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Originally Posted by DwnWthVwls
I don't think that's necessarily true. This reminds me of the discussion we had a while back about free will. I'm not an expert on the topic but I think even if we don't recognize it happening, we subconsciously do things for survival/preservation.
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We discussed that on the first page. We are driven by our urges, which came into existence to help us to survive and make babies, but our urges can (and often do) overrule the "biological imperative". If you examine humans in a narrow sense, you'll see that we answer only to our urges, which don't always lead us towards surviving and procreating. However, if you examine humans in a broad sense, we exist purely to survive and replicate our genes, with our urges simply being a means to an end, and those urges are only discordant (occasionally leading to behavior that is very counterproductive to the goal of survival/reproduction, like abstinence, genital mutilation/removal, and suicide) because humans have high levels of intelligence and complicated psychologies which don't at all mesh well with urges and instincts that originally came about to help us survive in a drastically different environment than most modern humans currently live in.
Basically, it all depends on how closely you're examining humans.
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Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
i guess that depends on how you mean "we exist to..", imo
cause we literally exist to reproduce
but maybe you could come up with a more poetic alternative that makes sense figuratively
like if im really into eating a sandwhich atm, then i might feel like i exist just to eat this sandwhich right now
but speaking strictly objectively... that's not actually true
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Originally Posted by Oriphiel
That depends on your point of view. To the person taking the joyride, it's all about doing whatever they want and having fun. But if someone in a large tower was watching them as they drove along, not knowing that they were just mindlessly driving without a destination in mind, but could see a bunch of possible destinations in the distance that they were getting closer to, then they're likely to think that the driver was specifically trying to get to one of those destinations.
So which person is right? Technically, they both are. The driver is just doing whatever they want, but they also are heading towards a destination.
It's kind of like a painting; if you stand very close to it, all you can see are blurry smudges. If you back up too far away from it, you can't make out the details. In both scenarios, even though the painting remains the same, it has changed exponentially purely because of how close or far the observer is. If you back away from life, it seems like it exists purely to replicate itself. If you get right up to it, it seems like life is all about following desires, and fulfilling wants and needs. But if you stand at a reasonable distance, the two come together, and in that balance you can see the whole picture, while also catching it's details. You and I are both critiquing the same painting based on our points of view; I am right up close, examining it's details, while you're far back, examining the big picture. If we both just adjusted ourselves, we'd see that we're both looking at and describing the same thing, just from different distances, and that neither of us is right or wrong.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
yea thats all good ori i agree that it all depends on your pov, and my original post about people literally existing to reproduce was from an objective, scientific pov
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