I know I normally post something controversial/news related, but today I'm just in a really detached, pensive mood.
So if you would care to indulge me, I have a question to ask.
Has anyone ever had one of those days where life just seems TOO real?
I was driving my car yesterday when suddenly I just thought to myself, "I'm moving along, operating a two ton machine at fifty miles an hour, and just calmly accepting it as completely natural."
I know everyone KNOWS that's what reality is, but don't we just take it for granted most of the time? I know I do. Half the time I feel like I'm just flowing through from action to action, event to event, and the ends are always what constitute our lives.
As soon as I thought about it, about how the world REALLY worked, how everything went on around us, without us, BAM. I was so strung out, I felt like I was on a bad trip.
Suddenly the car felt TOO real, the motion TOO vivid. It was like a bad dream. It was like someone had juts thawed me out of a giant icicle, and I just had one of those thoughts like: "'what if this is it?"
Hypothetically, let's say there is no God, no ends, no means, no purpose. There is just LIFE. Animal instinct drives creatures to survive, to live, and to procreate.
We have this same drives, these same instincts and inhibitions.
But we are also the first fully cognizant animals, very much aware of our own ability and potential, as well as our inevitable demise.
How will we tackle this issue as the centuries pass?Or rather, how will the evolutionary process tackle this? Assuming we don't kill ourselves off with the many means at our disposal, how will our schemas develop around science? around this new wave of atheism?
We would no longer need to procreate, to strive, to interact. We live, then we die. And even if we procreate, the universe is eventually going to collapse into nothingness again, right?
Forget Atheism, this goes beyond that. The future seems to be one of Existentialism, no, beyond that, so far as Nihilism even.
So now the daunting question arises: "Is this it?"
Perhaps humans are as far as we go, as far as we can go, as far as we will go.
But then what of life? Did it all just build and form and prosper, against all odds, in the realm of twilight, only to be shut out again by a cold deafening darkness?
Then WHAT IS THE POINT OF LIVING?
See? This is why I'm a Deist. Not because I fear death, and require a God to sustain me, but rather because I can't believe that life could be so driven, and so adaptable, just to be reduced to its basest of forms again. I refuse to believe life is an eternal triviality, doomed to struggle and suffer like Sisyphus, only to have our efforts toppled once again at their peak.
Maybe that just makes me ignorant.
that is all life is
our supposed "purpose" in life is to reproduce, evolve, survive...
there is no "higher calling" because there is no god. yea, it sounds bleak. but thats dosent mean its untrue. the source of your deism is derived from your inability to accept that we are nothing more than a "triviality".
but just because you cant accept it dosent mean it cant be true, does it?
No. It is very possible that it's far truer then I can ever hope to comprehend.
But why would we be given a survival instinct, when the game ends and the score is all 0 anyway? Eventually everything dies, for good.
My main question though was: now that we are aware that we are doomed one way or another, will it affect our evolutionary process at all? Or even..is this as high as we can go?
~The Writer~
see, your taking all of this from a very nihilist perspective. why should we let it stop us?
sure, we dont have any real "purpose" in life. then why dont we give ourselves purpose? life has no meaning, so lets give it meaning. take control and become your own god, master of your own destiny.
yea, eventually all that is will be gone. into nothingness, into empty space. but that dosent mean that we cannot improve on ourselves at the moment, it dosent mean that we cant work to give each other and the coming generation a better life. maybe there wont be a giant scoreboard when you die, telling you all the good things youve done. and maybe, in the end, it is all meaningless in the objective sense. but thats fine. because subjectively, to you and to those you have help along the way, it will have meaning.
"why" is not the question. there is no why. in a universe without a creator, there is no reason. it just is. we have the instinct to survive because that is lifes goal. why? it is irrelevant. we can speculate. but fundamentally its because that is what embodies life. the desire to live.
just because we know that we are going to die, and even that we are going to die and there is no afterlife, does not mean that we have no purpose. you know that, even though im an atheist, id rather live in a christian society than an atheist one. why? because, for most people, they need religion to help give them meaning. and because of that there will always be religion, there will always be a set of principles that will help people go through this cruel process known as life
but for you and me, who dont have that background, we must make due with what we have. give yourself meaning. find something that you want to do, set a goal, find an issue that you are truly passionate about. set your mind to it and make it your purpose. the objective reality that what you accomplish is meaningless is, in itself, meaningless if you give meaning to what you have set your mind to. because no matter what you live in a subjective reality and therefore anything you believe in has purpose.
I understand all that.
And I'm looking at this from a scientific, evolutionary standpoint rather then a personal, psychological one.
What if, because our brains have evolved to reason that we are all that there is, we begin evolving into a rather different species? One that likes all instincts and drives?
~The Writer~