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Using the word 'important' is an illusion. You will return to the earth today, tomorrow, 50 years from now and nothing you did today will matter. Sure, you can kid yourself with other humanists that you are leaving a legacy behind and helping the next guy, but let's fast forward to eternity and consider if that's true. You are simply a machine that is doing what it's supposed to do, determined by the manner in which matter is interacting set forth trillions of years ago.
If by 'you are simply a machine' you're just following a deterministic course, then yes. 'Doing what it's supposed to do' as defined by who?
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Originally Posted by chuckd83
Free will (actually any will), conscience, love, hate, caring, contempt, purpose, they're all an illusion.
Those are all, except for free will and purpose, processes in your neuron machine. And yes, free will and purpose are illusions. Brains range from a roundworm to a human's. In simple brains it is hard work, but every thought could in theory be traced to its origins. Every thought in a human's brain can also be traced to its origins. With a billion times more neurons in the human brain than a roundworm, it's much harder to trace. That's why we have the illusion of free will.
Oh c'mon, LKC! This unusually logical "theory" sheds new light on the age-old secular problem of which came first, the chicken or it's daily egg !
Isn't it time to retire the "which came first chicken/egg" metaphor as a model for unanswerable questions?
Quite obviously the first true, modern chicken came from an egg which was laid by a creature which closely approximated the modern chicken sans whatever mutation created the modern chicken.
And oh, a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it, of course creates a sound. The creation of sound is not dependent upon the presence of a listener
Morals and concepts, even at the most fundamental level, are meaningless unless they transcend. Otherwise, we're all left standing at the gates of Auschwitz saying "to me, this was wrong", "to me, this was necessary", "to me, this was right." And?
Or even the most fundamental foundations of all reason, logic, and language:
-law of identity: "that every thing is the same with itself and different from another"
-law of non-contradiction: "one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time"
-law of excluded middle: "for any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is."
What are you saying with this ill-defined "transcendence" concept of yours? That if morals don't apply to rocks than morals are meaningless? Are you saying our laws are meaningless since they don't apply to outer-space aliens? You seem to misunderstand the definition of meaning. meaning comes from ALL sentient beings.
I hope neither you nor your gods forget: "It takes more than one person to decide what's fair." ~ Spitting Venom by Modest Mouse
Standing at the gates of Auschwitz, you'd have to explain your reasons, and the rest of the stake holders would decide along with you. Otherwise we'd have to ban EVERYTHING since someone will always hate it or consider it against their Persons or against their Gods' Persons.
Not that these silly human constructs matter in the fundamental sense but:
Law of identity: God is not triune.
Law of non-contradiction: Jesus cannot be fully human and fully god, since a god is explicitly different from a human.
Law of excluded middle: God must be at least partially evil, since God is the source of all things, and from unsullied goodness nothing evil comes, yet evil exists.
What casts us into utter absurdity is hubris that our understanding of possibility is purely accurate. As that great Frech philosopher and writer Voltaire once said, "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." What casts us into utter absurdity is being uncritical of propositions simply because they strike us well as face-value.
law of identity is trashed about by wave-particle duality and space-time duality.
law of non-contradiction is insulted by the necessity of imaginary and irrational numbers.
law of excluded middle is torn asunder when I say that the blue sky is beautiful.
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Can these be false? If all humanity was destroyed, would they still hold true? Denial of them would cast us into utter absurdity, but yet we assume them all the while begging the question. This is what happens, however, when we unhook the transcendental from our ontology and make it purely autonomous. As someone said earlier - "I think, therefore I am." Then we're not really anything at all.
So yes, they can be false. yes, they might still hold true. our purposes and outcomes don't require us to deny begging the question.
The transcendental is an infinite regress, as anything can be transcendental to other transcendental things. Same is true with the word "supernatural," anything can be "super-supernatural" or lets call it "ubersupernatual." There is no reason not to make it autonomous, it works for our purposes.
"thoughts" require time, and they require space as far as I've seen. no thoughts are imaginable to me as existing in the space-void. "I think, therefore space-time must exist." It is necessary for space-time to exist, for entities to exist.
"And the next minute, officer, I couldn't find my wife!"
Wel now, c'monl Grandstander, olde chep! I simply sought to use that well-worn metaphor (and who says it's a metaphor?) to try to explain the all-new Theory of Intelligent Falling! I mean, heck: that one's quite the stimulating possibility, right?
Cluck-cluck. Btw, as a long-time chicken owner, I have found their thoughts and interpretations on life and egg-laying to be far more honest than those of several of my devout Christian friends' approaches!
Fact is, you can actually see it all in their once-dinosaurian eyes. They only allow us to live amongst them by their good graces. Plus, I feel them Purina Layena pellets, which are a lot easier to find and "attack" than some human who doesn't see them surging up from behind in a coordinated chicken attack until it's too late!
Note the well-coordinated pre-attack formation happening right here (moments later, I had to run for my life! Btw, it had been a real bee-atch naming all of these "friends", or so I thought. Perhaps it was when I got several of their names wrong one evening that they finally decided to turn on me…):
Beware the dino-chickens lest you all be caught unawares. (Hey: for the White House garden project, maybe we should send Barak Obama & wife a gift of several well-trained chickens?)
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"And the next minute, officer, I couldn't find my wife!"
