Yes, your view is consistent with your arguments, and it makes perfect sense, but it also seems to me that it partly dismisses the intention with my question.
We are humans, we are made of matter and energy, we feel and we evaluate. Yes, you can argue, correctly I assume, the Universe isn’t inherently moral, and to disagree with the spin I put to the question, but I am asking the Mind-you, not the Universe, how you feel, evaluate and discern this question, and the direct consequences those laws have in your life.
If you believe it is counterproductive to focus on the question, what I would find much more interesting is how you reasoned to get to that point.
Well, first I grew up reading fiction where the heroes had no choice but to win and make things better in an uncaring or outright-antagonistic universe, and subconsciously internalized the idea that everything is my/our responsibility, whether it’s my fault or not, and whether it’s within my power to change or not.
Then in a meandering discussion I had a biology professor freshman year of college I brought up the determinism/randomness dilemma I posed previously and he asked me, “Well, what is it you want from your free will?” After which I read a whole bunch of philosophy books and majored in physics. Along the way I had one philosophy professor say, in a lecture on moral philosophy, that, “A truly virtuous person would not have friends, just a general disposition to friendliness.” AKA that valuing any one person, including yourself, above others is a moral error (Note: I still believe this would be great in a world where everyone believed it and acted accordingly, but I don’t live in that world).
Along the way the mindset from the first paragraph, plus a few other things, led to me subconsciously suppressing my ow emotions. That slowly drove me into a depression over the course of about eight years, which it’s taken seven years of therapy and five years of antidepressants to break out of. It involved accepting that large parts of the world are just not my problem. Not that I won’t make an effort to improve them anyway, but rather that it’s ok, and necessary, for that effort to be bounded. And that feeling bad about this fact is a pure loss, to me, to those around me, and to my ability to enact the types of positive change I care about.
One positive note I’d add is that the more I learned about the physical world, the more I was able to see how much improvement is actually possible with the right knowledge and enough time and coordination to build stuff. As many problems and horrors as the world has, the laws of reality contain more than enough possibility for us to reduce, eliminate, or harness them and create a truly amazing future. Most people in daily life seem to think the world is bounded by what they’re familiar with, and I can’t even count how many times I’ve had people tell me that things that have already been done are either impossible or many decades away. It’s sad how many opportunities we’ve missed by just not trying or coordinating to make them happen faster, but that’s a temporary problem as long as we manage not to destroy ourselves.
I read, I think in one of Daniel Dennett’s books, that “The devil is the unfortunate amount of time it takes for sinners to evolve into saints.” I would add, “and learn to build angels.” But we’re getting there. I think this was maybe easier to see and believe a century or more ago, when physical progress was newer and we were less bombarded with images of every horror. The people who were alive to watch the Niagara Falls power plant being built and turned on could appreciate it without thinking about how America was still massacring the native Americans out west, and could feel and notice the wonders it brought to their own lives. But it’s really even more true today. For a number of years Nicholas Kristof would publish an end-of-year NYT column about how humanity had just had it’s best year ever, highlighting all the amazing progress that’d been made. And it’s not that hard, if you look in the right places, to see how we go from where we are today, technologically and infrastructurally, to a future where we’ve eradicated all infectious disease. solved aging, ensured abundant water and healthy food for everyone, dramatically reduced all forms of waste and pollution, and replaced all dirty energy sources while making everyone much richer. We already know that these will have huge downstream effects on other types of problems (political, social, personal, distributional) and will also let us redirect and target our future efforts on the many problems that will remain. I think it’s likely that my nieces and nephew will live for millennia, and at least possible that my parents might as well. In the long run, there’s no reason we can’t make the Goddess of Everything Else win.
I wasn’t expecting this response from you. Thank you, I am truly grateful for you sharing this with me. It is definitely a gift I will treasure, and it is also something I can work with more easily.
I am more of an intuitive person. Reading psychology, sociology, social sciences and experimental ideas/theories, and a lot of fiction and mind-boggling film. I am prone to reflecting, and delving into introspection, self-understanding and communication, societal and relational understandings. I haven’t read that much, but I have talked and delved deep into the nitty-gritty of my own and the psyche’s of other people. And, from that discovery, I started to notice, ever slowly, that I didn’t like to focus on the bad, the ugly and the dirty, below a certain threshold.
Which simply means, I am not able to handle a fundamental part of reality, but it didn’t bug me that much, as I similarly to you, grew up with ideals like the Phantom; simple good against bad—and the Bible. As I got older, things got more complex, but I held on to this belief that I could find some kind of level of complexity or abstraction, where my actions, thoughts or inner changes would matter sufficiently to seem to warrant the effort.
And, to my dismay, I had to accept that I was chasing my own tail. To follow that line of thinking would never end, I would forever try to force complexity inside my simple box of reality, and the effort would just strain me and not really bring me forward. Even though I can easily imagine and hold things lightly, I don’t go beyond a certain limit—some kind of mind-speed limitor, a reminder that “I’m not there yet”, or “a lot of things are missing before it would make sense to look at these issues”.
I did however meet someone that I acknowledged as an equal in their pursuit of making sense of things, and at that point many things clicked in place for me. Much of the reason I have in the last years radically changed a lot of my views about things, is because I through my partner have been confronted with an understanding of the world that was so different from my own—but that was similarly well-founded—that I had to either ignore it or try to widen the box and include many of the elements I had previously disregarded, dismissed or simplified nearly out of existence. And I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by.
I find some solace in imagining having different Cognitive functions/People in my mind, like a team or something—all with different ways of seeing the world, that dig out different data and even interprets that data differently. The reason I do this is not because I like to make things overly complicated, but that I have simply found no better practical explanation for how radically different these parts of the psyche interact with and view the world. Their increased cooperation, has taken me and us to places where we are regularly confronted by many sets of opposites and dichotomies that are seemingly diametrically opposed, that somehow still fit together and can create new options and directions.
As with many things, it isn’t quite easy to translate this back the other way around, to simplify the complex. I can drive a bike, but I can’t really explain how. Or, when I start to delve seriously into how I drive a bike, all the nuances and details, depending on how far I take it, it might end up as hard because of the opposite problem, that there is too much information for it to be divulged easily.
With regard to your choice on how to interact with the future, I also see entirely different options entirely. And I don’t like to dismiss them, even when it hurts to feel or look at. But I am averse to sharing them directly, and I am trying to backtrack to somewhere where I can talk and express things without getting lost in the myriad of interconnected parts, a place where it can be explained more coherently and easy to follow.
Asking this question is part of it. But this isn’t where I’m at, it is simply the intersection point where I can talk about something without veering totally of course—I hoped :)
Hello AnthonyC,
Yes, your view is consistent with your arguments, and it makes perfect sense, but it also seems to me that it partly dismisses the intention with my question.
We are humans, we are made of matter and energy, we feel and we evaluate.
Yes, you can argue, correctly I assume, the Universe isn’t inherently moral, and to disagree with the spin I put to the question, but I am asking the Mind-you, not the Universe, how you feel, evaluate and discern this question, and the direct consequences those laws have in your life.
If you believe it is counterproductive to focus on the question, what I would find much more interesting is how you reasoned to get to that point.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Ah, I see.
Well, first I grew up reading fiction where the heroes had no choice but to win and make things better in an uncaring or outright-antagonistic universe, and subconsciously internalized the idea that everything is my/our responsibility, whether it’s my fault or not, and whether it’s within my power to change or not.
Then in a meandering discussion I had a biology professor freshman year of college I brought up the determinism/randomness dilemma I posed previously and he asked me, “Well, what is it you want from your free will?” After which I read a whole bunch of philosophy books and majored in physics. Along the way I had one philosophy professor say, in a lecture on moral philosophy, that, “A truly virtuous person would not have friends, just a general disposition to friendliness.” AKA that valuing any one person, including yourself, above others is a moral error (Note: I still believe this would be great in a world where everyone believed it and acted accordingly, but I don’t live in that world).
Along the way the mindset from the first paragraph, plus a few other things, led to me subconsciously suppressing my ow emotions. That slowly drove me into a depression over the course of about eight years, which it’s taken seven years of therapy and five years of antidepressants to break out of. It involved accepting that large parts of the world are just not my problem. Not that I won’t make an effort to improve them anyway, but rather that it’s ok, and necessary, for that effort to be bounded. And that feeling bad about this fact is a pure loss, to me, to those around me, and to my ability to enact the types of positive change I care about.
One positive note I’d add is that the more I learned about the physical world, the more I was able to see how much improvement is actually possible with the right knowledge and enough time and coordination to build stuff. As many problems and horrors as the world has, the laws of reality contain more than enough possibility for us to reduce, eliminate, or harness them and create a truly amazing future. Most people in daily life seem to think the world is bounded by what they’re familiar with, and I can’t even count how many times I’ve had people tell me that things that have already been done are either impossible or many decades away. It’s sad how many opportunities we’ve missed by just not trying or coordinating to make them happen faster, but that’s a temporary problem as long as we manage not to destroy ourselves.
I read, I think in one of Daniel Dennett’s books, that “The devil is the unfortunate amount of time it takes for sinners to evolve into saints.” I would add, “and learn to build angels.” But we’re getting there. I think this was maybe easier to see and believe a century or more ago, when physical progress was newer and we were less bombarded with images of every horror. The people who were alive to watch the Niagara Falls power plant being built and turned on could appreciate it without thinking about how America was still massacring the native Americans out west, and could feel and notice the wonders it brought to their own lives. But it’s really even more true today. For a number of years Nicholas Kristof would publish an end-of-year NYT column about how humanity had just had it’s best year ever, highlighting all the amazing progress that’d been made. And it’s not that hard, if you look in the right places, to see how we go from where we are today, technologically and infrastructurally, to a future where we’ve eradicated all infectious disease. solved aging, ensured abundant water and healthy food for everyone, dramatically reduced all forms of waste and pollution, and replaced all dirty energy sources while making everyone much richer. We already know that these will have huge downstream effects on other types of problems (political, social, personal, distributional) and will also let us redirect and target our future efforts on the many problems that will remain. I think it’s likely that my nieces and nephew will live for millennia, and at least possible that my parents might as well. In the long run, there’s no reason we can’t make the Goddess of Everything Else win.
I wasn’t expecting this response from you. Thank you, I am truly grateful for you sharing this with me. It is definitely a gift I will treasure, and it is also something I can work with more easily.
I am more of an intuitive person. Reading psychology, sociology, social sciences and experimental ideas/theories, and a lot of fiction and mind-boggling film. I am prone to reflecting, and delving into introspection, self-understanding and communication, societal and relational understandings. I haven’t read that much, but I have talked and delved deep into the nitty-gritty of my own and the psyche’s of other people. And, from that discovery, I started to notice, ever slowly, that I didn’t like to focus on the bad, the ugly and the dirty, below a certain threshold.
Which simply means, I am not able to handle a fundamental part of reality, but it didn’t bug me that much, as I similarly to you, grew up with ideals like the Phantom; simple good against bad—and the Bible. As I got older, things got more complex, but I held on to this belief that I could find some kind of level of complexity or abstraction, where my actions, thoughts or inner changes would matter sufficiently to seem to warrant the effort.
And, to my dismay, I had to accept that I was chasing my own tail. To follow that line of thinking would never end, I would forever try to force complexity inside my simple box of reality, and the effort would just strain me and not really bring me forward. Even though I can easily imagine and hold things lightly, I don’t go beyond a certain limit—some kind of mind-speed limitor, a reminder that “I’m not there yet”, or “a lot of things are missing before it would make sense to look at these issues”.
I did however meet someone that I acknowledged as an equal in their pursuit of making sense of things, and at that point many things clicked in place for me. Much of the reason I have in the last years radically changed a lot of my views about things, is because I through my partner have been confronted with an understanding of the world that was so different from my own—but that was similarly well-founded—that I had to either ignore it or try to widen the box and include many of the elements I had previously disregarded, dismissed or simplified nearly out of existence. And I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by.
I find some solace in imagining having different Cognitive functions/People in my mind, like a team or something—all with different ways of seeing the world, that dig out different data and even interprets that data differently. The reason I do this is not because I like to make things overly complicated, but that I have simply found no better practical explanation for how radically different these parts of the psyche interact with and view the world. Their increased cooperation, has taken me and us to places where we are regularly confronted by many sets of opposites and dichotomies that are seemingly diametrically opposed, that somehow still fit together and can create new options and directions.
As with many things, it isn’t quite easy to translate this back the other way around, to simplify the complex. I can drive a bike, but I can’t really explain how. Or, when I start to delve seriously into how I drive a bike, all the nuances and details, depending on how far I take it, it might end up as hard because of the opposite problem, that there is too much information for it to be divulged easily.
With regard to your choice on how to interact with the future, I also see entirely different options entirely. And I don’t like to dismiss them, even when it hurts to feel or look at. But I am averse to sharing them directly, and I am trying to backtrack to somewhere where I can talk and express things without getting lost in the myriad of interconnected parts, a place where it can be explained more coherently and easy to follow.
Asking this question is part of it. But this isn’t where I’m at, it is simply the intersection point where I can talk about something without veering totally of course—I hoped :)
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence