4 ms·

> We are here on Earth to fart around. Except that we're not. We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA. There are some ancillary effects of this (like

by lisper 3y ago

> We are here on Earth to fart around. Except that we're not. We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA. There are some ancillary effects of this (like sex and eating and the internet) but it's not like life doesn't have a purpose at all. It's just not a particularly hifallutin' one.

fatfingerd 3y ago
You won't fill the role of farting around for much more than a day, a month or a century without taking certain respective steps.
unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
Or is there a better abstraction? We're here because intelligence is good, an organizational force. We're here to do that as approximately as we can.
- lisper 3y ago
  Oh how I wish that were true, but unfortunately at the end of the day Darwin is running the show. Intelligence exists not because it's "good" but because genes that build brains that can solve problems reproduce better than genes that don't.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    > Oh how I wish that were true, but unfortunately at the end of the day Darwin is running the show. This is just essentialism. We can draw that line at any arbitrary point. I can say Darwin isn't running the show, Einstein is. You can try to point out the ways biology effects our lives and argue that it should hold a more privileged position, and I can wave it away and insist you're being sentimental. "I wish that were true, but we're just rocks that happen to think and reproduce, nothing more." And just as credibly, I can say that things are at the level of human abstraction and that life is about farting around. I can point out how profoundly conceptions at this level effect our lives, and argue that it should hold a privileged position. You're free to set your standard and the arbitrary point you prefer, but that doesn't devalue anyone else's decision. It's just a philosophy that doesn't resonate with you because you have a different perspective, that might make it less useful to you but it isn't really a mark against it. I don't eat steak and have no desire to, but I don't argue when people say that steak is delicious.
    - lisper 3y ago
      The reason Darwin is revered is that he discovered some important emergent structure in natural processes that is not immediately evident from Einstein’s field equation even if it turns out that the latter entails the former. But “we are here on earth to fart around” doesn’t follow.
      - maxbond 3y ago
        I will immediately concede I am wrong if you can show me how democracy, monogamous marriages, and a night on the town obviously emerges from darwinism. Or from biology more generally. If you can't use biology to explain society, then based on your reasoning about why Darwinism is preferable to relativity, I think you should reconsider whether or not this is true universally rather than for you in particular.
        lisper 3y ago
        There's a stock answer for monogamous marriage: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-secret-evolutionary-weapon-monogamy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-secret-evolut... Democracy and a night on the town are a little more challenging. Both are actually pretty recent inventions, having existed only for a few thousand years, which is nothing on an evolutionary time scale, and the jury is still out over whether either will survive in the long run. (Personally I'll give you long odds against.) But the short version of the answer is that genes have only very indirect control over the brains they build, and sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own (so to speak) and goals of their own, some of which can be in direct conflict with the goals of the genes that built them. For example, birth control pills are an quite literally an existential threat to our genes. So in the long run one would predict that our genes will tend to build brains that have an instinctive aversion to things like birth control. But the dynamics of human societies are off-the-charts complicated and non-linear, so who knows?
        maxbond 3y ago
        > There's a stock answer for monogamous marriage This article is just supposition. "Monogamy forms the basis of complex social networks." As opposed to polygamy...? "Females preferred reliable providers to aggressive competitors." Pretty impressive how their attitudes were preserved in the fossil record. The article is pretty clearly written from the perspective that polygamy is weird and unnatural, noting that we have an "imperfect record " of monogamy - as if societies where this was the norm were a mistake. The article goes on to make it clear this is a controversial idea, not one that has wide acceptance in this community. If you have a better article or a better argument to present I'll check it out, but I don't see why I would accept this argument. > But the short version of the answer is that genes have only very indirect control over the brains they build, and sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own ... > But the dynamics of human societies are off-the-charts complicated and non-linear, so who knows? I think you've conceded the point.
haswell 3y ago
This is a perspective rooted in a human understanding of biology, which is ultimately just a language and labeling game to make sense of observed phenomena. If we're here to make copies of our DNA, then one has to ask what the DNA is here for, and we're back in the same place. The point someone like Watts is making is that even if we're just DNA replicators, that which is being replicated holds this capacity for playfulness and the enjoyment of play, which confers some broader notion of playfulness to the conditions that brought about our DNA. I recently watched "My Octopus Teacher" (worth a watch), and watching the behaviors of the featured octopus as it goes about it's daily life doing octopus things, even including what appears to be literal playtime with schools of fish, it's easy to see the point Watts was trying to make.
- lisper 3y ago
  > one has to ask what the DNA is here for DNA is not here "for" anything, DNA is a Thing That Happens. Given the right combination of atoms, a source of energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over. > that which is being replicated holds this capacity for playfulness and the enjoyment of play Sure, but that's just a side-effect of the process. It's not the reason we exist.
  - haswell 3y ago
    > DNA is not here "for" anything, DNA is a Thing That Happens. I agree, and my point was that saying: > We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA. Just kicks the can down the road. We're not here to make copies of our DNA any more than DNA is here to make copies of us. > Sure, but that's just a side-effect of the process. It's not the purpose of our existence. So, too, are we, as is replication itself. It happens to be the only reason the process continues, but it has no inherent purpose any more than playfulness does. It just is. This could also be framed as: we are the process. > Given the right combination of atoms, a source of energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over. All of these things happened before Darwin was involved, and while I understand the point you're making, I'm calling this out because Natural Selection is again just a language and labeling game that maps the process relative to our experience of it and our understanding of various scientific disciplines. None of this brings us closer to a "purpose", per se. The statement that "existence is fundamentally playful" is not a claim about purpose either. But rather, an observation about how things appear to be, based on our ability to understand them. Some people would also say that existence is fundamentally mathematical.
disco_framework 3y ago
Sure but that doesn't mean the two ideas are incompatible. In fact the act of making copies of our DNA might be a great example of playful work. Sex is fun and it has the capacity to spread our genes.
- lisper 3y ago
  > the act of making copies of our DNA might be a great example of playful work That's an interesting idea, but I don't buy it. I think playfulness requires a brain. How would you distinguish "playful" chemistry from "serious work" chemistry?
  - disco_framework 3y ago
    I know what you're saying but I think we may have lost the plot here. The original link was about finding meaning after all, right?
    - lisper 3y ago
      Yes, but the comment I was originally responding to was that “we are here on earth to fart around”.
afpx 3y ago
Animals don't just expire after reproductive age. They live on to help their kin, species, (in the case of Humans) most life. That's where I find purpose: in being useful to others.
- lisper 3y ago
  Sure, but that still all comes back to Darwin. Reproduction involves a lot more than just fertilizing an egg.
kevinwang 3y ago
The nihilist argument is that we're not here "to" make copies of our DNA. It just so happened that each of our ancestors were were good at making copies of their DNA (and thus we are good at making copies of ours). But outside of religions, there's no evidence that this is an obligation.
tasty_freeze 3y ago
I think you haven't really thought through your stance. If that is the only purpose, then men should sleep with as many women as possible, even raping them, because that is what matters. I knowingly married a woman who is unable to bear children. We adopted two, and I don't feel in any way that my life is less for not spawning. Here is a hypothetical: in scenario 1, you are an average Joe and have three kids. In scenario 2, due to your dedication to medical research, you never have kids, but you develop a new drug that eliminates diarrhea and saves millions of lives every year. Do you really think scenario 1 is a more meaningful life than scenario 2?
- lisper 3y ago
  > If that is the only purpose, then men should sleep with as many women as possible, even raping them, because that is what matters. No, because humans are not born self-sufficient. Humans have to raise their offspring, not merely produce them, in order to be successful. > I knowingly married a woman who is unable to bear children. We adopted two, and I don't feel in any way that my life is less for not spawning. Your genes are not just in you, they are also in other humans, so your genes can improve their reproductive fitness by producing people like you who help to raise other people's children (in which those genes also reside). With that in mind I'll leave your last question as an exercise :-)
  - tasty_freeze 3y ago
    One reproductive strategy is to have a few offspring and invest heavily in them; another is to have as many as possible and accept a lower success rate. According to your initial comment, the purpose of live is to reproduce, and if that was the end of it, then having as many kids as possible and let the seeds fall where they may is a winning strategy (and many animals do exactly that), but for humans it is a winning strategy only if one can get other people to raise your kids, which means it works only if the cohort of freeloaders is small enough. As for the genetics part, it seems you think there is an altruism gene(s) and that I can somehow determine if others have the same genes that I have and then invest in them. The idea of an altruism gene is dubious; if if such a thing exists, the mathematics say it is a dead end. The two kids I adopted (from another ethnic group even) are far less likely to have "my" gene than had I married a woman who could bear my children. The source of my altruism (as such -- we adopted to fulfill our own emotional needs) is far more determined by culture and circumstance that by the influence of genes. That last point closes the circle for my own stance: meaning is cultural and personal. It makes me scratch my head when Christian friends try to convince me that their morality is not objective because it is based on the Bible, but we can see historically that different people/generations interpret the Bible and justify whatever morality is in vogue at the time. It is no more fixed than that of atheists.
sph 3y ago
Even if I don't completely agree, only on this website it is acceptable to downvote one because they have a different philosophical perspective. smdh -- I think it's both, spread our DNA and faff around in between reproductive times. But there is no imperative whatsoever, and no one will judge your preference at the end. On a long enough timescale, even Einstein's impact is lost in the cosmic background noise.

by lisper 3y ago

fatfingerd 3y ago

You won't fill the role of farting around for much more than a day, a month or a century without taking certain respective steps.

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago

Or is there a better abstraction? We're here because intelligence is good, an organizational force. We're here to do that as approximately as we can.

lisper 3y ago
Oh how I wish that were true, but unfortunately at the end of the day Darwin is running the show. Intelligence exists not because it's "good" but because genes that build brains that can solve problems reproduce better than genes that don't.
- maxbond 3y ago
  > Oh how I wish that were true, but unfortunately at the end of the day Darwin is running the show. This is just essentialism. We can draw that line at any arbitrary point. I can say Darwin isn't running the show, Einstein is. You can try to point out the ways biology effects our lives and argue that it should hold a more privileged position, and I can wave it away and insist you're being sentimental. "I wish that were true, but we're just rocks that happen to think and reproduce, nothing more." And just as credibly, I can say that things are at the level of human abstraction and that life is about farting around. I can point out how profoundly conceptions at this level effect our lives, and argue that it should hold a privileged position. You're free to set your standard and the arbitrary point you prefer, but that doesn't devalue anyone else's decision. It's just a philosophy that doesn't resonate with you because you have a different perspective, that might make it less useful to you but it isn't really a mark against it. I don't eat steak and have no desire to, but I don't argue when people say that steak is delicious.
  - lisper 3y ago
    The reason Darwin is revered is that he discovered some important emergent structure in natural processes that is not immediately evident from Einstein’s field equation even if it turns out that the latter entails the former. But “we are here on earth to fart around” doesn’t follow.
    - maxbond 3y ago
      I will immediately concede I am wrong if you can show me how democracy, monogamous marriages, and a night on the town obviously emerges from darwinism. Or from biology more generally. If you can't use biology to explain society, then based on your reasoning about why Darwinism is preferable to relativity, I think you should reconsider whether or not this is true universally rather than for you in particular.
      - lisper 3y ago
        There's a stock answer for monogamous marriage: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-secret-evolutionary-weapon-monogamy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-secret-evolut... Democracy and a night on the town are a little more challenging. Both are actually pretty recent inventions, having existed only for a few thousand years, which is nothing on an evolutionary time scale, and the jury is still out over whether either will survive in the long run. (Personally I'll give you long odds against.) But the short version of the answer is that genes have only very indirect control over the brains they build, and sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own (so to speak) and goals of their own, some of which can be in direct conflict with the goals of the genes that built them. For example, birth control pills are an quite literally an existential threat to our genes. So in the long run one would predict that our genes will tend to build brains that have an instinctive aversion to things like birth control. But the dynamics of human societies are off-the-charts complicated and non-linear, so who knows?
        maxbond 3y ago
        > There's a stock answer for monogamous marriage This article is just supposition. "Monogamy forms the basis of complex social networks." As opposed to polygamy...? "Females preferred reliable providers to aggressive competitors." Pretty impressive how their attitudes were preserved in the fossil record. The article is pretty clearly written from the perspective that polygamy is weird and unnatural, noting that we have an "imperfect record " of monogamy - as if societies where this was the norm were a mistake. The article goes on to make it clear this is a controversial idea, not one that has wide acceptance in this community. If you have a better article or a better argument to present I'll check it out, but I don't see why I would accept this argument. > But the short version of the answer is that genes have only very indirect control over the brains they build, and sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own ... > But the dynamics of human societies are off-the-charts complicated and non-linear, so who knows? I think you've conceded the point.

haswell 3y ago

This is a perspective rooted in a human understanding of biology, which is ultimately just a language and labeling game to make sense of observed phenomena. If we're here to make copies of our DNA, then one has to ask what the DNA is here for, and we're back in the same place. The point someone like Watts is making is that even if we're just DNA replicators, that which is being replicated holds this capacity for playfulness and the enjoyment of play, which confers some broader notion of playfulness to the conditions that brought about our DNA. I recently watched "My Octopus Teacher" (worth a watch), and watching the behaviors of the featured octopus as it goes about it's daily life doing octopus things, even including what appears to be literal playtime with schools of fish, it's easy to see the point Watts was trying to make.

lisper 3y ago
> one has to ask what the DNA is here for DNA is not here "for" anything, DNA is a Thing That Happens. Given the right combination of atoms, a source of energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over. > that which is being replicated holds this capacity for playfulness and the enjoyment of play Sure, but that's just a side-effect of the process. It's not the reason we exist.
- haswell 3y ago
  > DNA is not here "for" anything, DNA is a Thing That Happens. I agree, and my point was that saying: > We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA. Just kicks the can down the road. We're not here to make copies of our DNA any more than DNA is here to make copies of us. > Sure, but that's just a side-effect of the process. It's not the purpose of our existence. So, too, are we, as is replication itself. It happens to be the only reason the process continues, but it has no inherent purpose any more than playfulness does. It just is. This could also be framed as: we are the process. > Given the right combination of atoms, a source of energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over. All of these things happened before Darwin was involved, and while I understand the point you're making, I'm calling this out because Natural Selection is again just a language and labeling game that maps the process relative to our experience of it and our understanding of various scientific disciplines. None of this brings us closer to a "purpose", per se. The statement that "existence is fundamentally playful" is not a claim about purpose either. But rather, an observation about how things appear to be, based on our ability to understand them. Some people would also say that existence is fundamentally mathematical.

disco_framework 3y ago

Sure but that doesn't mean the two ideas are incompatible. In fact the act of making copies of our DNA might be a great example of playful work. Sex is fun and it has the capacity to spread our genes.

lisper 3y ago
> the act of making copies of our DNA might be a great example of playful work That's an interesting idea, but I don't buy it. I think playfulness requires a brain. How would you distinguish "playful" chemistry from "serious work" chemistry?
- disco_framework 3y ago
  I know what you're saying but I think we may have lost the plot here. The original link was about finding meaning after all, right?
  - lisper 3y ago
    Yes, but the comment I was originally responding to was that “we are here on earth to fart around”.

afpx 3y ago

Animals don't just expire after reproductive age. They live on to help their kin, species, (in the case of Humans) most life. That's where I find purpose: in being useful to others.

lisper 3y ago
Sure, but that still all comes back to Darwin. Reproduction involves a lot more than just fertilizing an egg.

kevinwang 3y ago

The nihilist argument is that we're not here "to" make copies of our DNA. It just so happened that each of our ancestors were were good at making copies of their DNA (and thus we are good at making copies of ours). But outside of religions, there's no evidence that this is an obligation.

tasty_freeze 3y ago

I think you haven't really thought through your stance. If that is the only purpose, then men should sleep with as many women as possible, even raping them, because that is what matters. I knowingly married a woman who is unable to bear children. We adopted two, and I don't feel in any way that my life is less for not spawning. Here is a hypothetical: in scenario 1, you are an average Joe and have three kids. In scenario 2, due to your dedication to medical research, you never have kids, but you develop a new drug that eliminates diarrhea and saves millions of lives every year. Do you really think scenario 1 is a more meaningful life than scenario 2?

lisper 3y ago
> If that is the only purpose, then men should sleep with as many women as possible, even raping them, because that is what matters. No, because humans are not born self-sufficient. Humans have to raise their offspring, not merely produce them, in order to be successful. > I knowingly married a woman who is unable to bear children. We adopted two, and I don't feel in any way that my life is less for not spawning. Your genes are not just in you, they are also in other humans, so your genes can improve their reproductive fitness by producing people like you who help to raise other people's children (in which those genes also reside). With that in mind I'll leave your last question as an exercise :-)
- tasty_freeze 3y ago
  One reproductive strategy is to have a few offspring and invest heavily in them; another is to have as many as possible and accept a lower success rate. According to your initial comment, the purpose of live is to reproduce, and if that was the end of it, then having as many kids as possible and let the seeds fall where they may is a winning strategy (and many animals do exactly that), but for humans it is a winning strategy only if one can get other people to raise your kids, which means it works only if the cohort of freeloaders is small enough. As for the genetics part, it seems you think there is an altruism gene(s) and that I can somehow determine if others have the same genes that I have and then invest in them. The idea of an altruism gene is dubious; if if such a thing exists, the mathematics say it is a dead end. The two kids I adopted (from another ethnic group even) are far less likely to have "my" gene than had I married a woman who could bear my children. The source of my altruism (as such -- we adopted to fulfill our own emotional needs) is far more determined by culture and circumstance that by the influence of genes. That last point closes the circle for my own stance: meaning is cultural and personal. It makes me scratch my head when Christian friends try to convince me that their morality is not objective because it is based on the Bible, but we can see historically that different people/generations interpret the Bible and justify whatever morality is in vogue at the time. It is no more fixed than that of atheists.

sph 3y ago

Even if I don't completely agree, only on this website it is acceptable to downvote one because they have a different philosophical perspective. smdh -- I think it's both, spread our DNA and faff around in between reproductive times. But there is no imperative whatsoever, and no one will judge your preference at the end. On a long enough timescale, even Einstein's impact is lost in the cosmic background noise.