shadeyinka:

Let's look at things from biological point of view.
Are plants existing for a purpose?

Plants replenish the earth with oxygen!
Plants convert solar radiation to food for all other living beings!
Plants mop up the CO2 in the environment?

Looking at this, would you consider plants as having a purpose?

Of course, this question is easy to have an answer from you because you are outside the plant system!

But to the plant, can it understand by any means that it has a purpose apart from growing, swaying in the wind and dying? A plant doesn't even have the brainpower to understand their respiration, feeding , solar energy conversion etc

For the plant, can we say they are "born" with no purpose?
Unfortunately, isolating if the plants are isolated, they will come to your conclusion: that everything is meaningless!

Cc: budaatum:


L

What you are describing is the ecosystem that shows how different organisms cohabit and benefit from each other in the system.

If we human beings lived in the ocean and could breathe underwater, would you be considering the purpose of a plant?

It is simply natural evolution, plants and animals adapt to the environment around them.

IamPlato:
so You Are Saying The Purpose Of Man Is To survive.

Essentially, yes. As soon as one is conceived the purpose begins or life ceases.

Note, life. Humans are the "beneficiary of a system", as Shadeyinka called it, and are a product of the strife for survival that began from a single cell. One fails to see this when one isolates the parts from the whole.

budaatum:


Essentially, yes. As soon as one is conceived the purpose begins or life ceases.

Note, life. Humans are the "beneficiary of a system", as Shadeyinka called it, and are a product of the strife for survival that began from a single cell. One fails to see this when one isolates the parts from the whole.

What about a cloned human being?

What about human beings cloned for organ spare parts?

You didnt see that coming eh?

JackBizzle:



What you are describing is the ecosystem that shows how different organisms cohabit and benefit from each other in the system.

A system of which humans are just a part.

JackBizzle:
If we human beings lived in the ocean and could breathe underwater, would you be considering the purpose of a plant?

Do whales and fish, the equivalent of humans in the sea, not consider the equivalent of the purpose of plants in their environment?

JackBizzle:
It is simply natural evolution, plants and animals adapt to the environment around them.

They do not only adapt, Jack, they influence the environment around them too with the system working as a loop.

JackBizzle:



What about a cloned human being?

What about human beings cloned for organ spare parts?

You didnt see that coming eh?

What about a car? Or just the spare parts?

Did you see that coming?

shadeyinka:

I agree perfectly!

A foundermental question then should be who/what is benefiting from this system?

It will be an immense exercise to wonder, deserving of a separate thread I think, though I can see it culminating in God as opposed to the right answer which is, we do not have a clue, simply due to our arrogance of assuming knowledge while ignorant.

My Lordreed proposes this as our ignorance but many can't accept it, hence God.

JackBizzle:



Let's start with cosmic nihilism.

If a large meteor falls on the earth and destroys us and everything we have built, everything we have done will be meaningless. There will be no more humans, no more records, nothing. No future. The universe does not care. In fact, the universe is a cold inhospitable place. We are insignificant to the universe.

Purpose itself is meaningful only in terms of the Beneficiary of a system.

But what you have just described is more like a destruction of a system. It doesn't mean that there is no purpose but that the purpose was truncated. Like the crankshaft of a car engine has a purpose BUT when the engine knocks, the purpose of the engine is truncated!

But this statement by Buda is very important

You can not have a system, which is "a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network complex whole" without beneficiary.
The statement alone is obviously oxymoronic.

JackBizzle:

However, in the individual level, we have logic, pleasure and pain. In our individual lives we can create meaning to things and we have. We are only one chromosome away from having a different perception of the world- if everyone was born blind, we would have different meanings of what it means to exist.

Actually, when you isolate an individual system, it cannot know it's purpose for he is just a component of a much larger system. The Purpose of a system is always embedded in the beneficiary of such System.

If a human being will live to just die some years after, he has gained NOTHING as a person.
Eccl 2:11:
"And I looked upon all my works my hands made, and upon the labor I labored to do, and behold, all vanity and striving of the spirit, and no profit under the sun."

What do you think an isolated human truely gain from living on the earth for 100years and attaining a status of the president of a country?

JackBizzle:

Your clock contemplating its existence still runs into the same problem. What is the point of telling the time if the clock itself has no use for it? And does time even exist? Why do we count in hours? Why not in 1,000 seconds? A kilosecond? Why only tell the hours but not the day or month? All these questions will lead to clock to existential crisis, depression and then nihilism.

You got me wrong sir!

The clock by itself is purposeless! But a clock in the hands of a human being has the purpose of displaying time according to the needs of the man!

In other words, a clock without human being is purposeless!

JackBizzle:
.....and that's how you became a jedi master. Yodatuum.

I love you too Jack, lol.

JackBizzle:
Sorry, what you are asking me is to become some pluralistic spiritualist hippie?

"Pluralistic spiritualist hippie"? There you go again building walls of boxes. Is buda a jedi master. Yodatuum pluralistic spiritualist hippie, or is it not the truth that you see buda that way?

Why can't you just be JackBizzle, just like buda is simply budaatum despite all the boxes many wish to entrap buda inside? Why the labels?

JackBizzle:
I am open to learn but seeing as I am not a child with a tabula rasa brain, I have to put my beliefs (foundations) forward and see how they cope...

Become a born again child with a tabula rasa brain Jack, if you are really willing to learn, instead of a tabula fulla crap beliefs!

Its hard, I know. As hard as threading a camel through a needle's eye so to speak, but it is not impossible.

JackBizzle:

What is the point of telling the time if the clock itself has no use for it? And does time even exist?

You are mixing up time and clock as if they are the same thing, which they are not. Its the argument posed when we ask if a tree makes a noise when it falls in the forest unobserved.

Clocks do not have a use for time Jack, clocks just measure the existence of time that naturally exist. Whether you tell time with a human clock, time passes regardless. The moon will go round the earth and the earth around the sun whether you measure its course with a clock or not.

You would not claim gravity does not exist just because you have not built an instrument to measure it!

shadeyinka:

Purpose itself is meaningful only in terms of the Beneficiary of a system.


But what you have just described is more like a destruction of a system. It doesn't mean that there is no purpose but that the purpose was truncated. Like the crankshaft of a car engine has a purpose BUT when the engine knocks, the purpose of the engine is truncated!

But this statement by Buda is very important

You can not have a system, which is "a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network complex whole" without beneficiary.
The statement alone is obviously oxymoronic.




Actually, when you isolate an individual system, it cannot know it's purpose for he is just a component of a much larger system. The Purpose of a system is always embedded in the beneficiary of such System.

If a human being will live to just die some years after, he has gained NOTHING as a person.
Eccl 2:11:
"And I looked upon all my works my hands made, and upon the labor I labored to do, and behold, all vanity and striving of the spirit, and no profit under the sun."

What do you think an isolated human truely gain from living on the earth for 100years and attaining a status of the president of a country?


You got me wrong sir!

The clock by itself is purposeless! But a clock in the hands of a human being has the purpose of displaying time according to the needs of the man!

In other words, a clock without human being is purposeless!

I like the statement that you made- Purpose itself is meaningful only in terms of the Beneficiary of a system.

It sounds like a very good statement but it becomes meaningless when you consider the universe as a system and see that it has no beneficiary. Are humans beneficiaries of the universe? What do we actually gain from the universe? We live on a planet that has 99 million ways to kill us. 71% of the earth is uninhabitable for us. We can only use 0.3% of that water on our planet. What about the rest of the universe- most of it is a vast empty space between planets and galaxies that is as goods as black suffocating death to humans.

budaatum:


You are mixing up time and clock as if they are the same thing, which they are not. Its the argument posed when we ask if a tree makes a noise when it falls in the forest unobserved.

Clocks do not have a use for time Jack, clocks just measure the existence of time that naturally exist. Whether you tell time with a human clock, time passes regardless. The moon will go round the earth and the earth around the sun whether you measure its course with a clock or not.

You would not claim gravity does not exist just because you have not built an instrument to measure it!

But time does not exist. What is time exactly? The space between two events? Is that space physical or abstract?

But going back to the clock. We build clocks to measure time. However, from the clock's perspective, its function is meaningless- it has no use for time that it measures.


If a tree falls in the forest and no one observes it, it still makes noise.

The weakness in the clock's analogy is that it has a creator (humans) and we know the purpose of its creation (to tell time)

We as humans do not know if we have a creator and we do not know the why

JackBizzle:

It sounds like a very good statement but it becomes meaningless when you consider the universe as a system and see that it has no beneficiary.

Its either you have supergood eyes or you talk crap!

How did puny human you see that a universe that began billions of years ago has no purpose that might be billions of years in the future from now?

budaatum:

It will be an immense exercise to wonder, deserving of a separate thread I think, though I can see it culminating in God as opposed to the right answer which is, we do not have a clue, simply due to our arrogance of assuming knowledge while ignorant.

My Lordreed proposes this as our ignorance but many can't accept it, hence God.

I think a way of looking at it purely from intellectual point of view is to ask the question:

Can a system which operates in a self fulfilling cycle be purposeless?



Note:
Can we agree that for there to be a purpose of a system, there must be a beneficiary!

budaatum:


What about a car? Or just the spare parts?

Did you see that coming?

You missed the point.

You claimed that a human being's purpose is to survive.

That can easily be negated by cloning a human being for organ spare parts. The cloned human's purpose was not to survive. The cloned human was never naturally even meant to exist.

budaatum:


Its either you have supergood eyes or you talk crap!

How did puny human you see that a universe that began billions of years ago has no purpose that might be billions of years in the future from now?

That is the point! We cannot comprehend the universe. Its existence might as well be purposeless or meaningless to us, or at least beyond us!

JackBizzle:


But time does not exist. What is time exactly? The space between two events? Is that space physical or abstract?

But going back to the clock. We build clocks to measure time. However, from the clock's perspective, its function is meaningless- it has no use for time that it measures.


If a tree falls in the forest and no one observes it, it still makes noise.

The weakness in the clock's analogy is that it has a creator (humans) and we know the purpose of its creation (to tell time)

We as humans do not know if we have a creator and we do not know the why

No one cares about the perspective of a clock, Jack. Fact is, time, the space between two events that we built the clock to objectively measure, obviously does exist or the clock we built would measure nothing.

This is basic philosophy that everyone should know before contemplating the advance subject of this thread, and if you haven't already I strongly suggest you inform yourself

Here will be a good enough place to begin..

budaatum:

No one cares about the perspective of a clock, Jack. Fact is, time, the space between two events that we built the clock to objectively measure, obviously does exist or the clock we built would measure nothing.

This is basic philosophy that everyone should know before contemplating the advance subject of this thread, and if you haven't already I strongly suggest you inform yourself

Here will be a good enough place to begin..

Time does not exist.

Does time have a physical essence?

What is time exactly?

We on earth use the movements of the sun and moon to calculate time.

Have you considered how meaningless this is, especially if one were on a planet with no moons? Even just being on another planet would make one see how abstract time is.

JackBizzle:



That is the point! We cannot comprehend the universe.

Are you preaching your beliefs to me or philosophising in order to learn, Jack?

There was a time God built the heaven and the earth in six days but we recently landed a probe on very far away Mars, so evidence suggests that we can at least try to comprehend instead of nihilistically giving up and claiming it is purposeless or meaningless or beyond you!

If Eve thought the way you suggest, humans will still be naked and enslaved in Eden!

budaatum:


Are you preaching your beliefs to me or philosophising in order to learn, Jack?

There was a time God built the heaven and the earth in six days but we recently landed a probe on very far away Mars, so evidence suggests that we can at least try to comprehend instead of nihilistically giving up and claiming it is purposeless or meaningless or beyond you!

If Eve thought the way you suggest, humans will still be naked and enslaved in Eden!

Are you a christian deist?

Or is your Jedi master nature coming out again? Speaking in riddles like Yoda?

JackBizzle:



Time does not exist.

Does time have a physical essence?

What is time exactly?

We on earth use the movements of the sun and moon to calculate time.

Have you considered how meaningless this is, especially if one were on a planet with no moons? Even just being on another planet would make one see how abstract time is.

You will make me get angry easily, as Shadeyinka would tell you, if you continue with this line of argument instead of informing yourself, because even other planets in our solar system periodically go around the sun, as do planets in all solar systems.

JackBizzle:



What you are describing is the ecosystem that shows how different organisms cohabit and benefit from each other in the system.

If we human beings lived in the ocean and could breathe underwater, would you be considering the purpose of a plant?

It is simply natural evolution, plants and animals adapt to the environment around them.

I have decided to simplify things by narrowing existence down to just plants.

The question was: Do plants have a purpose?

Of course we know the answer, without them the carbon cycle, oxygen cycle and the food chain will cease to exist. That is their purpose!

We can broaden the argument to include animals. Without animals, there will probably be a depletion of CO2 in the air for the plants to survive with. Plants will probably drown in a sea of their oxygen.

We can thus conclude that every plant( irrespective of their species) and every animal (irrespective of their species) are just like a simple component in the big system.

If humans are subset of the animal kingdom, can one safety say that man is purposeless?

The key to understanding this Intellectual discuss is to know that a system cannot have a purpose outside the beneficiary of such system

budaatum:


You will make me get angry easily, as Shadeyinka would tell you, if you continue with this line of argument instead of informing yourself, because even other planets in our solar system periodically go around the sun, as do planets in all solar systems.

And do other planets go around the sun at the same elevation and period as the earth? What about a planet like Neptune that is very far away from the sun?

JackBizzle:


Are you a christian deist?

Or is your Jedi master nature coming out again? Speaking in riddles like Yoda?

If you do not understand what I say and want to understand, ask me to clarify instead of assuming I must be this or that please.

I am buda, and my nature is to be buda. I do not fit in boxes Jack.

JackBizzle:



And do other planets go around the sun at the same elevation and period as the earth? What about a planet like Neptune that is very far away from the sun?

Obviously not, a fact we can tell by measuring the time that other planets do take.

The fact we use a human clock that measure in seconds and minutes and hours and days and months and years is simply due to the earth we measure from. If we were measuring from a different planet a day will have a different number of hours or what ever we choose to call the periods we observe.

JackBizzle:



You missed the point.

You claimed that a human being's purpose is to survive.

That can easily be negated by cloning a human being for organ spare parts. The cloned human's purpose was not to survive. The cloned human was never naturally even meant to exist.

You miss your own point in failing to see your "cloning of a human being for organ spare parts" as a part of your very own human purpose of survival by making it sound like the clone cloned itself because it has the purpose of giving a fuq about you! Lol!

JackBizzle:






I like the statement that you made- Purpose itself is meaningful only in terms of the Beneficiary of a system.

It sounds like a very good statement but it becomes meaningless when you consider the universe as a system and see that it has no beneficiary. Are humans beneficiaries of the universe? What do we actually gain from the universe? We live on a planet that has 99 million ways to kill us. 71% of the earth is uninhabitable for us. We can only use 0.3% of that water on our planet. What about the rest of the universe- most of it is a vast empty space between planets and galaxies that is as goods as black suffocating death to humans.

Purpose itself is meaningful only in terms of the Beneficiary of a system.
Purpose has to do with a REASON or INTENTION. Intention can only exist in the mind of an intelligent personality. If there is no intention or reason can there be a purpose?
Do you agree with this?


Secondly,
All you have to do is to project from known to unknown. From the smallest things to the largest systems.

Electrons have their purpose in atoms!
Atoms have their purposes in chemical reactions!
Molecules such as water, CO2, carbohydrates, proteins etc have their purposes!
The sun has its purpose just as each of the stars.

Plants, Animals depends upon each other for their purposes.

Now, projecting to the universe!
Can it be an exception?

The fact that we can't "see" the beneficiary of the universe is no conclusion that He doesn't exist (for He must exist outside the Universe for Him to be a beneficiary of the Universe.

budaatum:


Essentially, yes. As soon as one is conceived the purpose begins or life ceases.

Note, life. Humans are the "beneficiary of a system", as Shadeyinka called it, and are a product of the strife for survival that began from a single cell. One fails to see this when one isolates the parts from the whole.

imagine you were the first man with the first woman and the question "why are you here" drops in your head, what will be your answer?

will you say you are here to survive? bro surviving is not a purpose, a purpose is meant to be significant or remarkable or a land mark.

if surviving is a purpose then the purpose is never achieved because no man survives, every one dies.


take the first man and first woman for example, their purpose is to reproduce and explore and educate the children created from reproduction, that is what you call a purpose.

they can choose to stay without doing all these and stay without giving a meaning to their existence.

budaatum:


Essentially, yes. As soon as one is conceived the purpose begins or life ceases.

Note, life. Humans are the "beneficiary of a system", as Shadeyinka called it, and are a product of the strife for survival that began from a single cell. One fails to see this when one isolates the parts from the whole.

the point is that, we choose to create a purpose for ourselves

I dunno why it seems people think atheists will default to nihilism of one kind or the other. The position has never held any appeal for me.

LordReed:
I dunno why it seems people think atheists will default to nihilism of one kind or the other. The position has never held any appeal for me.

False.

If you are an atheist, you are a cosmic nihilist.

Tell me, do you believe that there is any meaning on the universal level? Do you think we are significant in relation to the size of the universe?

JackBizzle:



Correction, no one is born with a purpose.

It seems you are saying that survival is a purpose- which it is not. It is just a function of being a living thing.

IMO it is both. We are biological creatures so I don't find it perplexing to derive purpose from a biological imperative.

JackBizzle:



False.

If you are an atheist, you are a cosmic nihilist.

Tell me, do you believe that there is any meaning on the universal level? Do you think we are significant in relation to the size of the universe?

Yes there is meaning because I give it meaning. I don't need a god or even other humans to tell me the meaning.