I have no idea what the title should be.

[Jasper]

I've gotten myself into a weird place, mentally.  I've studied rationality, physics, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, mathematics, ethics, BIP, and general philosophy, and I've begun to conceptualize the universe in some pretty non-anthropic ways.  For starters, I've started seeing human behavior, that is, all subjective experiences and outwardly observable behaviors, as the logical conclusion of molecules acting in concert to effectively repeat patterns.  I've started seeing life itself as a mere disease of matter.

This is probably terrible.  But is it incorrect?  Looking for feedback.  Maybe I'm just wigging out in response to the reproductive urge after being single for gasp three years.  I don't like feeling like a towering field of particles who seeks only the reiteration of its operating system in another field of particles.

[Bu🤠ns]

There's no heart.  To me it sounds like a little love is in order.

[Jasper]

That's the ODD part.  This is me when I'm totally smitten with a pretty girl.

[Bu🤠ns]

I don't know if it's necessarily about being love with another person. Maybe it's more of a general sense of compassion. The mind and rationality are great tools but I don't think it's the be-all end-all answer. 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and admit that lately I've been becoming aware of the value of having a personal relationship with God.

NOW i'm am absolutely not trying to push God on you...(Burns knows better).  But when someone has a sort of honest relationship with the Cosmos (i'm playing it safe now) there's a strange sort of fulfilling emotional component I'm noticing.   

In the Bhakti yoga tradition there's that Lover/Beloved sort of integration...from what I understand it gets pretty heavy and very very loving.

Don't go out and be all born again or anything...but perhaps consider an emotional or even surrendering component to your world view.

I dunno, just some thoughts based on recent events.

[Jasper]

Good thoughts. 

I do have my own brand of that same feeling, despite my views.  I come at it from a perspective of treating the self as a subset of the universe, and trying to reframe my significance in terms of that.  It's not loaded with spiritual payoff, but it beats being an epiphenomenon.

[PennyMagnum]

Makes sense to me. I tend to think of things in terms of Entropy. Fractals. The breaking down of patterns into other patterns. This is the part where the idea is too big and moving too fast for me to explain it properly with words. Lately, I've been trying to draw diagrams to express the way thought patterns change under different conditions.

What do you mean about life being a disease of matter though? Funny that you use the word "disease".

Here's Tom with the weather. ;D

[Jasper]

Think about what life is.  It's just a bunch of matter that got together and began self-replication patterns.  Add lots of time and death, you get us.

[Epimetheus]

My two cents is that you've got the right idea. Always remember the important ingredients of 1) laughter and 2) love. And I'll side with Burns for what I mean by "love". And the two may very well be identical in some sense.

[Triple Zero]

But matter is made of curled up space with quantum (or something) right? So doesn't that make matter a disease of space?

I mean, why draw the line at matter?

And so, everything just twisted out of nothing, does that make it meaningless? Because on that small to big scale, isn't meaning also  to be found somewhere in between?

[Jasper]

The denouement of all that was that I've since realigned my values to two core concepts:  Truth and Entertainment. 

And yes, I eventually noticed that personal meaning need not spring from the foundations of reality, or have much of anything to do with it.  You're right, it's a matter of looking for meaning in the right frame, since anything can be made arbitrary by looking at it the wrong way.

[Bu🤠ns]

I have a hard time establishing where the 'right' way might lie sometimes.  I guess it's just really easy for me to get so caught in the melodrama of it all to forget the Entertainment part.  I heard on this board once that It's funny,even especially when it's happening to you. 

I always liked that.

Because that's the attitude where Truth and Entertainment aren't separate.


  It's like you're just hanging out doing the thing you're doing, man...

[Lenin McCarthy]

Life might be a disease of matter, but why does it matter? 
Couldn't we just close our eyes, noses, ears and pineal glands and live our life as if it really had a meaning, and wasn't completely absurd, and then die a slow and painful death from drowning in cognitive dissonance at the age of 72?