miércoles, 24 de julio de 2013

Being God


I think I understand Nihilism now, I really do.

Real communication is an illusion, a mirage; there's always an unbreakable frontier; our language is so limited and rudimentary. (Am I Forgetting art? There's a case to be made for art). As individuals in this world at this point in time, there is no grand scheme, there is no purpose, no answer to look forward to...

Of course there's that one very big thing: Life.

Life, or matter or energy or whatever you wish to call it, is doing something. It's hard to say what exactly, but it is doing something. I guess it's a good bet to somehow help it keep going: reproducing ourselves, trying to make improvements in the way to best sustain it. Although, all you could hope to achieve is very little and it is unlikely you would be able to make an impact. Think about it, life would be roughly at the same place without da Vinci, or Napoleon, or Einstein.

But life is not completely devoid of answers, we have some information pre-programmed in our 'default installation', we call it instincts. By various mechanisms we're compelled to do a bunch of things. Don't die - or at the minimum don't die before you reproduce - is the main one. There are a couple of other more subtle ones; as intelligence develops, all animals start developing at roughly the same rate instinctive curiosity, a desire for knowledge. At later stages of intelligence (I can only theorise, there are but a couple of examples) we have an instinctive desire to do things, manipulate the things curiosity helped us uncover.

Life compels us to pursuit these vectors. Funnily enough, we usually assign these ideals to the deities (or even superheroes maybe?) we create, as if to have a reminder of our goals as Life. Immortality, omniscience and omnipotence. Never die, know it all and power to do it all. We could somehow say life wants to be god, or at least it's own idea of god. We could follow this 'meaning', but there's really nothing in it for us at the end (not foreseeable at this point), when we die, our universe dies. The only way to live this life is as a game, go for the points (pleasure), try to maximise it for everyone (that's the most efficient way).


Now trying to answer 'why'...would be like a kitten trying to solve a differential equation.


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