Show your phylosofical ability...

[Sublab]

If the world is mind and matter solely, mixed with desire and emotion, driven by a human nature that surged through history to get us where we are now... What is the basics of it all? What is the essence of human nature? What is the essence of our desire and its energy? Why are we here? Why is there even conciousness? And even more so, what is the essence of conciousness? I mean, we are all alive, we experience the world, we suck it all in, we grow old and then we die. One could pose the question: did we really experience anything truelly? If we'd be able to let go of emotion and desire and its inherent predomination above true experience, would there maybe be a different world?

A funny side note, at least to me, is that scientists have pin pointed the big bang down to the size of a molecule from which an explosion came that made all of the universe AND us on our extremely tiny planet orbiting a very neglegible star.

You are what you is, but why is what you is so conciously aware of being?

[L-A]

I'm having trouble with the way you're usings all those plural.

More seriously, I think consciousness is either the result of an intervention that happens at a level beyond our possible understanding, or truly a random occurrence that led us to where we are today. Which one it is, I have no strong conviction.

As to what motivates me from day to day, there are intellectual and very physical reasons:

Hobbies I want to dive deeper into, pleasures I'd like to know a couple more times, and a general curiosity that makes me interested in tomorrow. What's interesting is that we have survival and common growth instincts that act on us at an individual level. The desire for self-preservation, applied to all (well, most) individuals of a whole species, isn't so selfish in the end.

[Sublab]

[quote=L-A;11498348]I'm having trouble with the way you're usings all those plural.

Subconciously grab the remote and zap it away bro! No need for undue baby snakebites.

[fdeck]

Originally Posted by Sublab

If the world is mind and matter solely, mixed with desire and emotion, driven by a human nature that surged through history to get us where we are now... What is the basics of it all? What is the essence of human nature? What is the essence of our desire and its energy? Why are we here? Why is there even conciousness? And even more so, what is the essence of conciousness? I mean, we are all alive, we experience the world, we suck it all in, we grow old and then we die. One could pose the question: did we really experience anything truelly? If we'd be able to let go of emotion and desire and its inherent predomination above true experience, would there maybe be a different world?

A funny side note, at least to me, is that scientists have pin pointed the big bang down to the size of a molecule from which an explosion came that made all of the universe AND us on our extremely tiny planet orbiting a very neglegible star.

You are what you is, but why is what you is so conciously aware of being?

A smart person suggested Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett to me.

[carlos840]

Its actually philosophical!

Just saying...

[Crass!]

No reason.

Rubber (Official Movie Site) - A Film by Quentin Dupieux - Now Available on DVD and Blu-rayâ„¢ - Trailers, Pictures & More

[MakiSupaStar]

[Buxtehude]

Originally Posted by carlos840

Its actually philosophical!

Just saying...

Thanks. Saves me saying it.

[Pilgrim]

To quote the sage and philosopher Pogo Possum, it's "philisophiwockle".

[L-A]

Redonkulous!

[Correlli]

"Highest virtues include intelligence, sexual control, and practicing rituals" - Pythagorean School

[Papa Dangerous]

Originally Posted by Sublab

If the world is mind and matter solely, mixed with desire and emotion, driven by a human nature that surged through history to get us where we are now... What is the basics of it all? What is the essence of human nature? What is the essence of our desire and its energy? Why are we here? Why is there even conciousness? And even more so, what is the essence of conciousness? I mean, we are all alive, we experience the world, we suck it all in, we grow old and then we die. One could pose the question: did we really experience anything truelly? If we'd be able to let go of emotion and desire and its inherent predomination above true experience, would there maybe be a different world?

A funny side note, at least to me, is that scientists have pin pointed the big bang down to the size of a molecule from which an explosion came that made all of the universe AND us on our extremely tiny planet orbiting a very neglegible star.

You are what you is, but why is what you is so conciously aware of being?

First off, this sound like a college assignment that is being passed off as a philosophical thought. But I love a good thought, so I will take the bait on this one.

If the world is solely mind and matter that seems to incorporate just about everything we know. If something is matter, it is a physical item (solid). Even gas and liquid is a type of matter, thus we have all solids, liquids and gases accounted for by the term “matter.” As for mind, this seems to include all things of the mind, including thoughts, theories, cognitive thoughts, and such other human mind related things. This includes human functioning as well such as neurochemical impulses. Now, a lot of people believe that other humans have personal energies. This can be recognized via meditation and the like, but even if a person does not practice it, they still have this energy within them. Grass, trees, flowers, rocks, water, and other forms of nature how a type of energy as well. Emotions and desires are part of human instinct, as well as any other creature. Desire = if we are hungry, we desire food. If we thirst, we desire water. It is part of our function to want things in order to survive. These desires may be now as in us wanting new basses, but the basis of that is still the same. Emotions are noticed in humans, obviously, but it is also in animals too! How do we know animals have emotions? Well, there is such a thing called Learned Helplessness. If you take a mouse and put it on an electric grid and shock it over and over… it will learn to just give into the pain and accept it. Even if the opportunity to escape the shock is available, it will not move. It will just stay there and accept the pain. This emotion is fear/helplessness.

Things get fuzzy when you throw in consciousness. Evolution states that we were once primates and evolved. Through evolution our brains grew larger and more powerful. If our old brain functions by controlling our involuntary movements (breathing, blinking etc) and our prefrontal and frontal cortex are responsible for our personalities, one can conclude that through this process, people developed a consciousness, subconscious and ability to understand (at least the best we can) it. I am not saying an animal does not have conscious abilities, because there are experiments that suggest they do. (Studies concluded that when you put a dot with marker, or a sticker or what not on an animal’s forehead, than present that animal a mirror it will react in one of two ways. One, if the animal looks in the mirror and does not notice that there is a dot on its head, and does not realize there is something wrong, then they do not recognize themselves as an individual. However, if the animal tries to wipe off the dot, it shows that the animal has a sense of self, and thus they can be said to be conscious of their own being.) But being that I am only me, I can only base things off of what I have experienced. I trust other humans are the same as me because we are wired pretty much the same, and they too have expressed this consciousness. How many of you can agree that you have this little voice inside your head that you sometimes talk with, or you hear talk to you as you type out a long, thought out response? I personally believe that is not just our thought process, but part of our consciousness. It gives us advice when we are in a situation where we have to think really hard. It is that voice of reason that tells you to not beat down that ahole that stole your woman – despite how much you would really like to break his #$%ing legs.

So now we have defined these items and how they exist in the human world, and to some degree in the animal world. What are the basics of it? Well, that is very vague. That essentially is the time old question: “What is the meaning to life.” I cannot, nor can anyone else answer this question. We may get an answer when we die, or we may not. The essence of human nature is so survive and procreate. It is pretty much any species nature to produce offspring to ensure the survival of its species. Otherwise that species is no longer in existence, and the point – the essence – is gone. The essence of human nature and human desire are quite similar. Human nature is the desire to survive, is it not? Like mentioned before, our desire for new materials is just an expansion of our desire to survive. We have wants and needs and they are not always for material items. Sometimes a person desires love and affection, and this inherent from when we are children as well as in animals. Monkeys will be attracted to a surrogate mother that provides warmth as opposed to a metal surrogate mother that provides food. (They will feed when hungry, but when done, go to the warm surrogate mother for the feeling or warmth and comfort. In humans, and many other species (such as penguins) when two of them are united, they spend a life time together and raise their young. Their young grow up and repeat the process. (Humans no longer stick to this exclusively with a divorce rate of 50%, single parent and no biological parent situations). The “energy” of desire can be seen as the end result of such desires. How many times have you cuddled up with the guy or gal of your dreams and just have an overwhelming feeling that cannot be described? A yearning for closeness and affection beyond belief that you will do anything to have in your possession. This can be seen as the result of brain chemicals going off in your brain and throughout your body. It is the chemicals that make you feel that way, the moment of being with that person that triggers that result, and the desire is what put you into that position in the first place.

Why we are here goes back to the meaning of life. It is very hard, actually impossible, to answer that question. It can go from absolute no reason, to some religious belief. Neither way, there is no exact answer, nor is there any amount of philosophy that can even come close to answering it. Everything can be rebuked in some fashion. Consciousness can be seen as an advanced form of survival. Subconsciousness is another advanced form of a survival trait. Our subconscious does a lot that we do not even realize. I believe we can attribute the blocking out of excessive information to our subconscious ways. If we really were conscious of every minute detail that we seen throughout the day, our brains would overload. Imagine walking down the streets of a very busy city (let’s say NYC) and we noticed every single car, color, person, building, hat, doorway etc. – our brains would not be able to handle it all. This information gets sorted out through our subconscious. Look at déjà vu. If you see a white van drive pass through a window when sitting in a classroom of a specific class – the next time a white van drives by, you may catch it out of the corner of your eye if you are in the same seat as last time. This can result in that feeling of déjà vu, as if you relived the moment. You do not recall the first time the van drove by because your subconscious blocked it out, but the memory is still subconsciously stored, thus it feels as if time has repeated. Sometimes it is necessary to block out memories in order to survive. Whether it is like the aforementioned example, or in the cases of rape, our brain/subconscious does this so that we may move and continue life in such a fashion that is not debilitating. The essence of our conscious/subconscious can be survival, but as humans with the most developed brain of any other species we know – we have personalities, likes, dislikes, interests, disinterests, passions, responsibilities, and so on. We seem to have this ability that we can tap into the powers of our inner consciousness (maybe through meditation) and use it for personal growth. Perhaps it is part of human nature to reach this a state of nirvana, but due to everything that we are surrounded by, we are so easily distracted and withdrawn from it. I mean, how many children want to sit on a rock and focus for three hours when they can be playing xbox live? Perhaps the ambition of this human desire is another survival trait. To achieve such a state of being can lead to longer and happier life – healthier and less stress.

Did we really experience anything true? Yes, I would say that we did. A better question, did you ever experience something not true? How can you experience something that is not true? Even dreams have biological explanations, despite that they are still a great mystery. Day dreams are true in the sense that you thought of them and played a role in shaping what happens in your thoughts. If thoughts are part of your consciousness and your consciousness is already recognized to exist, than everything we ever experience has to be true. How does emotion and desire have an inherent domination over true experience? They seem like they would be on equal plains. If emotions and desires are part of an experience, and all experiences are true, then they do not dominate it. I would see experience being the result of emotion and desire. If your emotions or desires tell you to do something (whether you do them or not) will lead to an experience of some sort. If you were to “let go” or completely remove emotions and desire from the scenario, there may or may not be experience. If these things did not exist, than there would be no desire to exist, thus we would not be able to experience anything. However, if we did not exist as humans, but our souls (souls were not mentioned in the question, but I will define it as our subconscious energy that can exist outside the human body, and possibly inhabit some other type of body) still existed, than the possibility of experience can be infinite.

Scientists merely believe the concept of the big bang, and there is no proof. Humans beings are such a tiny, tiny, tiny, miniscule, portion of the entire universe (everything in and outside our solar system.), but that does not mean we are not important to the scheme of things. Granted, what we do here may impact the distant solar systems. We sent out radio signals a very long time ago, and they are still being sent through space. That means we are leaving an imprint on the universe. We have no idea if something outside our world has utilized those signals. Perhaps on some distant planet with advanced beings, they are watching I Love Lucy and learning about the people of America in the 1950s. It may not mean a lot to many, but it is still a single imprint of human kind upon the rest of everything in existence.

Yes, I am what I am. Why am I what I am, and why am I aware of it? Well, I do not know, I just am. It is a result from having a fully functional human brain. That can simply relate back to the: “What is the meaning to life” question. Or it can result back to the humans evolving throughout our existence, and it became part of our survival and dominance over the world. To sum it all up, we are who we are, and we that is all. We do what we do because it seems to feel right.
I hope you got some answer out of all of this. The worst part is, I put a good amount of time into writing this (I guess I miss college after all) and I do not know if anyone will actually take the time to read it. At least in school, the teacher cared to read my papers. Oh well, if anything, I learned a bit of something from thinking about all this, and I guess that is all that matters to me in the end! xD

[Papa Dangerous]

i just started to reread what I had wrote, and I notice some grammatical errors and some possibly unclear syntax and word usage to prove a point. I am too lazy to fix it thought. Just throwing it out there that I am aware

[Munjibunga]

Originally Posted by Sublab

If the world is mind and matter solely, mixed with desire and emotion, driven by a human nature that surged through history to get us where we are now... What is the basics of it all? What is the essence of human nature? What is the essence of our desire and its energy? Why are we here? Why is there even conciousness? And even more so, what is the essence of conciousness? I mean, we are all alive, we experience the world, we suck it all in, we grow old and then we die. One could pose the question: did we really experience anything truelly? If we'd be able to let go of emotion and desire and its inherent predomination above true experience, would there maybe be a different world?

A funny side note, at least to me, is that scientists have pin pointed the big bang down to the size of a molecule from which an explosion came that made all of the universe AND us on our extremely tiny planet orbiting a very neglegible star.

You are what you is, but why is what you is so conciously aware of being?

I've got all the specific answers to those questions but, for now, think of it like this: We are the instrument of the universe looking at itself. I'll get back to you on the rest of it.

[Munjibunga]

Originally Posted by Papa Dangerous

i just started to reread what I had wrote, and I notice some grammatical errors and some possibly unclear syntax and word usage to prove a point. I am too lazy to fix it thought. Just throwing it out there that I am aware

I don't see any profound revelations in there. Not much bang for the buck, bandwidth-wise.

Q. What is the meaning of life?
A. Dunno. Ask Pauly Shore.

Also, this business about the radio waves. The Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of about 100,000 light-years. The farthest our radio waves could have travelled by now is a little over 110 light-years. There are a good number of stars within that radius of Earth, but not enough to statistically support the liklihood of intelligent life in a planetary system. Some think the radio waves are so weak by the time they've traveled 4 light years or so, they are obscured by the background radiation. There are no known star systems with planets within that radius.

[flypejose]

After you have paid close attention to nature in general without any preconceived idea, I mean, after you have sorted out all the known data regarding the various fauna and flora systems, and all the physical phenomena in the universe (that you possibly can of course), you are more likely to be left with a real sense that there is some sort of meaning to this life!

A sense of meaning more convincing than the usual naturalistic explanations which ironically, fuel more questions due to their unsatisfying character. Look around, these existential questions keep on popping out in spite of the scientific “progress”! And obviously you wouldn’t have asked them in the first place if you already had satisfying answers!

I came to realize that you don’t get that sensation in a debate setting.

Be in the delivery room watching your kid crying as he comes into this world, observe the same going instinctively for his mother’s breast, which is precisely designed for the very purpose of feeding that precious little one with some nutritious fluids! Watch the birds in the sky, scrutinize a feather, and ask yourself which came first; the chicken or the egg (you a philosopher, right?)

At this point, many of the previous attempts at answering these tough questions will start to sound silly to your ears.

Besides directly observing nature, ask yourself why some of your actions appear to your “consciousness” as being absolutely bad, even when they give you pleasure and don’t “hurt” anybody?

Just some thoughts on whether life has a meaning. No definitive answers…

[bassybill]

Evolution states that we were once primates and evolved.

Close, but not quite spot on.

Biologists state that all modern day primates, including humans, have evolved from earlier primates (amongst other things).

Just sayin'.

[bassybill]

... the chicken or the egg...

Had a good discussion of that old one with my students the other day. It's a question that can be answered, but you have to be very precise about your definition of "chicken" and "egg" (especially the latter) before tackling it. And the answer to it just depends on semantics - it's really nothing to do with the "grander" areas of philosophy.

By the way, science is most emphatically not concerned with answering existential questions, if by that we mean questions like "what is the meaning of life?" That's because such questions can't be investigated using scientific method. The meaning of life is an entirely personal construct and any answers to that question are purely personal views - some very thoughtfully considered, others less so.

[Correlli]

"Artistic creation, seems to be rooted in a kind of inspired madness" - Plato

[L-A]

Oh, this question again. Dinosaurs laid eggs, you know.