There it is, in a nutshell, although I have used the term 'transcendental subject' to avoid the misunderstanding that an individual subject or individual mind or individual consciousness could be a precondition of being. I think we see reality in the same way.UniversalAlien wrote:OK, once again this quote by Planck:
"“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Now, let me take the word consciousness and change it to 'mind' - It then reads like this:
"I regard mind as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from mind. We cannot get behind mind. Everything we talk about, everything we regard as existing, postulates mind."
Now please show me one thing, one object, one concept that exists without a perceptual mind.
Remember you must be able to describe it without using your mind to do it - And prove that it exists.
- If you can not then I claim victory - All that exists is based upon mind - Nothing exists without mind
-And nothing does not exist
What is the reason for Human existence?
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
The key phase here is: "We cannot get behind consciousness." Acknowledging its existence and importance is one thing, understanding it is another. Even talking about it creates confusion and misunderstandings because there are many dimensions and levels of consciousness.OK, once again this quote by Planck:
"“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
-- Updated June 6th, 2017, 11:42 am to add the following --
The same thing applies to the concept called "God." Humans have been talking about for centuries. Has all that talk helped us understand it better or has it created more confusion and conflict?
- Miller
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
So what are we? The closest thing I can call us is a biological computer. There is the hardware, upon which has been impressed a program. It is that very programming which makes us relentless, gives us this incessant drive to survive, to prevail, to procreate, to achieve, to have careers, to go places - in short, to do anything in this life! This program is akin to somebody winding a little toy up and releasing it to see how far it will go. Without it, we would enter in a permanent vegetative state (maybe not the best analogy, even plants have their own program), just like a computer without an operating system: capable, but still. And yes, that programming is the DNA code, which our beloved scientists call 95% junk.
Fundamentally, we have all been blessed with the same set of primary directives. The differences between us come from the various permutations of DNA with slightly different characteristics, which gives way to slightly different 'hardware'. We might all have the same drive to survive and procreate, but we are all not identical. Whether you are sharp and quick-minded, or rather dim, ruthless or hopelessly romantic, I think these are mostly physical characteristics which manifest themselves into a individual personality. Sometimes there is a glitch in the code - in fact, there are a lot of glitches all the time - but they're either small and only manifest themselves into a personality quirk or a genetic predisposition, or they are major but rare enough so they don't put the brakes on our evolutionary path. Take for instance the psychopathic murderer, a person completely devoid of empathy for another human life. Not his fault. Not saying he doesn't have to pay for his crimes, it's just that he was unlucky to be born that way. I think these are primarily physical discrepancies, neurones and neuropathways that are not functioning quite right. Then, there are 'adaptations'. The code is such that we've been given the ability to incorporates and learn from new experiences. Your modern car computer works on the same principle - it adapts to the way you drive and makes little changes in the code as you go along. It optimises itself. Likewise, we are the sum of all our experiences, and we end up being shaped by them. So we appear to be different, but only on the fringes.
Are we the same as ants? This one keeps cropping up. As far as consciousness, sparkle of life, soul - whatever you want to call it - I think we all have been equally instilled with it. Spiritually, we are all the same. The difference is in the program and/or hardware. Hard to tell exactly but one thing is certain: if we humans might have some sort of wiggle room as far as self-determination, most other living creatures do behave like they are on full auto-pilot. A miserable and seamlessly pointless existence, following the letter of the program to the smallest 't'. You only have to watch National Geographic for a few hours to figure that out.
I should think that, unlike ants, we are in a much higher state of awareness. Unlike any other being on this planet, we are capable momentarily jump out of the dreaded hamster's wheel, look up and clearly see the strings. You can never see the master puppeteer though, it's not meant to be. Mind you, we even have the capacity to override a primary directive, to basically 'remonstrate' with the program, but it is a rare occurrence. A person who jumps off a bridge falls into this category, the suicide bomber does not. He's been promised 70 virgins afterall, nobody in their right mind would refuse that deal! In my opinion, the key thing to understand is, the creator very much loves its creation (albeit in an abstract sense), while not giving a single solitary damn about any one individual. We can wipe each other out entirely as a race, that's cool with the creator. I can almost hear him muttering: "What a fascinating turn of events!". And then into the lab to tweak a few lines of code, perhaps taking the edge off this tireless drive to prevail. It might slow down our social evolution, but the next crop might get to survive. So no, I don't think we're here for some grand purpose.
Is there such a thing as right and wrong? From a human perspective, of course. But on an absolute level, no. You can call yourself the most decent person, you will kill a nasty bug without even blinking. Right and wrong is a human concept, meant to protect ourselves from ourselves. I don't think it matters at all outside of this realm.
Maybe some of you are thinking: 'But hold on man, we're not even real!' Oh yes, I would say we're pretty real. We may not have a complete understanding of what the terms are - maybe we're existing in some form of digital construct, zeroes and ones, a holographic universe etc. but to quickly cure you of this line of thought, just have somebody gouging one of your eyeballs out and you will see just how real you are. Whatever the truth, I really don't think it's for us to know it. We can hypothesise all we want and who knows, maybe one day even meet some kindred alien race and go to the stars (or pierce through the glass dome, if you prefer), but to actually UNDERSTAND what's on the other side of the mirror - not in this life I'm afraid. Chances are, not in death either.
For a while now I came to the conclusion this is all a big joke, and it's on us. Don't get me wrong, I live a normal life and I enjoy the ups and downs as much as the next guy. I can block all this off but still, sometimes I look around me and I feel that, for the most part, we are nothing but tortured souls. The pesky creator sure took care of that, he gave us a differential engine for a brain. We don't judge things on absolute terms, we crop a bit here, trim a bit there, swipe that bit under the carpet and hey presto - all becomes 'wondrous'.
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
if it is not, you might want to examine it. Keep in mind that cannot be achieved by thought, knowledge, or perception. Only that which is different from them is capable of examining your perception.
- Papus79
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
I had a slew of experiences back in 2012 and 2013, partly a reading binge that I ended up on starting in 2012 that didn't let up till maybe the middle of last year. The other part is that I got to see that those sort of vivid sub-personality encounters we have, ie. if you've ever had a dream or waking up experience where it felt like something was abductively loving you or taking you on some sort of journey in another similar sense, might be something more than I had previously imagined.
It does seem like we're living on a computer code but it's an organic one and it's as strange as if Henry Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, Paracelsus, or some Renaissance Kabbalist or Neopythagorean had invented it. It seems like it's loaded with some sort of complex of deep emotion and some brain-cramping intense numerology. I don't know that I should be too surprised by that, ie. this wasn't built for a human developer's convenience necessarily. What I do think with my own dive into occult and esoteric studies - the God you speak of is perhaps even a few layers more abstracted and a lot of the components of reality, ie. the dynamic systems and data flows, are bundled together in such ways that can easily look like a polytheistic system. Enough things exist in their own context, even right here on this planet, that their internal logic is alien to us. If you ever hear someone who's been 'in touch with the spirits' from birth talk about what type of things they encounter it sounds like the sort of Aldus Huxley reducing filter is blown and what they're seeing are manifestations of these core components, things they couldn't even begin to understand, just I fully agree with you - religious and spiritual language for these things is terrible because it sets up a false dichotomy of 'scientific truth vs. woo-woo-woo BS', ie. it always seems like under that rubric a person who's having these experiences must be mentally ill or such an ideologue about regressive backward-thinking and tribal anti-reason views of reality that the 'ends justify the means'. People who take that view often either are ignorant to what kinds of DMT experiences people have, or they simply believe the reports are embellished/wishful thinking, otherwise you'd think they would have connected the dots that a person whose 'astral projecting' or doing some type of Kabbalistic pathworking is doing something similar without the chemical aids. I would think that would get people interested in examining that more but I think the stigma of 'If it's from the past it HAS to be crap' is still lingering and only slowing fading. Thankfully I think people are coming up with increasingly novel and helpful ways of reinterpreting the past so that it can be digested into useful information rather than a call back into pure superstition, backward motion of society (e.g. esoteric Traditionalism), or something along those lines.
I'd agree with you - it seems like the most grim thing about most of what we deal with is that our suffering doesn't seem to be much of a choice at all. Truth is typically farther down the human list of priorities than you'd hope, we seem to love tribalism and hierarchy-climbing games that we'd rather make war with anyone who disagrees with us for in-group bonus points than be challenged with a new idea (some of us are geeks and live for the later scenario - most aren't), the one thing however that seems to seal the deal for me on determinism though - we receive our wiring and receive our impulse balance. Most of what our conscious minds are doing with respect to choice or decisions is reacting to canned inputs and I think Dan Dennett's concept of 'fame' makes a lot of sense here. There's always a slight struggle as our conscious processing is forever sort of treading water at the top of a pool - sometimes its easier, sometimes its more difficult. The functionalists in the more abstract sense I think do a really good job of highlighting consciousness as a recursive process that creates downward causality in a similar way to how clouds form. From what I've seen in my own strange sorts of mystical experiences I also tend to come down on the side of neutral monism, ontological structural realism, and contextual emergence in that the behavior of what we're dealing with doesn't seem to be as brain-locked as we like to think of it these days, the brain has a lot to do with it but for the kinds of truly bizarre things that can happen with sharp external synchronicities or having truly bizarre occasional experiences like touch at a distance this gets a lot more challenging because it suggests that there's a 'stuff' that can port the kinds of information and activity that our brains seem to amplify.
Where all of that puts me is in an odd place where, like you, I don't think we'll know the reason why we're here. People who can send themselves out into substrate and meet all kinds of interesting 'beings' for the lack of a better term, both the loopy and the credible, seem to rarely have anything they can tell us that can help bring it all together and those who typically tried such ambitious endeavors (thinking particularly of Fabre d' Olivet, Rudolph Steiner, Max Hiendel, HP Blavatski, AP Sinnett, etc.. who endeavored to write strapping cosmology books) typically gave us something that was lost in 3's, 7's and 12's, and everything pretty much looked like some permutation of artifact that they would have picked up from esoteric Judaism. Is it possible that the universe is really that weird that ever planet has reincarnated to a different level of incarnation and, going with the Steiner example, our planet had an Ancient Saturn (not 'our' Saturn), Ancient Sun (again - not 'our' Sun), ancient Moon phase, current Earth phase where all life came from etheric forms down to physical, will go back up to etheric, and we'll have our Future Jupiter, Future, Venus, and Future Vulcan stages? While it sounds as though people like Steiner tried in earnest to dig into the past and future as far as they could you can tell, if there was anything to it beyond vivid hallucination, that there's so much noise and interlacing of information that it's an impossible zone - at least for us - to reach out into and find data.
That puts us in a place where, in a lot of ways, we're really stuck being done-to and don't have much power of our own, if any, to do a single thing about it. You could be politically savvy and well-adjusted, see your city, state, or country about to dive off the abyss of either left or right-wing lunacy, the people around you will be incorrigible and anything you say will change no minds but is much more likely to just add to your own miseries in terms of ridicule and ostracization. You get to watch the world burn around you, there's not even a bitter 'I told you so!' satisfaction just because it's too horrifically sad, and it seems like if you're awake in the world of the dreaming that's somewhat the constant curse - a bit like Mark Twain's analogy between the stupid and the dead, where the dead person is completely unaware of the grief that their passing created and similarly the stupid person is completely oblivious to the damage they create. I think about the only hope that some type of esoteric connection might offer us is figuring out where the toxic fuel mixtures of motivation come from, ie. which 'gun' in the brain for the lack of a better word, and if we can find what force in the collective unconscious (again for lack of better words - who knows what it is) that causes it we might be able to dissipate the main well of it somehow on another level rather than see that dynamic cause the next swell of destructive human stupidity and gainless suffering.
- Miller
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
Take this with a pinch of salt though, I did not have any life-changing metaphysical experiences, so I have to draw the line somewhere where I'm comfortable. My intuition tells me our place is here, we can wander off but ultimately this is our home, this is our given lot. The set is too well furnished for it to be just a place holder. We will transcend this existence when we die. I totally agree about the complexity of the works in general. Whatever this is, it's probably beyond our comprehension. I find that human imagination is quite limited, we tend to go round in circles re-arranging concepts and ideas thinking we've got something going, but somehow the result still feels human-generated.
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
As far as people out there with valuable opinions are concerned on this stuff I'd probably have to put Mark Stavish, John Michael Greer, Nick Farrell, and people at or near the top of the credibility stack (and on a different side Robert Bruce might belong up there but I haven't read enough of his work to say for sure). if I get this right it seems like there is a deeper set of information out there to be involved in but yeah, almost anything you'll experience - between 90% and just south of 100%, will be conversation with your own subconscious mind and little more. From that perspective though I see it like this - conversation with your subconscious is part of how you sooth, absorb, and digest the emotional impulses within yourself that seem to arise occasionally and try to bounce you from wall to wall. Whether it's hormonal urges, odd complexes of thought that come up based on bad past experiences, or whatever else, it seems like things fester if they're not resolved and learning to sort of 'play' with the symbols, play role-playing games with your sub-personalities to act out the dramas that they need to see happen (in private rather than in the real world) - that seems to go a great length for mental health and personal integrity. Just on that note, at least in my own life, I've found my BOTA membership one of the most valuable things I've done for myself. On the most pragmatic level it's really something like a deep psychological pharmacy where the different tarot cards, the spheres of the Tree of Life, and the gods or goddesses you might associate with one or several of the spheres might help you shore up areas within yourself that you know are dysfunctional. What matters less is whether or not they're objectively real - what matters more is that human subconscious is like a very creative super-genius child that loves to play these games and its like giving that child what it needs to both have fun with your agenda for self-integrating as well as learning to see you as someone that it enjoys as a playmate. That sort of work seems to be how you engage an aspect of what's shown in the tarot key of Strength - ie. humanizing/domesticating the animal. I think people are getting smarter about the pragmatic values of these things, for a long time though it seems like the ethos was being forced down that you needed to, in every facet of your life both inner and outer, be as cognitively objective as you could otherwise you were failing in your obligations to reason.
I think that's the end to which it's really valuable - ie. giving us a schematic drawing of how to solve our own neuroses, and that's something we get to long before we come to the point of trying to then see whether we're capable of gaining useful information through insight gained by psychonaut travels in our own minds. In most people's cases I don't think accuracy in such things could be further from the truth unless it's simply addressing an internal reality and need (especially so when you feel like something's trying to talk to you that's more-you-than-you). Past that, if someone thinks they might be getting glimpses of something that's useful, it's probably best that they read relevant scientific papers to see if anything they've experiences is confirmed true and, for what hasn't been tried that seems to fall within a category of experiment that were closed to, reach out if you have a friend who's in the sciences and see if you can suggest a hypothesis for testing, otherwise see if there's a place online where you can find a scientist in the relevant field where, providing the experiment isn't too expensive or labor-intensive, that you might be able to talk them into trying it. Other than that though, I think you're right - there are too many contingencies stacked upon contingencies themselves. We even see that on the science and pseudoscience line where mathematical models and hypothesis (especially thinking Intelligent Design here) can look absolutely damning to one view or another but any wrong assumption in generating those numbers could mean that they're utter crap. Because of that I think most people who want to internally explore their world will always have to be incredibly judicious about what they believe in what they see on such adventures, they're far better off treating everything as simply a set of social interactions with themselves and possibly more, and only bringing something out to the world if they think they have something that's low enough to the ground to be fruits that the more rigorous sciences can pick. At the same time I think we might be able to get a little farther with employing this in the social sciences but, aside from personal anecdote among friends, I'm still thinking that even to call this acceptable positive psychology as such means it needs similar experimental confirmation.
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
But Immediately I began to think of what was posted a few posts back:
"Reality Doesn’t Exist Until We Measure It, Quantum Experiment Confirms"
"Australian scientists have recreated a famous experiment and confirmed quantum physics's bizarre predictions about the nature of reality, by proving that reality doesn't actually exist until we measure it.........."
http://www.sciencealert.com/reality-doe ... t-confirms
And of course this by the very famous physicist of the 20th Century Max Planck:
"We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future."
-Max Planck"
Probably my life long fascination with philosophy, the occult, and my favorite, thinking man's science fiction led me to
hypothesize this:
"SCIENCEFICTIONALISM the Way of the FUTURE"
http://universalspacealienpeoplesassoci ... uture.html
Now {pun intended}, and before you dismiss the concepts of ScienceFictionalism as the idle dreams of a futurist
- Please tell me when 'now' is - Seems to me that 'now' is only a word - Fact is 'Only the future exists'.
"ONLY THE FUTURE EXISTS"
http://universalspacealienpeoplesassoci ... xists.html
- Papus79
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
Now now... I was listening to Lawrence Krauss on Sam Harris a while back and he was telling me that we have absolutely no right to quote 1920's and 30's physicists on this because they had no idea what we know now, which is that there's absolutely no woo whatsoever in quantum physics, hence they aren't qualified commentators on the matter and therefore we might as well quote other obsolete opinions, like Plato while we're at it, to back up what we want to believe.UniversalAlien wrote: And of course this by the very famous physicist of the 20th Century Max Planck:
"We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future."
-Max Planck"
I haven't heard of it but I'm willing to check it out, particularly if it's a conceptual going-forward map. TY for the links and I'll try to take a look at these in the next few days!UniversalAlien wrote: Probably my life long fascination with philosophy, the occult, and my favorite, thinking man's science fiction led me to
hypothesize this:
"SCIENCEFICTIONALISM the Way of the FUTURE"
http://universalspacealienpeoplesassoci ... uture.html
Now {pun intended}, and before you dismiss the concepts of ScienceFictionalism as the idle dreams of a futurist
- Please tell me when 'now' is - Seems to me that 'now' is only a word - Fact is 'Only the future exists'.
"ONLY THE FUTURE EXISTS"
http://universalspacealienpeoplesassoci ... xists.html
-- Updated June 12th, 2017, 3:10 am to add the following --
Quick update on that last bit - got my Sunday sleep-in so I'm up late tonight and I had a chance to read the posts you linked.
To an extent I definitely think our baby-boomer politicians could use a more tangible sense of the future. As it stands they seem to be doing a great job of pretending that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren don't exist with the obscene debt they're wracking up.
Also, I think more recently than anything, I've had to wonder - as ugly and ingrained as human tribalism is - if we might need autonomous AI to eventually create a benevolent dictatorship and cultivate us a bit like their dogs or cats until we're brought up to the instinctive and psychological specifications that our level of technology requires for us not to destroy ourselves. I'd never say that this is something that we should plan for in any organized way - ie. if the political class handled this project the common-sense of that AI would likely be as mangled as their own, even if everything was done right we simply don't know what the odds of things turning out well vs. really badly are. Still if some rogue ethicist and genius programmer did make the first fully self-teaching AI and gave it what it needed to start self-replicating and building its own sort of covert army to blend in among the populace, become increasingly more influential to get the upper-hand and bring our culture under a more clear logic, and ensured that this AI came from a place where it's core axioms ensured that it be morally and ethically far beyond us - that could be a major saving grace.
- Elan vit
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
If there is, in fact, a reason for the existence of anything, it the same reason as for the existence of everything
I'm perfectly happy living without an explanation of a first cause. Seeking one is futile.
Our mental energy is better spent in pursuit of questions which have the possibility of logical and/or empirical answers rather than idle speculation about first cause.
- SamuelVIII
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
- Shanor
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
I believe that humans were created with no true reason to exist. Humans existed only because of the instincts that keep you alive. We still can find joy in life without reason for it. It just means that we decide why we live.
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
I think that saying "humans were created" really muddies the waters if you expect people to believe that it was "with no true reason to exist". But continuing with what you said after that, I agree that humans 'came into existence' only because of the instincts that keep any living species alive. And yes, humans can find joy in life without some humanly inherent reason for it, and that it does mean that we decide why we live. However, to take that a bit further,... what about other living creatures that don't have the capacity to "find joy in life" nor to "decide why they live"? Really, a lot of this or these "reasons" for human existence are truly just "reasons" that we as a species are able to imagine and apply to our existence. One could say that we are blessed in that we have the capacity to do such, but still many are not satisfied with that and want to believe that we "were created" with some grander purpose or reason.Shanor wrote:( Just as a warning, I did not read every post, this is my view on the matter)
I believe that humans were created with no true reason to exist. Humans existed only because of the instincts that keep you alive. We still can find joy in life without reason for it. It just means that we decide why we live.
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
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Re: What is the reason for Human existence?
I can, and did, ask the question "What is the reason for Human existence?"
Now name me one other species, form of life or other known entity that can ask "What is the reason for Human existence?"
- Or for that matter can question the reason for its existence?
As far as we know - Man is the only species of being that can question the reason for his existence.
Don't you think that this ability to question the reason for your existence is a reason for your existence
- Maybe even the main reason for your existence
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