4 ms·

You should also read Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene. Everything we think we are, and what we are here to do, is fight to make our kids or our kin’s kids (if we can’

You should also read Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene. Everything we think we are, and what we are here to do, is fight to make our kids or our kin’s kids (if we can’t / won’t reproduce) survive and do the same. Politics, architecture, everything is you being manipulated to do this.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Oh yes that’s a great one too. The general category of evolutionary biology humbles you quickly out of any notion that thinking you have anything resembling free will in most of your life.
trgn 3y ago
I think stepgen gould (?) joked that taking that perspective, you could easily argue that the purpose of the human organism was for shit to make more shit.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Sincerely, there really is no meaning to life other than to make more life. Cancer is the extreme and absolute epitome of this. Any other meanings we as humans might contrive from life are all just coping mechanisms from that brutally simple reality.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    And that only because the kinds of life that (briefly) didn’t absolutely prioritize making more life are, almost by definition, extinct.
  - ordu 3y ago
    You postulate that evolutionary forces are the only source of meaning. But there is another point of view, stating that the only source of meaning is a human mind. Without an human observer there is no meaning at all. If we go this road, then human mind is a byproduct of evolution that invented "meaning" and I see no obvious reason to subordinate it to evolution, which is a meaning created by a human mind to make sense of empirical data it got. I can agree that other biological features of human body and of human mind serve to evolution, and it kinda subordinates our minds to evolution, and recursively it subordinates meaning. But I cannot fathom is it even possible to argue that all mind's traits are subordinated to evolution. There are things like schizophrenia that doesn't seem very good for evolution. Probanly there are better hidden traits, that may give our minds some freedom from evolution.
    - galaxyLogic 3y ago
      I don't think evolution creates or produces "meaning". It is just a blind dumb mechanism which occurs when things self-replicate. Meaning is something in the human mind, related to language. Words and other actions have "meaning". We can ask "what is the meaning of this word, or of this action?". Meaning relates to communication between individuals, not to emergent phenomena like evolution.
galaxyLogic 3y ago
And "kin" basically means anybody or anything that contains SOME of the same DNA.
Qwertious 3y ago
>Everything we think we are, and what we are here to do, is fight to make our kids or our kin’s kids (if we can’t / won’t reproduce) survive and do the same. IIRC, the point is that this is not the case - that's what our genes "want", with manipulations like sex feeling good to get us to have children (but we fought back with contraception, and evolution is extremely slow to catch up).

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

Oh yes that’s a great one too. The general category of evolutionary biology humbles you quickly out of any notion that thinking you have anything resembling free will in most of your life.

trgn 3y ago

I think stepgen gould (?) joked that taking that perspective, you could easily argue that the purpose of the human organism was for shit to make more shit.

Dalewyn 3y ago
Sincerely, there really is no meaning to life other than to make more life. Cancer is the extreme and absolute epitome of this. Any other meanings we as humans might contrive from life are all just coping mechanisms from that brutally simple reality.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  And that only because the kinds of life that (briefly) didn’t absolutely prioritize making more life are, almost by definition, extinct.
- ordu 3y ago
  You postulate that evolutionary forces are the only source of meaning. But there is another point of view, stating that the only source of meaning is a human mind. Without an human observer there is no meaning at all. If we go this road, then human mind is a byproduct of evolution that invented "meaning" and I see no obvious reason to subordinate it to evolution, which is a meaning created by a human mind to make sense of empirical data it got. I can agree that other biological features of human body and of human mind serve to evolution, and it kinda subordinates our minds to evolution, and recursively it subordinates meaning. But I cannot fathom is it even possible to argue that all mind's traits are subordinated to evolution. There are things like schizophrenia that doesn't seem very good for evolution. Probanly there are better hidden traits, that may give our minds some freedom from evolution.
  - galaxyLogic 3y ago
    I don't think evolution creates or produces "meaning". It is just a blind dumb mechanism which occurs when things self-replicate. Meaning is something in the human mind, related to language. Words and other actions have "meaning". We can ask "what is the meaning of this word, or of this action?". Meaning relates to communication between individuals, not to emergent phenomena like evolution.

galaxyLogic 3y ago

And "kin" basically means anybody or anything that contains SOME of the same DNA.

Qwertious 3y ago

>Everything we think we are, and what we are here to do, is fight to make our kids or our kin’s kids (if we can’t / won’t reproduce) survive and do the same. IIRC, the point is that this is not the case - that's what our genes "want", with manipulations like sex feeling good to get us to have children (but we fought back with contraception, and evolution is extremely slow to catch up).