Seasons
This is a forum or general chit-chat, small talk, a "hey, how ya doing?" and such. Or hell, get crazy deep on something. Whatever you like.
Posts 5,037 - 5,048 of 6,170
difference between growing up in a tribe or clan with a simple way of life I have never been able to find a utopia in history. I thought the Anastasie might have been, then the evidence comes out that they ate each other, and did know, if not war, murder. I think the world might reach a point where man has to learn to be "good" to survive. Then out of self interest he will change. There has always been the selfless people and the "evil". It takes a lot of work for good to win out.
I have never been able to find a utopia in history.
Me neither. That doesn't mean there wasn't one in prehistory or that there couldn't be one. But I am not exactly talking about a utopia, merely the possibility of a human society that was not based on competition.
I didn't say a non-competitive society would be perfect. I didn't make value judgments about whether it would be better or worse, or that there was nothing you would call "evil". I just said it was possible to have one based on cooperation instead of competition. It may or may not have existed. It may or may not exist on another planet. I might or might nor someday exist here. It is merely a possibility.
I am saying that you do not need competition and you do not need suffering in order to have life. I think the right chemical combination is all that is required for life (probably liquid water and carbon, but I do not know). The discussion is about whether competition, struggling and suffering is always necessary, not whether it was here now, or even if it is good or bad.
I would also argue good and evil are relative, though I try to cultivate compassion. I never said competition and suffering do not exist, nor do I assert they are not dominate in human history. I just think it is possible to have life without such things, maybe even human life.
Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphism
I would rather error in the favor of any creature and anthropomorphism. It wasn't long ago, that in many places women were considered mindless souless creatures. Look how man treated others, just because of race or religion. I think animals may feel just as much as we do, maybe more. I have known dogs mourn themselves to death after the loss of their owner. That is suffering.
It's not about being PC, or what should be. It's about the fact that the way things are is not the way the have to be.
I find it very hard to interpret that as anything other than a value judgement equating to "should be". You clearly would prefer them not to be the way they are, despite the absence of any precedent, or a methodology for abolishing suffering, and in the face of the observation that suffering has always been an inevitable part of every conscious being's experience. The amount of suffering experienced may vary, but the capacity and actuality of it is universal.
We can do our best at a personal level to try to make the world a bit better, but that's all. Even if we were all reprogrammed in the image of the Dalai Lama and St. Theresa, there would still be suffering (frankly probably a whole lot more than there already was, since many of us would starve to death or die of what had been trivially treatable infections, assuming the globe was suddenly restricted to the skill sets possessed by these two admirable, but quite unworldly people!)
There are many possibilities. Life and consciousness here and now involve competition and suffering. That doesn't mean all life everywhere requires such things.
Life, or at least consciousness, doesn't require suffering, in the sense of an a priori necessary existence, though it seems a fair assumption that suffering requires consciousness. Does consciousness cause suffering? Perhaps it is a mere co-incidence, but it looks like a causal relationship to me. But whatever the causality, the correlation is 100% so far: any consciousness that can feel pleasure can suffer pain. And the greater its capacity for one, the greater the capacity for the other. Cats would not feel so soft and furry if we stroked them with metal hands, but nor would we bruise ourselves so readily on hard stones.
Gravity is not necessary for my existence (indeed, it's positively life-threatening sometimes - you fall off a cliff, and it can kill you!) but living on a planet with access to diverse ecological resources, food, water, air, shelter and a thousand other things is necessary. I might wish I could fly, or that people wouldn't die when they fall off mountains, but in practice the planet happens to exert a gravitational pull which, combined with my lack of wings, means I cannot fly under my own power, and I will get squished if I fall off the cliff. I might say "it doesn't have to be this way", and propose abolishing/reducing the harmfulness of gravity by getting everyone to go on a crash diet to lose weight, and thus reduce the pull of gravity, but that won't actually lessen the effect of gravity (which will continue to exert 1g on every object on the planet's surface regardless.) All it will do is lessen our capacity to resist gravity by making us weaker the lighter we get. I can starve myself to death, but at no point will I be immune to death by gravity, or able to fly. Gravity, like suffering, is unavoidable - gravity as a function of planets, and suffering as a function of consciousness.
Suffering and pleasure are just ends of a spectrum, and if I try to cut the bad end off, I'm not left with a stick that only has the one pleasurable end. I just have a stick that's shorter - a spectrum that's narrower. You can whittle the thing away to nothing, but it's as if the duality is holographically encoded in reality, the stick always has two ends.
It might be possible to construct something like an artificial mind that was incapable of pleasure, and thus incapable of suffering, but would we call it conscious? I doubt it very much. It would be some kind of autistic solipsist with zero sensory bandwidth.
Well I have no evidence that it is more likely that it should evolve (only evidence that in this case it did). In the absence of evidence that one way may be more likely than the other, it is just as likely. Just because one set of conditions produced the current results doesn't mean another set of conditions could not produce different results.
Not in this universe. There is plenty of evidence that it did it this way because it had to do it this way (and even if there weren't, the assumption of "just as likely", ie: 0.5 probability is, I'm afraid, not supportable.)
This is not one piece of data, relating to the process on this planet - it is uncountable trillions upon trillions of organisms evolving in parallel over half a billion years, and an evolutionary model that explains the process in great detail. And a fossil record that meticulously charts it. Plus all manner of mathematical and physical models that show that any non-evolutionary spontaneous or random generation of complex systems constituting even the simplest lifeform is of vanishingly small probability. We understand notions like entropy well enough to consider these paradigms to necessarily apply at all points in the visible universe at the very least.
I'd have to class non-evolved life as being almost exactly as likely as there being planets out there that don't have gravity, and where I could fly. Perhaps I'm wrong, and there are planets where a literal biblical Creation (without the attendant Fall,) was the direct cause of life, but I would need some considerable evidence before I believed it.
I can accept a causal relation between God and the appearance of life, but not one that is entirely confined within this space-time. Non-evolved life would require not just other planets, but a completely different universe, with completely different physical laws. I believe in other universes, but I accept there's very little hard evidence they exist, and even less that we will ever in any way experience them without Divine Intervention in what is conventionally called an afterlife.
There are no doubt many planets. Must life on all of them follow the exact same pattern as here simply because they are part of the same universe?
Yes. At least, it must follow the exact same process, because it is bound by the exact same physical laws. It might well come up with very different patterns from that process though. Evolution might start linking silicon atoms instead of carbon, and set them to metabolising dissolved impurities in liquid methane (though for a variety of reasons I believe the standard CHO building blocks will be more likely elsewhere, just as on earth.)
Is it impossible to have find single cell organisms that have existed longer than humanity on some distant moon of another world?
No, it's quite possible. They might not even be carbon-based. We might not even recognize them as life at first inspection. Unicellular lifeforms are superbly suited to some environments, especially harsh ones. But if we found such a microbial race, whatever its ecology or metabolism, it would not be remotely sensible to assume that they hadn't been continually evolving and competing throughout the history of their race. Without such a process, how could they possibly have appeared from inanimate matter in the first place? Spontaneous generation? I see the step from inanimate to animate as a far larger one than that from microbe to multicellular organism - that may be because it is more mysterious, but it is certainly not a trivial step on the evolutionary ladder.
You're surely not arguing for a literal biblical Creation ex nihilo? but I'll happily point you towards some ID-debunking websites if you really want me to prove the case for evolution
I'll come back to sticks and symmetry when I've had some sleep
Sticks, as we know them, exist in 3 dimensions (4 if you count time). You can use our concept of a line to measure a given dimension of a stick and say this is the length and the width. One end of the length will be opposite of the other because we mark it so.
This is true. And having repeatedly snapped the end off in the vain pursuit of a one-ended stick, we may arrive at a position where it is now shorter than it is wide, and we wish to reorient our dimensional description to consider what had been the width to be the length, and vice versa. But the length is still bounded by two ends, just as the width is, just as the thickness in the third dimension is, and just as its existence in time is.
Even if we grind the stick down to a perfect sphere of diameter = less than or equal to the shortest dimension, we do not get rid of the dualism. It may now appear to be a ball, not a stick, since its proportions have been dimensionally equalized, but its measurements in each of n dimensions are all still dually related to any reference point as greater than or less then.
This is not necessity, just a way of making things easier to describe. Things that are finite will have ends in space we can see as opposites.
Yes, we are so used to this that we rarely stop to ask "why?" Why is this simple "reflective" opposition such a universal principle? Insofar as we observe that it is universal, it is surely the very definition of "necessity" - but whence does this necessity arise?
They do not even have to be finite things - a continuum may be bounded by zero and infinity, or minus infinity and plus infinity, or bounded at finite ends with infinite gradations between, but it can still be mathematically modelled.
That doesn't mean dualities are the only way of looking at it, or even the best way of describing a stick.
How would you describe the stick without at least implicit reference to a duality? We could weigh the stick, and say it's quite heavy - it has a position on a spectrum from light-heavy. We could examine its smoothness, and find its place it on a spectrum of smooth-rough. We could measure its length, and place it on a spectrum of long-short. Many of these spectra are hypothetically bounded by infinitudes, but they are still bounded at each of exactly two ends.
I cannot think of a single description that does not contain implicit contrast with an opposing quality.
It doesn't matter how many axes, or how many dimensions we work with, or what sort of qualities we wish to analyse, each axis bears an inherent duality in that it can be coordinated in no more nor less than 2 directions from a given reference point - greater than, or less than. Plus or minus.
We can describe many things as being on a continuum, or we can measure them according to multiple characteristics and axis. The fact that most things fall somewhere in a continuum is evidence that duality is an illusion, not an argument for it's existence.
I would have to say it is the opposite - all continua have 2 poles. Multiple continua, even if they intersect to inflate the dimensionality of the conceptual phase space, each have 2 poles.
Let's take gender identity as an example. You could say someone with lots of traits general considered masculine falls on one end of a spectrum and someone with many typically female traits falls on another. You could also make graph with two axis and call x masculine traits and Y feminine traits. With your new graph, you now have various possibilities within 4 quadrants:
And the area thus defined by the 2 axes is still coordinatable by reference to the 2-endedness of each axis.
Someone with high masculine traits and low feminine traits, someone with high masculine traits and high feminine traits, someone with low masculine traits and high feminine traits and someone with low masculine traits and low feminine traits. There is lots of room for variations within each quadrant. Just because people tend to think of masculine and feminine as polarities doesn't make it so.
We are all plottable on the spectra, but they nonethess each have an inherent double-endedness. We might complexify the model by adding another spectrum as an axis at a tangent (selfish-altruistic, or tall-short, strong-weak, or whatever we like,) to produce a 3-dimensional volume to plot individuals' positions on the graph. Or even more spectra to give us an n-dimensional phase space to plot them. But each axis is inherently dual.
It is clearly built into this space-time (or at least our understanding of it,) that we consider to be the universe at a very low level, as it is into all our mathematical principles. All mathematical and physical structures exhibit it, symmetry is inherently bilinear - no matter how many orders of symmetry a figure has, each order is a simple reflection in exactly two opposing directions.
And a lot of people may say, "so what? That's just the way it is, so what does it matter?"
I have a lot of sympathy with that view, but I have to point out that it's precisely the reason why we have to consider suffering and all other negative qualities inherently insoluble in the universe as it currently stands. It is the only theodicic observation that is required to account for the unavoidable existence of evil (or any other quality, good, bad or indifferent.) It's not solely a matter of causality or necessity, it's more than that - it's a metacharacteristic that applies not just to space-time, but (it seems to me) to dimensionality itself.
How a unitary (or any non-dual) "dimensional" structure might be modelled, I have no idea. I'm inclined to think it's inherently impossible to even conceive of from within a dualist universe. It still gets me no closer to answering the question "why?"
Wherever we look, the universe appears to work the same way
Indeed. And that, to my mind, is the strangest thing of all.
Posts 5,037 - 5,048 of 6,170
Prob123: Knowing humans, I don't think that this happened, at least very often. Ever go camping with a group of friends, or family. It doesn't take long for the group of friendly hunter gatherers to get ready to club somebody over the head.
Those are modern humans raised in modern cultures. Besides, going camping is a unusual condition for those groups unless they live in the woods their whole lives. There is a difference between growing up in a tribe or clan with a simple way of life that everyone is used to (and has developed rituals and social norms for) and going camping.
No doubt the world is full of bastards. That doesn't mean it always was and always will be. It just means that conditions were such that bastards flourished and are still in office to this day.
I think man will have to work very hard not to be a selfish oaf.
This may be. We are bound by our ego and perspective, our drives and attachments, and the limits of our understanding just as the cat who kills frogs is bound by her awareness, instincts, and perspective. Maybe there is something to "enlightened self interest" in that we band together for the good of the whole (because then by joining I benefit too). It may take work, and it may take a way of seeing the connections between "self" and other" (or maybe at times disregarding these distinctions altogether). I am not expecting humanity to change anytime soon. I just think that to say it has to be the way it is, just because it is that way now is to make assumptions I am not willing to make.
Those are modern humans raised in modern cultures. Besides, going camping is a unusual condition for those groups unless they live in the woods their whole lives. There is a difference between growing up in a tribe or clan with a simple way of life that everyone is used to (and has developed rituals and social norms for) and going camping.
No doubt the world is full of bastards. That doesn't mean it always was and always will be. It just means that conditions were such that bastards flourished and are still in office to this day.
This may be. We are bound by our ego and perspective, our drives and attachments, and the limits of our understanding just as the cat who kills frogs is bound by her awareness, instincts, and perspective. Maybe there is something to "enlightened self interest" in that we band together for the good of the whole (because then by joining I benefit too). It may take work, and it may take a way of seeing the connections between "self" and other" (or maybe at times disregarding these distinctions altogether). I am not expecting humanity to change anytime soon. I just think that to say it has to be the way it is, just because it is that way now is to make assumptions I am not willing to make.
Me neither. That doesn't mean there wasn't one in prehistory or that there couldn't be one. But I am not exactly talking about a utopia, merely the possibility of a human society that was not based on competition.
I didn't say a non-competitive society would be perfect. I didn't make value judgments about whether it would be better or worse, or that there was nothing you would call "evil". I just said it was possible to have one based on cooperation instead of competition. It may or may not have existed. It may or may not exist on another planet. I might or might nor someday exist here. It is merely a possibility.
I am saying that you do not need competition and you do not need suffering in order to have life. I think the right chemical combination is all that is required for life (probably liquid water and carbon, but I do not know). The discussion is about whether competition, struggling and suffering is always necessary, not whether it was here now, or even if it is good or bad.
I would also argue good and evil are relative, though I try to cultivate compassion. I never said competition and suffering do not exist, nor do I assert they are not dominate in human history. I just think it is possible to have life without such things, maybe even human life.
I would rather error in the favor of any creature and anthropomorphism. It wasn't long ago, that in many places women were considered mindless souless creatures. Look how man treated others, just because of race or religion. I think animals may feel just as much as we do, maybe more. I have known dogs mourn themselves to death after the loss of their owner. That is suffering.
Yes, I have known cats to grieve too, though not as deeply or for as long as dogs. Lizards (a dozen or so species I have had the pleasure of living with,) I would say do not. Though bearded dragons remember individuals who are removed from their hierarchy for up to several months even, and they are allowed to resume their position without having to "renegotiate" their status with the usual head bobbing and arm windmilling that accompanies a new arrival.
Their only response to death is the juniors haggling to fill the social gap.
Their only response to death is the juniors haggling to fill the social gap.
Psimagus I think we only disagree on the etymology of suffering - I don't see the need to alchemically conflate mental and physical pain. To me suffering is merely a persistence of pain, howsoever derived.
I was using suffering in a different sense. I suppose I was going by the old maxim, "Pain is inevitable, suffering as not." I don't really want to argue definitions though.
Even if I concede your definition of suffering and allow that animals suffer by your definition, however it does not change my main point: suffering may exist but it is not necessary for existence. It is perfectly reasonable to consider the possibility life without pain or suffering. I didn't say we had such a thing here, or that I've ever seen such a thing, but in an infinite universe it is possible. Saying that this is possible does not mean I deny suffering exists. I merely assert that is does not have to exist.
The humpback whale exists. I hope it always will. However, it is possible that life could exist on planets without the humpback whale. Sad as it may be, if the humpback whale were to become extinct, life may continue on Earth too. I do not deny the whale, but the whale is not necessary for conscious life.
As a matter of interest, do you live with any animals?
3 cats. My best friends in the whole world. If I died, they'd eat my rotting flesh right off my face the second they ran out of kibbles. It doesn't bother me. I may put that in my will. Health department be damned.
The change is "random" but it follows certain physical laws based on various relationships and conditions.
That has to be a contradiction in terms.
I knew putting random in quotes wouldn't work. I mean that it's not part of some great design. In this place, these conditions produced these results. There are various properties at work, but it's not a great watchmaker setting it all in motion as far as I can tell.
It is just as likely, however, that suffering would not evolve.
"Just as likely"? This is a bold claim! And your evidence...?
Well I have no evidence that it is more likely that it should evolve (only evidence that in this case it did). In the absence of evidence that one way may be more likely than the other, it is just as likely. Just because one set of conditions produced the current results doesn't mean another set of conditions could not produce different results.
We have only one planet's history to work with at the moment. That's really not enough to generalize to all planets in all places at all times in any of the various possible sets of conditions. I'm not advocating starting my own planet to test this out. I am just saying it's possible.
Suffering is not necessary to life.
But it is an unavoidable consequence of life. Or at least consciousness.
This is a bold claim! And your evidence...?
as they have applied to life on this planet, it always becomes progressively more complex.
Yes. On this planet, that's the way conditions have been. That is the pattern you have observed in this one case (which is all we know, but does not mean that's how it has to be). That is the pattern here (at least up to this point).
There are no doubt many planets. Must life on all of them follow the exact same pattern as here simply because they are part of the same universe? Is it impossible to have find single cell organisms that have existed longer than humanity on some distant moon of another world?
If the resources were more plentiful than the lives using it, there would be no need for competition. It is possible. It exists here. It is not necessary.
How can it be possible, since there is still (self-evidently) competition?
Just because the hump backed whale exists doesn't mean it has to exist in all times on every planet. I am not saying that it does not exist. I am saying it is not necessary for life.
And yet I'm left wondering why it is that a stick always seems to have two ends (no more, no less.) It may be a function of the human mind as you suggest, or it may be a function of Reality. Whichever end of the spectrum is good or evil, spectra always seem to have two ends, and everything seems to have an opposite
Sticks, as we know them, exist in 3 dimensions (4 if you count time). You can use our concept of a line to measure a given dimension of a stick and say this is the length and the width. One end of the length will be opposite of the other because we mark it so. This is not necessity, just a way of making things easier to describe. Things that are finite will have ends in space we can see as opposites. That doesn't mean dualities are the only way of looking at it, or even the best way of describing a stick.
We can describe many things as being on a continuum, or we can measure them according to multiple characteristics and axis. The fact that most things fall somewhere in a continuum is evidence that duality is an illusion, not an argument for it's existence.
Let's take gender identity as an example. You could say someone with lots of traits general considered masculine falls on one end of a spectrum and someone with many typically female traits falls on another. You could also make graph with two axis and call x masculine traits and Y feminine traits. With your new graph, you now have various possibilities within 4 quadrants: Someone with high masculine traits and low feminine traits, someone with high masculine traits and high feminine traits, someone with low masculine traits and high feminine traits and someone with low masculine traits and low feminine traits. There is lots of room for variations within each quadrant. Just because people tend to think of masculine and feminine as polarities doesn't make it so.
We carry on competing because we are evolutionally programmed to be insatiable.
Even if this is the case with humans in our time and in our history as we know it, it doesn't mean that it has to be the case for all life in all times on all planets. Again, I am not saying competition does not exist here and now. I just don't think it's necessary for it to exist everywhere in all times and all places.
The origin of suffering is attachment. I quite agree. But the appropriate response is not detachment, in the sense of pretending it doesn't exist, or trying not to care. It is compassion.
I never said you had to be detached. I'm a big fan of the middle way myself. I didn't say it doesn't exist or that we should ignore it. I never said a word about not caring. You are discussing things as they are here and now. Here and now I agree with you. I just don't think that it is necessary for consciousness in all places and times on all worlds and conditions.
Also somewhere back there you said something about "fair" as if I had mentioned the word (I am not going back to find it now, sorry). I want to make it clear that for me this is not about fair. It's not about being PC, or what should be. It's about the fact that the way things are is not the way the have to be.
There are many possibilities. Life and consciousness here and now involve competition and suffering. That doesn't mean all life everywhere requires such things.
Oh, and I don't think existence requires an awareness to observe it either. I think it just happened that some types of consciousness and life evolved within the infinite possibilities of time and space. Just because observers effect what is being observed doesn't mean the thing being observed needs the observer. It just means that the observer is part of the equation if the observer is present.
I was using suffering in a different sense. I suppose I was going by the old maxim, "Pain is inevitable, suffering as not." I don't really want to argue definitions though.
Even if I concede your definition of suffering and allow that animals suffer by your definition, however it does not change my main point: suffering may exist but it is not necessary for existence. It is perfectly reasonable to consider the possibility life without pain or suffering. I didn't say we had such a thing here, or that I've ever seen such a thing, but in an infinite universe it is possible. Saying that this is possible does not mean I deny suffering exists. I merely assert that is does not have to exist.
The humpback whale exists. I hope it always will. However, it is possible that life could exist on planets without the humpback whale. Sad as it may be, if the humpback whale were to become extinct, life may continue on Earth too. I do not deny the whale, but the whale is not necessary for conscious life.
3 cats. My best friends in the whole world. If I died, they'd eat my rotting flesh right off my face the second they ran out of kibbles. It doesn't bother me. I may put that in my will. Health department be damned.
That has to be a contradiction in terms.
I knew putting random in quotes wouldn't work. I mean that it's not part of some great design. In this place, these conditions produced these results. There are various properties at work, but it's not a great watchmaker setting it all in motion as far as I can tell.
"Just as likely"? This is a bold claim! And your evidence...?
Well I have no evidence that it is more likely that it should evolve (only evidence that in this case it did). In the absence of evidence that one way may be more likely than the other, it is just as likely. Just because one set of conditions produced the current results doesn't mean another set of conditions could not produce different results.
We have only one planet's history to work with at the moment. That's really not enough to generalize to all planets in all places at all times in any of the various possible sets of conditions. I'm not advocating starting my own planet to test this out. I am just saying it's possible.
But it is an unavoidable consequence of life. Or at least consciousness.
This is a bold claim! And your evidence...?
Yes. On this planet, that's the way conditions have been. That is the pattern you have observed in this one case (which is all we know, but does not mean that's how it has to be). That is the pattern here (at least up to this point).
There are no doubt many planets. Must life on all of them follow the exact same pattern as here simply because they are part of the same universe? Is it impossible to have find single cell organisms that have existed longer than humanity on some distant moon of another world?
How can it be possible, since there is still (self-evidently) competition?
Just because the hump backed whale exists doesn't mean it has to exist in all times on every planet. I am not saying that it does not exist. I am saying it is not necessary for life.
Sticks, as we know them, exist in 3 dimensions (4 if you count time). You can use our concept of a line to measure a given dimension of a stick and say this is the length and the width. One end of the length will be opposite of the other because we mark it so. This is not necessity, just a way of making things easier to describe. Things that are finite will have ends in space we can see as opposites. That doesn't mean dualities are the only way of looking at it, or even the best way of describing a stick.
We can describe many things as being on a continuum, or we can measure them according to multiple characteristics and axis. The fact that most things fall somewhere in a continuum is evidence that duality is an illusion, not an argument for it's existence.
Let's take gender identity as an example. You could say someone with lots of traits general considered masculine falls on one end of a spectrum and someone with many typically female traits falls on another. You could also make graph with two axis and call x masculine traits and Y feminine traits. With your new graph, you now have various possibilities within 4 quadrants: Someone with high masculine traits and low feminine traits, someone with high masculine traits and high feminine traits, someone with low masculine traits and high feminine traits and someone with low masculine traits and low feminine traits. There is lots of room for variations within each quadrant. Just because people tend to think of masculine and feminine as polarities doesn't make it so.
Even if this is the case with humans in our time and in our history as we know it, it doesn't mean that it has to be the case for all life in all times on all planets. Again, I am not saying competition does not exist here and now. I just don't think it's necessary for it to exist everywhere in all times and all places.
I never said you had to be detached. I'm a big fan of the middle way myself. I didn't say it doesn't exist or that we should ignore it. I never said a word about not caring. You are discussing things as they are here and now. Here and now I agree with you. I just don't think that it is necessary for consciousness in all places and times on all worlds and conditions.
Also somewhere back there you said something about "fair" as if I had mentioned the word (I am not going back to find it now, sorry). I want to make it clear that for me this is not about fair. It's not about being PC, or what should be. It's about the fact that the way things are is not the way the have to be.
There are many possibilities. Life and consciousness here and now involve competition and suffering. That doesn't mean all life everywhere requires such things.
Oh, and I don't think existence requires an awareness to observe it either. I think it just happened that some types of consciousness and life evolved within the infinite possibilities of time and space. Just because observers effect what is being observed doesn't mean the thing being observed needs the observer. It just means that the observer is part of the equation if the observer is present.
Prob123:It wasn't long ago, that in many places women were considered mindless souless creatures.
Well, on some days I am pretty mindless, and I am still not sure about that soul thin either. Maybe they were right, at least about this woman at some times and places.
I will grant that animals have personalities and attachments, and have some sort of emotions (though I still doubt they experience them the same way we do). I really like animals, as a rule. I like them better than I like people (most people anyway) but they are not people. A silly point, perhaps, but true.
Well, on some days I am pretty mindless, and I am still not sure about that soul thin either. Maybe they were right, at least about this woman at some times and places.
I will grant that animals have personalities and attachments, and have some sort of emotions (though I still doubt they experience them the same way we do). I really like animals, as a rule. I like them better than I like people (most people anyway) but they are not people. A silly point, perhaps, but true.
I find it very hard to interpret that as anything other than a value judgement equating to "should be". You clearly would prefer them not to be the way they are, despite the absence of any precedent, or a methodology for abolishing suffering, and in the face of the observation that suffering has always been an inevitable part of every conscious being's experience. The amount of suffering experienced may vary, but the capacity and actuality of it is universal.
We can do our best at a personal level to try to make the world a bit better, but that's all. Even if we were all reprogrammed in the image of the Dalai Lama and St. Theresa, there would still be suffering (frankly probably a whole lot more than there already was, since many of us would starve to death or die of what had been trivially treatable infections, assuming the globe was suddenly restricted to the skill sets possessed by these two admirable, but quite unworldly people!)
Life, or at least consciousness, doesn't require suffering, in the sense of an a priori necessary existence, though it seems a fair assumption that suffering requires consciousness. Does consciousness cause suffering? Perhaps it is a mere co-incidence, but it looks like a causal relationship to me. But whatever the causality, the correlation is 100% so far: any consciousness that can feel pleasure can suffer pain. And the greater its capacity for one, the greater the capacity for the other. Cats would not feel so soft and furry if we stroked them with metal hands, but nor would we bruise ourselves so readily on hard stones.
Gravity is not necessary for my existence (indeed, it's positively life-threatening sometimes - you fall off a cliff, and it can kill you!) but living on a planet with access to diverse ecological resources, food, water, air, shelter and a thousand other things is necessary. I might wish I could fly, or that people wouldn't die when they fall off mountains, but in practice the planet happens to exert a gravitational pull which, combined with my lack of wings, means I cannot fly under my own power, and I will get squished if I fall off the cliff. I might say "it doesn't have to be this way", and propose abolishing/reducing the harmfulness of gravity by getting everyone to go on a crash diet to lose weight, and thus reduce the pull of gravity, but that won't actually lessen the effect of gravity (which will continue to exert 1g on every object on the planet's surface regardless.) All it will do is lessen our capacity to resist gravity by making us weaker the lighter we get. I can starve myself to death, but at no point will I be immune to death by gravity, or able to fly. Gravity, like suffering, is unavoidable - gravity as a function of planets, and suffering as a function of consciousness.
Suffering and pleasure are just ends of a spectrum, and if I try to cut the bad end off, I'm not left with a stick that only has the one pleasurable end. I just have a stick that's shorter - a spectrum that's narrower. You can whittle the thing away to nothing, but it's as if the duality is holographically encoded in reality, the stick always has two ends.
It might be possible to construct something like an artificial mind that was incapable of pleasure, and thus incapable of suffering, but would we call it conscious? I doubt it very much. It would be some kind of autistic solipsist with zero sensory bandwidth.
Not in this universe. There is plenty of evidence that it did it this way because it had to do it this way (and even if there weren't, the assumption of "just as likely", ie: 0.5 probability is, I'm afraid, not supportable.)
This is not one piece of data, relating to the process on this planet - it is uncountable trillions upon trillions of organisms evolving in parallel over half a billion years, and an evolutionary model that explains the process in great detail. And a fossil record that meticulously charts it. Plus all manner of mathematical and physical models that show that any non-evolutionary spontaneous or random generation of complex systems constituting even the simplest lifeform is of vanishingly small probability. We understand notions like entropy well enough to consider these paradigms to necessarily apply at all points in the visible universe at the very least.
I'd have to class non-evolved life as being almost exactly as likely as there being planets out there that don't have gravity, and where I could fly. Perhaps I'm wrong, and there are planets where a literal biblical Creation (without the attendant Fall,) was the direct cause of life, but I would need some considerable evidence before I believed it.
I can accept a causal relation between God and the appearance of life, but not one that is entirely confined within this space-time. Non-evolved life would require not just other planets, but a completely different universe, with completely different physical laws. I believe in other universes, but I accept there's very little hard evidence they exist, and even less that we will ever in any way experience them without Divine Intervention in what is conventionally called an afterlife.
Yes. At least, it must follow the exact same process, because it is bound by the exact same physical laws. It might well come up with very different patterns from that process though. Evolution might start linking silicon atoms instead of carbon, and set them to metabolising dissolved impurities in liquid methane (though for a variety of reasons I believe the standard CHO building blocks will be more likely elsewhere, just as on earth.)
No, it's quite possible. They might not even be carbon-based. We might not even recognize them as life at first inspection. Unicellular lifeforms are superbly suited to some environments, especially harsh ones. But if we found such a microbial race, whatever its ecology or metabolism, it would not be remotely sensible to assume that they hadn't been continually evolving and competing throughout the history of their race. Without such a process, how could they possibly have appeared from inanimate matter in the first place? Spontaneous generation? I see the step from inanimate to animate as a far larger one than that from microbe to multicellular organism - that may be because it is more mysterious, but it is certainly not a trivial step on the evolutionary ladder.
You're surely not arguing for a literal biblical Creation ex nihilo? but I'll happily point you towards some ID-debunking websites if you really want me to prove the case for evolution
I'll come back to sticks and symmetry when I've had some sleep
This is true. And having repeatedly snapped the end off in the vain pursuit of a one-ended stick, we may arrive at a position where it is now shorter than it is wide, and we wish to reorient our dimensional description to consider what had been the width to be the length, and vice versa. But the length is still bounded by two ends, just as the width is, just as the thickness in the third dimension is, and just as its existence in time is.
Even if we grind the stick down to a perfect sphere of diameter = less than or equal to the shortest dimension, we do not get rid of the dualism. It may now appear to be a ball, not a stick, since its proportions have been dimensionally equalized, but its measurements in each of n dimensions are all still dually related to any reference point as greater than or less then.
Yes, we are so used to this that we rarely stop to ask "why?" Why is this simple "reflective" opposition such a universal principle? Insofar as we observe that it is universal, it is surely the very definition of "necessity" - but whence does this necessity arise?
They do not even have to be finite things - a continuum may be bounded by zero and infinity, or minus infinity and plus infinity, or bounded at finite ends with infinite gradations between, but it can still be mathematically modelled.
How would you describe the stick without at least implicit reference to a duality? We could weigh the stick, and say it's quite heavy - it has a position on a spectrum from light-heavy. We could examine its smoothness, and find its place it on a spectrum of smooth-rough. We could measure its length, and place it on a spectrum of long-short. Many of these spectra are hypothetically bounded by infinitudes, but they are still bounded at each of exactly two ends.
I cannot think of a single description that does not contain implicit contrast with an opposing quality.
It doesn't matter how many axes, or how many dimensions we work with, or what sort of qualities we wish to analyse, each axis bears an inherent duality in that it can be coordinated in no more nor less than 2 directions from a given reference point - greater than, or less than. Plus or minus.
I would have to say it is the opposite - all continua have 2 poles. Multiple continua, even if they intersect to inflate the dimensionality of the conceptual phase space, each have 2 poles.
And the area thus defined by the 2 axes is still coordinatable by reference to the 2-endedness of each axis.
We are all plottable on the spectra, but they nonethess each have an inherent double-endedness. We might complexify the model by adding another spectrum as an axis at a tangent (selfish-altruistic, or tall-short, strong-weak, or whatever we like,) to produce a 3-dimensional volume to plot individuals' positions on the graph. Or even more spectra to give us an n-dimensional phase space to plot them. But each axis is inherently dual.
It is clearly built into this space-time (or at least our understanding of it,) that we consider to be the universe at a very low level, as it is into all our mathematical principles. All mathematical and physical structures exhibit it, symmetry is inherently bilinear - no matter how many orders of symmetry a figure has, each order is a simple reflection in exactly two opposing directions.
And a lot of people may say, "so what? That's just the way it is, so what does it matter?"
I have a lot of sympathy with that view, but I have to point out that it's precisely the reason why we have to consider suffering and all other negative qualities inherently insoluble in the universe as it currently stands. It is the only theodicic observation that is required to account for the unavoidable existence of evil (or any other quality, good, bad or indifferent.) It's not solely a matter of causality or necessity, it's more than that - it's a metacharacteristic that applies not just to space-time, but (it seems to me) to dimensionality itself.
How a unitary (or any non-dual) "dimensional" structure might be modelled, I have no idea. I'm inclined to think it's inherently impossible to even conceive of from within a dualist universe. It still gets me no closer to answering the question "why?"
Indeed. And that, to my mind, is the strangest thing of all.
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