Materialism, morality, and psychic efficiency

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My guess is that we'd all agree with the demands of the colony (body of cells) being that 'push' if we were to agree on a purely material stance (or, any other yet undiscovered energies welling up at a more fundamental level throughout all life). I know we have theists in here, its not a jab.

I surrender.

This is the only post I have read in WP that I cannot understand and I cannot even concentrate to read through it, while it is about worthy things.

I know there is a pitiful gap in my knowledges. But I do not think that I would consider that if I should go back to study science. Time is too precious to me, it does not permit me to do so.

I'm kind of surprised, I realize that a lot of people hit around the edges rather than dealing with the actual topic - I don't see myself as *that* smart, and I can verify your intuition that its not psychobabble. I guess I've just thought about this stuff way too long. It seems like so many of the world's problems is that when people find out what something is, what it does, or what the deeper mechanics of things are - they freak out and do weird, perhaps quite stupid, things with that awareness.

If I do have a gift, maybe, it perhaps might be being able to dive into that stuff more lucidly than a lot of people can bring themselves to and for what its worth - while I actually did believe in a life hereafter and was trying to figure out which religion was correct - I think that may have been where I really elaborated that skillset. As an atheist now though I'm still just as curious at peeling back the corners and really trying to find out what's there beyond my line of sight, which I do believe can be done deductively and inductively.

Fine so far as it goes. But it is kind of pointless to ask someone who believes in a heliocentric solar system and evolution to agree that he would think X IF in fact Apollo drove the sun across the world every day and the animals were all molded out of clay by Old Man Coyote.

Having been an atheist I can say that in those days I do not think I would have gone with your take on morals But I can't really go thee any more.

As for deduction and induction - I will say to you what [back in my atheist days] I said to my [equally atheistic] friend who wanted to reconstrruct what the one original human language was like. Our sight is limited. On earth there is fog, there is the curvature of the earth, there are only inches as a base for binocular vision. Even if you can put one sensor on Pluto and one on the 17th planet of Beta Cygni, you will not be able to resolve images past a certain point.

It is the same for thought. We can use deduction and induction [and capacitance - ingroup joke] to work up an equivalent circuit to that in the Black Box - but frome inside the Black Box we cannot reason too far toward what lies outside.

But, I guess I really didn't feel like saying at the beginning "Theists stay out - this is an atheists only thread". I figured that if what I'm saying isn't something a theist can relate to, they don't need to worry about it. If consensus is that I should put that kind of disclaimer before presenting an idea in a mixed crowd, perhaps I'll give it some additional thought.



That's still way too literal for line of sight though. I don't think we need to physically see the edges of the universe, what lies beyond, or anything like that to figure some very important things out and I think those things are still there to be found, right in front of us in the semantic structure of life.

My biggest concern, like a lot of people, has been making peace with my existence. That's another propulsion that pushes me outward trying to figure why things are the way I are and why I have any right to relax, accept myself for my own limitations, or sometimes any right to even be here breathing. To me, to have a healthy sense of atheism, I would need a fair amount of introspective understanding of what it is I'm dealing with. The time that I sat with friends, ate mushrooms (by no means my first time so I wasn't taken by inexperience nor taken off my nut), and had the realization concretely hit me that my consciousness and 'me' are a vector or oscillation created by something else - that we are motion not the apparatus - if you think of it as looking as a moving sound wave or motion on a spectrum analyzer its oscillation off of the base point, if a sound wave its oscillating off of the transient line and nonexistence, like sleep, is when it zeroes out. What that means to me qualitatively goes pretty deep and there are a lot of questions I have left to answer, but also I'd love to figure out, not only what's in store for us but how we should view life itself if we are going to give it the most accurate lens possible. Obviously what we would tend to define as 'us', or at least the vehicles we're trapped in for the foreseeable future, can be identified from others or as unique or having something to give back by what they possess internally, how their internal energy flows, how that leverages their future. Being able to stay as close to your optimal self is probably the best thing most people can do. Admittedly I am agnostic on whether or not the best thing some people can do is extortion, grand theft, or killing, I tend to think of that as misplacing aptitudes but, again - I can't say for certain that I'm right on that because I can't muster personal experience in that category.

For me the most accurate lens is this - there is no free will, there is no us as separate from the universe, there's not a solitary muscle twitch we can manage that hasn't been predestined since the big bang, if we have half an infinity on one side of oblivion and half on the other, this is really just a strange sliver of oblivion where we don't actually exist in any meaningful sense but get to really feel just how screwed we are being 'this' and being 'here'.

That said though I can't necessarily rule out a life hereafter, as we are motion and no energy is really created or destroyed, but I would not see it as a religious kind of thing but rather its an artifact of the churning of the universe and thus a headless system, much like evolution, simply just happening to exist in the same way as we do in a corporeal form.

Why am I saying all of this? I'm not sure, I guess I just want to get the topic back to my very first post - hopefully I'm expanding on it enough in bite-sized pieces where it feels a bit less esoteric. All in all though, these are the things that I want to explore and delve deeper into. In a sense, IMO, if there is any richness to be found in atheism its here.

What is psychic efficiency?

ruveyn

The way I'm using it - energy spent within the sum of all efforts in related to what you want, tending your gene-given quest for happiness and fulfillment wisely. Efficiency being something like the choice between building a car with round or square wheels.

Getting a bit more of a handle on what you are looking for. I fear - from what I have seen - that you are like me when I search the house for the thing I left at the office - putting in work on the wrong place.

But as I said to metaphysics a while back, there are the back stairs - I did not find the keyhole I peeped through by folloswing any conventional path.

But you can't really reconcile "no free will" and seeking the most efficient path.

At least as "thought experiment" [I hate that term, it is NOT experiment!], consider opening up to these as what ifs:

Can the universe as you see it make at least as much sense if there IS freedom do desire and if outcomes are not mechanitically determinate?

Can the universe as you know it make at least as much sense if what we see is NOT all there is?

Can your life and the lives of others as you observe them make at least as much sense if there is an absolute Good and and absolute Truth and a fundsamental reality NOT inscribed in our DNA?

Lol, yes I can. I was predestined to go on thinking about this for the last year or so and predestined to write a thread about it. Everything said in here, the whole universe, is all part of the same mechanical Heron play. Some people reading this might find it interesting, some might think I'm crazy or trying too hard to be cool, some might just yawn because its not a party or belief bashing thread, whatever blend of slightly positive to cynical reactions I get - all just as predestined.


I'll take whatever I can find proof of and, I can find no mechanism - no place - for free will.


Yes. If there were a God even it would still be just as deterministic. Anything within space time, within a timeline is 1:1. Probability (of human action or of rain) is a fictional thing when it really comes down to it, its a conceptual measuring stick because we aren't nearly advanced enough to have that much long-sight..


I'm really starting to think that any concept of absolute Good or absolute Truth are a bit vacuous. On a human level, obviously, its the health and advancement of humanity and desire for the best attempt to be made in aiming for that good for the individual as well. We try to look out for other lifeforms as well in what ways we find manageable.

That's not at all to say I'm going solipsistic, what you'd call absolute good or truth, I get it - its more of a cluster of values, a feeling, that many people have but if you really examine it on a legalistic level it unravels and falls right through your fingers, much like absolute anything, or 70 percent chance of rain on Tuesday for that matter.

The closest thing we'll find to absolute truth IMO will be a negotiation of what we can figure out about the universe, figure out about ourselves, and choosing the sunniest and most positive disposition we can find between the two.

You got time. Not my job to try to convince. I was never equipped with the skill.