Comment by smitty1e

3 months ago

"Evolitionary" implies some direction and execution scope, does it not?

Possibly I'm guilty of over-reading the word.

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smitty1e

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card_zero  3 months ago

How does extra scope (like an afterlife) solve the problem of purpose? Now you have two problems of purpose. If I remember rightly, C.S. Lewis in his sci-fi made heaven into an endless series of adventures, which is the minimum necessary to make it attractive. But this still doesn't resolve to an ultimate purpose any more than a finite life does.

Often the question "what is the purpose of my existence?" is a proxy for some less abstract question, I think. Consider Young Frankenstein, and the gag where characters sing "Oh, sweet mystery of life at last I've found you! At last, I know the secret of it all!" because they got sex. Less cynically, it may simply be a matter of identifying comfortable values, in terms of the possible values available in the human condition in the present day. I mean you're unlikely to be honestly asking a question with a giant universal scope, if you claim that it bothers you personally.

  • smitty1e  3 months ago

    I don't find it contradictory to subscribe to both an individual Destiny and an "universal scope" Destiny of which the individual Destiny is a component.

    This Destiny is in tension with Free Will (in my telling).

    In retirement, my hope is to produce a lengthy, pretentious exploration of a few ideas that will doubtless help someone's insomnia.

    • card_zero  3 months ago

      Right, but any identification of the Ultimate Purpose is going to be a very vague bad guess. I kind of like "to learn", but besides that I tend to keep returning to a string bag of mixed values that won't boil down to anything neat.

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hansifer  3 months ago

Possibly you're over-reading, but definitely you didn't answer my question.

  • smitty1e  3 months ago

    More explicitly, then, "evolutionary" implies some grasp of a direction toward which things evolve.

    Otherwise, it's just so many chemical reactions.