Quote:
Originally Posted by Wax Frog  Without it, or perhaps I should say without any "metaphysical" element, I'm just a rather pathetic model of we mostly-deluded meat puppets who infest this rock. |
But that is such an unnecessarily negative view of the human infestation!
We are jaw-droppingly fascinating, loving, intelligent, the only self-aware beings in the universe (maybe). I know what you mean and I think my recent epiphany (what?, I freaked me out there) is due to learning that materialism doesn't have to be all dry and meaningless, loveless and mechanical. There
is consciousness now. Even if it happened rather haphazardly, it is amazing. In fact, it is more amazing because it isn't just explained by some deity making it so and it's a done deal. Somehow, out of the very fabric of the rock itself, life grew or strove or was caused to become (maybe we don't have the language to express these ideas) able to look at itself.
Rock! Looking at itself and going all weak and weirding out. Stick around. Love might not have been squeezed out of the sky like toothpaste, but it's here now. You know you love and you are loved, don't you? I hope so. If not...anyway maybe that's another thing altogether, but my point is that any universe that can do that neat trick - well, I just wish even more that I could stick around for ever!
Actually, that was what was behind my resistance, perhaps. Accepting the possibility of materialism means that mortality is absolute, and given that it is an amazingly beautiful world, and I have an amazingly beautiful girl, that hurt enough for me to keep looking for escape hatches - God would save me somehow. And that's what led me to all sorts of muddled thinking, my desperation to be saved and not have to die. Now I'm beginning to accept my mortality, my utter and complete helplessness against that reality. It's making me want to find other comforts, like leaving good things behind for future generations, that kind of thing. I can only live on through other people's memories or my words and the effects of my deeds. It still hurts like hell, but it feels like a grief I can go through as other people go through it.
And just possibly, the fact that the universe clearly wants to get conscious (for the scientists: exhibits inherent syntropy) is evidence that consciousness is there within its fabric, even if it is a kind of dumb potential of consciousness. It may be God, giving birth to Itself, but It doesn't seem endlessly merciful and fluffy, bringing all Its conscious shards into the holographic fold at bedtime. I hope I'm wrong, of course.