I don't know what specifically you are referring to but, the sun is going to be a red giant in 4.5 billion years, earth cannot sustain life. Deep into the future, all the stars will eventually burn out and there will be no more new ones born. The night sky will be dark. The only radiation emitted will be black holes slowly evaporating on a time scale so huge we can't even meaningfully comprehend it. There is no energy to sustain life. Then there is the heat death of the universe to look forward to.
Humans might survive past earth, but oblivion will come for us all the same. We just get to play around in our little imagined worlds of purpose and meaning a little longer all to no avail beyond living one's life.
And that's all any of us can really do, chose how to face existence knowing there is no grand scheme in which each of us is some how important or matters. Choosing to live is equally as valid as choosing not to. We are evolutionarily engineered thinking emotional machines where certain states make us feel good(love, friendship, self actualisation food...., accomplishment) and certain states make us feel bad (sickness, loss, pain...)
All we can do is live a life we are happy(good state) with, be it building stone walls that last or having kids and raising them.
> We are evolutionarily engineered thinking emotional machines where certain states make us feel good(love, friendship, self actualisation food...., accomplishment) and certain states make us feel bad (sickness, loss, pain...)
Certainly this could lead one to be a little more circumspect about grand pronouncements.
It seems like you’re saying some people are being tricked by our brains, but others (like yourself) are able to pull aside the veil and truly understand our place in the universe. Perhaps we’re all being tricked.
Regardless, in a universe where nothing matters, truth and knowledge have no more value than children or stone walls.
> It seems like you’re saying some people are being tricked by our brains, but others (like yourself) are able to pull aside the veil and truly understand our place in the universe. Perhaps we’re all being tricked.
I make no such claim. We interpret and navigate the world with the mental models and toolsets we have. If you can do math, you can calculate, estimate, plan, budget....etc. Similarly, some toolsets give you access to insights and paradigms eg: religious toolset might make you interpret the world differently. I merely have a certain toolset which lets me look at the world in a certain way, does not mean this toolset is exclusive, leads to authoritative interpretations or it's acquisition is special in any way.
I could just say "In my humble opinion"
>Regardless, in a universe where nothing matters, truth and knowledge have no more value than children or stone walls.
As always value is in the eye of the beholder, there is no objective value beyond what a subject is able to get out of it. So if you feel truth and knowledge are important, they are. If you feel faith is more important than truth, it is, to you at-least.
One problem I've noticed with the way human beings communicate is that for any given situation, there's no way of knowing whether the person speaking is doing so with an implicit "imho", or whether they mean the things they say literally. In this case, I thought that you were speaking literally.
I wonder how much this phenomenon (and others like it) contributes to the amount of polarization and disharmony we are experiencing in the world right now, or in the past for that matter, all without our knowledge or interest.
we will have left earth (and inevitably our sun) long before 4 billion years away, most probably as a hybrid species by then
on the theorised heat death timescale humans have only been around for less than infinitesimal fractions of quadrillionths of a percent of their potential. what's to say we don't in that time escape it by transiting to a new, younger universe?
Or, you know an asteroid hits us causing the 6th Extinction Level Event killing humanity. As long as we are doing wild speculative Sci-Fi the Great filter in our future is a real possibility to consider.
For now, we are an incredibly young species who has time and again demonstrated our penchant for chasing after short term incentives at the cost of longterm harm. We are making the earth unliveable faster than we are progressing towards being a multi-planetary species (which seems like an insurmountable leap given the candidates and the cost structure we have to work with). But humans are inventive and resourceful so here's hoping we grow beyond living on earth.
Humans might survive past earth, but oblivion will come for us all the same. We just get to play around in our little imagined worlds of purpose and meaning a little longer all to no avail beyond living one's life.
And that's all any of us can really do, chose how to face existence knowing there is no grand scheme in which each of us is some how important or matters. Choosing to live is equally as valid as choosing not to. We are evolutionarily engineered thinking emotional machines where certain states make us feel good(love, friendship, self actualisation food...., accomplishment) and certain states make us feel bad (sickness, loss, pain...)
All we can do is live a life we are happy(good state) with, be it building stone walls that last or having kids and raising them.