I imagined that most would take a look at the carnage spewed out on media channels and decided to vote more negatively. But the fact that we are still here and still progressing (however slowly) must mean that we are winning somewhat
Yeah, I mean it depends a lot on what you think the purpose of the experiment is, right? I take a somewhat simplistic view at the big-picture scale: I want to live, therefore it’s better to be alive than dead, therefore continuing to be alive is exceeding my expectations and counts as a win in my book. But it’s more complicated once you get into the weeds of ‘purpose’ and such. For me I think there is no point or purpose to life beyond it as itself, we’re just a particularly complex chemical soup cast adrift in the universe left to work shit out for ourselves. But what that means is that I get to decide what everything means including life itself, and since I want to continue living and creating meaning I have decided that that means I am accomplishing my purpose in life. Yeah the world sucks and all that, but it is still populated by people and people are what matter; we can make the world a better place by improving the lives of those who live here by reducing the amount of suffering in it. As Camus says, the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.
We’re optimizing our fitness function as living beings (ie, we’re still alive), so I’d say that’s a solid thumbs-up.
I imagined that most would take a look at the carnage spewed out on media channels and decided to vote more negatively. But the fact that we are still here and still progressing (however slowly) must mean that we are winning somewhat
Yeah, I mean it depends a lot on what you think the purpose of the experiment is, right? I take a somewhat simplistic view at the big-picture scale: I want to live, therefore it’s better to be alive than dead, therefore continuing to be alive is exceeding my expectations and counts as a win in my book. But it’s more complicated once you get into the weeds of ‘purpose’ and such. For me I think there is no point or purpose to life beyond it as itself, we’re just a particularly complex chemical soup cast adrift in the universe left to work shit out for ourselves. But what that means is that I get to decide what everything means including life itself, and since I want to continue living and creating meaning I have decided that that means I am accomplishing my purpose in life. Yeah the world sucks and all that, but it is still populated by people and people are what matter; we can make the world a better place by improving the lives of those who live here by reducing the amount of suffering in it. As Camus says, the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.