Would it have been better to have had zero conceptual knowledge of reality? Animals seem to thrive pretty well without conceptual knowledge. Animals and non-sentient nature tends to thrive in a state of being unaware or unconscious of what is happening in reality.  Nature seemingly is at peace with the mystery of existence, nature itself never demands answers to questions in the way humans do. But then humans are also part of nature, so it does seem as though nature is on a quest here to seek for answers...but why? surely if life and reality is a mystery, then it will always remain a mystery.  

 Human capacity to think about life has only enlarged wider the huge gaping gap that is this not-knowing mystery of reality. There is a longing to fill this black hole with endless questions, even though all our answers are unavailable. Yet, we still try to unravel the mystery, we never give up the quest for self knowledge.

Personally, I do not believe the mystery of life will ever be knowable.  I also believe that 'Religion' was an idea used by humans to assuage the aching longing of never being able to know the origins of their own existence. Or of any other things origin of existence. 

Are we animals that just happened to learn to communicate with each other using conceptual language,because nature just happened to endow the human with a bigger brain in comparison to other animals, and is why we were able to spin off a sense of self and otherness, with what we know as our personal conceptual story, forming the idea we are the author of our own sense of identity?

Are you asking if ignorance is bliss?


I doubt it.


If it were certain people would be the happiest motherfuckers on the planet rather than the miserable bastards that they are.

(August 12, 2022 at 2:43 am)onlinebiker Wrote: Are you asking if ignorance is bliss?


I doubt it.


If it were certain people would be the happiest motherfuckers on the planet rather than the miserable bastards that they are.

No, not asking if ignorance is bliss.

Personally, I do not find being alive remotely blissful.

I have always pondered the idea that it is better to have not known any knowledge than to be told by another this is what we want you to believe.

(August 12, 2022 at 2:29 am)TrueNorth Wrote: Would it have been better to have had zero conceptual knowledge of reality? 

For an animal like us?  Unlikely, I think.  Our species success is attributed to it in no small part.

Quote:Personally, I do not believe the mystery of life will ever be knowable.  I also believe that 'Religion' was an idea used by humans to assuage the aching longing of never being able to know the origins of their own existence. Or of any other things origin of existence. 

We're pretty solid on the origin of our existence nowadays.  I don't think that was ever the primary function of religion, though every religion seems to have some ridiculous story about it.   I like meso-american origin myths.  We just walked up out of a hole in the ground.  Talk about phoning it in, right?  Where were we before the hole?  Shh..eat your snacks and listen to the story or I'll beat ya.

Quote:Are we animals that just happened to learn to communicate with each other using conceptual language,because nature just happened to endow the human with a bigger brain in comparison to other animals, and is why we were able to spin off a sense of self and otherness, with what we know as our personal conceptual story, forming the idea we are the author of our own sense of identity?

Alot less "just happening" and alot more selective pressure, but yeah, seems so.

I'm uncertain what "just happened" to yield modern humans. Scientists are largely in the same boat. As to our having a fundamentally different mental world than them, since I'm not a chicken, a crow, an elephant, or any other animal, I must extend a certain agnosticism to the question. Just as being a woman, I don't know how a man's experience differs from my own, and being sighted, I don't know how a blind person's experience differs from my own, I have to assume a large grain of ignorance concerning what it is like to be a bat, or any other animal and confess that I simply don't know. We don't yet know in what way we experience the world in any objective manner, and I'm always reluctant to trust first-hand experience when used as a scaffolding for either metaphysics or such grand conclusions about either our consciousness or that of any other animal.

It sounds to me like you are asking questions rooted as much in your own personal ideology as they are in reality.

Are animals luckier than humans....hmmm...my critters are waited on hand and foot. I buy them high quality food and treats. They all have lots of toys. I bathe and groom the dogs and groom the cat. I bake for the parrots. I clean up after them. I spend a good part of the day doing the in/out thing with the back door. I make sure they get veterinary care. Ain't nobody doing all that for me.

(August 12, 2022 at 3:06 pm)arewethereyet Wrote: Are animals luckier than humans....hmmm...my critters are waited on hand and foot.  I buy them high quality food and treats.  They all have lots of toys.  I bathe and groom the dogs and groom the cat.  I bake for the parrots.  I clean up after them.  I spend a good part of the day doing the in/out thing with the back door.  I make sure they get veterinary care.  Ain't nobody doing all that for me.

Bast: ‘Do the humans still worship us?’

Modern domestic cat: ‘Well, I shit in a box and they clean it up.’

Bast: ‘Well done, my child.’

Boru

Each one of my dogs has a bigger carbon footprint than my car...and I still service them. My car...otoh, is in the process of being replaced because of the cost of service. Hell..i plan to breed these dogs..but I'm not looking to feed any new fordlets, children of Big G (kids name for the car).

Crazy shit...every single one of these dogs has a greater yearly conventional economic value than an acre under crops. If I wanted to stack fat knots of cash I'd stop doing regenerative ag and start an environmentally disastrous puppy mill. Maybe that's why we're in this predicament? A single puppy, average litter size 8-10...... is worth more than 40ksq ft of hard ass work tying tomatoes under a climate change created heat dome.

(August 12, 2022 at 2:29 am)TrueNorth Wrote: Would it have been better to have had zero conceptual knowledge of reality? Animals seem to thrive pretty well without conceptual knowledge.

Not being able to apprehend reality means no science, no progress. Would it have been better if we couldn't figure out a vaccine for smallpox ? Definitely not. Knowledge clearly helps our own survival, after all.

(August 12, 2022 at 2:29 am)TrueNorth Wrote: Human capacity to think about life has only enlarged wider the huge gaping gap that is this not-knowing mystery of reality. There is a longing to fill this black hole with endless questions, even though all our answers are unavailable. Yet, we still try to unravel the mystery, we never give up the quest for self knowledge.

I am not sure what questions or mystery you're alluding to. If you reject religious narratives, you're left with the established scientific theories that clearly set a threshold to what we can ever know about reality. A religious narrative can be seen as a special kind of knowledge that is complementary to scientific knowledge. Consider this very simple analogy, just to make this point clear : 

let's say you finished having dinner (say, a portion of beefsteak), and after a while your friend comes over and asks you what you were doing ? would your answer be : 

"I ate dinner", or,

"A sliced portion of animal meat, muscle fibers, went along my digestive system, my oesophagus carried the beef steak to my stomach after I swallowed it, next the stomach produced hydrocloric acid that digested the food before sending the resulting soupy liquid to my small intestine, where enzymes from the pancreas -among other things- helped break down protein into amino acids and fat into fatty acids, then absorbed the stuff into my bloodstream, I'll save you now from the large intestine and anus part, unless you really want to know",

The second answer contains more information than most people ever knew in the history of mankind, and the curious thing is, we don't always need the second answer. The action of a personal agent (you) having dinner is, in some circumstances, far more informative than a detailed description of what's going on inside your belly.

The first answer resembles the religious narrative or account of reality, the second one is the scientific account of reality. So people either view life as "A part of God's plan for people", or they can look at the various parts of nature and life forms and how they fit together, and then try to figure out how, precisely, the parts fit together. These two viewpoints are not in conflict, they are complementary, the same way eating dinner while abstracting away the internal mechanics of your digestive system doesn't mean you consider biology or medical sciences useless. But most people unfortunately don't understand this. It's most of the time either religious fundamentalism or scientism.

With this in mind you can easily see why you regard life to be a mystery : you're looking at an heterogenous collection of various parts of the world (animals, people, nature), and then, because of the cognitive limitations of the human mind, can't process the overwhelmingly complicated biological and physical mechanisms that govern our existence. It's this inability that we are repressing, and instead prefer to regard the whole thing as a mystery -a cop out. Yes, some realms of knowledge are probably inaccessible to us forever, but so what? 

And if one rejects the religious narrative, then there is no mystery about life, really, when you think about it more realistically, I can't do better in this context than quote the following paragraph from "the denial of death", probably the most accurate description of reality that there is: 

"We live in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is tearing others apart with teeth of all types -biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue".

That's the fundamental fact that takes away all the beauty and mystery in life: in the end, everything is decay and excrement. One either seeks the belief that this birth and decay cycle is part of a larger divine plan, or sit there, and excrete some more.

(August 12, 2022 at 4:44 pm)Klorophyll Wrote: "We live in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is tearing others apart with teeth of all types -biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue".

That's the fundamental fact that takes away all the beauty and mystery in life: in the end, everything is decay and excrement. One either seeks the belief that this birth and decay cycle is part of a larger divine plan, or sit there, and excrete some more.

Stop complaining, god created all of that and saw that it was good. It's one of it's more mystifying decisions..since, despite that missive about animals and how true it is for animals, we know that this creature also understands and can create autotrophs....and there are more autotrophs in the world than heterotrophs. I do agree, though, that some people are compelled to invent soul forges in order to give their lives (and especially any pointless suffering) meaning which it does not have. Massive cope.