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Joe, not a bad place to be! Very cool. Enjoy.

Agreed re: time -- the greatest diminishing resource that none of us know how much we start with.

Grant, thanks for your thoughts. I'd love to know where you fall on these or other items important to you.

Daniel, sitting in Guaruja Brasil reading your blog. TIME is absolutely the only limiting factor that we really face. Nice work with pointabout!

I am not overly surprised that you might not have heard of it, but I imagine you had some knowledge of Ray Kurzweil and his concepts of the technological singularity, no? The movie is interesting on its own, but his writing is immensely fascinating and influential. Some say he is an amazing futurist, a tech prophet even, and some think he is absolutely nuts. I happen to think that he is generally right in his predictions, but that his timelines are off and he puts too much faith in the outcomes.

It is amazing. It is immensely easy to assign anthropic value to the world around, to claim that it must have been made for us because we are here and everything is so finely tuned for us. But, of course, the universe just "is" and we just "are". We exist in this particular universe, potentially one of many, because the conditions are right for us to be here right now. It is not here for us and we are not here for it, but as a natural outcome of the universe's laws and the eons in which they have been running along.

The lack of human-centric meaning does not take away from the awesome beauty of the whole enterprise - if anything, and I think you feel the same way, I think it is an absolute gift to be able to experience life here on Earth considering the probabilities for its inclusion in the universe in the first place.

Dave, I haven't seen Transcendent Man (nor had I heard of it -- my friends call me a "pop culture retard" as there's not even a TV in our house) but I Googled it (here's the link for anyone interested http://transcendentman.com/) and it looks interesting. It's on my "to watch" list.

Thanks for sharing. Your points about what life has been like for much of the time life has existed really resonate. We're spoiled into thinking that life *should* be easy, when it's amazing that life even works at all. One thing I'm always blown away by is how consistent the world is from one day to another. Each day, the earth spins, the sun rises & sets, and temperatures stay within a narrow band that supports life. To the best I can tell, there's no rule set anywhere dictating this must be so -- obviously setting aside the physics and science that cause it all to work. But there's no reason a natural disaster couldn't change things drastically, and yet we as a species are able to rely on constants to the point they fade into the background and we can forget about them and how wonderfully amazing it is that everything works as well as it does.

Seems like you've been reading the thoughts in my head, Daniel...and that you might have attended a recent viewing of "Transcendant Man".

I agree with much of this, although I have a different take on what life is or is not about. I do not subscribe to the idea that life has meaning or that it even needs to. We are here, the universe exists, there are laws that govern reality and there is no more to it than that. We can construct lives of great meaning and import and evaluate those lives based on deep-seated and long-standing social norms and expectations, but that does not make those lives have intrinsic value in a universal sense (unless you believe in things like karma or an afterlife...which I do not). We are large piles of atomic particles or an almost infinite set of vibrating strings, just like everything around us and in existence, and the differentiation that allows our particular configurations of particles to have achieved awareness does not make us special or give our existence more value. We are merely a result of a long process of self-assembly, of entropy, and that process will continue whether we are part of it or not (I happen to believe we will increase the speed of this process through technology, but that is another discussion entirely). It is amazing to "be here", but being here does not mean anything about us at all.

I think that our brains fool us into believing that live is better than it is and that we convince ourselves that life has meaning and that we should architect our lives to have "worth". We want to be satisfied and happy and our brains are wired to fool us into thinking that we are and, by extension, others can be. Life is actually rather hard. For most of human existence, life was a long slog of terrible stuff briefly interrupted by moments of joy. We were either cold or hot, often hungry, roaming or building shelter, and just trying to stay alive. We scratched it out, started to thrive and were able to slowly develop technology and cultivate civilization...billions of years after the beginning of the universe. You don't even need to consider our entire history as a species, just consider what live was like for an average person 100 or 150 years ago and compare that to today. Is life even all that great for that majority of people on the planet today? The search for and belief in meaning allows people to have hope, to convince themselves that life is a better experience than it is, and to continue to go forward. But that does not make it real or change the fact that life can be, more often than not, not worth living.

Of course, none of this stops me from loving my wife and kids, having great friends, enjoying people and experiences and the life that I do have. I do not need there to be meaning to enjoy it, although my enjoyment is dampened by an existential angst that I've never been able to shake. And, despite what some might consider a bleak outlook, I consider myself to be happy and am still a progressively minded person with a big bleeding heart.

Nice post D....
I believe we come from completely different backgrounds and culture but I find myself to agree with pretty much everything you pointed out.

I especially liked the part about doubt what you're certain of, not giving up and the "negativity" of any organized religion.

talk soon,
G

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