[Sunnybayes]

Originally Posted by songwriter

The answer is maybe that we're DNA wanting to be eternal so to us to have children with still that DNA, etc. We are like the spermatozoids.... and the DNA is the eternal thing... since billions of years ago.

I'd agree with songwriter on this one. But then what is the purpose of evolution and how did it start?

A creature exists because it could take advantage of its environment the most to make the most copies of itself.
That the reason for life is to live, and to sustain itself. Like its own little bubble of order amid the disorder of the universe. Like life is there to battle against the heat death of the universe and the law of thermodynamics which say that disorder is always increasing in the total system, so its there to fight that.

So that then maybe, the point of life is to increase the rate of heat death [lol, or decrease it]?

Also I like the DNA idea because it also fits with

Our goal is to raise consciousness.

Our purpose is to give back to the Universe.

I think everyone's goal is to be loved, to feel loved, to love, sex, etc... there's a lot of nuances to it. But it's all the same.

Those are the upper level goals programed in by DNA and evolution. The feeling of love is a chemical occurance designed to keep you with your love partner long enough to raise children.

To feel loved is to feel appreciated, which is to feel like you are loved by other people, and if you are loved by other people that means you have done your role in society. The point of society is to keep us all working together to cooperate so that together we can survive better in the nature and environment, so that we can all replicate more, or at least sustain ourselves to exists.

Keep growing and give it time.

Keep growing. Does growing mean make more money and be happier?
If you make lots of money then you are creating lots of value for society, which means you are helping society to help each individual person in the society to survive and to follow the wished of the DNA which is to replicate.

To be happy means... When have you expereienced happiness? When were you the most happy? When you created something awesome (created new circuits in your mind, which your brain rewards you for with pleasure because those circuits means that you now understand the environment better so that you can survive in it and manipulate it better, therefore make DNA replicate)?

When you won a million dollars (money = exchange of service in society)?
With a million dollars you can buy lots of cool gadgets. Gadgets that cause pleasure for you, like your Ipod.

Why does listening to music cause pleasure?
Because when you listen to music, you are learning a new sequence of sound.
Learning sound is something that you do when you are communicating with someone, like with language, and communicating. Obviously communicating helps the society out = help to replicate DNA better. And that since music has a structure to it, and has patterns in it, then your brain rewards you for being able to learn patterns. Because if you can learn the patterns of nature, then you can learn how to learn how to predict your environment better. Therefore able to survive better and replicate your DNA.

When you kiss a girl (maybe=sex)? When you ate the most satisfying mean in your life (food=life)? When you got an A on your exam? = You are closer to getting the job of your dreams. do good in math=get good grades=get good job=lots of money=lots of value for society=survival for DNA.

So basically happiness is DNA's reward to you for doing things that helps itself to replicate, or to at least sustain its level of being in the given environment. And if something makes you happy, then you're likely to do that same thing in the future which will lead you to replicate your DNA.

I think goals are as individual as each person. We all have different aspirations and as they say what is sauce for the goose is poison to the gander, or something to that effect.

This is sorta right, but that this just means that we all have different subgoals of reaching the ultimate goal of helping to let DNA to replicate. After all, we must all have different goals because we can't all be doing the same thing in the society, because a society needs different people to help fulfill all the different roles. Like in a family, someone must take care of the child, someone must take care to go hunt for food, someone must go get the water, someone must be on the lookout for outside threats like strangers and wild animals.

And I also hear things like, to serve GOD's purpose. And this still means the exact same thing. People say that god is everywhere. People say that god is inside of you. I like to interpret this as that everything in the universe has its own piece of consciousnesses. Why I think this is because I read an awesome article in a blog that logically concludes :

Logical proof that consciousness is eternal Read the whole thing. Its pretty awesome.

Case 2: Consciousness is completely physical. In physics, numbers have to add up. When you add up the mass of particles in a rock, the total mass of particles equals the total mass of the rock. The mass of the rock already exists in the mass of the particles. What is it, in the brain, that adds up to consciousness? Where does it come from?

In physics, every property of any object is the sum of the properties of every particle within that object. For example, the heat energy of a steel rod is equal to the sum of the heat energy of the rod’s molecules. The charge of a molecule is equal to the sum of the charges of it’s particles. Energy works the same way, and science tells us that energy is just another form of matter. Everything in physics is a sum of its component matter and energy. And so must be consciousness, if it is a physical thing.

Logic Step #3: If consciousness is completely physical, then consciousness is a property of matter and/or energy.

Yep — that means that every quark possibly has some sort of awareness. And why not? If you kick a rock, it has to know, so it can get up and start rolling. Rocks may not be able to think…or can they? (They can take sunlight as input, process it into heat, and store it in a crystalline structure until a lizard’s belly requests the output. That sounds like a computer to me!) It doesn’t have to be the quarks that are aware; it could be, say, the weak force (although this distinction has been diminished by findings that matter and forces are really the same thing). Either way, some physical building block is aware.

Now, science knows something about matter and energy. It’s eternal. Matter and energy cannot be created nor destroyed — common knowledge for anyone who passed a physics class. And consciousness, if physical, is inherent to matter/energy.

Case 2 conclusion: If consciousness is completely physical, then consciousness cannot be destroyed.

There you have it. Either consciousness is metaphysical and possibly eternal, or consciousness is physical and assuredly eternal. Either way, it sounds like a good deal to me.

So if conciousness is inherently a property of matter, then what distinguishes us from rocks is the way that our conciousness is organized. In a rock, the atoms in it are not organized too well, and there is no communication between the atoms, besides just the atoms inside the rock bumping into each other. So the conciousness that is inherent in the atoms of the rocks is only concious of itself and another atom if it is bumped by another atom. So basically it is a collection of really stupid concious individual atoms not aware of anything but itself and if it bumps into something else. And no, they cannot think. The only thought that a atom has (if it could actually speak, that is, if it had the brain structures to cause language) would be "I was just bumped. Okay, so time to move this way as a result." And then of course it would forget because it cannot remeber anything... So I think an atom is just a really small unit of conciousness.

You can't really kill an atom[lol, unless you do nuclear fission on it]..., but you can kill a person, but what happens when you die is that the conciousness that was there in you is still there... but is no longer organized into the converging "I". The individual conciousness of the atoms and neurons can no longer communicate with each other, because the heart has stopped transporting blood. The neurons then run out of the chemicals that they need so that they are no longer able to communicate with each other. I also think this is true, because there are people who seemingly have multiple personality disorder who seem to have more than one person in their head... for some reason, in their brain, their consciousness converges into multiple "I's" instead of just one I, like a normal person.

But our brains are highly structured, and there is lots of communication going on inside of it through the neurons. And what is really interesting is that the brain is structured as a hierarchy of regions, with the lower level neurons taking in sensory information like each pixel of the eye, and then as you go up in level, the features of the scene come into focus. And at the top of the heirachy, I'd guess is where all the conciousness converges into I.

Then the only reason we are here would be to raise our consciousness. The same goal as Steve actually.

Well, assuming Steve is human, then of course his goal is the same as ours. And of course our goal is to raise our conciousness.
Because what does raising our conciousness can do?