Think about this
 

i will throw out random tidbits of philosophy here for your consumption. (and possible discussion, i'm game)

lev shestov, athens and jerusalem:

32 - THE HUMAN TRUTH AND THE LIE TO GOD

Descartes affirmed that God could not be a deceiver, that the commandment "Thou shalt not lie" is observed by God also. However, God does deceive man. That is a fact. He shows man a sky - a blue, solid crystalline dome - which does not exist. Thousands of years have been required for man to free himself from this lie and to recognize the real truth. God often deceives us, and how difficult it is to escape from these deceptions! Yet, if God never deceived us, if no man ever saw the blue sky but knew only an infinite space, empty or filled with ether, if, instead of hearing sounds, men only counted waves - it is probable that they could not have gained much. It may even be that they would have ended by feeling disheartened by their truths and would have agreed to recognize that God may violate His own commandment.

Or would they not have agreed to this? Is the truth above all? Perhaps another idea would then have come to their minds: Is the truth really that which men themselves find, while that which God shows them is only a lie? To put it another way, may it not be that the sky is nevertheless a crystalline dome, the earth is flat, and sounds themselves exist and are essentially different from movement? May it not be that colors obey, not the laws of physics, but the will of God? Is it not possible that man may one day be called to this "knowledge," that he may renounce his demonstrated truths and return to the indemonstrable truths? And - who knows - will he not then find that the commandment "Thou shalt not lie" has only a relative and temporary value? No, it is not better to die than to speak falsehood, even if it be only once, as Kant taught; but it is better not to be born at all than to live in the world of our truths. In other words, a time perhaps will come (Plato many times spoke of it, but no one listened to him) when the "better" will triumph over our truths and our self-evidences.

47 - THOUGHT AND BEING

The more positive knowledge we obtain, the more estranged we become from the mysteries of life. The more the mechanism of our thought perfects itself, the more difficult it becomes for us to recover the sources of being. Knowledge weighs heavily upon us and paralyzes us, and perfected thought makes of us submissive, will-less beings who seek, see and appreciate in life only "order" and the laws and norms established by this "order." Our teachers and guides are no longer the prophets who spoke "as those who have power" but the scientists, for whom the supreme virtue consists in obeying the Necessity which they have not created and which never allows itself to be persuaded by anything or anyone.

adorno, minima moralia

14

Le bourgeois revenant. – [French: the returning bourgeois] The Fascist regimes of the first half of the 20th century have absurdly stabilized an obsolete economic form, multiplying the terror and misery the latter required for its continued preservation, now that its senselessness is plain as day. Private life however is also marked by this. Along with the reach of administration, the asphyxiating social order of the private, the particularism of interests, the long since obsolete form of the family, the right of property and its reflection in the character have all been shored up once more. But with a bad conscience, the barely disguised consciousness of untruth. Whatever was once good and proper in what was bourgeois – independence, persistence, thinking ahead, consideration – is rotten to its innermost core. For while bourgeois forms of existence are doggedly preserved, their economic prerequisites have fallen away. That which is private has gone over completely into that privation, which it secretly always was, and the stubborn grip on one’s own interest is intermingled with the rage that one is no longer capable of perceiving that things could be different and better. The bourgeoisie have lost their naïvété, and for that reason have become wholly obdurate and malevolent. The benevolent hand which even now cares for and nourishes their little garden as if it had not long ago turned into a “lot” [in English in original], but fearfully holds the unknown intruder at a distance, is already that which refuses to grant the political refugee asylum. Objectively threatened, the power elite and their functionaries become subjectively utterly inhuman. Thus the class comes into itself and makes the destroying will of the course of the world into its own. The bourgeoisie live on like ghosts who threaten catastrophe.

God is dead, and we have killed him. What does this mean? It means that once there was God, and now there is only us. God deferred the meaning of His existence to us, and ever since we have been trying to defer our meaning back to him. That is to say, we have let the abyss write our values. Now we must face it as the “void that approaches with all its forms/whose most perfect image/is the advance of an incalculable group of crab lice” (Artaud). To atone for God's death, we must become gods ourselves. That is, we must do what not even God could... create meaning.

This has been heavy on my mind for about a year. The "information age" is killing humanity.

Yeah, google has almost become our backup brain, our external hard drive if you will.

I mean it's helpful and wonderful and all, but a lot of people will start to rely on the internet more and more, to look up anything they wont bother to actually learn about. And thus they don't have to try too hard to remember things. To learn things in a more specific way and not just quote what you read.

it basically lowers all 'knowledge' to the mundane level of 'information,' no one fact is more valuable than any other, each is equally ready for consumption.

Theres two kinds of knowledge.

The kind that you can actually apply to do some kind of skill, to be able to do something with your life and contribute to the world.

Or the the kind you only memorize but don't really think about, just to make people think you're really smart.

And that's a problem.

We're now in a world more defined by success than any real meaning or value, so when you take that into consideriation and how our values have changed...

maybe Paris Hilton IS the greatest polymath of the 21st century. O_o

In addition to that, I think being able to fact check every statement made at any moment is having the same effect. There will soon be no more legends.

So here's a question.

Is this a halt in our evolution? Or just another stage?

i personally believe that we (mankind) are currently drifting aimlessly, clinging to a past that has an aura of meaning to avoid a present that has none. instead of creating a world of new ideas and values, which we are obviously capable of, we step aside and let capital take control, we create new markets to construct dream worlds we can hide away in, we create an entire industry whose sole purpose is to convince us to buy useless things, we create a socio-economic order to convince us to work useless jobs. just think of how many people slave away only to make companies more efficient, or the sheer quantity of useless 'status symbol' objects people surround themselves with. the whole point of modernism, of the 20th century, was to free us, to help us realize that beauty is arbitrary, that truth is constructed. for some reason this freedom terrifies us. if the world could stop clinging to its religions, its customs, its prejudices... we are all united by our desire to live and love, not to mention our biological imperatives. humanity has great potential, but i don't know if we'll ever realize it.

Regarding the evolution of our access to information a couple of you are speaking about (mainly Boo Boo), I tend to disagree that our capacity to learn is being atrophied by the fact that knowledge is now only a mouse click away.
I understand that prior to our abundance of technology, things were learned via studies that required an amount of time to undertake. That's a given. But to penalize someone for utilizing the abilities current technology has granted us is ridiculous.

Regardless of the medium, the determining factor behind any kind of success is the motivation driving it. Sure, it took a lot more back before we had what we have today, but do you expect us to intentionally dismiss opportunities for the sake of adhering to an ethic that is no longer relevant?
I'm not stating that hard work is no longer relevant. I'm stating that the old saying "God gave me a head to save my back" is reflective of a very basic wisdom that I'm sure "most" of us exercise daily.

As far as the statement that the abundance of information available discourages the desire to learn, well, I think that's an ignorant generalization.
There's a difference between a person who isn't building their knowledge and one who is. It has nothing to do with whether Google exists or the fact that there's spell-check in Mozilla Firefox by default. It has everything to do with the person.
And you might say: "Well we just have it too easy these days".
I'm glad for it.
To know that we can utilize our current abilities to better ourselves in ways our predecessors couldn't doesn't make me feel like we're failing.
It makes me feel like there's just less of us who realize we aren't.


And regarding seeking a higher knowledge that transcends our intellectual pursuits, well, I believe we all do that in our own way.
For some, it's music, for some it's art. Some people even make songs with their flatulence.
The only thing that will ever be important is that you fulfill your own path, no matter how difficult or easy it may be.

I think the problem is people draw conclusions and form opinions much more by reading about things as oppose to doing them. Reading about something used to force you to ask questions, to put what little portion of the entire puzzle you've learned into practice. Now instead we just click on the next link and draw another conclusion.

There are a lot of talkers and a lot less doers.

To me I've always looked at the progression as information (when combined with experience leads to) knowledge (when combined with experience leads to) wisdom.

The previous post makes some good points and draws some conclusions I disagree with.

I do think the wealth of information at our finger tips is dumbing us down, is discouraging us learning how to do things. I do think that is a generalization but anything but an ignorant one. Of course their are expectations, but they're are a lot more people who don't even understand how much they are missing out on. When you read something online, you share in someone else's learning experience, when you do something yourself you create your own expereince which has an abundance more or relatblei information that you can turn into knowledge and wisdom.

I don't think people should be faulted for taking advantage of the wealth of information so readily available to them, but I don't think they should confuse information with knowledge. I can read an article on how a helicopter fly's and explain it perfectly, that doesn't know anything about why it fly's, it means I can read and relay information.

Now lets say I never learned to read but spent my life fixing helicopters, I might not be able to explain how it flys, but I could fix it if it wasn't flying.

Where we go astray is we tend to trust the first guy still because in the past if somebody knew enough about something to explain it or break it down in great detail it was because they had knowledge about the subject, expereince and wisdom. Today there are a lot more of those first types however and most of them couldn't tell there ass from a hole in the ground unless they did a Google image search.

I also feel like there is an unwillingness to admit a lack of knowledge now, the same curiosity that used to fuel learning and growth is now looked at as a weakness by a lot of young people who'd rather lie about what they know and go look it up.

Last wednesday I watched a film at the MFA on Child Advertising and how its effects (read: corrupts) children. They made a point to say that "you can't just pick up a stick and pretend its a wand anymore, you need the Disney version Harry potter wand" and that because of this, children can't even play any longer, they just reenact what they've seen on television and in movies.

I think Boo Boo and the rest are making the same point (in a general sense) about adults here.

But still I'm hesitant to believe that humans are so easy to silence. There will always be something uniquely human about them, and to reference the set-up in CA's first post in here, The race wouldn't have dragged themselves out of the mud if not for the ability to percieve things in different and often perverted ways.

If anything i'd say that this is a set back, a new stumbling block we must mutate and adapt to. In the end, my faith with us is persistant.

That last paragraph you typed is intensely true.
With this net beneath us, we feel like no matter how sure footed we think we are, we've always got a backup.

But that's the kind of clusterfuck kinda situation that flips this whole thing around. It helps us, but it hurts us. It can hurt us, but it has such a potential to help us.

Something that very recently made me actually think about exactly what we're talking about:

My dad called me talking about a compressor for an AC unit for a house I'm selling, and me, not knowing crap about AC compressors, a lot of it was going over my head. He was giving me the specs so I could replace the compressor. (which is ridiculously expensive, btw... never buy one. Just go steal it.) So naturally, my first instinct is: "Google > type used compressors > find lowest price".
I realized that the knowledge he had was a product of actually working with the equipment. Sure, I can find the right compressor, but what do I watch out for? How do I know what I buy is of operable quality?
I really don't want to spend my life on Google, so I typically make a decision and roll with it. If I'm proven wrong with my decision, I will have learned.
But I can't possibly learn everything there is to learn just in case I'll need the knowledge.

What I'm getting at is: respect knowledge gained by experience, but if you happen to have gotten knowledge from an inexperienced source... well, that's experience.
:)

There is nothing bad from having more information readily available. I remember when I was a kid, before we bought our first computer, I had dreams of acquiring all the possible knowledge I could. I struggled in school because I found school work tedious and boring. Now, being part of the information age, everything seems pretty good. Being able to look up most things I'm curious about brings a certain drive and makes me want to learn more. Having it all available to me has increased my willingness and want to learn. The internet makes learning fun, which it should be.

That's cool. But to me, the emphasis of my argument is placed on some people's inability to see the same virtues in, say, two people who spend several years in college... only one is traditional, and the other, online.

I'm only using that as an example of an end justifying its means.

I agree with the sentiment that having knowledge readily available is nothing but a good thing.

The down side of having this information available is becoming to dependent on "google" or "wikipedia" (to greatly over simplify the info available on the net) is missing out on the doing, the experience.

Someone (I think VF) said something about motivation being a common factor. YES YES YES. When you can just read about something you might lose the motivation to gain that knowledge through experience.

This is why people who read the book usually think the book is better then the movie, in a roundabout way.

Best metaphor I can give you:

I give the same Dresser unassembled to two people.

Person A is a carpenter and is given no instructions and no previous knowledge of piece of furniture.

Person B has never assembled any furniture but is allowed to select the dresser to be assembled by both and is given detailed instructions as well as a laptop PC.

Who is your money on to finish assembling it first?

You don't think that going to a state where we are more than consumers in an economy would be a step backwards? I think the wavering towards the past is a byproduct of everything moving towards meaninglessness. What I mean is, I don't think it's negative to use the past as a model, when it's all we really have. It's not like everyone thinking that way is some traditionalist or luddite just stuck in the past for past ideal's sake.

i think the past that serves as a model is just another fantasy world we've managed to construct. if things are 'moving towards meaninglessness,' what does that really mean but that our fantasies are confessing their own absurdity? is clinging to illusions to escape from suffering really all life is? i personally believe there is more to life than that, but that to find it you have to let go.

<- wants to smoke weed with you

The downside of having so much information readily available to us is that we might treat the internet as a second brain, as a sort of crutch to rely on if we cannot be bothered truly learning or even remembering what we have read. This lowers the urgency for reading and properly learning things - a lot of processed information will never reach the knowledge stage.

While being taught in class, there are students who ask their professors whether the material is assessable, as if something isn't worth learning unless it'll be directly assessed in the final exam, because if the student ever does actually need it, they can simply look it up on the net.

However, there are undoubtedly many positive points for having information so readily available to us and I don't think I really need to go into that territory. But I will point out that some professions have been shifting their focus such that the ability to learn is just as important as knowledge already acquired (the software industry for example). The availability of information facilitates the on-job learning required for projects.

The phrase, 'moving towards meaningless' is pointless, and I can't imagine how you would articulate the meaning of earlier generations. To give life a meaning, you pretty much have to presuppose the existence of some external creator that apply its understanding of life's meaning onto us.
Otherwise we can only forge meaning from our own context, and any 'meaning' we alight on would be just as arbitrary and pointless as any other.


Regarding the information age, I'd say the availability of information is placing less importance on the amassing of information and more on the ability to shift through the multitude of sources and come up with a decent analysis of the matter.
Not that that wasn't always an important skill, but that seems to be the direction society is heading in.

If we're saying that availability of information is lessening the motivation to learn, then we're not really commenting on the state of technology, but the state of humanity. Sure, we might think that the state of technology provides causation for this, but when you really think about it, you realize that regardless of the tools provided, the force behind those tools being put to use is dependent on the persons using them.

I beg to disagree that, for instance, an aspiring doctor in the 1500's had a more noble and relevant motivation than an aspiring doctor in our current time. The mode at which either people acquire the skills necessary to perform in their profession is irrelevant. They both end up saving lives.

What I want to say is that, if anything, we're MORE motivated to learn, specifically in professions, because of the availability of knowledge and the modes at which we are able to acquire it.
Compared to the past, we're much better equipped to make places for ourselves in a professional life than we ever were. We see more and more needs being met as a result of technological knowledge than we ever have.
We just have to look at this kind of thing in a broader spectrum.
Don't be discouraged by crapbags who never wish to accomplish anything. That has nothing to do with the options available to them.
People have been people for as long as they've existed.
No amount of cushion is going to change the basic desire to excel.

We're just focusing too much on all the people who don't.

Sorry, I didn't make it too clear in my post but I actually agree that the availability of information nowadays is motivating more people to learn - it's so easy to jump on Wiki and read about anything whether you're interested in ossuaries, Samuel Coleridge or blue-vein cheese.

I just think that the quality of learning (on the net) is often worse than say, from a book, because of the lack of urgency in memorising concepts/information. I'm not insinuating that people's memories are improving/deteriorating throughout the ages or that people are nowadays more lazy. I'm just saying that if all information is at your fingertips, there's not really a great urgency to remember what you read, provided that you remember enough to find that information in the future.

It probably sounds like some crackpot theory but I feel like I naturally put more effort into learning/remembering things that I know I can't just google and understand in two seconds, whether it's because the material is quite advanced (and I'm learning it from a book) or the nature of the application of the material precludes looking it up (i.e. no time to google a foreign word while you're conversing in that language).

Students might once have been required to rote-learn certain things like the colours of common ions in chemistry but I imagine there's less emphasis on that nowadays since these facts can simply be googled. I am wondering if material which is traditionally rote-learned will be entirely phased out in the future for this reason? That could arguably give students more time to spend on actual concepts which require learning and not just rote memorisation (knowledge). On the other hand, do we want people to have to consult some external source every time they're asked to recall a non-conceptual piece of information? I know this is a bit of an extreme view of things, but technology is only going to become more streamlined within our lives, and so this topic will become more interesting/relevant as time goes on.

if you're ever in chicago...

:D

I see what you mean and I agree.
I guess I'm not sure, at this point, whether all this is a positive or a negative. Your last sentence really sums it up though.
If I may indulge in a bit of science fiction for a moment, I could suppose that eventually we may have technology that allows us to instantaneously learn and memorize any particular knowledge. If that were to become a reality at some point in our future, then the observations we're making about the current state of knowledge acquisition would lose relevancy.
In the here and now, though, I'd hope we keep our options open and hold off on making a bonfire out of our libraries. :)

And religion. The more we know about science the stronger case people build against god/gods. Of course im sue you all knew that already. Just pointing that out.

I think in the relative long run the information age will serve to advance scientific and biological evolution.

I'm not talking about creating super humans or r2d2's, getting high with Chewbaca or logical with Spock. But entering further into the unknown. I think all of our history tells us this is what will happen. The more information we can share the more solutions and conclusions that can be reached. Growing presumably closer to the unattainable absence of unknown.

It's repeatedly been pointed out in this thread that it's all about what you do with the information available to you. It's easier and more common to just let it go in one ear and out the other and be used as a "back-up drive" for your memory. However there is no doubt that it opens a world of opportunity for the properly motivated and most ambitious learners among us.

i would encourage (re)reading my first post.

if physics in particular has taught us anything in the last hundred years or so, it's that even though we might be able to set up experiments and formulate reasonable expectations, we don't really know what is happening, how it's happening, or why it's happening. all science tells you is that when this one thing happens, this other thing will usually happen afterwards. it can get more and more detailed, but the level of 'how' and 'why' always slips between the gaps.

Cardboard

Do you believe we are killing God?

If so how? and if not how do we go about it?

:rofl:
Post of the day.

there's a couple perspectives i could approach this from. in terms of the 'traditional values' that are associated with the Abrahamic God, the legitimacy of the Bible as a tool to plot out your life, the role of priests in telling you what to do, we certainly care about these things less and less. to actually 'kill God' in the sense of 'killing the Idea of God,' this process has to be carried out to its natural conclusion in which all of morality is progressively abandoned. for instance, love is simply posession, friendship is competition, 'thou shalt not kill' and 'love thy neighbor' are simply ways of promoting personal comfort. this can go even further to the point where personal pleasure or comfort themselves are just seen as momentary lapses in suffering, and are sensed as being just as mundane and pointless as suffering. at this point, when you have sucked the value out of everything, maybe you have 'killed God.' but what do you have left? only an overwhelming terror of Death--nothing matters but better something than nothing.

it's a dead end, unless you kill yourself. it's also, in my opinion, not quite true. you can find the holes for yourself.

now the other sense of 'killing God' with God literally dying, if God exists in the sense of the Bible as a being of perfection infinitely above us, any attempts to kill it would probably just amount to hitting yourself in the face. consider trying to shoot out of the universe, for instance, but having the bullet curve (because spacetime is funny like that) and hitting you in the back. one could argue that that metaphor sums up human existence in general.

however, there is another sense of God dying which I think some Jewish mysticism discusses, namely, that God made all the creatures of the world out of clay and then brought them to life by naming them, but that by naming them he imparted his essence on them and thereby ceased to exist by himself, but only through us. this would be a more pantheistic conception, whereby we have 'killed god' by becoming human.

I wonder if as the traditional role of God and his home continues the religion and God are not as much dying as adapting. Pertaining to the holes, I'm also not sure that I agree with the presumption the death of good would coincide with some sort of "abandonment of morality". I do believe in any god suggested, suspected or claimed to existence by humans and yet I feel a strong comfort in my moral base. I don't think morality began with the began with the idea or discovery of God and I don't think it will end with God's death.

Is it not possible that with the absence of God comes resolution with death. An acceptance, instead of an uncertainty. The worst part about dying is not knowing when it's going to happen. The worst and best part about anything is the anticipation. What's to stop people from focusing more on their own life and their own wills and motivations without God to steer them.

For all we know our lives are actually the span of the Universe, or the universe is just a creation individual to each one's psyche.

It's Occam's Razor to the umpteenth power but I like to deal with hypothetical using the rules of the World I know.

I love the bullet in the back metaphor and yes everything in life seems to be spherical and a lot of things do end right about where they started.

When\how do you suppose\believe God was created and\or discovered?

I happen to believe in the whole Christ/God deal, but that's just me.

However, I have struggled with that faith and in doing so have turned to concepts such as secular humanism, atheism and agnosticism throughout my life, so I'll try to offer my opinion on that question from those earlier mindsets.

When I was an atheist, I assumed that God was born out of that fear of the unknown that you were talking about. Humanity has always had a penchant for creativity, for storytelling, and I believed at one time that God came out of that as a response to that fear of the unknown and fear of what might be out there waiting for us.

I mean, most of us can't even stand waiting to find out what we got for our birthdays. How are we expected to wait and see on something as terrifying as eternity and whatever the hell that might entail?

I also used to believe that the concept of a creator or creator(s) came out of a time when science was incapable of explaining just about everything that made the world and universe as we understood it capable of running, existing and so on. It made sense to create something to answer those questions, to deal with that fear of the unknown and to establish a concept of morality to draw the line from point A., being alive, out and about to point B., being dead.

That was also my answer to different cultures having a different God or even more than one. Although many similarities bind both the cultures and peoples of today and those of the years and centuries gone by, there are also enough differences to demand that each culture, society, whatever have an answer (of sorts) that would work for their own ideas of eternity, morality, the unknown, the spirit world and everything in between and all around it.

I believed that the first concepts of God came out of the first time we ever began to seriously let these questions get to us, and you can probably go back as far as you want for something like that.

I don't believe that anymore, but that used to be more or less my explanation for it.

i like your super-subjective approach where each individual's life span is the life span of the universe. in that picture, God was discovered probably somewhere a third of the way through. i guess enlightenment traditionally comes after a period of apprenticeship, so probably when the sojourner is in his/her early twenties or something. the how of it would probably be the conclusion of their quest for truth, a 'final understanding' of how things fit together and why anything happens, the true nature of space and time... in this sense then God would be outside of space and time since all these different lives converge and intersect on this one point that is God. perhaps, further, that convergence is what holds time and space together to begin with.

as far as not needing God as a basis of morality, I think that if you examine any morality closely enough you can always trace it back to some principle, say 'love' for instance, which is ultimately in some sense being deified. i sometimes take a 'pantheon' or animistic view of the universe, where i think of each emotional state as being a god, for instance there is a god of pain, a god of love, a god of boredom, a god of apathy, a god of contentment, etc. and all life is the eternal drama between these gods, as they change places, dance, fight, etc.

Did you just make that?











Because... it rocks.

I may be misunderstanding you here, which is why I will ask you this question. Why do you want to believe this? I feel like you are either over complicating things, or you actually believe that your emotions control you. In that case you have no control over yourself. What value could be given to you then? What can you be responsible for? This sort of attitude makes a human seem like a battlefield. Ultimately, what is the essence of a human then? If your essence is determined, then ultimately one cannot say his reactions to his experience are truly his. They are of the thing that determined your essence.

On the other hand, if we freely choose our essence (existence before essence) those emotions will have originated in us. The emotions will feel more rich because of the fact that they our ours. As a person we feel more consistent. Surely this view must be looked at as more fulfilling then feeling as though our emotions are determined?

One could say that a human has no essence though, and that is ugly and nihilistic. Ultimately we have no objective essence that sticks with us throughout life. I would agree with that. We create our essence in every moment, and the essences of those moments can be grouped to created the best idea of someone's character that we can.

Really, I would just like you to explain the bolded a bit more. My idea is that you use the word god in a figurative sense in that they control all of us.

i see the agency of 'man' which determines his freedom is his ability to focus his attention. a person will inevitably experience all sorts of emotions and see others undergoing the same, but we are free to determine which emotions we enjoy and seek out in the world, as well as which emotions we cause other people to experience through our interactions with them. usually these are similar, because if we embody a certain emotional state we will cause other people to experience it through us. i think the notion of 'control' doesn't apply in a world-picture in which gods are at play. the purpose is simply to continue the play, it doesn't need any aim beyond itself. the individual human essence, then, can be progressively purified as a person identifies more completely with one such 'state,' or it can be developed in multiple directions, and infused with a rich ambiguity. in this sense there is existence before essence, but there are nonetheless essences before existence. ultimately the question 'do we own our lives' seems rather meaningless to me. we affirm life by living it, but we are determined by life... there is no straightforward linear relationship. I is something very ambiguous, a whisp of smoke with a different appearance based on your angle of observation. the more a person defines themselves, and tries to redefine their environment, the more they open themselves up to conflict and struggle.

as for 'why' i would want to believe this, i essentially find it more reasonable to attempt to give a subjective account of the universe rather than an objective account. the reason for this is that i believe all thought is essentially anthropocentric, and i think it's impossible to really think objectively about anything. the thing that characterizes 'objective' elements such as particles from 'subjective' elements such as emotional states is that particles seem 'indifferent' to us. however even indifference is just another subjective interpretation, we really can't interpret anything except subjectively. for instance, we speak of the 'birth of a star.' although we might scoff at the notion with our immodestly modest scientific worldview, we intuitively sense that the process of Birth is the same in a star as in a person. it is a universal allegory which transcends the arbitrariness of flesh and blood. science forces us to realize we are tiny specks of dust in a vast universe, but there is nothing objective about the sense of wonder at incomprehensible infinities nor about the feeling of smallness and insignificance. science does not deliver such sensations, it is something a few steps deeper.