What I know is that meditation yields a certain result, not that said result provides any insight into the true nature of reality. All it does is alter one’s sense of it all. It’s entirely possible the whole thing can be wrong.
All sorts of things that we do are products of conditioning (learning within the environmental conditions that we have been exposed to). And everything we do has a basis in and sometimes is primarily a product of our inherent biology.
The behavior of heart beating that we all do all of the time is exclusively an inherent behavior. Most things that we do are a product of 1) for sure our inherent capacities and 2) to some extent or another of conditioning.
Re: things that we do that are also partly or mostly conditioned: I repeat the obvious example, language. Humans are inherently evolved to develop a language within a verbal community. But the particular language is a matter of one’s particular conditioning.
Tying one’s shoes with a particular bow is majorly a matter of conditioning.
Just want to refer back to the “is the mind pictures” thread, where we that ended (page 21!). I like the way Bob Seidensticker worded it.
Adam is saying here that life has no ultimate meaning. Well, yeah. So what?Adam apparently gets anxious at the thought that God, a billion years from now, won’t leaf through his little notebook, see Adam’s name, and think fondly of the good times they had together during Adam’s brief life on earth. Sorry Adam, but out of the billions of people on the earth right now, you’re not that big a deal. You’re even less important when seen with all of history as a backdrop.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a helpful observation: “If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.”
Life has plenty of meaning, just not transcendentally grounded meaning. It has the meaning that we assign to it and that we find for it, not that someone else like a religious leader assigns for us. Most of us find that not debilitating but empowering.
Xian continues his pursuit of “true reality” and can’t enjoy the regular old reality the rest of us live in because it’s not the thing he thinks it is or it’s not the thing some website said it is.
I think that, other than our autonomic nervous system, most of our mental and physical selves are flexible, and this flexibility is individually determined by our genetic predispositions for whatever aspect of ourselves we’re looking at.
For example, you can train yourself to be more calm in stressful situations, but only to the degree you’re brain allows it. Some people are cool as a cucumber in situations that would make me vomit from anxiety. Now, I can work hard at becoming better at dealing with my social anxiety, but I’ll never be as calm as someone who’s naturally comfortable in those situations. Same for physical strength and flexibility- you have lots of control, but within a set of unalterable, genetic boundaries.
However, when it comes to many other aspects of our lives, we’re purely conditioned. Things like religion and social taboos have no basis in our genetics, and are put into our brains by others. If I were taught that worms are delicious and healthy, I’d have no problem eating them. I was not taught that, and although I am intellectually aware they are a viable food option, there’s no way I could comfortably eat a bowl of them (unless I forced myself to eat them for a long period of time and got over my irrational disgust.)
Some people don’t work at changing, so they remain relatively unchanged their whole life. Others see things about themselves that they don’t like and work at changing those things, and are constantly changing and improving themselves. (I exist in the middle ground of those who want to change all sorts of things about themselves, but are too scared to do half of them.)
So I’d say the answer is variable- and how much of your life is conditioned depends on you.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a helpful observation: “If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.”Life has plenty of meaning, just not transcendentally grounded meaning. It has the meaning that we assign to it and that we find for it, not that someone else like a religious leader assigns for us. Most of us find that not debilitating but empowering.
People who find made up meaning empowering are, in a sense, delusional. When value and meaning are assigned on a whim it renders the process rather meaningless. Some even argue that making meaning is just a denial of reality.
As for DeGrasse, I like him for his science but not so much his philosophy. I don’t think he really gets what the cosmic perspective means. It’s essentially that nothing we do matters and that there is no meaning or significance behind our actions. I’m willing to bet that if the agents of the past thought in such a manner you wouldn’t see the level of technological advancement we have today (because in the cosmic perspective it doesn’t matter). In fact one common method of dissuading suicide is telling people they matter. So would you really lie to such folks?
I had a longer post, but I tried to edit it and lost it. Here’s a Victor Frankly quote.
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl
3point14Rat wrote:
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Some people don’t work at changing, so they remain relatively unchanged their whole life. Others see things about themselves that they don’t like and work at changing those things, and are constantly changing and improving themselves. (I exist in the middle ground of those who want to change all sorts of things about themselves, but are too scared to do half of them.)
Lois. People can only “work at changing” if their determining factors lead them do it. But consciously working at changing doesn’t always result in change because determining factors must be affected in the right way for the person to actually change. The point is that your consciousness is unconnected to your determining factors. This is why most people who consciously try very hard to change don’t change, or don’t change very much. Your determining factors are “unaware” of your efforts. You will only change when your efforts to change actually result in a change in your determining factors. We can’t know whether they can or can’t. If you think you’ve “succeeded” in your efforts to change it’s because your determining factors were in a state to lead you to try to change, and then they were affected in the right way by what you did to try to change. Our conscious efforts are not in control, even though we want them to be in control and when we believe they are in control.
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”Yet I highly doubt that such folks knew the nature or really grasped the concept of cosmic insignificance. Had they done so, I doubt such a quote would have been uttered. I mean lets be frank, I doubt the people in those camps would know about the meaninglessness of it all and just knew the horror before them. Making meaning just proves the meaninglessness of life rather than solves it.
“Making meaning just proves the meaninglessness of life rather than solves it.”
That dear Watson, depends on one’s perspective.
No surprise that you disagree, you are pretty much programmed to do that. And no surprise that I can’t figure what you really think. You keep mentioning some kind of reality that I guess has meaning, but you don’t know where this reality is, so anybody who has anything to say about, is wrong, according to you. I’ve never argued with you about the inherent meaning in life or the ultimate purpose or our significance in comparison to the the vast universe.
As far as I can tell, Neil coined the “cosmic perspective”, so I’m gonna think he knows what he means. There’s a full article about it on the Hayden website. It’s not what you said. Urban Dictionary gives us this. It’s not that “nothing matters”, rather we are “seemingly insignificant”, comparatively so, to the vast cosmos.
I mean lets be frankYou're not being Frank. You're being Xian. Frank saw meaning right in front of him and was not disturbed by some star dying light years away. You don't want to experience your own experience.
Lois: " People can only “work at changing” if their determining factors lead them do it. But consciously working at changing doesn’t always result in change because determining factors must be affected in the right way for the person to actually change. The point is that your consciousness is unconnected to your determining factors. This is why most people who consciously try very hard to change don’t change, or don’t change very much. Your determining factors are “unaware” of your efforts. You will only change when your efforts to change actually result in a change in your determining factors. We can’t know whether they can or can’t. If you think you’ve “succeeded” in your efforts to change it’s because your determining factors were in a state to lead you to try to change, and then they were affected in the right way by what you did to try to change. Our conscious efforts are not in control, even though we want them to be in control and when we believe they are in control."Maybe. I can't guarantee that my interpretation of that is exactly what you were trying to say. Does "determining factors" = "genetic predisposition"?
One of the determining factors that affects how we judge ourselves is intertwined with the determining factor of how hard we work at making any changes. So those who are constantly striving to improve themselves tend to also have a personality that willingly sacrifices to make those improvements.
Inherent in our consciousness is our personality, which is a determining factor. So there is a connection between consciousness and determining factors.
I guess I might be looking at ways of changing that are most obvious to me, and this influences my thoughts about the topic. The examples I think of are weight, fitness, diet, education, personal hygiene, and other aspects of our physical selves. An individual’s ability to influence any of those aspects is directly related to both that individual’s physical limitations, and, more importantly, their mental ability to change- both of which are genetically determined (what I’m assuming you mean when you talk about “determining factors”. Please correct me if I’m wrong.)
Your closing sentence is tough. If you mean that our conscious efforts are hardwired by our genetics (our personality is not in our control), then I agree. If you mean that our conscious efforts are thwarted by our genetic limitations, then I agree only that we can’t exceed our limitations but disagree in that we do have control within those limits.
You’re not being Frank. You’re being Xian. Frank saw meaning right in front of him and was not disturbed by some star dying light years away. You don’t want to experience your own experience.Frank made meaning, you can't see what doesn't actually exist. I do experience my own experience, but sadly it's too much in accordance with the way things are. I can't lie to myself anymore and say things have meaning or that they matter.
No surprise that you disagree, you are pretty much programmed to do that. And no surprise that I can’t figure what you really think. You keep mentioning some kind of reality that I guess has meaning, but you don’t know where this reality is, so anybody who has anything to say about, is wrong, according to you. I’ve never argued with you about the inherent meaning in life or the ultimate purpose or our significance in comparison to the the vast universe.As far as I can tell, Neil coined the “cosmic perspective”, so I’m gonna think he knows what he means. There’s a full article about it on the Hayden website. It’s not what you said. Urban Dictionary gives us this. It’s not that “nothing matters”, rather we are “seemingly insignificant”, comparatively so, to the vast cosmos.
The cosmic perspective is that nothing matters. Neil just doesn’t seem to want to take that final step towards that direction. Many people don’t. I’m not saying this “other reality” I hear of has any meaning, just that it’s the truth and not this constructed world that we live in. The challenge of the modern age is to reckon with the truth of reality which is nihilism. Religion doesn’t work anymore, and attempts at “making meaning” are more like a way of avoiding the truth.
Nihilism takes many forms, so it doesn’t work as a definition of the “truth of reality”. You use the scope of the universe as your evidence that our lives don’t have meaning, so you acknowledge the existence of that universe, but then you say there is some other truth, and you get pretty slippery after that, not really saying anything of any substance. The most consistent theme you have is Existential Nihilism. There is plenty to say on that, much of it has been said by well-known thinkers. But you don’t care much about what others think. You just want to tell them that they are wrong and they are avoiding some truth that you can’t describe.
Humans have the ability to choose a meaning for their lives. Humans are derived from the Universe.
I would never try telling someone experiencing fear, anger, love or frustration, that their feelings are not real. Emotions are experienced and are therefore part of reality. Even emotions that are felt due to an idea that is fictional are real emotions.
I’m truly sorry that some people are incapable of emotion, but that doesn’t somehow mean that those of us who can experience them are delusional.
Xian, are you capable of feeling emotions? You don’t need to elaborate, just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is good enough.
I would never try telling someone experiencing fear, anger, love or frustration, that their feelings are not real. Emotions are experienced and are therefore part of reality. Even emotions that are felt due to an idea that is fictional are real emotions.I’m truly sorry that some people are incapable of emotion, but that doesn’t somehow mean that those of us who can experience them are delusional.
Xian, are you capable of feeling emotions? You don’t need to elaborate, just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is good enough.
It’s not a matter of feeling emotion. But things like meaning, connection (not physically), beauty, don’t exist “out there”. There is nothing you tap into when you look at art or listen to music, the feelings are fabrications.
I’m sorry I wasted my time asking you a question. I should have learned that it’s a waste of time from all the other times you ignored them.
You make it impossible to care or have sympathy for you, when you never engage in conversation. You bitch and moan and ask questions, but never ever care what anyone else says.
How does that feel Xian? Does it alter anything in you when someone says it’s impossible to sympathize with you? Are you trying to switch off your emotions because you can’t make sense of what an emotion is? You can do hide your emotions when typing to someone you can’t see, but it’s not really possible.
Your argument that feelings are fabrications reminded me of the Blind Watchmaker. The story is, if you see a watch on the beach, you know it is designed, so you know there is a designer, then the analogy is, if you see something complex like a human, it must be designed, so there must a designer, but we don’t see humans were designed like we see watch factories, so there must be a God, the designer of us.
The problem with this is, it ignores that the grains of sand in the beach are also complex if you look closely, so there are “watches” everywhere. We recognize the watch as designed because we differentiate it from nature. If you are talking about all of creation, you can’t do that and have the analogy hold up. The analogy becomes all “watches”.
So, to your “feelings are fabricated”; fabricated from what? From the chemical reactions in your brain? And what was your brain fabricated from? From the elements that came together and somehow life arose and evolution happened. Questions like this have answers, we don’t need to invent some other “truth” that is accessed by some mysterious process. Even when we don’t have the answer, there is no reason to jump to a different mechanism for finding truth.
<p style=“text-align: left;”>Just jumping in:</p>
<p style=“text-align: left;”>There is no such thing as freedom of choice. Think of our universe a series of erected dominos. if you knock one off, the rest will follow. Now, it makes no sense to argue that the domino in the middle could have behaved differently. In other words, how can a causal universe allow for freewill. And by the way don’t blame those who condition you; in the end, they themselves have no choice.</p>