An observer imparts meaning and order to the things it can observe. For the 17 year locusts it is one thing; for our cats it is another; For posters here, it is varied and likely different.
What is the point of life?
- Thread starter gozpel
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I mean, surely you are aware that I was bypassing that point
In the (likely) absence of a hierarchically important observer, any sentient observer of note can be asked. You don't need to read 20 pages of Heidegger to get to that.
You're going to have to unpack this a bit more. The specifying of "inherent" wasn't originally there, so unless it's presupposed via some kind of context I'm unaware of, it seems to be simply an argument towards devaluing the importance of life. It doesn't just mean human life here. Anything.
One of the problems I have with "random creation means nothing is important" is it's frequently used to justify nihilistic, often reactionary opinions. If I had to put a spin on it, to misquote Syndrome (from the Incredibles, because why not that's about as good as I'm going to get philosophically, personally), I'd say it means everything is important. And "when everything is important, then nothing will be", hah. But seriously. Just because something was random, or was born out of chaos, doesn't mean it can't be important. Some of the greatest human advances in history came out of random chance.
Yes, it relates to our perception of what "important" means, but that's presupposed when discussing the point of life as per the thread. Like, what use does referring to the Sun have? Nobody knows. Nobody knows what geothermal forces care about. Maybe every force in this universe is sentient (as per how we understand sentience) but we just can't observe it, or they simply don't care enough to interact. Who knows! I mean, this could be a really dumb point (I mean it in good faith), but it seems silly to take these shots at a human-centered argument, but then assume how things like the Sun or physical forces work based on your understanding; i.e. a human understanding of those things and what they can perceive?
I found this "game"/"map" called "If the Moon Were Only One Pixel" that allows you to travel the whole solar system, from the Sun to Pluto, and see the relative sizes of each, along with their major moons and experience the vast distances between the planets. It was really interesting thought exercise.
The main site, with the creator's intro and a link to the map itself:
https://joshworth.com/portfolio-items/if-the-moon-were-only-1-pixel/
If you just want to skip all that and go straight to the map:
https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
I actually sat down and scrolled through the entire thing, and read all his jokes, and commentary that he includes to break up the vast emptiness. It actually took quite a long time to get through the whole map. If you scroll at full speed you're traveling about 1 light minute per second, so roughly 60 times the speed of light(? am I calculating that correctly?) which is around Warp 4 in Star Trek. Scrolling full speed without stopping to admire the planets or read any of the commentary, it will take you about 5 or 6 minutes.
There are buttons at the bottom to change how the distance is displayed from km to miles, to light-seconds, to fun things like "blue whales"
. There are also buttons at the top that allow you to fast forward from one planet to the next in just a couple seconds if you don't feel like scrolling manually, but I found it very interesting to actually scroll through the whole thing.The distances between planets is mindboggling, even moreso when you get to the outer planets, especially given how I've seen the solar system depicted in books and planetariums, etc., my whole life. It kinda bummed me out a bit, because it made me realize how far we are from humans engaging in any regular interplanetary travel. All in all, though it was a fun, simple map to play around with.
@hobbsyoyo - I'm tagging you because I'd love to hear your thoughts on the map
Gori the Grey
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You haven't read your Encyclopedia Brown, Sommer.
That's true
Space (and solar system) is huge! The distances mostly unimaginable. Always as been.
Not that huge compared to global debt. Very few distances measure in the trillions.
Earth #1
In philosophy, debt is just a concept and doesn't really exist, like individuals. And anyway, trillions is not a big number in cosmic terms. You should be thinking in terms of parsecs.
Gori the Grey
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He solves one of his mysteries by knowing the actual scale of the solar system.
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
Not really, no. As you say the key word is inherent. I as a human being value human life, but that is a moral judgement. There is nothing inherently better or more important about human life than microbial life, or an insect's life. they're just different forms of life. Human life is not objectively more important than a flies (an is statement), but there are many reasons why we should value a human's life over an ants (ought statement).
That is true. It's a philosophical knee-jerk reaction, not a logical conclusion, but people often confuse those
Sure, but we weren't necessarily comparing human life to those things. I wasn't trying to anyhow. The thing I took object to was that nothing was important, and not only that, but because of the proposed origin being random in nature.
I'm going to struggle here because I'm an engineer and in no way philosophical, but here goes. "importance" can be an emergent property in a developed system. Any system. Oxygen at high concentrations in an atmosphere can be toxic to certain forms of life, but in lower concentrations can proliferate other forms of life. Suddenly, oxygen is important. Not because anybody has assigned it meaning, but because it supports something other than itself, without even realising or meaning to (presumably, hah). To the things that depend on it, it has importance. Relative to other things, sure, it might have less, or none. But it's still pivotal in that particular context, and assuming biological and geological conditions replicate, any other context throughout the universe. Its importance is therefore a constant, irrespective of any one, singular context.
Maybe I'm just not understanding the words as they're intended in this kind of discussion. As an engineer, I'm definitely more utilitarian in my definitions with things.
I imagine that in the - not so distant - future, people will be using dna (human, animal) to run calculations. Things which are impossible now, will be easy to achieve with machines that cost as much as a pocket calculator used to (when those still existed, I mean).
It is a thing. The main problem is that it is error prone, but there are applications for which that is an advantage.
hobbsyoyo
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I don't want to come across as glib but I see the vast void that bums you out as an exciting challenge. It gets to the root of what I am doing and hope to keep on doing my whole career: figuring out ways to get people and things from one end of that black void to the other, as quickly and economically as can be done. At one point I started a thread in the science and math subgroup called 'the 1% project' or something where I hoped to put together a bunch of calculations on how you could get a ship with an ordinary nuclear fission reactor up to 1% of light speed. These are the kinds of things I think about for fun.@hobbsyoyo - I'm tagging you because I'd love to hear your thoughts on the map
Gori the Grey
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What he presupposes does in fact exist. That is to say, there do exist human observers. For as long as that may prove to be the case, there are beings to whom things import. As a result, things are important.
We can of course raise this issue again once there are no human beings. And we will likely give a different answer at that point.
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You might think that the money I owe to the chemist is a lot, but that's just peanuts compared to Global debt
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
I can vibe with this re-definition of important, I feel it may actually benefit our discussion hugely, precisely because it is not as anthropocentric.
One curiosity though: Is there anything that, depending on its concentration, is utterly unimportant? Because I honestly don't think so. Doesn't matter if it's temperature, gravity, rainfall, population sizes, doesn't anything become important under the correct circumstances, and aren't those circumstances mostly arbitrary?
Aren't all three "stages" of oxygen equally important - High concentration meaning certain death, medium being some kind of life-enabling equilibrium, the last meaning the complete absence of oxygen, again certain death? I think if we take your definition for granted than no property is ever unimportant, which in turn means everything is important, which in turn kind of defies the very definition of "important" as we use it in a colloquial context.
Maybe if we take a route of: "A property is important to the degree to which it effects other properties in its own or other systems".
In that case "important" would mean a similiar thing as to what "significant" means in science/statistics. I'm not sure this preserves the original meaning of the word important, but it seems like a good working definition. If you think about it, a property can theoretically affect many other properties, but in absolutely marginal ways. In that case surely we would not call that property important. So what counts is both the amount of other properties it affects and the degree to which it affects them.
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