We are mere Spatiotemporal blips of information in the infant universe with delusions of grandeur. So if you have to tell yourself deep in the night that you actualising your reproductive prerogative makes your sad little life more meaningful than the farmer, please grasp at those straws.
The only true delusion of grandeur is thinking that dwindling others' experiences against the vastness of the universe is enlightenment: If we don't experience our existence in geological/cosmic time scales, why waste time believing we are mere blips?
With the current pace of change, having children may no longer be the obvious winner it has been for all of history, but it might still be...
The fact that we've hit upon a certain arrangement of matter which yields consciousness and the ability to manipulate the matter around us is something which seems worth preservation.
I contain the information for how to give life to inert matter. I've done it three times now, and I think it's worthwhile.
Yes, it is more meaningful to have kids than to build a stonewall.
Aren't walls inventions of man, as such, an effect caused by man. How can an effect (invention) of man be equated to the inventor?
Do you compare the effect of human freedom to the effect of unconscious matter in history?
We're very far from where we started. We're here because of both people that had kids and because of people that built stone walls. In many cases they were the same people.
It's a consequence of evolution. Right now we are limited yes. But nobody knows future.
> If we don't experience our existence in geological/cosmic time scales
Feel free to experience your existence without deriding others existence.
Humans might survive past earth, but oblivion will come for us all the same. We just get to play around in our little imagined worlds of purpose and meaning a little longer all to no avail beyond living one's life.
And that's all any of us can really do, chose how to face existence knowing there is no grand scheme in which each of us is some how important or matters. Choosing to live is equally as valid as choosing not to. We are evolutionarily engineered thinking emotional machines where certain states make us feel good(love, friendship, self actualisation food...., accomplishment) and certain states make us feel bad (sickness, loss, pain...)
All we can do is live a life we are happy(good state) with, be it building stone walls that last or having kids and raising them.
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956
Certainly this could lead one to be a little more circumspect about grand pronouncements.
It seems like you’re saying some people are being tricked by our brains, but others (like yourself) are able to pull aside the veil and truly understand our place in the universe. Perhaps we’re all being tricked.
Regardless, in a universe where nothing matters, truth and knowledge have no more value than children or stone walls.
on the theorised heat death timescale humans have only been around for less than infinitesimal fractions of quadrillionths of a percent of their potential. what's to say we don't in that time escape it by transiting to a new, younger universe?
How did that really influence you?
We can look back, we are not a magic generation unique to all the other generations before us. We know what's going to happen with us and our legacies.
You don't need to leave something behind of course, but the species benefits from it.
So assert that life has no meaning, as alluded to here.
These are axiom-like statements that cannot be proven. Everyone has a faith as to which of these assertions is true.
Life can have meaning because we choose to give it such.
I'm completely at peace with the thought that a century from now no-one will think about me one way or the other.
I mean statistically the chain of events that led to me ever existing as me was so small that after winning that hand, it's time to leave the table and enjoy it.
