What would you rate life on a scale of 1-10

But the only people who worry about this, and especially the ones who think in categories as "should", "good" or "bad", are us - us humans. Animals don't care if they're the last of their kind; saving species from extinction is an entirely human agenda. And so is the idea of saving life or destroying the planet in general.

 

Well, Adam and Eve got banned from paradise because they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Nevertheless, I would not consider knowledge (i. e., cognition) a curse. It creates a lot of problems, because cognition is only able to see parts, not the whole, but it can solve just as many. I find the contemplation of my existence to be very liberating.

 

Well, first of all, I feel we are here for a purpose. This is a basic attitude which might decide over everything else.

I understand that the world often appears cold and brutal, and that one might yearn for the sweet warmth and thoughtlessness and embryonal position of your mother's womb, or to at least be aligned with one's own nature, as animals are. Let me just say that I have come a long way, and for a few years I've systematically studied philosophy. I have found my inner peace.

 

A fucking 10!

 

Tough question...

First of all, I would never claim to actually "know" it for sure, or even be able to sufficiently put it into words. Instead, I would go for a more fundamental question: Instead of asking what the purpose is, I would ask how there could be any in the first place. What are the preconditions needed for a purpose to exist?

The thing is, the scientific worldview (of today) does not leave any room for a higher purpose, if you really think it through. The idea that the world consists of (what we describe with) facts and theories linking different facts together makes it impossible to achieve a value-laden purpose which stands above time and above cultural, sociological, psychological and biological influences. This is explained by David Hume and his Is-ought problem: It's logically impossible to deduce what ought to be merely from what is there. To conclude a normative ("ought") sentence from an argument, you already need a normative sentence as a premise. You just cannot base values, morals or a purpose on factual/descriptive ("is") sentences.

To deduce even the most basic sentences, such as "humans ought to strive for survival", you would already need a normative statement, such as "life is precious", in your premises. While most scientists would agree that "life is precious", this sentence is not a logical result from their research, but a result from their inner moral compass. They only agree here because they do not feel any need to question it.

Similar things could be said about human rights and everything. You can never deduce "slavery is bad", "murder is bad", "rape is bad" or even "torture is bad" from empirical facts alone.

In the bible, the ten commandments do not build on descriptive sentences. They start off with normative statements ("Thou shalt not...") right away, so they do not struggle with the Is-ought problem. But the scientific worldview has to deal with this problem.

Any sort of purpose falls into the normative category. Thus, if you hold a strictly scientific worldview, the consequence of the Is-ought problem would be that every purpose you see or feel will be a subjective (or, at best, "intersubjective") construction of your mind (the minds of the environment you live in).

To achieve a point where a purpose in life becomes possible again, you would have to prove the scientific (materialist/realist) worldview wrong. You have to break through its walls. I usually do this by showing that we cannot have access to any reality independent of our consciousness (which is the basic assumption of realism), and how everything we deem to be independent of it (such as, e.g., all the planets, stars, galaxies and everything) can only be described in terms of mental representations which always requires a consciousness for them to appear in the fist place. Edmund Husserl, the philosopher I personally admire most, called these phenomena. In the end, no matter how much there apparently is besides our little human bodies, it always remains the human mind which knows (or assumes to know) of all these things.

Once you have done this, you will see more value in your intuitions and gut feelings, you will see a hidden purpose and meaning in things, without having to articulate it in particular. Your inner life will fall back into its natural order again, and you will find peace - without relying on an afterlife or anything beyond this world (or beyond this, your consciousness), without needing anything "otherworldly", which might quickly look like wishful thinking to the scientifically trained intellect.

 

I think life is great. I want to have almost infinite kids. I'm way too positive on the scale. It's ok I'm already living in the real world you don't need to bring me down. I just want more access to women that I can impregnate. But instead I find porn. Because I accept that I can not just get every woman pregnant. Sometimes I just can hurt myself by watching porn as I can disconnect from some really negative mind sets.

 

By "that purpose" you mean the one that I (who isn't a scientific realist) deems the purpose of life, right? (I'm just a little confused because the sentence you quoted was related to scientific realism.)

Well, it is subjective insofar as it requires a subject, i. e. consciousness. But, if consciousness is pretty much the ground of everything (not because of any metaphysical or spiritual speculation, but because of the way our mind works), subjective doesn't mean "insignificant" anymore, and subjective and objective are not separated anymore, because everything we call objective requires mental acts and representations as well - which means that objectivity is a specific form of subjectivity.

Are you quoting Einstein here? He said almost the same thing in the discussion about quantum physics, and it is great that you bring him up here that way. Einstein was a scientific realist according to the book - in fact, he was one of the few who actually thought it through. Nevertheless, as I have suggested before, I hold an opposing view regarding many ideas. Moreover, the historical development of quantum physics was against Einstein in the long run - which is because scientific realism and quantum theory are incompatible with each other. Unfortunately, this is being widely ignored by physicists nowadays. Most physicists are not interested in philosophy anymore, and vice versa, most philosophers have given up on physics.

The question is: What is the moon if you don't look at it? Whenever you think of "the moon" you will probably see a picture in your mind - but this picture is only seen while you actually look at it. If you don't look at it, there will not be any of the corona you know, or any of its yellowish shine, because these require a conscious observer to exist. All the actual impressions you can have of the moon are only there as long as you look at it. If colors only exist in our perception, the colors of the moon are gone as soon as you look away.

For scientific realism, there are two ways the moon continues to exist when you look away: 1. as a mental representation (stored in your memory in case you don't think about it), 2. as a cluster of physical objects.

1. is uninteresting, 2. is what it's all about here, right? But the only way you could possibly come to know physical objects is through your mind (regardless of the question whether or not a physical reality exists without consciousness). Physical objects only make sense in physical models, and models, again, rely on mental representations. Thus, everything you might associate with "the moon" is in your mind, even the phrase "the moon is still there if I do not look at it", as this phrase requires a certain, abstract idea of a three-dimensional space both your body and the moon exist in.

There is another question, though, which is harder to reply to: How come other people can see the moon and tell me about it, even in case I have spent my life in a cave and never came to see it? How come they can take pictures of the moon and show them to me? This is the question of inter-subjectivity. And I admit I don't have a clear answer to it.

No philosophy has ever persuaded me that it actually got the relation between body and mind right (some claim that there is no such relation at all, but I don't believe you can state that without reaping many logical contradictions). I am inclined to believe that our intellect (or its current structure) isn't made for it. Assuming that it once arose from trying to survive in the wilderness, it is likely that it excels in creating theories about the connections between phenomena, but not in theories about the being of the phenomena – which is a relatively new question in human development, at least if you believe evolution to be real. Nevertheless, I also believe we can have ideas which, while they are clear to our intuition, cannot be grasped by the intellect. Time would be an example for this. Intuitively, we know what time is, but we can never explain it in such a way that we holistically do justice to all of its aspects (physicists tend to treat time as if it was a "dimension", i. e. something spatial – that way, they might understand those characteristics of time which are akin to space, but not that which sets time apart from space). It might be similar with the relation between body and mind. And it might be similar with the purpose of existence.