What is existence?

[Nem]

st0pnsw0p said:

Nem said:

Why is the wrong question.

How is the right one.

Why is a human construct. It doesn't have to have an answer.

 

But since this is what's being asked the answer is: There is no reason. Existence is what you want to do with it. It's a consequence of quantum reactions at the end of the day. If i must have a reason, it's the pursuit of Happyness.

 

And yes, i know that it's cruel that it is this way and people turn to Religion because of it, but that is weakness. It's refusal to accept reality and fall for fairy tales.

Oh, to answer some of the questions:

Our thoughts are electro-magnetic pulses through brain cells. In truth they may very well be the product of chemical interactions and we actually don't have any free will at all. Though, we do seem to have the ability to resist it... or do we? It may just be adaptation skills.

Others being real. Well... yeah, it can be a huge illusion, but we can safely say they are real in a non-scientific way by unpredictability. When someone talks to me about a topic i never heard before, i don't think my mind could have locked it away just for that precise moment. If it is, then daaamn, our brains would be devious and highly efficient to say the least. I don't believe my brain can do all that or i'd be a super intelligent amazing being (way more than i already am :D ).

After death... who knows? It's most likely the end of consciouness. But the atoms that compose us will live on and continue to be star dust. The universe is much much bigger than any of us. We are but a spec of dust in the wind.

I guess existance is not the weird thing. Because we are atoms, we existed before. Counciousness is the odd one... or illusion of?

Yeah, we are nothing basically. Just live your lives to the max. Find happyness. That's what life is about.

Thoughts and electro-magnetic pulses are not the same thing, they are two very different things with very different sets of properties. The two are related, no doubt, but their relationship is not one of identity.

Whether or not free will exists depends on how it's defined. If by "free will" you mean the ability to make decisions completely unaffected by the circumstances surrounding us then you're absolutely correct that it doesn't exist, and this is the case even if our thoughts AREN'T the product of chemical processes. If by "free will" you means the capacity to make our own decisions, the you're absolutely wrong and free will does exist, even if we assume physicalism to be true and our thoughts to be the product of chemical processes in our brains. If physicalism is true then we ARE our brains and the processes taking place in them, so saying that they're the ones responsible for our choices is the same as saying that WE are the ones responsible for our choices.

If there is no consciousness then what is the thing being made to believe that there is a consciousness? Consciousness can't be an illusion because only conscious beings are subject to illusions.

 I can't very well be right or wrong when i asked a question. ^^

Thruth is, we don't have enough information to know yet. 

 

Though i wonder... if we have been "programmed" with chemical processes that determine our decisions, we wouldn't be more than a computer program. What distinguishes us is that we can process new information. How that works is the interesting part. A new concept, like quantum mechanics. How do our brains go about discovering different ways to think, to see reality, to discover? That, i believe, separates us currently from programs. We can accept new variables in a way a program can only accept the ones it was instructed to.

Though, there has to be a logic to the madness, and most likely there is, though we don't know how yet. The "secret" of counciousness may be there.

 

Until we find what that is people can relax about the machine invasions as machines are still stupid and only do what you tell them to.

 

VGPolyglot said:

palou said:

... that's not how math works.

 

2 things:

 

- There are, in fact, different , much bigger infinites (this is irrelevant in this case, though)

- "expansion" simply means that any 2 elements have, at limit, a greater distance between each other. This is fully possible, while staying within the same infinite subset of any metric.

Also, an infinite number of possibilities does not mean every single possibility, since if it's infinite there obviously can't ever be everything. But as for the universe being infinite, is there undeniable proof that it is?

Edit: Sorry, just noticed you already gotba better answer. Was still catching up with the thread.

The universe is infinite as far as we know. We can only measure how far the light goes, but it's not like it ends as far as we know. The light we can see ends. On the side of the big bang it gets so bright we can't see past it. Those are the "barriers". They only mean our inability to see past them.

Besides... it would only beg the question of what is in the other side then? 

I doubt our religious friends are reading, but the only honest answer to that question is "i don't know".

Last edited by Nem - on 11 February 2018