Philosophy

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You have it backward. Unless there is evidence to suggest a Cosmic Purpose we are best off assuming that there is no Cosmic Purpose. The only purposes we know of in the Cosmos are our little purposes which do not add up to anything significant. The Universe neither knows nor cares.

If an issue cannot be decided empirically then it is nonsense.

ruveyn

How would moral issues be resolved empirically?

How can morality be anything other than a human construct?

OP: I didn't read the whole post but I think I get where you're going.

Also, I don't think that culture is a waste of time simply because there's no purpose in life. With that in mind corporations, NGO's, and charitable organizations shouldn't have mission statements. We probably shouldn't even bother eating, drinking, sleeping, or breathing if we want to get down to brass tacks.

That said I don't think you could have a united aspie culture in this sense inclusive of all aspies. I am of the opinion that different people have different....not fundamental needs but different things they need to feel whole. I've argued for a long time as well that atheism, while it in and of itself is technically an anticulture, it shouldn't be seen as strange or absurd to have culture within atheism - such as big charitable and social organizations, much of the things that many people cling to organized religion for even if they find the beliefs indefencible at times.

As far as an organized aspie subculture with an agenda; I figure we could make great think-tanks and research collaboratives for sure. I also know you can't really make a goal of 'defeating nihilism' but I'm sure there can be objectives that lend themselves to that effect - ie. enriching culture, adding to and creating culture, perhaps even taking on some benign and forward-thinking societal planning experiments to see what tweeks and fine-tuning make people the happiest or feel the most fulfilled?

Nothing real specific is coming to me at the moment but I'm sure if I give it a few more hours I could come up with some other additional ideas.

I can tell I like both of you guys already.

Even as a full determinist and materialist myself though I really don't get the idea which gets floated around that lack of purpose means that people shouldn't self-actualize, try to make a better world, or have organized culture if they find that it gives humanity a better touchstone to reality and itself. The reason I find nihilism as an assertion over things so vacuous is that if we're in a meaningless universe where we have no free will then, there's nothing we can possibly do that the universe didn't feed to us - hence you can't be out of harmony with the 'program', there's no such thing. To have goals, dreams, and hopes and actually wish to work toward those things - for a person who has such drives - is just them being what the universe swirled their atoms together to do. It didn't have to do so consciously, it didn't have to do so for that specific purpose as we'd think of it (trying to head off some really stupid outside rebuttals right now before they happen), it just does what it does and whatever comes as a result is appropriate from that standpoint.

That's a very interesting way of looking at it and I'm not sure that this has occurred to me before. Yes: If we have purposes as individual's then the universe has a purpose in as far as within that universe there is a purpose. It might be more accurate to say that the universe has many purposes - as many as there are individual creatures that have a purpose. I suppose then the question becomes whether what we experience as purpose is actually a 'purpose' or whether it would be more accurate to describe it as something else, like an 'instinct' or even 'genetically and cultually determined behaviour', or some such. Then I'm thinking whether we require free-will to have a purpose for without that, 'purpose' seems susceptible to reduction to something altogether mechanical. My current view is that we don't have free-will, and so what started out as an interesting opportunity to rethink the idea of a purposeful universe, now looks to me like either, or both, a confusion of language and/or conceivable in terms of a basically materialistic worldview.



I agree with you here. Agnosticism seems to be the only logically coherent view to have on this. But even that agnosticism is perhaps merely an ideal, pragmatically vacuous in a world relentlessly requiring action of some sort.. I mean, do we not have to act out of some interpretation, some belief, of how things are? Do we not act AS IF we either believe or disbelieve such and such to be the case with regard to matters for which empirical evidence is lacking?

I don't think it's 'safe to say', as you put it earlier, that there is any empirically verifiable 'best off' about our assumptions with regards to the question of the existence of Cosmic Purpose.

Neither is it factually verifiable that 'our little purposes', as you say, don't add up to anything 'significant'. Significance, at least, in the sense of this idea as a feature of subjective psychological experience. In my particular subjective experience, what I might call my purposes are perhaps the salient feature of what I experience as significant in my life.

It is perhaps true that it is technically nonsense to talk of ideas that are empirically unverifiable, and you're sounding a little Wittgensteinian to me here, but that does not mean that the subjective, internal experience of purpose or any other empirically non-verifiable part of our 'inner world' is not of the greatest importance to what we are doing with our lives, and, it is nonsense, rather, I suggest, to live the empirically unverifiable part of ones life with disregard to the features of that form of life that we find most compelling. I understand that such a view is also part of Wittgenstein's broader philosophy.

Last edited by Saturn on 06 Jan 2012, 12:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It is important to us third generation Primates.

ruveyn

I agree that it is people who supply purposes. Reflecting on your other statement that the universe does not exist to [do] anything, etc., I don't think we can go this far. There are no laws of nature in nature. Like purposes, they are strictly speaking also something that arises within our thinking. We can't say, either, that there are no built in purpose in nature, only that we don't find one. Not only that we havn't found one or that we havn't found one yet, but that we bring this question, this way of thinking, to nature and it is within this way of thinking that no answer shows itself. Nature left alone from our thinking is by definition unthinkable and could be said to transcend even our notion of purpose or lack of it, although to say this would again be to think something about the unthinkable, and would strictly speaking be another mistake.

Well that's what we are, so let's get on with it. We are, arn't we, getting on with it, that is?

would any of you know anything in the material world that could qualify as a purpose? and if not would you then please explain why we have the word purpose if there is only a material world.

Yes, sensation gives us a rubric of needs to follow. That implies the need for a better and better world, which takes both scientific and social progress.

is sensation in the physical world?

Are you a materialist? If so the answer is yes.

I believe that most people experience themselves as having purpose/s. Some extreme materialists might theoretically reduce this experience to physical phenomana, but that doesn't stop the ongoing nature of experience which most people would describe phenomenologically as being of other than material in nature.

I think language gets us into difficulties in at least 2 ways. One, what I would call the Derridean way, where by stating one concept we are necessarily implying the existence of its conceptual opposite, thereby problematising the attempt to affirm or deny that something rather than its opposite is the case. Two, what I would call the Wittgensteinian way, where talking about anything that isn't empirically verifiable as being the case, renders such talk nonsense.