It’s not a very good way of life for me, makes making choices hard and I end up easily led around because I don’t know who’s right and I lack confidence to assert myself.
You’re aware of being led around though. Kind of like when I realized I was getting high every day. I knew I should do something about it, but it took a few years.
Everybody lacks confidence. Even people who appear confident lack confidence. Good leaders, smart thinkers, know they are wrong, a lot. The problem is, no one knows specifically when they are being wrong (psychopaths excepted). As soon as you know you’re wrong, you change it to “mistaken”, start correcting, get right, read up, exercise, practice or find a teacher.
Sometimes, often I’m not. All my life I just sorta trust people, even though that’s a bad idea. I don’t really know if someone is giving me the runaround or not and trying to play the game sounds exhausting. I’ve tried but I just end up being suspicious of everyone or trusting everyone, there is no middle ground.
I know they lack confidence at times, but me I have none. I assume I’m wrong and others are right and that’s why I need other people to tell me it’s fine when I say what I think because otherwise I won’t believe myself. There are people I think are “right”, namely Buddhism, and any time I find something I don’t know about I ask them.
It’s probably not a logical thing to do but it’s what I got.
“I want to do the right thing, but often I don’t know just what the right thing is. Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years pass and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart. Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at tasks undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes. Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don’t worry about my destiny.”
- Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967)
I don’t really understand poetic phrases like that. Is it sorta saying to not really worry about it?
Someone sent me this comment and I figured it might be relevant, the video it’s based on isn’t great.
"thank you for sharing that. In a sense you’re right that what I’m talking about is a kind of “theism” but it’s a very different notion of what “God” is. It’s what Einstein called “Spinoza’s God” - God as equivalent to Reality. Not a thinking agency, but simply the sum total of existence.
In a sense it is a very non-personal, “inhuman” notion of the divine, because it has nothing to do with humanity. And - as you point out - when you strip away all the illusions we invent around meaning and connection we’re left looking at a “bald” universe.
But the interesting thing is, we are just as much a part of the universe as anything else. We’re not any more special, but we’re not any less either. And in my own experience with the void - years feeling disconnected, unable to finding meaning or any sense of meaningful love or direction in my life - I started to recognize that the void wasn’t barren and inhuman, but actually the place from which everything emerges and to which everything returns. Infinitely fertile and all-accepting. And it’s from the void that all life emerges and is sustained and returns to. And from that place, it’s not that we “find the meaning of life” - meaning simply ceases to be a question that we have to ask about. Disconnection becomes impossible - because where in this whole universe could you run to to truly be separate? And love - which I’ve heard defined recently as a “perennial indivisibility” - is in fact the very essence of space and time. This is the “theism” I’m talking about. It isn’t about some other-worldly God(s). It’s about the essence of reality itself."
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Now you’re talking CFI language!
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I’m not, what the guy wrote was complete nonsense that I hear from mysticism and spirituality forums. Love isn’t defined like that and it’s not the essence of space and time.
It sounds like he was trying to escape the crisis of meaning by inventing some fantasy about what the universe is, which is ironic considering he talks about meaning not being a question he asks about.
He never faced the void, he just painted over it.
Oh dear, silly me, I thought inthedark wrote that. It sure would be nice if he used quotes, when they are appropriate. It helps with general clarity.
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That’s what you say about everything, so, not surprised.
This is more so and something I tend to hear a lot of spirituality types.
The short of the video is atheism leads to nihilism but there is some deeper spiritual truth beyond it. I don’t think so:
You want the universe to have meaning for you. But that is a little toomuch to ask.
The universe has meaning to itself. Evolution is a meaningful process and that applies to everything, not just you. You and I are just little expressions of the potential of the universe.
David Bohm called it “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”. Everything you see is the Implicate order become explicate.
IMO, it’s all mathematical function. See Max Tegmark: Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH).
It is the only quasi-intelligent universal function that fits all the required parameters.
Yeah. I know. Why do you need to keep telling me?
Evolution isn’t a meaningful process and the universe does not have meaning to itself, it’s not sentient.
And no the mathematical universe does not fit all the parameters, it’s not science. In fact it’s nonsense.
No confidence in myself like I mentioned before.
All of knowledge about the universe can be described mathematically. We can even create reality by mathematical measurements of physical properties.
The Table of Elements consists of mathematical patterns. Atomic weights are mathematical measurements. Molecules are mathematical objects. A simple recipe consists of mathematical addition. The Universe functions via “differential equations”.
Don’t confuse Human descriptive symbolism with Universal mathematical values and functions. Patterns of any kind are mathematical objects.
Name me a single property of the Universe that is not mathematical in essence.
Challenge: Describe the H2O molecule in non-mathematical terms.
The short answer is no, mathematical universe isn’t science it’s philosophy.
Nothing you mentioned is mathematical, we made math up.
I told you, do not consider human symbolic representations. Consider what human symbolic representations are representative of in nature.
Fractals are mathematical objects, DNA is a mathematical coding system.
The universe functions in a mathematical manner.
Input (value) → Function (process) → Output (value)
Schematic depiction of a function described metaphorically as a “machine” or “black box” that for each input yields a corresponding output
Determinism is a Universal mathematical Law
In mathematics, computer science and physics, a deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system . A deterministic model will thus always produce the same output from a given starting condition or initial state.
Deterministic system - Wikipedia
That is the very definition of mathematical system.
Forget human numbers and symbolics. They are just the “words” that describe the functions. The Universe does not change its mathematical behaviors because humans attach symbols to it.
Wrong and wrong.
Functions are human numbers and symbols, that’s what math is. Universe doesn’t operate on mathematics.
Again with the nonsense theories.
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See, you are not making an argument against the concept of functional universal mathematics. It is you denial that speaks nonsense.
You have no argument that denies the existence of generic relational mathematical values and functions.
The human symbolization has nothing to do with that. Numbers are for our convenience. But the universe does deal with “quantity” and “value” and “addition”, and “product” , as well as any human mathematician.
The human term “constants” stipulates that there are certain fundamental mathematical properties that govern the behavior of spacetime itself.
The value of the gravitational constant at any part of the universe remains constant which is 6.67408 × 10-11 N m2 kg-2.Dec 17, 2020
https://byjus.com/physics/value-of-gravitational-constant/#
Do you call this “nonsense”?
DNA as information: at the crossroads between biology, mathematics, physics and chemistry
We argue that another paradigm shift is needed to understand biology: its mathematization. It is held by some biologists today that mathematics will never be useful in their discipline in the way it has been in other sciences.
But to argue this is to misunderstand the nature of mathematics. Mathematics at its core is no more than the search for patterns in structures; as all is fundamentally patterns, mathematics is universal. In the same way that other sciences have mathematized themselves, biology must surely follow; as Newton did for physics, Dalton for chemistry and Fisher for statistics, so it is necessary to undertake this project for biology.
In other words, biology needs its own particular Newtonian revolution. For this, it is imperative that the vast accumulation of data coming out of biological research should begin to be organized into a logical structure. But for this end, it is not generally useful to attempt to transfer manu militari the methods of mathematics that have served physics. Within the present secrets of life there probably lies much more mathematics than has yet been discovered.
Thus, the paradigm shift is like the end of the rainbow, seemingly remaining out of reach even as we move towards it, and it may be for this reason that some have viewed biology as bound to remain essentially inaccessible to the methods of reasoning of physics and mathematics.
more… https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2015.0071
Universal mathematics are discovered. Human invented the symbolic representations of the mathematical values and their interactive functions.