Terrapin Station wrote: ↑January 7th, 2021, 9:27 am
Greta wrote: ↑January 6th, 2021, 8:28 pm
What sort of entities do you have in mind? Or do you believe that humans are evolution's final product?
I was asking the question to you with respect to "Logically, the only meaning to any individual's life is that of a stepping stone towards entities that will hopefully be mature and aware enough to create or understand meaning."
I'm not sure in what context you'd be asking me the same question.
Are you saying that you were referring to some evolutionary development from humans? So that you're saying that humans are not mature and aware enough to create or understand meaning but some further evolutionary development would be?
And sure, there are going to be other evolutionary developments in the future, re creatures that don't presently exist.
Yes, as per previous posts, we humans are simple beings, and the simplest of us are barely different to other primates. Just as we would not expect a chimp or a child to understand superannuation, we cannot expect humans at this stage to understand the meaning of life.
Physically, our space explorations have taken us not far from home in relative terms, we have drilled just 12kms down into the Earth, the ocean floor remains mostly a mystery. In terms of evolution, we still do not know how abiogenesis occurred or what consciousness is.
As for governing ourselves, we are unable to devise sustainable societies and we cannot stop ourselves wiping out the great and iconic species that we love. KThe new breed of kleptocrats like Putin, Erdogan, Bolsonaro and the outgoing Trump, and mad dictators like Xi and Kim, make clear that we don't know how to deal with chronic liars - those who never admit their crimes. Instead, we simply fall under their sway.
Science is young. Until embracing the scientific method in recent times, humans were deeply subject to superstition. And humans, after just a few centuries of tentative research on a 4.5b year-old planet in a 14b year-old universe that is about 100th of the way into its lifespan, think they can understand the meaning of life? That's like expecting a one year-old to understand the meaning of adulthood.
So it seems more than likely that entities in the future - here or elsewhere - will evolve that will develop a far deeper understanding of life than humans in the 21st century, which is still capable of falling for the most blatant of childish lies. I doubt that our brains have sufficient capacity to do so, just as a dog's brain does not have the capacity, and a baby's brain lacks the organisation and experience, to solve mathematical equations.
Perhaps the main issue is the problem of other minds, the impermeability of mentality. In the future, it seems likely that entities will emerge that are capable of processing multiple viewpoints simultaneously just as individuals currently process multiple senses. From there, what evolution does is far beyond any current observer's capabilities.