EMC2 wrote:Greta wrote:If breeding like an animal is the only way of imbuing life with meaning, then why do we humans do all the other stuff? A distraction to keep us out of bother until reproduction?
Does the absurdity level remain low for the 40% or so of parents who separate?
Humans are not animals, so humans don't breed. Only animals breed. Humans
progenate.
Here you are equating "having children" to "breeding" which I think you mean actually mean as "having sex". Having children is not equivalent to having sex. They are although related, very different concepts. Well I think you are wrong. It is not only making children that is the most meaningful, that is holding the baby for the first time, but the entire process of seen your children grow up is the best thing in life.
The overwhelming percentage of people who commit suicide are ones without any children. Only a very small percentage of people with children, very small compared of the total percentage of people with children commit suicide.
Humans most certainly are animals. Thus humans breed. They also "propagate" and reproduce, or whatever other synonym you prefer.
The reason why people buy into this myth - that life is only meaningful when bonded and breeding - is that it is an
all encompassing role. So if the marriage or children are lost, one's entire life's devotions are lost, making life appear meaningless for a time.
It is the level of absorption that creates meaning, not the targets of absorption.
Profundity can be found everywhere and anywhere once the anthropocentric blinkers come off. The more people who recognise this, the fewer who will fall into pointless despair over a romantic falsehood. If breeding and rearing are all that save human life from absurdity, then nature, space, creativity and learning are meaningless. Just a backdrop to The Great Human Ego Show. Further, given human populations are unsustainable, interests outside of breeding are increasingly more meaningful and helpful.
Of course, if one wants children, they are following the same path as billions of others, human and otherwise, playing our roles as links in the chain of life - as does everyone, whether we partake in breeding or not.
-- Updated 23 Nov 2017, 18:09 to add the following --
Judaka wrote:Greta wrote:No one was discussing the feelings of rocks, just the similarities in dynamics between entities in various parts of nature as part of a pretty free-ranging discussion.
Anyone who hasn't noticed that humans have unique emergent properties is probably familiar with all of the space programs run by other species [sic]. It's not the point and never was. I simply believe that humanity cannot be understood without context against the progressive developments of pre-human, and even pre-life history including our existential situation in the cosmos, and to just focus on humanity's works as though the journey started a few decades, centuries or millennia is shallow, persistently throwing up "mysteries" rendered understandable and even predictable when contextualised with nonhuman reality.
We humans cannot avoid being part of the Earth's systems, whether we want to convince ourselves that we are free agents largely operating outside of nature's influence or not. It's a great source of absurdity - humans mentally and emotionally distancing from our roots, as though our nonhuman past is an embarrassing idiot b@stard son kept under the stairwell to be ignored as much as possible.
Your usage of the word absurd in this thread is what triggered that response and you are still using it, I know that it is a word but are you talking about Absurdism? The topic of this thread? I have already said my piece on that so I will address the first part of my earlier comment before, in regards to bringing up the history of the Earth and human evolution in response to something like an existential crisis. However if this was simply incidental and the conversation went that way and it wasn't related to Grotto's comment then I will not lambaste somebody for being interested in science.
Yeah, sorry, I was just following the conversation's flow. Indeed, we are not rocks, although every atom of a rock is potentially part of a person in the future :)
Judaka wrote:The reason I brought up the rocks is that you are not purely talking about the science of the human mind and at times of personifying nature and talking of it as though it had a function but to digress the story of the universe is a story of causality and whether that makes us part of the system of causality (nature/nurture) or having transcended that (choice) is an interesting question and I think that is worth debating but I have had two thoughts while reading what you had to say.
I like to think that, rather than personifying nature I am attempting (seemingly not very well) to "naturise" persons, so to speak - to regain human context that was lost in our delusional dreams of divinity. The dinosaurs were gods amongst flatworms once. Now we are the "gods", but actually just dominant and using that dominance to increase the gap between humans and other species.
Imagine if Australopithecus and Habilis and Neanderthal were still alive, bridging the gap between "man and beast", would we think the same? Ha! On second thoughts we'd still see H. Sapiens as special and the others to be beasts, just as the Luba people in Africa consider pygmies to be subhuman.
Seemingly this conceit appears to be an inevitable natural dynamic associated with dominance, seemingly a naturally selected attribute.
I do have a general beef about philosophers disregarding the natural world, which I consider to be a logical error.
Judaka wrote:First is that when people start to talk about history or science in huge swathes they portray a greater consciousness of subsumed conflicts and nuances that existed throughout nature and Human existence. However in reality collectively we have no control over each other and trends are bound to emerge ... I think human history in particular has nothing to do with what the majority of people wanted but how people came to come to power and what kind of attitudes and values those people had.
Yes. It appears logically that all of the sustainability problems of the Earth today have always been inevitable; it's always been a matter of "when", not "if". Now it is a matter of "how" - how soft or hard a landing will be experienced before a new equilibrium is reached?
Judaka wrote:If nature to you is causality then it is a meaningless statement to say that we are affected and affectors, I do not know what one could learn from this and I don't think you meant it that way. Indeed the very idea of nature in a universal sense seems to simply encompass everything and to speak of it to me is to speak of causality - where before humans all was nature and all was under nature's influence. Defining it that way makes intelligent species problematic in that we are taking back some of that which once belonged to nature? The influence over all things, the explanation for all things and all that is acted upon and acts. It is not that humans transcend it but that we are simply included?
Humans
are nature - we cannot be otherwise - and thus we still follow nature's rules like any other animal, just with more bells 'n whistles.
Judaka wrote:Secondly in an evolutionary sense what is now was once something else and it may be an interesting conversation recreationally but functionally it is seldom relevant, a rock used in a slingshot does not require an understanding of how the rock was formed, one does not gain nutrience from food only when they are able to name the various vitamins and minerals and what it is that they do.
Meaning and absurdity are not about functionality.
Judaka wrote:What has been made available to the nihilist or existentialist that was not before by talking about his meagre origins?
By learning of those "meagre" origins one learns to ever more appreciate that they were far from meagre.