know very well how the individual adhesion is crucial to their survival. But we don't need such an example to figure out that we are affecting and being affected every time. Existence could not create non existence; Non existence could not create existence (Parmenides...?). We can think of it also likely the butterfly effect, as Ranvier suggests.

Maybe this reflection can help David but not in how he is represented to himself or as some kind of solution. It would be a shift of understanding, from which all his actions should follow.
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Present awareness
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Re: How to decide

Post by Present awareness »

Be the change, you would like to see in the world. That’s it!
Even though you can see me, I might not be here.
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