Comment by gooseus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gooseus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Long post and having only skimmed it for now, I think I mostly agree... though I don't think I could ever call myself a nihilist.

The last section captures what I've tried to say in my own (not currently online) writing on the subject of life, existence, and purpose/meaning.

> As far as we know, we and our societies take the prize for being the most complex structures the universe has yet evolved.

This is where I end up in a lot of my own musings on the subject. Another point I typically make is that we KNOW that the immense diversity and complexity that exists on Earth will end in the future, unless some intelligence is able to spread life outside of Earth.

Personally, I think that one of the most important human activities should be actively trying to seed other nebula, stars, and planets with archaic life, since this increases the overall probability that life will continue to evolve somewhere, even if humans fail to expand beyond Earth.

We could be parallelizing the process of life across worlds and creating potential for other interesting life to evolve to solve the unique problems of other parts of the universe. By spreading life from Earth, we also increase the likelihood that future intelligence could find evidence of our (and each others) existence, which would be _very_ interesting (for them), and could help them get through the difficulties we face now.

I'm not sure how you resolve the opening of "we're just here to fart around / dance" nihilism with what you mention at the end about how Earth, life, and humans being the most complex and interesting thing going in the universe, but I like the style/format, and I'm definitely going to give this a longer read later. Thanks for sharing!

> Personally, I think that one of the most important human activities should be actively trying to seed other nebula, stars, and planets with archaic life, since this increases the overall probability that life will continue to evolve somewhere, even if humans fail to expand beyond Earth.

I think merely one Voyager Record[0] is not enough. We need to be sending millions of these in all directions right throughout space, and spaced out over decade intervals. Then there's a greater possibility of discovery/contact. We already do this to some degree with the Arecibo message[1], but probes like Voyager are better IMHO.

[0] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

I agree to some extent, though I think the trade-off of sending lots of messages into space is lower than sending "seeds of life".

A message has encoded information that can communicate something we're trying to express to another life form, but what is that? How will they respond and what will that response be?

Much of the point of sending a message to other life is to find other life that can respond to us... but if we can't manage to make ourselves sustainable then a response may reach us too late for it to matter, I pessimistically think this is a very likely scenario.

Sending out millions/billions of seeds, and targeting worlds where we believe we'd arrive at an early-ish period of planetary development, we could potentially jump-start the evolution of life on multiple worlds. Perhaps these worlds develop their own intelligent life, or maybe it becomes a world filled with non-intelligent biodiversity with billions of new species with millions of new physical and chemical innovations that a future intelligent race (maybe even humans, assuming my pessimism is misplaced) could learn from.

>> As far as we know, we and our societies take the prize for being the most complex structures the universe has yet evolved.

> This is where I end up in a lot of my own musings on the subject. Another point I typically make is that we KNOW that the immense diversity and complexity that exists on Earth will end in the future, unless some intelligence is able to spread life outside of Earth.

"Knowing" is NOT a group activity. Either one knows (because one has personally verified whatever-it-is) or one believes/assumes/hypothesises.

PS

The point of my comment being that if one doesn't understand what "knowing" is, I don't see how it is possible to approach finding "meaning".

I say that "knowing" is very much a group activity, in fact, it's the only way one can even approach certainly that what one "knows" isn't just a hallucination or a dream.

We can only "know" by verifying that what we experience is consistent with the experience of others, this is the essence of repeatable scientific experimentation and peer-review in science... which is the group effort of improving the extent and accuracy of what we know, as a group.

You can argue for solipsism if that's what you want, but you ought to know you'll only be arguing with yourself.

> We can only "know" by verifying that what we experience is consistent with the experience of others,

If you look at your sentence structure, you should be able to see the assumptions you are making. I think you're baking in the idea of knowing being a community activity when you say 'we can only "know"'.

Reality is personal - it is not a group activity. An individual may do things with groups, but they remain an individual, with one mind, one body, etc. I don't think this is debatable.

You seem to think I'm arguing for solipsism, when I say 'knowing is not a group activity'. If that's what you think, you are wrong - I am no solipsist. I'm simply stating the plain, verifiable reality of the matter - I'm not pretending to be beholden to some collectivist illusion.

Some questions and answers to consider.

Where does 'knowing' occur? In one's mind, surely. Can one person know, and another not know? Of course. Can one explain to another how one can verify an idea? Quite possibly. If that person then verifies the idea for themselves can they say that they know? Yes. Can some people say that "we know this or that" without any of them having verified any of it? Well, people do say this all the time, but it is simply nonsense - either an individual knows or does not.

It is perfectly possible to say that one knows this-or-that but this-or-that could really be an unverified belief. While language allows this misuse, I would argue that this is a form of a lie - 'believing' is not 'knowing', and to say one knows something that one has not verified is a form of lie.

Finally, an individual (one mind, one body) is not a "we". (Although if you use speech in a special way like the Queen perhaps you can argue the point.) "We" is simply a means to describe a group that we are included within. There are times when it is fine, meaningful to use "we" eg "we four went for an ice cream". This is a true statement. But what does it mean to say "we know human society is complex"? Its simply a nonsense statement - a group has no mind. The mind is with the individuals in the group. To say otherwise is to pretend there is something more to a group than a convenient linguistic handle.

I really don't think I'm saying anything that isn't self-evident. But perhaps this is hard to see if you suffer from this commonplace group delusion, which seems to be foundational to many individuals' view of reality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com