Kierkegaard believed that the apparent meaninglessness of life is actually part of God’s plan and he advocated a “leap of faith” towards the transcendental in order to overcome nihilism.
Albert Camus on the other hand, believed that such a “leap of faith” only distracts us from our real predicament and that we should revel in the absurdity and meaninglessness of life.
Heidegger was concerned with living “authentically”, by which he meant in full understanding and acceptance of our predicament and fate.
Sartre was concerned with creating meaning for oneself.
Of course there is nothing new under the sun, and all these ideas were addressed to some extent in NeoPlatonic, Dionysian, Apollonian, Stoic, Epicurian and cynic thought.
Personally, Camus’s concept of a happy Sisyphus revelling in his suffering rings hollow with me. At least the Stoics didn’t pretend that one can attain “happiness” from suffering. I’m also dismissive of Sartre’s idea of creating meaning for oneself. Kierkegaard’s idea of a hidden transcendental meaning in meaninglessness is similar to Nietzsche except they end up in very different places.
Einstein came to believe that passage of time is fundamentally a fiction: like frames of a cosmic movie, events are all laid out throughout spacetime, and it is only our limited nature that requires us to perceive them sequentially. The relativity of simultaneity formed part of that conviction, but it went beyond that. General relativity shares with Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell?s electrodynamics and many other physical theories the feature ofmathematical determinism,or ?unitarity?: given a complete description of a system at one time (however defined), the system is uniquely specified at all earlier and later times. It?s as if one could take any frame of the cosmic movie and by choosing a particular chemical to add, reveal any other chosen frame of the movie. If all the frames are hiding in each one, how can we say that the past or future is any less real than the present? As Einstein put it to a friend who had recently lost a loved one, ?People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion?. Why mourn someone who lives?
Einstein came to believe that passage of time is fundamentally a fiction: like frames of a cosmic movie, events are all laid out throughout spacetime, and it is only our limited nature that requires us to perceive them sequentially. The relativity of simultaneity formed part of that conviction, but it went beyond that. General relativity shares with Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell?s electrodynamics and many other physical theories the feature ofmathematical determinism,or ?unitarity?: given a complete description of a system at one time (however defined), the system is uniquely specified at all earlier and later times. It?s as if one could take any frame of the cosmic movie and by choosing a particular chemical to add, reveal any other chosen frame of the movie. If all the frames are hiding in each one, how can we say that the past or future is any less real than the present? As Einstein put it to a friend who had recently lost a loved one, ?People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion?. Why mourn someone who lives?
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[quote]pat wrote:
Good article. I tend to agree.
When one argues for Intelligent Design I think presenting the probability ratio of “1 in 10^10^123” is important to present as it provides prospective on the argument.
Of course the way around that is to invoke the multiverse theory. But that theory has a litany of problems on it’s own even if you disregard the fact that there is not a shred of evidence for it. Which is an odd thing for scientists to do, to purport a theory that doesn’t have any evidence at all. I could even ‘feel’ it if it had a very tiny amount of evidence, but absolutely none I find problematic.[/quote]
If you can wait an infinite amount of time to observe something, even the slimmest possibilities will undoubtedly occur. Our perspective is biased by the fact that we do exist now and could not be making the inquiry if we did not.
[quote]pat wrote:
Good article. I tend to agree.
When one argues for Intelligent Design I think presenting the probability ratio of “1 in 10^10^123” is important to present as it provides prospective on the argument.
Of course the way around that is to invoke the multiverse theory. But that theory has a litany of problems on it’s own even if you disregard the fact that there is not a shred of evidence for it. Which is an odd thing for scientists to do, to purport a theory that doesn’t have any evidence at all. I could even ‘feel’ it if it had a very tiny amount of evidence, but absolutely none I find problematic.[/quote]
If you can wait an infinite amount of time to observe something, even the slimmest possibilities will undoubtedly occur. Our perspective is biased by the fact that we do exist now and could not be making the inquiry if we did not.
[/quote]
Where do you fall on the question, Neph? Or have you already answered and I’m missing it?
If believing in an after life makes you happier and gets your mind off dying, then I think that’s a great faith to have.
For me, I will die and that will be the end of me. The bits that make me will go into the ground and decompose into something else.
One day, the sun will explode and possibly shoot the blocks which made me far out into space and they might be reused in another lifeform or just be squished together to make a smelly gas.
I will be gone but I still find that concept pretty cool.
[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
Where do you fall on the question, Neph? Or have you already answered and I’m missing it?[/quote]
If I wanted to be coy, I’d say something about Aristotle and the immortality of the perfected intellect. But I doubt there is a personal life after death.
I do like Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality, but the physics are outdated (Tipler assumes a great contraction of the universe to power his God-machine) and the conclusions are far-fetched.
