8 ms·

If physicalism were true, and abiogenesis happened without any intervention of "higher being"(s), and Darwinism were correct; then life wouldn't be meaningless.

If physicalism were true, and abiogenesis happened without any intervention of "higher being"(s), and Darwinism were correct; then life wouldn't be meaningless. Neither would its purpose be determined by each individual. Life would have exactly two objective purposes: to survive and to reproduce. It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just happens that a species that survives and reproduces will continue to live. That also means that there's no good or bad. There are only what traits are advantageous to survival and what traits aren't. For example, being trustworthy is "good" because trust within a group is a prerequisite for achieving a relatively advanced society like Homo Sapiens has built. Breaking into someone's house is "bad" because otherwise we would only be as advanced as other primates that take each other's territories all the time. But when you think about it, there are "good" things that aren't advantageous (or even are harmful) to survival, and there are things advantageous to survival that are considered "bad" by most people. Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics. So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so?

andrewjl 3y ago
> Life would have exactly two objective purposes: to survive and to reproduce. Why does abiogenesis and Darwinism being correct lead to those two being the objective purposes for humans?
- kogus 3y ago
  As it says: It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just happens that a species that survives and reproduces will continue to live. Without a creator, there is no real “purpose” at all. Everything came from nothing, will end as nothing, and is ultimately irrelevant. Everything. As a Christian, I sometimes look over into that chasm and wonder how atheists bear it.
  - vacuity 3y ago
    I'm an agnostic (absolute, textbook definition) but I disagree. As a human with consciousness and free will (whether that's an "illusion" doesn't make a difference from where I'm standing), I define meaning in my life. Not all consciously, but I have thoughts and desires. If it'll all be irrelevant when I die, why should I care? I'm not dead yet. If there is no afterlife, I won't be around to care. If there is, I'll figure it out on the fly.
  - Drakim 3y ago
    What actually changes if there is a creator though? Isn't it exactly the same, it "just happens" that a creator created a species and that species survives and reproduces. As you yourself say, it's merely a tautology to define purpose into existence, but the same is true even if a creator is involved, it's still just something that "happens". Something was created by a creator. Now what? Where did purpose come from?
    - kogus 3y ago
      Presumably the creator created with purpose. If I make a chair, it fulfills its purpose when it serves as a place to sit. It does not serve its purpose if someone uses it to awkwardly dig a hole. Likewise if God made me to, say, love and forgive others, I can either serve my purpose or not. But the purpose is given to me by the intent of the creator.
      - Drakim 3y ago
        If "purpose" is simply the intent of a creator, the words used to describe what the creator intended when they created, then I don't see the great loss in not having it. Imagine your father always wanted a child, and for the child to take over the family business. Is your life without merit, utterly void of value, if you become a fireman instead? After all, you are not fulfilling the purpose, the intent, of those who created you. Anything outside their specifications is meaningless nihilism, right? Personally, I think there is more to "purpose" than this definition, it's a very small definition that does not truly compass what people mean when they talk about purpose.
- vacuity 3y ago
  I'm not sure why parent involves abiogenesis, but as they go on to say, surviving and reproducing aren't really purposes (as in motivation) but self-evident truths. Something made to replicate itself into more things that self-replicate and so on.
  - Drakim 3y ago
    Self-evident truths of what exactly? Surviving and reproducing are facts of live, they are descriptive facts. What you ought to do with your life is not descriptive, but prescriptive. You cannot derive prescriptive statements from descriptive facts.
    - vacuity 3y ago
      I didn't say you could. GP didn't seem to either.
      - Drakim 3y ago
        Fair enough, but I felt you implied it by calling them self-evident. That's the sorta phrasing usually used when people try to wrangle meaning out of facts.
        vacuity 3y ago
        I guess I have to join advertising or PR now. sobs quietly in corner
feoren 3y ago
When you say "survival" in terms of Darwinian evolution, you're really talking about survival of specific genes. Why should we choose to be beholden to the primal "desires" (if you'll grant me the intentional stance) of our genes? We are the AI that our DNA invented that turned around and overthrew it. The planet is ours now, not our DNA's. There are many other things that evolve too: ideas, memes, viruses, and many more if you relax "evolution" to simply mean "progress", like my own knowledge and the capabilities of the human race. It's myopic to focus on genes alone. > eugenics Eugenics takes for granted the idea that some "genetic purity" is good for its own sake. Why? Why is a world with fewer, but "genetically superior" people, (and more genetically similar), better than a world with more people and more genetic variety? That's not even necessarily good even if you myopically focus on the actual gene pool, much less if you take all the other aspects of humanity into account. > So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so? Yes, there is: we all collectively decide properties of the world we'd like to live in, and we try to guess what kind of world future generations would also like to live in, and then we call those actions that ultimately improve those properties "good" and those that lessen those properties "bad", and we can even partially rank actions based on the integral of their effect on these properties from now until the end of the universe (allowing a Net Present Value calculation to avoid infinities, to acknowledge our imprecision of future outcomes and preferences, and even to simply prefer utility now over the same utility later). We try to maximize happiness (in its various forms, some more important than others) and minimize suffering (ditto), taking diminishing returns into account so we don't just make one dude trillions-happy at the expense of everyone else. This has infinite degrees of freedom and requires perfect knowledge of the future, so we know it's not actually possible to achieve, but it gives us a direction to orient our moral compasses and strive to get as close to this perfection as we can.
- vacuity 3y ago
  Objective, huh. Anyways, here's a problem in your last paragraph: We?
  - feoren 3y ago
scottLobster 3y ago
My perspective is that if there is any objective "meaning" to be known, we are as incapable of understanding it as mitochondria are incapable of understanding why they produce ATP. We don't "know", in the objective scientific sense, whether anything has any meaning, but it's useful to act as though it does. Useful being defined as reducing suffering/providing reward for ourselves and, on the scale of the species, for others. People search for meaning because finding it relieves suffering and provides reward, and people generally encourage others to find meaning because there are generally benefits to the species as a whole. Perhaps it's just a sophisticated way for our DNA to ensure its own propagation, perhaps there's something more to it, perhaps it's a random outcome of mutation. But it does relieve suffering and provide reward. That's good enough for me, there's plenty to do between here and the obvious limits of human knowledge that's likely to have far more impact on how we live. It's like if we're living on one of those flat-earther maps, and we can see the edge of the world, but there's lifetimes of uncharted territory between here and that edge. You can sit still and impotently focus on the edge, wondering if whatever's beyond it means that the world itself is meaningless, or you can explore the land in front of you and try to make something good happen, without particularly worrying about what's over the edge. Maybe one day we'll collectively get there and find out, but there's no way for you and I to do so in our lifetimes. So why worry about it? Of course if you want to claim that science and logical analysis is the be-all-end-all of existence, and you're unwilling to accept the unknown will likely remain unknown with our current biological capabilities, well I'd say "have fun" but you certainly won't. You'll just continuously suffer of your own accord, unwilling to accept any relief, continuously staring into Nietzsche's abyss until your organic form expires. If there is a metaphorical hell brought on by sin, that state would certainly be a candidate (the sin in this case being pride).
chronofar 3y ago
> So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so? I’m not sure how “higher beings say so” gets you to objectivity, especially when the very nature of our understanding of any such being would be anything but objective. Mostly what you’ve touched on there is that “good” and “bad” are rather inadequate descriptors of any sort of well reasoned and thorough analysis of many subjects. There can be multiple competing objective functions and incentives to analyze in complex systems, and simply labeling such things with any sort of dichotomy is liable to leave you wanting. This does not mean the answers lack objectivity, or value propositions that can be meaningfully evaluated, it simply means the objective evaluations are considerably more complex and nuanced than many are willing try and assess, and this poled subjectivity serves as a somewhat lazy proxy for performing a better evaluation. Sometimes this is necessary given our limited capacities in day to day life, but it does not inherently speak to limitations of objectivity or evaluation of morality or philosophy.
- beltsazar 3y ago
  > There can be multiple competing objective functions But my whole point is that there can only be one ultimate objective function: to maximize the chance of survival. There might be some other objective functions derived from the ultimate one, but none can be standalone. Other standalone "objective functions" can always be asked "Why is it desirable?" For example, why is minimizing suffering desirable? Pain is just a signal to the brain that something dangerous is happening. Murder is "bad" because a species that has fewer counts has a lesser chance to survive. Torture is not necessarily "bad", unless it's argued that it in the long run will lessen the chance of survival.
  - chronofar 3y ago
    I disagree that maximizing the chance for survival is the only ultimate objective function, or that it's somehow the only one that can escape "why is this desirable?" questioning, or that it is even coherent as an objective function in the long run (I see no reason to think the we'll run into technological limits that prevent us from deviating from natural evolution in the future for much, if perhaps not most of life). Evolutionary mechanisms do not bestow some "ultimate" or unquestionable truth/goal of which all others are subservient or branched from, it is merely an explanatory framework for biological continuation we've observed in the world, and like other similar explanatory frameworks we generally would do well to avoid attributing "purpose" where all we can see (if we can even see that) is "is." It certainly is likely an attributable factor for much of what we value as we are products of said process, but we do not owe it primacy any more than a computer off the assembly line owes the assembly line its purpose. To be honest I'm now a bit confused on your position, as you explicitly brought up points in your previous post that elucidated some of the cracks in attempting to treat survival as the "one true goal": > But when you think about it, there are "good" things that aren't advantageous (or even are harmful) to survival, and there are things advantageous to survival that are considered "bad" by most people. Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics. And I could posit other thought experiments or examples or such, but perhaps first I should ask how this line of questioning doesn't lead you away from survival as the ultimate objective function.
danparsonson 3y ago
> Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so? Physics has no concept of good or bad, so if you mean universally objective then I would argue not. However an analogous question might be, is there an objective comfortable or uncomfortable air temperature, and I think we could all agree that 25C is comfortable wheres 40C is not, so objectivity in that case is species-dependent. Therefore as you alluded to earlier in your post, what's 'objectively' good or bad is based on a consensus of what's good or bad for members of our species. It's actually relatively easy to have a good moral compass without a higher being looking over one's shoulder, although the idea of the higher being seems to induce some people to favour 'objectively' good over personally good when there is a choice to be made.
amelius 3y ago
This assumes that humans are great for the planet and life on it, which they are not.
- beltsazar 3y ago
  Help me to understand, I can't see any relevance. The way I see it, the only assumptions are the three premises I mentioned in the very beginning of the original post.
HKH2 3y ago
> Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics. Yeah, it's so bad that people want to be with whoever they find the most attractive. The government should just allocate partners to people at random to avoid eugenics (If you want a divorce then you get put back in the pool for reallocation.)
ChainOfFools 3y ago
Exodus (bible OT) contains a phrase (in the voice of god) that is remarkably precocious of its purpose: asserting, through unconventional grammar, a certain essentially existentialist claim completely unique to its speaker. έγώ είμι ό ών ( pardon the abuse of the acute accent, I can't get this IME to reproduce the grave) which is translated as "I am that I am," means something dynamically close to "I am the IS." or "I am that which IS." A structure that implies being outside the passage of time, uncreated and therefore not dependent on reproduction to continue surviving, or even on life to keep on living.
- throw0101a 3y ago
  * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am Which is where Aquinas and others get / build on the concept of 'God as verb'. God is not a thing or a being (not even the Supreme Being), but rather God is to be: Being itself. See Aquinas Summa contra Gentiles, XXII. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_contra_Gentiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_contra_Gentiles Search for ipsum esse subsistens (Subsisting Essence Itself) if you wish to go down this rabbit hole.

andrewjl 3y ago

> Life would have exactly two objective purposes: to survive and to reproduce. Why does abiogenesis and Darwinism being correct lead to those two being the objective purposes for humans?

kogus 3y ago
As it says: It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just happens that a species that survives and reproduces will continue to live. Without a creator, there is no real “purpose” at all. Everything came from nothing, will end as nothing, and is ultimately irrelevant. Everything. As a Christian, I sometimes look over into that chasm and wonder how atheists bear it.
- vacuity 3y ago
  I'm an agnostic (absolute, textbook definition) but I disagree. As a human with consciousness and free will (whether that's an "illusion" doesn't make a difference from where I'm standing), I define meaning in my life. Not all consciously, but I have thoughts and desires. If it'll all be irrelevant when I die, why should I care? I'm not dead yet. If there is no afterlife, I won't be around to care. If there is, I'll figure it out on the fly.
- Drakim 3y ago
  What actually changes if there is a creator though? Isn't it exactly the same, it "just happens" that a creator created a species and that species survives and reproduces. As you yourself say, it's merely a tautology to define purpose into existence, but the same is true even if a creator is involved, it's still just something that "happens". Something was created by a creator. Now what? Where did purpose come from?
  - kogus 3y ago
    Presumably the creator created with purpose. If I make a chair, it fulfills its purpose when it serves as a place to sit. It does not serve its purpose if someone uses it to awkwardly dig a hole. Likewise if God made me to, say, love and forgive others, I can either serve my purpose or not. But the purpose is given to me by the intent of the creator.
    - Drakim 3y ago
      If "purpose" is simply the intent of a creator, the words used to describe what the creator intended when they created, then I don't see the great loss in not having it. Imagine your father always wanted a child, and for the child to take over the family business. Is your life without merit, utterly void of value, if you become a fireman instead? After all, you are not fulfilling the purpose, the intent, of those who created you. Anything outside their specifications is meaningless nihilism, right? Personally, I think there is more to "purpose" than this definition, it's a very small definition that does not truly compass what people mean when they talk about purpose.
vacuity 3y ago
I'm not sure why parent involves abiogenesis, but as they go on to say, surviving and reproducing aren't really purposes (as in motivation) but self-evident truths. Something made to replicate itself into more things that self-replicate and so on.
- Drakim 3y ago
  Self-evident truths of what exactly? Surviving and reproducing are facts of live, they are descriptive facts. What you ought to do with your life is not descriptive, but prescriptive. You cannot derive prescriptive statements from descriptive facts.
  - vacuity 3y ago
    I didn't say you could. GP didn't seem to either.
    - Drakim 3y ago
      Fair enough, but I felt you implied it by calling them self-evident. That's the sorta phrasing usually used when people try to wrangle meaning out of facts.
      - vacuity 3y ago
        I guess I have to join advertising or PR now. sobs quietly in corner

feoren 3y ago

When you say "survival" in terms of Darwinian evolution, you're really talking about survival of specific genes. Why should we choose to be beholden to the primal "desires" (if you'll grant me the intentional stance) of our genes? We are the AI that our DNA invented that turned around and overthrew it. The planet is ours now, not our DNA's. There are many other things that evolve too: ideas, memes, viruses, and many more if you relax "evolution" to simply mean "progress", like my own knowledge and the capabilities of the human race. It's myopic to focus on genes alone. > eugenics Eugenics takes for granted the idea that some "genetic purity" is good for its own sake. Why? Why is a world with fewer, but "genetically superior" people, (and more genetically similar), better than a world with more people and more genetic variety? That's not even necessarily good even if you myopically focus on the actual gene pool, much less if you take all the other aspects of humanity into account. > So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so? Yes, there is: we all collectively decide properties of the world we'd like to live in, and we try to guess what kind of world future generations would also like to live in, and then we call those actions that ultimately improve those properties "good" and those that lessen those properties "bad", and we can even partially rank actions based on the integral of their effect on these properties from now until the end of the universe (allowing a Net Present Value calculation to avoid infinities, to acknowledge our imprecision of future outcomes and preferences, and even to simply prefer utility now over the same utility later). We try to maximize happiness (in its various forms, some more important than others) and minimize suffering (ditto), taking diminishing returns into account so we don't just make one dude trillions-happy at the expense of everyone else. This has infinite degrees of freedom and requires perfect knowledge of the future, so we know it's not actually possible to achieve, but it gives us a direction to orient our moral compasses and strive to get as close to this perfection as we can.

vacuity 3y ago
Objective, huh. Anyways, here's a problem in your last paragraph: We?
- feoren 3y ago

scottLobster 3y ago

My perspective is that if there is any objective "meaning" to be known, we are as incapable of understanding it as mitochondria are incapable of understanding why they produce ATP. We don't "know", in the objective scientific sense, whether anything has any meaning, but it's useful to act as though it does. Useful being defined as reducing suffering/providing reward for ourselves and, on the scale of the species, for others. People search for meaning because finding it relieves suffering and provides reward, and people generally encourage others to find meaning because there are generally benefits to the species as a whole. Perhaps it's just a sophisticated way for our DNA to ensure its own propagation, perhaps there's something more to it, perhaps it's a random outcome of mutation. But it does relieve suffering and provide reward. That's good enough for me, there's plenty to do between here and the obvious limits of human knowledge that's likely to have far more impact on how we live. It's like if we're living on one of those flat-earther maps, and we can see the edge of the world, but there's lifetimes of uncharted territory between here and that edge. You can sit still and impotently focus on the edge, wondering if whatever's beyond it means that the world itself is meaningless, or you can explore the land in front of you and try to make something good happen, without particularly worrying about what's over the edge. Maybe one day we'll collectively get there and find out, but there's no way for you and I to do so in our lifetimes. So why worry about it? Of course if you want to claim that science and logical analysis is the be-all-end-all of existence, and you're unwilling to accept the unknown will likely remain unknown with our current biological capabilities, well I'd say "have fun" but you certainly won't. You'll just continuously suffer of your own accord, unwilling to accept any relief, continuously staring into Nietzsche's abyss until your organic form expires. If there is a metaphorical hell brought on by sin, that state would certainly be a candidate (the sin in this case being pride).

chronofar 3y ago

> So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so? I’m not sure how “higher beings say so” gets you to objectivity, especially when the very nature of our understanding of any such being would be anything but objective. Mostly what you’ve touched on there is that “good” and “bad” are rather inadequate descriptors of any sort of well reasoned and thorough analysis of many subjects. There can be multiple competing objective functions and incentives to analyze in complex systems, and simply labeling such things with any sort of dichotomy is liable to leave you wanting. This does not mean the answers lack objectivity, or value propositions that can be meaningfully evaluated, it simply means the objective evaluations are considerably more complex and nuanced than many are willing try and assess, and this poled subjectivity serves as a somewhat lazy proxy for performing a better evaluation. Sometimes this is necessary given our limited capacities in day to day life, but it does not inherently speak to limitations of objectivity or evaluation of morality or philosophy.

beltsazar 3y ago
> There can be multiple competing objective functions But my whole point is that there can only be one ultimate objective function: to maximize the chance of survival. There might be some other objective functions derived from the ultimate one, but none can be standalone. Other standalone "objective functions" can always be asked "Why is it desirable?" For example, why is minimizing suffering desirable? Pain is just a signal to the brain that something dangerous is happening. Murder is "bad" because a species that has fewer counts has a lesser chance to survive. Torture is not necessarily "bad", unless it's argued that it in the long run will lessen the chance of survival.
- chronofar 3y ago
  I disagree that maximizing the chance for survival is the only ultimate objective function, or that it's somehow the only one that can escape "why is this desirable?" questioning, or that it is even coherent as an objective function in the long run (I see no reason to think the we'll run into technological limits that prevent us from deviating from natural evolution in the future for much, if perhaps not most of life). Evolutionary mechanisms do not bestow some "ultimate" or unquestionable truth/goal of which all others are subservient or branched from, it is merely an explanatory framework for biological continuation we've observed in the world, and like other similar explanatory frameworks we generally would do well to avoid attributing "purpose" where all we can see (if we can even see that) is "is." It certainly is likely an attributable factor for much of what we value as we are products of said process, but we do not owe it primacy any more than a computer off the assembly line owes the assembly line its purpose. To be honest I'm now a bit confused on your position, as you explicitly brought up points in your previous post that elucidated some of the cracks in attempting to treat survival as the "one true goal": > But when you think about it, there are "good" things that aren't advantageous (or even are harmful) to survival, and there are things advantageous to survival that are considered "bad" by most people. Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics. And I could posit other thought experiments or examples or such, but perhaps first I should ask how this line of questioning doesn't lead you away from survival as the ultimate objective function.

danparsonson 3y ago

> Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so? Physics has no concept of good or bad, so if you mean universally objective then I would argue not. However an analogous question might be, is there an objective comfortable or uncomfortable air temperature, and I think we could all agree that 25C is comfortable wheres 40C is not, so objectivity in that case is species-dependent. Therefore as you alluded to earlier in your post, what's 'objectively' good or bad is based on a consensus of what's good or bad for members of our species. It's actually relatively easy to have a good moral compass without a higher being looking over one's shoulder, although the idea of the higher being seems to induce some people to favour 'objectively' good over personally good when there is a choice to be made.

amelius 3y ago

This assumes that humans are great for the planet and life on it, which they are not.

beltsazar 3y ago
Help me to understand, I can't see any relevance. The way I see it, the only assumptions are the three premises I mentioned in the very beginning of the original post.

HKH2 3y ago

> Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics. Yeah, it's so bad that people want to be with whoever they find the most attractive. The government should just allocate partners to people at random to avoid eugenics (If you want a divorce then you get put back in the pool for reallocation.)

ChainOfFools 3y ago

Exodus (bible OT) contains a phrase (in the voice of god) that is remarkably precocious of its purpose: asserting, through unconventional grammar, a certain essentially existentialist claim completely unique to its speaker. έγώ είμι ό ών ( pardon the abuse of the acute accent, I can't get this IME to reproduce the grave) which is translated as "I am that I am," means something dynamically close to "I am the IS." or "I am that which IS." A structure that implies being outside the passage of time, uncreated and therefore not dependent on reproduction to continue surviving, or even on life to keep on living.

throw0101a 3y ago
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am Which is where Aquinas and others get / build on the concept of 'God as verb'. God is not a thing or a being (not even the Supreme Being), but rather God is to be: Being itself. See Aquinas Summa contra Gentiles, XXII. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_contra_Gentiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_contra_Gentiles Search for ipsum esse subsistens (Subsisting Essence Itself) if you wish to go down this rabbit hole.