Thinking about the existence of life

Well, you just asked the million dollar question.

I would guess that watching inception had something to do with the dream lol. Still I think that while there is no way to know for certain, sometimes you just have to accept that things are real so you don't go crazy wondering.

If you go with what Descartes thought, he knew that he existed because he was aware of his own thoughts. There must have been some part of his mind that really existed to be aware of things even if not everything he was aware of existed.. In other words I think therefore I am.

There are multiple things with Descartes philosophy that I have issues with, but it is a pretty good starting point for accepting your own existence.

 

I guess I'm more of a skeptic when it comes to consciousness, existence & the soul.

I believe that, given our brains & the sizes that they are today (proportionately we have some of the biggest brains in the animal kingdom), we are capable of experiencing thought, consciousness & a feeling of existence. Our personalities are merely a manifestation of our brains & the experiences that have shaped us over the many years we've been alive. In relation to the soul & the suggested 'afterlife'.. I'm really not sure about that one (who can be?); I don't believe we carry some kind of energy that can be carried on post-death, but who knows? The universe is a mysterious place.

 

Good question.

I often think about wether there is a higher power... How can everything in nature be so perfectly designed...

 

I disagree with Descartes' Cogito ergo sum. All that we can know for certain is that the present moment of perception exists. My memories could be faked, my surroundings an illusion, but each moment of conscious perception must exist.

More generally I think the idea of a concrete and definable "self" does not reflect the reality of existence.

 

Nothing in nature is designed well (of course, because it wasn't 'designed' at all). There are much more efficient and elegant ways of doing everything.

 

Existence, free will, perception, and thought are all illusory figments of a wonderfully complex brain. The way i see it, we humans may as well all be made of clockwork.

Even so, that presents a moral problem. If the above are all illusory, so is morality. That's not a philosophically tenable position from which to pontificate proper behaviour.

Therefore, there is no objective morality and it all has to be derived from first principles. Of course that only amounts to an illusion of forming order out of chaos, but that doesn't matter.

Be happy with your illusion, it's the only one you'll have!

---------- Post added 8th Nov 2012 at 06:40 PM ----------

"ways of doing everything" implies that something was "done" as opposed to something merely happening.

Life forms weren't "designed" by anything other than the simple rule that once something is capable of self replication, it will continue to do so if given a sustaining environment conducive to it AND the simple principle that natural mutation will result in slight differences in that self-replicating something. Whichever one is mutated into a slightly more viable form will naturally come to replicate more than the one in a slightly less viable form. Complex life was in fact bound to happen, much like the planets were bound to form from the 2nd generation supernova scraps, and the sun was bound to form from the same 2nd generation primordial soup.

It just so happens that life has evolved with the ability to gaze at its navel. Intelligence is merely one of many, many biological advantages that creatures have evolved to have. It took life a long time to evolve a life form capable of constructing tools and being intensely social, but now that it has happened i think it's a bit of a laugh that people automatically assume, based on the complexity of what's around them, that everything was put just the way it is for our benefit.

My beloved occam's razor would dictate, given all that we now know of the process of evolution, that there's no need to grapple with the notion of superior beings and the "act" of creation. You could say that it's natural to believe in such things, given that the desperate desire to find explanations for absolutely everything is the primary drive behind our now many generations tall, foot-to-shoulder, towering intellect. It has only been in the last 150 or so years that enough knowledge has been built up to explain the origins of the heavens and the earth, and the light and the beasts, etc etc.

But asking occam, what's more likely? Given all the physical phenomena pertaining to evolution both cosmic and biological, phenomena we have observed and now understand fairly thoroughly, what's really more likely? That we're just the product of 13 billion years worth of those well-understood laws, or that sky-daddy done it? Open and shut case, for me.

 

A lot of people answered from the physiological/anatomical brain structure and function. I will answer your question from my philosophical point of view. It's rather simple: There is ultimately no intrinsic meaning to life. The definition of "life" is only made by man after he discovers himself. What do I mean by that? Man is thrown into this massive shit hole called "life" as a blank slate and it is not after his existence that he can give life meaning. So, there are no universal set of rules or values by which life is created, based upon or guided. There is no universal truth.

 

They say your life flashes before your eyes as you die, so might we all be in a dying state and just reliving our lives? And then as we die in this reliving the process restarts...