RE: Existence: What the fuck is going on?
March 27, 2015 at 3:53 pm
(This post was last modified: March 27, 2015 at 4:28 pm by Mudhammam.)
(March 27, 2015 at 8:58 am)JuliaL Wrote:Kurt Vonnegut Wrote:The only way I can feel the least bit important is to
think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and
look around.
Kurt Vonnegut also Wrote:Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
(March 27, 2015 at 11:46 am)Faith No More Wrote: Part of his kind of reminds me of the other night when I was trying to wrap my brain around just what exactly the present is. I mean, I understand the past and the future, as they appear to be clearly defined, but every attempt to pinpoint just what the present is kept slipping into the past!It really is strange...there is no discernible "now" yet it's all that there ever is in one very true sense. William James supposedly calculated our psychological perception of "now" as a length of twelve seconds... kind of a funny idea when you think about it. There's a great lecture about his life and views, well worth a listen and much of it touches upon the stuff in the OP, but especially check out the bit starting around 15:00 and going to 25:00.
https://youtu.be/qSJnEFEtGJc?t=15m
(March 27, 2015 at 11:46 am)Faith No More Wrote:I third that.(March 27, 2015 at 6:02 am)bennyboy Wrote: I like the Buddhist response to all this: acceptance. Accept the futility and absurdity of your existence. Call it the impermanent dream it is, and don't demand that it must make sense. It's ironic that thinking and logic have as their goal making sense of the chaos, but that the most logical view is still that existence is nonsensical madness, full of paradox, ambiguity and inconsistency.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's as if the search for knowledge cannot properly begin until one accepts that it is an absurd endeavor.
(March 27, 2015 at 1:19 pm)Pyrrho Wrote:That Epicurus quote (specifically the part I placed in bold) has been of much comfort, and I'm inclined to view it that way... sure, the idea that my stream of consciousness is flowing towards the complete annihilation of my sense of being, and this can only be synonymous to the lack of experience we conceptualize as our state prior to birth, does, on the one hand, rid me of fear over the thought of actually being dead...yet it is also, on the other hand, aside from being utterly and frighteningly inconceivable, kind of depressing to me, in a way similar but far worse to reminiscences over the joy and innocence of childhood and the fact that I will never again experience those days of youth in which I could take the world for granted. It's as though everything I strive for is but an hallucination, and the reality as it is for all time, apart from this spec of existence I cling to as all there is, has been, and will be, is literally nothing. It takes the wind out of my sails sometimes. It spurs on a primal fear because I see infinities all around me, and I must surrender my complete self to it, and eventually let go of the pleasures and pains of life, even life itself, and bid it farewell...forever. And how DOES eternity, whether past or future, come to find itself defined at this moment, preceding the next, proceeding the last, as if additional events were added to something that has no numerical value? Anyway, those are just some of the ideas I feel literally plagued with at any given instant (much to my girlfriend's dismay, who complains I don't listen enough...).
- Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.[/list]
http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html
As for your future nonexistence, you should consider how things were for you in the year 1800. Was 1800 a bad year for you in any way at all? That will be how your years will be once you are dead. Nothing bad can happen to you when you cease to exist. Not even boredom.
One book I can't recommend highly enough is Irvin Yalom's Staring At The Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. It made me weep and laugh, and at the end of the day, really put the philosophy espoused by those such as Epicurus and Nietzsche into flesh and blood for me.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza