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> You have found happiness when the idea "life is meaningless" seem obvious and irrelevant. Precisely. To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots. There i

by scalio 10y ago

> You have found happiness when the idea "life is meaningless" seem obvious and irrelevant. Precisely. To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots. There is no meaning behind the universe, it just kinda, is. The realization that the only sense you can find in life is the one you create yourself, makes a lot of things clearer. This is also why it should be irrelevant that life is meaningless, since what do you care about the true meaning of life (which probably doesn't even exist) once you found something better, more satisfying, that you can cope with and develop in?

CuriouslyC 10y ago
I'm curious as to why, when faced with unpredictable phenomenon, you chose to go with the hypothesis "everything is random" rather than "everything is choice" when you have an experience that appears to be choice, and would probably have a hard time naming a truly random phenomenon.
- jshevek 10y ago
  The parent didn't say "everything is random", nor anything that absolutely requires this viewpoint. To declare that "everything is choice" strikes me as putting one's beliefs ahead of inquiry.
  - scalio 10y ago
    Indeed, when I say life has no meaning, I don't mean that it is devoid of rules. Quite the contrary is true, since our modern life revolves around mathematics. In that sense, the universe is exquisitely meaningful, it's full of mathematical meaning, but that's not massively useful for us humans trying to figure out how to spend our time.
    - CuriouslyC 10y ago
      At the small scale, the world is unpredictable. As the scale grows, for well behaved linear systems the law of large numbers kicks in, and you get predictable, mathematical behavior. For complex nonlinear systems, however, the unpredictability of the small scale can "propagate up" and render the system at the large scale completely unpredictable. Remember that mathematics is just a model, not the territory. For starters, you have incompleteness; for any formal system you can make true statements that are unprovable. Additionally, two constructs which are central to mathematical analysis, infinity and truth, don't exist. For hundreds of years epicycles were used to model the orbits of the planets. Now we're elevating grand theories that embed the universe in an 11-dimensional manifold.
  - CuriouslyC 10y ago
    "To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots" Due to Bell's theorem, we know that either there is inherent uncertainty in the universe, or the whole bedrock of science gets called into question. If properly informed by physics, the view that we are robots must follow from the view that the uncertainty in nature is uncontrolled, i.e. purely random according to some distribution. Given that we have a subjective experience of choice, this presents the alternate hypothesis that the uncertainty is the result of choice constrained by preference. These aren't the only two possible hypotheses, but remember that all hidden variable models have been effectively ruled out, so no deterministic hypothesis is permissible. I would of course love to hear any plausible alternatives you could present.
sireat 10y ago
We are back to Ecclesiastes without the tacked on Epilogue but with a touch of Blade Runner. I have two problems with this realization(not that it makes it any less true). First, anything truly goes then and we are back to "might is right". Any state/laws some subset of humanity creates is no less right than any other subset of humanity which includes various levels of psychopaths. First problem is not such a bad one as long as your own morale code more or less coincides with the society in which you reside. Second problem is more personal. How do you choose what is meaningful given how truly short the life is? At 40+ I realize that life can end with a whimper at any moment. Barring some truly Kurzweilian breakthrough 40 more years of enjoyment is most I can hope for. I truly enjoy the little pleasures of life parenthood, food, drink, chess, biking and so on. At the end of the day, you realize there is no hope of working on that unsolved math problem, that huge programming project, that great novel. Unfortunately there is so little time and no time for any grand works unless you already showed some promise at early age (ala Thompson). So far the only solution is somehow to delude yourself that what you are doing is meaningful to you.
- armitron 10y ago
  You are deluding yourself when you think you actually have a choice. A chaotic dynamical system moving between (or sitting at) attractors doesn't leave much room for Free Will.
  - qu4z-2 10y ago
    That all depends on how you define "choice", surely.
  - sireat 10y ago
    Well this is one delusion I am glad I still have. I can delude myself that I have Free Will by choosing to take a vacation next week. Then I could flip a coin to decide my destination between Singapore and Bangkok. Sure it was all deterministic at some level but the illusion was good enough for me.
- ep103 10y ago
  In my thinking, this has two answers. 1) First, an old parable: When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world. 2) If I've learned one thing, its that without other people, life is largely meaningless, or at least, a very much great deal emptier. As such, I do not think it is a logical gap to say that therefore, a large component of the "meaning" of life, lies in one's interactions with other people.

by scalio 10y ago

CuriouslyC 10y ago

I'm curious as to why, when faced with unpredictable phenomenon, you chose to go with the hypothesis "everything is random" rather than "everything is choice" when you have an experience that appears to be choice, and would probably have a hard time naming a truly random phenomenon.

jshevek 10y ago
The parent didn't say "everything is random", nor anything that absolutely requires this viewpoint. To declare that "everything is choice" strikes me as putting one's beliefs ahead of inquiry.
- scalio 10y ago
  Indeed, when I say life has no meaning, I don't mean that it is devoid of rules. Quite the contrary is true, since our modern life revolves around mathematics. In that sense, the universe is exquisitely meaningful, it's full of mathematical meaning, but that's not massively useful for us humans trying to figure out how to spend our time.
  - CuriouslyC 10y ago
    At the small scale, the world is unpredictable. As the scale grows, for well behaved linear systems the law of large numbers kicks in, and you get predictable, mathematical behavior. For complex nonlinear systems, however, the unpredictability of the small scale can "propagate up" and render the system at the large scale completely unpredictable. Remember that mathematics is just a model, not the territory. For starters, you have incompleteness; for any formal system you can make true statements that are unprovable. Additionally, two constructs which are central to mathematical analysis, infinity and truth, don't exist. For hundreds of years epicycles were used to model the orbits of the planets. Now we're elevating grand theories that embed the universe in an 11-dimensional manifold.
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  "To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots" Due to Bell's theorem, we know that either there is inherent uncertainty in the universe, or the whole bedrock of science gets called into question. If properly informed by physics, the view that we are robots must follow from the view that the uncertainty in nature is uncontrolled, i.e. purely random according to some distribution. Given that we have a subjective experience of choice, this presents the alternate hypothesis that the uncertainty is the result of choice constrained by preference. These aren't the only two possible hypotheses, but remember that all hidden variable models have been effectively ruled out, so no deterministic hypothesis is permissible. I would of course love to hear any plausible alternatives you could present.

sireat 10y ago

We are back to Ecclesiastes without the tacked on Epilogue but with a touch of Blade Runner. I have two problems with this realization(not that it makes it any less true). First, anything truly goes then and we are back to "might is right". Any state/laws some subset of humanity creates is no less right than any other subset of humanity which includes various levels of psychopaths. First problem is not such a bad one as long as your own morale code more or less coincides with the society in which you reside. Second problem is more personal. How do you choose what is meaningful given how truly short the life is? At 40+ I realize that life can end with a whimper at any moment. Barring some truly Kurzweilian breakthrough 40 more years of enjoyment is most I can hope for. I truly enjoy the little pleasures of life parenthood, food, drink, chess, biking and so on. At the end of the day, you realize there is no hope of working on that unsolved math problem, that huge programming project, that great novel. Unfortunately there is so little time and no time for any grand works unless you already showed some promise at early age (ala Thompson). So far the only solution is somehow to delude yourself that what you are doing is meaningful to you.

armitron 10y ago
You are deluding yourself when you think you actually have a choice. A chaotic dynamical system moving between (or sitting at) attractors doesn't leave much room for Free Will.
- qu4z-2 10y ago
  That all depends on how you define "choice", surely.
- sireat 10y ago
  Well this is one delusion I am glad I still have. I can delude myself that I have Free Will by choosing to take a vacation next week. Then I could flip a coin to decide my destination between Singapore and Bangkok. Sure it was all deterministic at some level but the illusion was good enough for me.
ep103 10y ago
In my thinking, this has two answers. 1) First, an old parable: When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world. 2) If I've learned one thing, its that without other people, life is largely meaningless, or at least, a very much great deal emptier. As such, I do not think it is a logical gap to say that therefore, a large component of the "meaning" of life, lies in one's interactions with other people.