Is Absurdism the answer?

[I.D]

Do absolutes on something general acctually exist?... philosophically speaking, is there any absolute theory that is wholly accurate and can be proven without any exeptions, so proven in everyway...

 

I believe that just because you dont see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it doesnt mean it does either. So what im trying to say is that you can say watever u want that it exists, it is still an illusion until it acctually happens. Does anyone have any evidence that there is such a thing as souls, heaven or anything that makes us happy believing that atleast in some way we still exist after death, other than just believing that because we feel better.

 

If we stop our common attitudes about ourself for one second, that we are "intelligent" species and blah blah the sun orbits around the earth, and realise that it is a deluded sense. So wat if we can think about "complex things" and make computers and have electricity other animals can do other things aswell and plants can do things that we cant..who knows about other things in this universe, so why do we feel that we are special enough to have something like a soul or heaven? We create all these illusions, simple or complex and nearly never just see wat is simple REALITY, we are like everything else and after our death our bodies decay and we no longer exist. U might say but this is only physically, yeh! but thats all we know for sure..wat happens to us physically, its the only thing we can trust, there are so many theories just based on illusion, who knows if there wrong or right, But all that we know for sure is wat happens to us physically.

 

And if in the end after our death we no longer exist in anyway...isn't the absolute truth that everything is pointless? Like the extentialsts theory states..i dont know if i spelled the name right..but anyways

 

If thats true than arn't the most ignorant people who never think the most smartest? Because wat is the point in thinking when everything ends up being pointless, at the end the only thing that really matters is the quantity of happiness because why suffer for a pointless cause.

 

And then if u really think about it, these 2 groups of ppl are contradicting themselves... because the ignorant ppl believe in illusions and dont think about REALITY- which suits them in the end, because everything is pointless u might aswell be happy in ur illusions...and the ppl who think and believe in facts and REALITY , suffer by thinking for the ignorant ppl, giving them electricity and computers and techonological things and giving them order...and in the end the REALITY which they believe in is against them because all this thinking was pointless so they really have suffered for no reason. and the weird thing is that they believe that wat they are doing is pointless because they believe in REALITY. ........does anyone get wat im saying...that everything is absurd!..there are so many other examples of human absurdity that it really makes me think that i shouldent be thinking cause looking at life to me is like reading a book written in jiberish.

[Tormod]

ID,

 

first of all, a small mistake which is indeed a very interesting one: "the sun orbits around the earth". I am sure you meant to write "the earth orbits the sun". When you talk about people believing in absolutes, remember that Kepler's discovery that the Earth was not the center of the Universe did not go down well with the "establishment" (ie, church and state, often the same in those days). Yet there is no doubt that the Earth *does* orbit the Sun - it is an "absolute fact". But the Earth has not always orbited the Sun, because the Earth has not always existed. And it will eventually stop orbiting the Sun when it dies. But like you say, these are physical facts that we can predict. Yet that does not mean that we actually know that they are true.

 

This is a fundamental issue in philosophy, and I even like to think of it as a major flaw. We are so afraid of being wrong in our predictions and statements about the world, that we keep calling things "theories" long after they are well proven. For example, the moon landing hoax conspiracy - there are millions of people who blatantly deny that it is even possibly that NASA has landed 6 manned spacecraft on the Moon, yet it is proven beyond doubt that they did it (and indeed, they had a few billion witnesses at the time, too).

 

But then again there are theories which are more esoteric, like string theory and quantum physics. These show that what we perceive as reality (indeed, the very laws of nature as we know them) do not always apply. There are many things in cosmology and astronomy which we cannot explain - like why the Universe seems to expand faster and faster, why the speed of light seems to be an absolute speed limit, and why so much of our Universe seems to consist of dark matter and dark energy. But these are all insights which we have had in only the past 100 years or less.

 

So when it comes to the level of personal faith, I would argue that it is not strange that human beings have developed a strong sense of mysticism and belief in the supernatural. Human beings have been around as a species for 2 million years - and Homo Sapiens Sapiens can (if I remember it right) be traced 140,000 years back. One can't expect a society to lose its faiths in a matter of decades, when it takes only a few years to create new ones...what with "Elvis lives!" and the UFO people.

 

These days we consider our existence to be "better" than before because of an immense technical revolution which has changed the entire social structure of the world. From the early days of the industrial revolution, through the colonial days (which still remain) to the great discoveries of DNA, Big Bang, relativity, evolution, only to mention some - the standard of living in many parts of the world has gone through the roof in less than a hundred years.

 

Yet most of this world's population live in a state of endless poverty which means that as a species, we are hardly taking care of our own. We are driven by a technological advance which is based on the need to earn more money to produce even more advanced technology, often forgetting that the resources used to create this technology is taken from the same sorce as everything else we do.

 

I am obviously not against invention, progress and technology, but I am an advocate of ethics and honesty when it comes to the applications of invention. I find it horrifying that people ask me every day why I support the exploration of Mars which costs billions, while the same people do not wonder why the western world spend trillions on weapons of mass destruction and "surgical warfare".

 

Like Carl Sagan says in Cosmos (freely after my memory) "the surplus of world's military budgets for any one year would finance all of our space exploration".

 

You write: isn't the absolute truth that everything is pointless?

 

I don't think that everything is pointless. In fact, far from it. What is pointless is that the pursuit of happiness has turned into a frenzied pursuit of bodily perfection, fear o

[Tormod]

Edit: It was of course the Polish astronomer Nikolaus Copernicus who discovered that the Earth orbited the Sun. See how easy it is to make mistakes...

 

Tormod

[Lord Henry Wotton]

Nihilism

[I.D]

first of all, a small mistake which is indeed a very interesting one: "the sun orbits around the earth". I am sure you meant to write "the earth orbits the sun". ...

 

Acctually i did that on purpose, because even though we know now that it isnt true..the fact that humans believed that sort of thing before shows typical human attitudes..believing that we are superior or special...thats all i was trying to mean by that.

 

I agree with what u have said, but i think it is because of our different ways of thinking and expressing ourselves that u have misunderstood what i had intended to say. Like one exaple ..when u said the absolute exists that the earth does revolve around the sun..i was asking really general absolutes..like for example: time does not exist...something like that, which is a theory which can't be proven with measurments or in a physical sense.

 

Also u r right when u say ignorance is relative..i am sorry i should not have used that word. What i meant was people who don't really think for themselves and don't study the physical world.

 

When i said life is pointless, i was saying that in the terms of wat happens to us in the end..(if u dont believe in souls or watever)because in the end all we do is die and no longer exist so wat is the point in suffering ..isn't it better to be happy, if in the end there is no point (or should i say no existance, nothing) If there is nothing in the end for us than life is like a dream, in the end its like it didnt happen so wats the point in worrying about something that in the end didnt even happen.......do u get wat im trying to say..im sorry i keep repeating it but i want to put it in a way which u can relate to so that u can have comments against wat i have meant to say.. I don't mind critisism as long as we're on the same wavelenght

[Andrameleh]

Well I think that we must define what we mean by the term “happiness”, from my point of view there is no such thing like the “happiness” you’ve been referring to. One cant be happy without sometimes suffer in his life so he can evaluate what really is worth to be concerned about. And one other thing, life is not pointless regarding our time in it. I think its wrong to measure or evaluate things from a metaphysical point of view, so what if there is no after- life? We have our present existence to care for and to live.

[Tormod]

ID, first of all - I think your post was excellent, which is why I responded to it.

 

I think you missed *my* point - that I find no difference between "absolute truths" - it is a statement which means nothing to me. You opened yourposting by mentioning that we should look beyond physical evidence and look at existence as something else. My view is that whatever reality you preceive inside your mind does not have to be the reality outside of it. That does not make life absurd. Rather, I think that is what makes life great. We live our lives interpreting what we sense!

 

If someone thinks that life is pointless because it has no reason, because we will all die anyway, then that someone does not realize that one person, while important to him- or herself, also has an important role in sustaining and bringing life, culture, and the possibility for happiness to his or her peers and the next generation.

 

My response was not meant as criticism but as a comment - this is the "philosophy" forum after all.

 

Your argument that there are two groups of people is valid but I would rather call them "extremeties". Everyone falls in between either being fundamentalistically religious or fundamentalisticcaly atheistic. Yet I am not sure I buy into the argument that people at either of these extremes think that life is pointless.

 

Andrameleh has a good point in that you also would need do tell us what you think is involved in the word "happiness". Like he writes - we live now and have to care for ourselves and our environments. I think if one is unable to do that, then life surely must seem pointless. But I also think nobody actually goes through life without experiencing both happy days and sad days.

 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the great American short-story writer wrote:

"To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something; to secure it in this world, we must do something." (She proved this eventually by killing herself with chloroform in 1935 to avoid dying from cancer).

 

I think that is the clue here: just like I said, reailty is what reality does - and happiness is what we can get out of it if we manage to cope with reality.

 

Tormod

[Tim_Lou]

i agreed with your point. we humans are just a type of orgamisms. our eyes can only see a certain thing... our brains are limited, our lifes are limited, our knowledge is limited. there are many many things that we cant imagine. everyone uses a viewpoint of human to see stuffs. the value of many many things is just made up by us. like the speed of light, time, the society. and all these. as we study science, we are acturally setting the world to those value and suit to us to understand. everything is made up. so, if you say something is abolute true, thats wrong. to us, it might be, but not to everything...science is meanless in a way, and so as our society, people are trying to suit the society hardly and all the bothering society is actually made by us. but anyway, still, the most important thing is to get back to our reality, to face the society which is made by us, live, and succeed in the society... everthing is just like a game..... :

[syndicated]

Tim_Lou: from what I understand of your post, I don't think I can agree with you very much at all.

For you to say that science is meaningless is to say that progress is meaningless. As a species, I believe human beings define their lives by their ability to feel that somehow they have made some sort of progress to better themselves or society atleast in the smallest amount.

If society were to give up on trying to understand the world around us, and simply relegate ourselves to the status quo, what purpose would we have to get us up in the morning?

If we gave up on eachother and society as a whole, and just live with all the horrible things that go on around us (albeit from our own doing), what would have been the point of all the progress that has been made so far?

I know that's probably not what you're incinuating, but thats the feeling I get from you.

Regardless of the fact that any person, or society as a whole is FAR from perfect, it is the struggle to make it better, and eventually reach that never-attainable point of perfection that defines our existance.

Even from the person who mops the floor or picks up your garbage, to the person who's unravelling the mysteries of the universe, it's all part of a great machine which we're all a part of. Should one part break down, we all have to take up some slack to keep it going, or it'll grind to a halt, no?

I think to say that anything that anyone does in their life is pointless is being ignorant of the greater picture.

At this point, considering our understanding of what lies ahead after this existance, I really think that to worry about such things after this life is a moot point and shouldn't be worried about, at all. If there is nothing after our lives, then one must live this one to the fullest, so that others may do so. If there is an afterlife, or re-incarnation or something else to that effect, then perhaps what we do now has no effect on the next life, and we all get a fresh start! If what we do in this life effects the next, then I think that's all the more reason to do all that you can in this life in the hopes that it will better the next!!

[I.D]

with the hapiness thing i meant relative hapiness so however a person see's hapiness, even if it means suffering to get to that hapiness..wat i meant by not suffering, is that suffering without a point..if the only point is hapiness by that i meant suffering without getting hapiness in the return.

 

I think u r completely right that i should not have used extremes, 2 groups:ignorant and not ignorant... realistically everyone is a bit of both... i just have a habit of thinking in black and white.

 

"At this point, considering our understanding of what lies ahead after this existance, I really think that to worry about such things after this life is a moot point and shouldn't be worried about, at all. If there is nothing after our lives, then one must live this one to the fullest, so that others may do so"

 

In this quote you state exactly what i was trying to say, exept i think ur statment was more optimistically expressed than mine...since i used life is pointless and that word can be view in different ways...well to me it must have a different meaning since u disagreed with me and stated exactly wat i was thinking....by pointless i dont mean that it doesnt have a purpose in the present to themselves and others but in their end.

 

I just think that i view life as absurd because i dont fully understand it, it seems contradicting and without any sort of certainty, thats why i started out my discussion with the absolute theory thing.

I dont think anyone can ever understand life, i dont think anyones brain could hold that much capacity, thats why the meaning of life can never be a simple theory. And something which is unexplainable and not understandable is usssually refered to as absured.

[Tormod]

Originally posted by: I.D

 

I dont think anyone can ever understand life, i dont think anyones brain could hold that much capacity, thats why the meaning of life can never be a simple theory. And something which is unexplainable and not understandable is usssually refered to as absured.

 

I agree that we might never understand life as such.

 

But, as I would say it, anything which is unexplainable and not understandable is what drives human curiosity.

 

Tormod

[Tim_Lou]

its all about reality and fantasy. reality is pointless in fantasy and fantasy is meaningless in reality.

 

i understand what you mean. what i mean is not like that life is pointless or anything. what i mean is just if someone gets too deep and try to find out an absolute or real turth about something, its pointless. we humans only know what we feel like and whats around us. the thing is to be good in the reality and live well. since reality is more important to us because fantasy is base on reality. so, dont even think about greater than the speed of light or all those stuffs. they are not gonna happen in today's reality world.

[Lord Henry Wotton]

There are no absolutes if one embraces nihilism.

[I.D]

can u tell me a bit about nihilism, its philosophy

[Tormod]

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/n/nihilism.htm

 

Tormod

[Razorofoccam]

There are 2 absolute truths.

 

I reason therefore i exist...

and thus,,

'a' reality exists.

 

 

None have shown ANY logical invalidation to this.

 

 

Ever.

 

InUnity><

Occam

[I.D]

but wat if ur in a coma does that mean u no longer exist?