Why life is absurd
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
Also consider the economic argument. On the one hand, the level of investment experts make in becoming so is squandered by death. And yet, this also levels the playing field for newborns, since you don't have to compete against the guy with 8,000 years of experience.
I think human intelligence hits an asymptote due to mortality. There's only so deep an individual can go, and a limit on how much you can replace depth with breadth.
We enter and exit this world as babes. 100 years is in many ways a pathetic excuse for an existence. Obviously extending that would have to focus on quality not quantity, and has supremely disruptive economic effects (on par with strong AI) but I do not doubt there are great leaps we will take toward this end over the next 500 years.
One nice side-effect of a millennial-scale existence would hopefully be a more macro and less cyclical approach to "current affairs".
We see the effects of longer, more productive lives already in youth unemployment and property prices. It may not be until the post-boomer generation that we adjust to this. Perhaps there is a historical period where a generation has lived far longer than the few preceding it, from which we can get an idea how society managed?
The solutions have been things like:
- subdivide the property (not sustainable)
- The younger son goes to the military, or the frontier, or...
- The younger son courts a daughter in a family with no sons
- Increase the death rate (war, disease, etc)
- Establish an equilibrium and plan for a given number of living beings, preventing the formation of new ones until there are free resources. (Attempting to defy this will lead to the previous or next outcome.)
- Expand in to new areas to provide more SPACE!
Maybe think in classes instead of individual cases. 100 years is nothing. Wheels within wheels. And larger wheels are turning.
Even less, many people choose family.
Also if longevity is achieved there will be plenty of disruption on the way, since there is no "magic pill", but rather a lot of breakthroughs combined.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "human intelligence", but in general we get deeper not by stretching vertically, but by moving vertically, if you follow the metaphor. Many software engineers today don't even have a passing familiarity with the deeper levels of the stack they're programming on, and that's all new stuff in the last ~50 years.
Does this really work about as well (e.g. leaky abstractions but better than nothing) in all disciplines? Learning math is a pretty much a 'climb the ladder' experience. You don't have to literally discover it all for yourself, but you do still have to learn it. I assume e.g. biology is similar; there are absolutely abstractions upon abstractions, but it takes a tremendous amount of work to level up to the point where you are making breakthroughs.
Certainly low hanging fruit abounds, but our individual capacity for learning seems fairly limited in the great scale of things, and has not advanced much in the past few centuries. As a species, we either gain an order-of-magnitude increase in our ability to learn/retain knowledge, or the computer does it all for us. Not sure how much I like the potential adverse side-effects of the 2nd case.
Evolution of science / technology is typically drawn on an exponential scale and we're staring up the side of a cliff ahead of us. There are a lot of marvels in the world we have built, but most of them to someone with 15 years of training in the relevant field are not black boxes or magic. I just imagine climbing much further up the cliff and you start to get to that point.
E.g. I was watching a video of how the Toyota Prius eCVT works last night. I know fuck-all about CVTs, but I have a passing familiarity with planetary gears, and could follow the 15 minute explanation / walkthrough and learned enough to distinguish eCVT from magic. In 100-500 years I would be surprised if the underlying technology of our personal transportation devices would be remotely so 'accessible'.
Isn't it only a matter of time before computers are designing and replicating devices that are sufficiently beyond our capability to understand how they even operate? Or synthetic compounds created by computer algorithms that cure disease but we have literally no idea the mechanism of action? Maybe in a very few problem domains today this is already the case.
* > Isn't it only a matter of time before computers are designing and replicating devices that are sufficiently beyond our capability to understand how they even operate? Or synthetic compounds created by computer algorithms that cure disease but we have literally no idea the mechanism of action? Maybe in a very few problem domains today this is already the case.
Of course there's also the middle ground option, where the clear distinction between human and computer becomes blurred, and eventually meaningless.
In 150 years your car will be made from carbon only and will have tiny simple motors in its wheels. Plus some magic energy source.
Humans and humanity don't have goals. The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. And it is certainly not our goal to be creative, productive, efficient. We make up goals for ourselves to give subjective meaning to our lives, and that can be plenty. The hard part of anyone's life is to find the existence that gives their life meaning in their eyes. You think extending our lifespan or making society more efficient are worthy goals? So dedicate your life to those goals. But make sure that's really meaningful to you, because, frankly, the universe doesn't give a damn.
But I think for those of us who are, mortality seems like an awful joke, and a terrible waste. We just get started and then it's all cut short.
Structure (and the immense variety), life, mutations, and the known universe that exist rather than infinite disorder and an entropic void seems more than just "indifferent".
So what? I fail to understand how this supposedly renders our lives more or less meaningful.
Anecdotally speaking most people get through their day to day tasks thinking that somehow it all matters in the end.
If nothing really matters, and best you can do is be your own little streetlight(to paraphase Kubrick) you are faced with the problem on what to choose as your meaning.
Pick anything, it will do. That is scary.
Why?
No natural law, no nothing -> pure chaos
Put it another way, indifferent universe strongly points to us being a complete accident, our qualia so cherished by us just an absurd joke.
So meaning being null means there is no ultimate answer not even 42.
But I understand OP as well. Some other potential entity only a dozen light years away might not care much about our human art, love, war or suffering. Maybe the interest in alien life is unique to us because we are social in nature. We don't know other civilization's cultures. Maybe they know where we are but actively choose to ignore us. We can't even deal with or comprehend cultures a few hundred miles away from us. It makes no sense to try and preemptively comprehend the intent of the rest of the universe.
But for us as humans, our lives are usually maximally meaningful often to the point where it's egocentric and selfish. I am sure you can think of a few people who deserve to die rather than you. After all the selection of ostracized or hated people is very large. However, in the grand scheme of things you can only claim to look at local optima and we walk through history like a greedy algorithm.
Only when the full scale of events are known, when humanity's history becomes static either by ending or stagnating, we are truly able to make conclusions whether events in our time are good or bad. And even then it doesn't mean that it actually matters.
As far as we know currently, the future looks particularly grim†: on the longest time scale imaginable, the very fabric of the universe is being thinned out of existence. The absurd thing here is trying to make sense out of what definitely hasn't, as all information within this universe will ultimately be destroyed.
Whatever, I choose to enjoy the ride.
And you are also supposed to both have a career and find your place in the world meantime.
We long for a real basis for morals, but if all we are is matter obeying the laws of physics, morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.
We long for meaning, but that's hard to come by too. It usually comes down to randomly picking something and assigning meaning to it, and claiming that now you have meaning. But if all you are is a machine made of atoms that is headed for death, what kind of real meaning is possible?
Here is a deeper level of absurdity. Humans have randomly evolved to have these aspirations (immortality, morals, meaning), but those aspirations can't be fulfilled because all we are is collections of atoms randomly evolved by an uncaring universe. This is a sick cosmic joke. If the materialist starting point is correct, then our persistent aspirations cannot be fulfilled in the universe that exists.
Or else the materialist view of the universe is incorrect. Then our aspirations are not a sick cosmic joke - they are evidence that we are more than the materialist view says we are.
That's not necessarily true: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#2
As Sam Harris said, either I'm a deterministic machine, or I'm a random machine, but in neither case do I have moral responsibility for what I do.
First off, naturalism does not necessarily imply determinism. But even given physical determinism, the incompatibility of it and free will is not a certainty:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
The point I'm really trying to make is that there are a lot of smart people who have written on all these topics, and the answers are far from settled.
As for compatibilism... it looks like "you can't totally prove that materialism implies no free will, so it might be possible." No mechanism, not even a guess at one, just "it could still be". Forgive me, but I don't find that very persuasive.
I think that my objection to most of the compatibilism stuff is this: What is the "I" that is going to choose? In a purely naturalist view, all I can be is a collection of matter that obeys the laws of physics, because there's nothing else for me to be. I'm a machine made out of atoms, nothing more. It seems to me that all these compatibilist arguments aren't really taking that seriously. (Perhaps not surprisingly, since they're being made by philosophers, not physicists.) They therefore have some intuitive, experience-based idea of what a person is that sneaks in to their arguments, rather than really grappling with the implications of the purely naturalist position.
Another good question!
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
> It seems to me that all these compatibilist arguments aren't really taking that seriously. (Perhaps not surprisingly, since they're being made by philosophers, not physicists.)
They are. Nothing about naturalism implies "I'm a machine made out of atoms, nothing more." Even granting that I am a machine made out of atoms, I'm not just that. I possess other properties than just being a machine made out of atoms--e.g. those atoms are in a particular location, they can affect other sets of atoms, etc.
Going back to the original point, there's nothing innate about sets of atoms that implies they can't also be the subject of moral assertions. I understand that you may not intuitively agree with this position, but there's nothing about sets of atoms that logically rules out this possibility.
You should actually study the philosophy before dismissing it.
To me, the physics is pretty convincing. I don't care that philosophers object "but you can't totally rule it out!". There's lots of things I can't totally rule out. That doesn't mean that they should be seriously considered.
One could argue morals should be based on the survival of mankind. Because that's the only positive goal of it, to survive as long as possible,though, ultimately mankind will come to an end,that's inevitable. On the other hand, as long as there is energy,artificial intelligence could outlast us.It would be mankind's testament and ultimate legacy. I always thought that, if we were to find another alien civilization,it would be through the AI they designed or in form of pure data. And it's probable that it would be available as binary data too.
When we talk about morality, we're looking for something that should happen, deeper than what does happen or what anything wants to happen.
Because we happen to be humans. But there's also lots of other creatures out there to favor: monkeys, dogs, that sort of thing.
>When we talk about morality, we're looking for something that should happen, deeper than what does happen or what anything wants to happen.
The word "should" becomes utterly meaningless if it has nothing to do with what we want. What do you think "should" would mean if I proved conclusively to you "should" exterminate all life on Earth? It's an ungrounded symbol if it doesn't take your real desires into account.
>“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” -- Immanuel Kant
In other words, a moral system needs to answer the question "why should I give a #$@*?". Why not let the world burn if i feel like it? Why not just that part over there that's only being used by people I don't like and don't depend on? Your Kant quote is a succinct statement of the commands of most moral systems, but doesn't answer the real question. If there's nothing more to the universe then we can see, only matter in odd configurations, I don't see how it can be answered.
P.S. I'm not sure what you meant by "real desires", but it bears mentioning that there exist people and other beings whose real desires are purely destructive, to others and themselves; self interest in the usual sense (survival and comfort) is not necessarily relevant. Think about people we class as "mentally ill" (which really just means outlier, since our "healthy" baseline is just the average). If you didn't mean to imply that no one has a "real desire" in some sense to do "evil" things like destroy all life on earth, then you can probably ignore this part, but it had to be said
See this for more on why: http://liamk.org/is-love-real/
Our options are Nihilism/Zen/Absurdity or Theism. And if the former is true, it doesn't matter if we hold the latter. As CS Lewis put it, if the Theists are wrong after all they would have merely paid the universe a compliment it would not have deserved.
Oughts cannot mean anything in the first place unless they ultimately reduce to some kind of is-checkable fact.
The Is-Ought Problem and the Open Question Argument are not so conclusive as to justify nihilism.
Only if the world is posited to be something beyond material (supernatural), can we suggest values are Real and hold to Moral Realism. Anytime we suggest that humans have value or that moral statements correspond to real truths, we have abandoned empiricism and have entered the realm of faith.
But of course there is. Humans have value to humans. You are assuming that "have value" requires a supernatural grounding.
All of the practices done before this (meditation, compassion, tantra, etc) are--as in other branches of Hindu and Dharmic faiths--understood to be merely optional "yogas" or activities to fill the time and enjoy oneself in a Nihilistic world.
Additionally, the practices of Buddhism are said to lead to Enlightenment, but even for the Buddhist, wanting Enlightenment is a huge mistake as Moksha/Nirvana is available at all times, without the practices, as our default status. As Jed McKenna notes: Why does Buddhism rarely produce Buddhas? It is because Buddhist practices ("yogas") are not able to transmit the realization that Self is Illusion and All is Nothingness. If you read the Anathapindika you'll see that Siddhartha denied that the Creator God (issara-karaṇa-vāda) existed, that he claimed there was no free will, but even though every thing is deterministic we should practice good anyway.
Let us, then, abandon the heresy of worshipping the Creator God and of praying to him;
let us no longer lose ourselves in vain speculations of profitless subtleties;
let us surrender self and all selfishness,
and as all things are fixed by causation,
let us practise good so that good may result from our actions.
Utilitarianism -- and many others -- are equally possible. You can assume any set of moral axioms (including those of utilitarianism) without assuming God (the defining assumption of Theism) -- and, in fact, Theism in and of itself gets you nothing, except that it usually is coupled with assumptions about what God wills and the moral axiom that what God wills is what we ought to seek.
You misunderstand the dichotomy. This is not about what we can do, humans can delude themselves all the time. The question is about what is logically consistent.
"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence" applies in a purely natural universe, which means that if there is no God, we can dismiss Utilitarianism (and all the others) as there is no evidence for it. Only if the universe is supernatural (if God exists) do things change.
Morals are more than made up rules because if we're just atoms, they have come about through evolution. Presumably any advanced creature would have senses for pain so it does not harm itself at the wrong time, something like happiness when things go well, an instinct to protect the offspring, a sense of beauty which quite likely corresponds to environments and creatures that are helpful for survival and probably some instincts to not trash the environment to the extent it wipes it's kind out. Hence much of the basic morals we have would seem some what inevitable to evolved life forms.
I quite like common sense evolved morals. They can be preferable to what the God inspired likes of ISIS get up to.
No one contests that if all is material we have developed rules that allow us to survive. The question is: Do our rules refer to Truth (Moral Realism) or are they invented (Moral Nonrealism). The hypothesis that they came about through evolution is not evidence that morals are Real. See the link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9060768 to maybe better understand what is meant by "arbitrary".
Even more absurd is the unfairness of the whole joke of life. I'm lucky with an education and a good job giving me a chance to focus on experiencing nuanced pleasures instead of fighting to survive. Being mentally ill does give me share of anguish, but mine is nothing compare to the poor, unfed and terminally sick. Their life is even more absurd: a passage through a brief but painful passage through anguish, suffering and hopelessness.
As an ex-Muslim, I have trouble adjusting to this: meaning is just a human construct. Things don't have meaning on their own, we assign them a purpose ourselves. Religion gave me re-assurance of eternal afterlife where I get a second chance to live a life without the evil and suffering of this existence. However, it did have a fatal flaw: it was false hope.
Now, life went from a short journey into another realm to a serious emergency. Now, I have to make of what I was lucky to own; but it can all go away in a single accident. After being a pattern-seeking religionist, everything is just starting to seem so random...
1. Humans live about 100 years. 2. The highest human ambitions, like writing a great novel, can only be reasonably accomplished in a well-balanced life if that life lasts more than 1000 years. 3. By definition, our life is absurd because we don't have enough time to reasonably accomplish our highest ambitions.
She concludes that human life could be made less absurd by extending life to 1000 years -- this I disagree with.
The problem I have with this thesis is that I think the phrase "highest human ambitions" is really a shifting goal. It's a goal that is set by the accomplishment of a person of extraordinary talent who dedicates her entire life to that one pursuit.
We think today that a brilliant novel on the order of Tolstoy is a high human ambition, only because it's the limit of what a human can do. Instead, consider if humans lived much shorter lives, reaching their cognitive peak at age 15. In such a world, few people would have time to learn calculus, and so solving a differential equation might be within the highest order of a human's mathematical ambitions.
Conversely, let me suggest that if the average person were to live to 1000 years, the definition of human ambition would scale accordingly. Imagine the absolute masterpiece symphony that Beethoven could write if he were alive today. He would have hundreds of years of experience. He would have seen the evolution of music and integrate all these advances in his repertoire. He could afford to spend 50 years writing his mater symphony. This level of music will be now our new target of ambition.
The central problem reduces down to this fact. The high water mark for an ambitious goal is always defined by people in that field who are unreasonably talented and dedicates an unreasonable fraction of their lives to the field. If these experts lives the same number of years as I do, since I'm a generalist of average talent dabbling in their field, I will never be able to accomplish anywhere near their level.
The absurdity here then seems to stem from the intrinsic human desire to always compare ourselves to the best, even when we realize we don't want to commit to the field (with good reason) as the best do.
But what bugs me most is that a universe without an entity to perceive and observe it is just such a waste of ... energy? It's almost like the existence of the universe implies the existence of an observer. That the formation of intelligent life is an expected result of the universe existing.
It can only be a waste if it has some higher purpose.
Seems like a logical stretch, but very poetic.
Entropy leads to life. Life and entropy leads to evolution. Evolution, given enough space and time to work within, eventually leads to intelligent life.
Intelligent life leads to...?
Spoilers!
So that's probably not what you consider "optimal ethics", but given the starting assumption (that there is no God), it seems very difficult to explain why de Sade was wrong.
If we can't prove unambiguously whether or not God exists (and we can't), much less what the actual Will of that God is (even the religions which more or less agree on the same God can't agree on that), then ethics in the presence of God are in practice no different than ethics in the absence of God.
I think it's difficult to prove the Marquis wrong because it's impossible to prove him right.
Edit: let's just pretend I wrote this from an alternate mirror universe where what I said here made sense in context. I'm not deleting this comment because that's the coward's way out....
And many people accept de Sade's premise. They are then left with his conclusion. (Not necessarily sadism - that's just what de Sade felt like doing. The part that people are left with is "Whatever is, is right" - that is, there is no basis for a "should" or an "ought"; there is no basis for morals.)
Morality doesn't require the universe have a purpose, but morality has to have a purpose.
The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort on. At least until a solution is more tractable.
Further, the idea that everyone dying is some great tragedy is only true in the philosophy Bostrom and others have adopted. It is one of massive egoism and human-centrism that I think is misplaced. These same people then reject any philosophies that lessen the devastation of death on the grounds that they are the fictions of lesser minds attempting to placate themselves over their impending death. But there is no objectively true philosophy. The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.
I find your conception of philosophy unsatisfactory. Furthermore there are reasonable angles of attack we have on aging. We are making great strides in understanding metabolic pathways of aging in animal models, but we need the research funding to attract the researchers to get the work done. We will make significant progress when you can expect to have a bountiful academic career working on it. Longevity research is currently a career dead end.
David Sinclair[0] is wealthy and well known for his work in longevity. He Sold his company to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.
D Sinclair's earlier work was on resveratrol, and there's some more products coming. Well, actually one has arrived—in the US at least: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sinclair_%28biologist%29
Novartis[1], the pharmaceutical company, who ranked number one in world-wide sales in 2013 is working on a longevity drug based on rapamycin.
Elizabeth Blackburn got a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 2009, for her work on telomeres!
Quite frankly: lulz!
[0] http://www.elysiumhealth.com/team [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novartis
I've linked to a page of academics from top institutions[0]. If you're at Harvard researching longevity, then you're doing OK career-wise, imho.
If you sell your company for $720 million, you're doing OK career-wise, imo.
Demonstrably, you're incorrect.
Ouch, that's my career ;)
But the current trick to do longevity research in a way that will be funded is to point out how major diseases have age as a major risk factor, and that to tackle cancer, heart disease, etc, we need to understand more about aging. And that the median age in the US is increasing, therefore age-associated diseases will cause more of a health care cost burden.
In absolute terms, our society spends a pittance on this important problem. But relative to other biomedical researchers, aging researchers don't have that hard a time. You just have to be careful not to make overly bold claims and be lumped in with de Grey et al.
To summarize my thoughts on this article, I will add that I independently came to much the same conclusions as the OP, and that's why I'm doing what I am. I don't think I could make web apps all day or do 99% of careers because of this very absurdity. In fact, I am constantly surprised at the ability most people seem to have to go to a completely meaningless job every day.
Life extension has been demonstrated in other species. And medication, such as metformin, has been shown to extend human lifespan (I believe average, not maximum). Anyway, the point is that life extension for humans is perfectly tractable.
Re metformin. From a study[0]: 'Patients with type 2 diabetes initiated with metformin monotherapy had longer survival than did matched, non-diabetic controls. Those treated with sulphonylurea had markedly reduced survival compared with both matched controls and those receiving metformin monotherapy. This supports the position of metformin as first-line therapy and implies that metformin may confer benefit in non-diabetes. Sulphonylurea remains a concern.'
[0] 'Can people with type 2 diabetes live longer than those without? A comparison of mortality in people initiated with metformin or sulphonylurea monotherapy and matched, non-diabetic controls' http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dom.12354/abstrac...
I think that if there's one thing that philosophers agree on, after arguing with each other for a couple of millennia, it's that the point of philosophy is not to find a clever way to lie to ourselves - it's to find out something true.
Since that is too much information to deal with you have to selectively ignore parts of it. A useful philosophy lets you get rid of essentially all the irrelevant information while keeping and fitting into a mental framework what is relevant. So in a sense it is a lie, but it is one that hopefully preserves the important parts. My argument was that Bostrom's philosophy ignores too many of the important parts by dismissing his critics' viewpoints as unfounded. Hopefully that clears things up a bit.
There is, however, objectively inconsistent philosophy. Bostrom would probably argue that most people believe things (such as valuing individual lives) that are inconsistent with complacency in the face of death. Witness, for example, the obstinate resistance to cryonics even among those who would eagerly seek out an untested and experimental surgery to avoid death at the hands of cancer or heart disease. Unless great care is taken to reason dispassionately, the enormity and apparent intractability of death compromise a rational assessment of its horror.
There is a vast difference between an untested, experimental surgery to save you from death and a tested, nonworking procedure that relies on beneficent future people to invent wholly new technologies to save you from death.
Cryonics is not about saving lives, it's about hoping against the evidence to recreate them when they are already gone.
If you want to cheat death, you need to actually conduct an experimental science of cheating death (ie: preserving and restoring people before they are truly dead) rather than just buying the first available option, no matter how scientifically unworkable and technologically unrefined, like a lottery ticket.
The Wright brothers did not bet that their first design for an airplane would work. They experimented until they arrived at a design that did work.
It is tedious to be human. The amount of time dedicated to maintaining one's body even when young and healthy can feel tiresome.
Longevity is not about extending our misery but about finding a way out of these limited meat bags.
Perhaps there is a meaning and the universe is not absurd, maybe our minds are simply too stupid to figure it out. Maybe if we extended our brains, increased our intelligence...
Only time will tell. That's why we need more of it. That's why it's worth putting up with the daily bullshit called living until it reaches the breaking point.
If I created life I would almost certainly make it finite but endow it with a sense of hope that life goes beyond a single life span.
That is one of the conjectures propounded by the Upanishads.
The problem is that religion doesn't answer anything(or gives absurd answers,backed by nothing but faith and fishy philosophy),isn't rational because it is not fasifiable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
What is clearly absurd is religion.
http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/07/christianity-t...
It isn't about the holy books being full of inaccuracies, historians know they totally are full of shit already,from an historical point of view.
"thought provoking piece" ? no Plato is though provoking, Kant is thought provoking. Descartes is thought provoking. Islam and the rest are barbaric and thrive on ignorance, not enlightenment. They are hate pieces that are contextual to the era they were written,not by "a creator" but by men.
But I must admit, Islam is a little more perfect than the other two, as the ethnocentrism of Judaism and the gross absurdity of trinity will not stand that longer. The fact that it tries,however to build up on the other two doesn't save it, from a meta-physical point of view.
Logic teaches us than building something on absurdity only leads to more absurdity.
- why would anybody waste their time, given that life is so short? The problem I guess is that "waste" is relative. Who wasted their time? Me in school, or my buddies partying?
- it's absurd that your luck is pretty much determined by where and when you were born. It's absurd that some people think they are so accomplished and scored many runs but without realizing they were born on third base
- it's absurd that the probability is high there is no God. why would something so mathematically amazing as the universe generate something so brutally absurd as conscious life?
- I think it is absurd that I just wasted 5 minutes of my life thinking about this instead of tucking my kids to bed or reading them a story for bed time.
Well, I guess life is in fact absurd. My original premise is invalid.
Let's not forget that meaning – or the lack of thereof – may as well be a human construct. Life is not meaningful nor meaningless. It only is.
Existentialism argues that we create our own meaning by living life and exercising our free will. Nihilism counters that there is no meaning and so nothing matters. Absurdism is the acceptance that life is ridiculous and by defiantly laughing at it we can live authentically.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
And what do we do about it? Science and engineering life-extending technologies. Write about our memories and discoveries. Make music and art. It's absurd and it seems to work for us.
i've often wished i could hibernate; there's a ton of victorian art that shows a clear obsession with humans flying like birds; i spent many childhood afternoons trying to hold my breath longer (so i could stay underwater); there's been tons of fiction, philosophy, science and engineering put into talking to animals...
however, most of all, i agree with all the comments above suggesting that the notion of permanence itself is absurd, our insistence on a hard-nosed materialist viewpoint is absurd, our insistence that we're smart enough to understand the universe is absurd (we're little smarter than our dogs and cats, who we're sure can't possibly understand the universe)
Every human must experience and keep on experiencing or otherwise taking your life might be more less painful than living it.
This really isn't the relativity that the author alludes to, but I have something to say about this too. As physicists, we term this "relativity" the author deals with as "dealing with units." Having a concept of time is meaningless without a given scale. For example, for the ultraintense-plasma interactions that I am discussing in the paper I'm writing today, a picosecond is a long time given that the electro-magnetic dynamics I care about happen on the femtosecond scale. For the hydrodynamic simulations my groupmate will work on, picoseconds are the timescales of significance. Of course, when heating the coffee in the cup next to me, the barista measures timescales much larger than this, of the order of seconds, exponentially longer than both of the former scales.
Life is a complicated phenomenon which captures dynamics at many scales. Thinking about life can be just as complicated, if you let it. An issue I often see is equating parts of life with other parts and thus, using the same scales for both. This often leads us into trouble. Why does it take my friend an hour to shower while it only takes me ten minutes? If I can write a python script in one day, why the hell does it take this junior dev two weeks to make his? Of course, the same issue here is a novice physicist comparing the fs physics I deal with to the ps my friend does, the comparison isn't valid just because they are both "times."
This is why even though life seems short for some people it can seem long for others. Just because 80 years is a year and people are people, any given individual has their own experiences and opinions that shapes their vantage point, and it can be hard to really compare the two. Of course, just like the "real" relativity SR, there are certain constraints we can make on time in this context, many people might prefer longer lives even if we lived 1000 years if millennial* olds are as selfish as us 80-year-ers are. But the diversity in context must be taken into account as it should be for me when I model ultra-intense laser plasma interactions. Context always matters.
Thinking about the context for each person's scales makes our look on life a little less absurd. I think that more often than not, people's motivations (for desiring longevity, for instance) have good reasoning in them, especially when you consider their context.
[*] It's funny that millennial here means people who are 1000 years old as opposed to people in their late teens to early twenties.
> The point of the article is to explore this absurdity.
I think the point of the article was just to sound smart. It doesn't really explore anything, nor provoke thoughts or insights.
Only those without a clear focus on their goal may ask a question 'why am I here?'. If you've ever achieved something in your life that others will admire or build upon - it was not in vain. That's why we are here: being its members, to advance humanity as a whole.
That's also exactly why we should never achieve immortality (so that we have motivation to do something in out limited time) and if we do so, it would be one of the worst events humanity has ever encountered.
Sadly, this day most people look at this world through prism of financial wealth, but trading things (often completely useless things, I might) back and forth can hardly be considered an achievement future generations can benefit from. All in all, in the modern world, realization of one's potential has stepped back to give way to greed and that cannot be called progress in any way.
EDIT: Well isn't that a knee-jerk reaction. People always reject this argument for some reason and always fail to come up with the solid reason for this. Is this what we've come to as a humanity?