QUOTE (franzoir @ Jan 16 2010, 05:24 AM) I am very pessimitic about the nature of life but im not advocating mass destruction. I believe our emotional capacity makes life worth living despite its pointless nature. Which is why i argue for enriching experiences.
I tend to get pretty pessimistic myself from time to time, though on the whole, I think life is an amazing thing. I mean, you look at some of the basic "laws" we use to explain the nature of matter (physics, baby), and then some of the popular theories out there as to the origin and/or demise of the universe, I just get amazed. And then to think that on at least one small planet, some basic chemical compounds joined together that could grow, divide, and compete with each other, and over billions of years slowly changed into this huge diversity of life we see around us today. And then to think that we, of all creatures, have the capacity to (at some degree) understand this process, to consider our place in it all. I think it's pretty amazing stuff.
Sure, those ~3 billion years of evolution did leave us with some weird artifacts, although human emotion isn't really pointless, at least from an evolutionary perspective, as it plays a key role for maintaining a social species such as ours. Although yeah, there's still nothing "inherently meaningful" about it, or anything else for that matter.
QUOTE (franzoir @ Jan 16 2010, 05:24 AM)I just arbitrarily handed out labels so that people could question whether it suits them or not.
Really? If I had to use one word to describe my approach to thinking about things, I'd say it was Mathematical. In math, you have as few axioms as possible (assumptions you take for granted), definitions (words used to describe simple or complex ideas), and theorems (truths with always hold true, so long as you assume your axioms to hold true). After hundreds, thousands of years of carefully selecting axioms, of deriving full-proof theorems, we've turned mathematics into something both elegant and infinitely useful, even though in the end, it's simply based off of a few axioms we have no way of proving. Same way with life. You start off knowing nothing about the universe. You need to make some assumptions. Sure, you usually base them off of what others around tell you along with your own personal experiences, but those things are far from being solid evidence. Anyways, we make some useful assumptions about the nature of things, and from there we can derive all manner of truths, which (at best) can be considered absolute so long as the assumptions you're making are also taken as absolute truths. This approach works great for scientific endeavors. For other aspects of life, whether they be social, artistic, spiritual, or what have you, whatever assumptions you choose to accept really come down to personal preference, though I personally recommend things which are useful, elegant, beautiful, or all three.
I'm going to leave you alone now.
*jumps out window*