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Comment by her_tummy_hurts | Hacker News Reader

I don’t thunk my brain could handle no beginning

With all respect, I think we generally live in a human society that has been built around that very constraint.

Curious to know why that is. Would you mind expanding?

Because if we have not beginning, we have no purpose. If we have no purpose, this is all really for nothing. I am not arguing whether it is or not, or whether there is a beginning, but lets look at it this way... You woke up this morning, that was the beginning of this day at night you will rest. Now, lets say there is no memory or record of 'waking up' beginning, we therefor cannot anticipate an end and everything we do now may feel for some less meaningful. I don't really know. I am just expressing my under-educated overthinking take on it.

Countered the downvote because I’m interested in this line of reasoning. Could you expand on that? Why do you think having no memory of “waking up” to existence makes it less meaningful?

I'm reminded of the following quote by Alan Watts from The Way of Zen:

To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams; wandering nowhere; of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.

Not the parent, but it kind of makes sense: if a network cable has no beginning it definitely has no purpose.

That's actually a great analogy there. I will say I wasn't really vouching for that line of reasoning more than exploring my own thoughts about it and that was one route my mind went. I like to do that with deeper questions from time to time. I guess that with no..."sense of time" or understanding of our beginning we have a less accurate ideal of what our ending may be. However, there is one thing we know for certain is that we do die. At least our bodies do. What happens after that though is to be disclosed. So maybe only what we do between those two points is what matters anyways? And some may view that as if we are going to die anyways, what does it matter?

I like that idea. I think the world is a beautiful place, and I think also that humans can be a beautiful species at the times they come together. What is that one quote? "All that wander are not lost." I believe we can find peace with our existence and mortality and its something we have to remind ourselves of that individually it is not forever, and how it will end in general is not yet perceived.

All of the worst things in human history have happened as a result of mob mentality or 'humans coming together'.

On the contrary, the only times humanity doesn't sap me of the will to live is when I'm dealing with people on an individual basis.

> All that wander are not lost.

I feel like you're misunderstanding that quote as well.

It's supposed to be "Not all who wander are lost" and it refers to loners, wanderers, vagrants and explorers that never settle down and 'plant roots'.

The idea being that there are plenty of people that exist like that and enjoy that way of life. Other people with families and steady jobs tend to look at them as if they are 'lost', without truly understanding what it is to walk the earth.

I think this is a correct line of thought to a point. There is not greater purpose, and if there is, it ought to be unlike any other form of purpose. Since in general purpose is built up -- you do some task for a purpose, and that purpose is a task in some greater purpose.

As far as individual contentment, it seems maybe the truest greater purpose is actually itself: the greatest purpose is to have a greater purpose that your everyday purposes are acting towards. This gives a consistent mechanism I think, but still incomplete, or is it? Its incomplete because the "why" of the greater purpose doesn't seem to emerge from it existing. But this was mentioned at first: the why is for individual contentment, or more technically, for positive consciousness, joy, happiness, love, whatever you want to call it. The sort of existence which when you are it, you don't need or care to ask about a greater purpose, because you can feel..you know, that you're fulfilling it.

I'm not seeing any purpose to humanity as it is.

What purpose are you seeing?

As biological organisms, notions of birth/death are hard wired into the lowest levels of our cerebral kernel which serves as the foundation for every higher level of consciousness. As such, we only have the fundamental architecture to perceive an existence that is (literally) grounded in a small gravity well, with all of our primary circuitry distinctly focused on what is in “front” of both in space and time. As organisms, we cannot directly experience time that preceded our own existence, we can only mentally model that experience through intuition. That works well enough for relating to the existence of other organisms and the physical world we share, but that relatability breaks down quickly at larger space/time scales.

Incidentally, though our individual multicellular existences may follow a birth/death cycle, the molecular information flow (DNA) that transcends our organismal existences may perhaps provide the closest approximation to a model necessary to conceptualize possible relationships between multiple space-times.

(I’m clumsily alluding to the blackhole/whitehole infinitely branching multiverse concept, with DNA playing the part of sub-atomic mass/energy primitives which encode the structure of new unidirectional space-times/universes in an endless phylogeny which ultimately still doesn’t get us anywhere closer to “where did it all begin?” but surely expands the scope of the investigation wide enough to buy us enough time to keep procrastinating... Ok, back to work.)

disclaimer: I only got a B in undergrad physics and have absolutely no clue what I’m talking about.

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