By your reasoning, "a "meaning of suffering" is that suffering destroys meaning (like fire necessarily burning itself out)? — 180 Proof

Aye, but I'm not sure whether that's linguistic auto-mutilation or truth of a deeper kind.

I don't believe I do. What do you have in mind? — A Christian Philosophy

Huh?

That the big bang occurred is the current scientific consensus. Like all scientific claims, it's only provisionally true and all scientists are aware of this caveat. The question then is rather misguided if it's designed to critique science.

:up:

We can hope brother! and maybe that's what humans are best at, when its the worst of times. — universeness

:grin: We haven't yet done all we can!

Suffering destroys meaning. The expression "fly in the ointment" doesn't leave anything to the imagination now does it? An awesome day can be ruined completely by something as small as a paper cut or bird poop on an expensive suit/dress.

How then are we to find meaning in suffering when the latter negates the former?

Excellent point. Yeah, we could stop having children - announce and enforce a moratorium on reproduction for ALL life - that would eventually lead to the biosphere going extinct, turning earth into a dead planet, BUT life would evolve again and it's back to square one for life and us (the nociceptive system, our bane, would be back in business so to speak).

Instead what we can do, as of now, is to find a solution to pain & suffering like the transhumanists - that would be real progress and not the Sisyphusean hell scenario I described in the previous paragraph.

:up:

Therefore choose life, so that thou mayest live! Thou and thy seed! — universeness

:ok: You too!

Well, we know mass (gravity) and high speeds (close to c) slow down time. There's no saying there aren't other as of yet unknown factors that affect time similarly or in ways we haven't yet thought of (what if there's an x that reverses the direction of the arrow of time?). Really good question mon ami. Perhaps a mathematician/physicist will provide us with more insight into the issue. Bonam fortunam.

Heterosexual male. You don't need to replicate until you occupy all of space and time Mr Smith for YOU are a human being and there is no one exactly like you and please remember we will NEVER see your uniqueness again but YOU are here, and in the future YOU will ALWAYS have been here. YOU are photographed/recorded in the fabric of space and time and YOU have no idea what legacy YOU will leave and who YOUR LIFE touched. ANTINATALISM SUCKS! — universeness

Beautiful thoughts mon ami, beautiful thoughts. As for whether antinatalism makes sense or not, I'd say we let people know that they have the option not to bring children into the world and for a really good reason (there are people who have such a horrible life that they wish they were never born) to boot. After that, the decision is theirs to make.

The solution for war is as simple as it is, I feel, idiotic. The OP seems to be approaching the problem under the assumption that the zero point is we can wage wars and then not to. I'd say we simply disarm ourselves to the point that war would mean punching, kicking, pulling out the hair of your opponents. The casualty rates will be ridiculously low. :snicker:

realising the necessity of the ‘ego’ whilst not placing it on a pedestal. — I like sushi

Oh! :up: I can't live ... with or without you!

Does anyone use such language these days outside of archaic religiosity or fanatical devotion to a cause? — Tom Storm

A beautiful question! Hats off to you señor/señorita.

:100: To suggest that the solution to human suffering is the non-existence of humans so that no contemplations regarding the value/injustice of human suffering can take place is illogical. Just like the idea of killing the patient to cure the patient is illogical. — universeness

You're onto something, monsieur/mademoiselle as thr case may be.

I don't know why we die, but I do know how we die.

Like dogs of course! :snicker:

None of those statements are necessarily true. — schopenhauer1

Now you see it, now you don't.

Yes, it is overlooking their dignity, using them as a means..treating them like an inanimate chess piece to move around and foist significant existential conditions upon. — schopenhauer1

Now you see it, now you don't!

This is not my quote, Agent Smith:

'mindfulness is the optimum state of mind'

It was attributed to me by Pantagruel.

Mindfulness is a new age idea grasped by sheep and apparently embraced by Pantagruel. — ArielAssante

Oh!

A thousand apologies. — Ranjeet

If only life were so simple. To start with, the human heating will happen in decades and the natural cooling in millennia. So if you don’t mind first being cooked and then waiting….

But then the cooking is going to be so extreme that it pushes the Earth into some new setting anyway. Do stuff like melt the poles and you might have to wait hundreds of millions of years for ice to start to creep back. — apokrisis

Don't be so dismissive but, yeah, unmanageable complexity is the norm, simplicity is just us daydreamin'.

How fasinating. Are we expecting the two oppsing forces (natural cooling effect due to earth's orbital characteristics vs. global warming) to cancel each other out? Net effect = normal climate.

Evidence for this could come in the form of temperature rising but being lower than expected for the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

relative opacity to infra red. — unenlightened

So glass (re greenhouses) is basically CO₂ solidified. :cool:

Has anyone heard of functional fixedness and the associated the candle problem?

The journey is the destination — 180 Proof

X: Where are you going?
Y: Nowhere, I just like walking.

All this fitness craze that's taken the entire world by storm, there's something to it, eh?

Buying a treadmill as soon as I can.

:snicker:

Ok. A question: Do you mean to say that h. sapiens suffered the most during the course of evolution? After all we are the ones most adept at metacognition, as self-aware (self-conscious) as we are. Ref: you associate suffering with metacognition. Interesting.

Antinatalism makes zero sense: Pain/suffering is important only to the extent that it delays/prevents death (nonexistence). To then prescribe nonexistence as a solution to pain/suffering is to both simultaneously accept and reject the value/significance of pain/suffering.

I hope this whole climate change affair isn't a detective novel - all the evidence points to one person but in the end the culprit turns out to be an another, someone who we thought couldn't possibly have committed the crime. :snicker:

Death can be meaningful, oui mes amies? Martyrdom in a secular context.

mindfulness is the optimum state of mind. — ArielAssante

I must beg to differ unless someone's managed to find a solution for the amount of stress involved in being mindful 24×7.

Trust the gods of evolution (Charles Darwin & Alfred Russell Wallace) - if our natural state is to be not mindful then there's a very good reason why. Don't want my brain to explode.

Karma, though it's an extrapolation of Newton's 3^rd law of motion (action = reaction) is unscientific - it can't be falsified since e.g. if you buy a lottery ticket and win, it's your (good) karma and if you lose, it's your (bad) karma.

A theory that explains everything explains nothing.

To say the scientific method works simply means it has produced many (scientific) theories that do a good job of a) explaining phenomena and b) predicting phenomena, whatever these phenomena are.

:grin: It's true, it is!

Algos is your ally, it saves you from Thanatos
Thanatos is your ally, it releases you from Algos.

What a mind job! — Cypher

Frenemy! :snicker:

Danke for the explanation.

Do you see any connection between 1 & 3?

Accepting a third truth value basically rejects the principle of bivalence. — Moliere

I see but wouldn't it be better to say we don't know if p or ~p instead of we know neither p nor ~p. There's a difference, no?

No and yes. In Kripke's system the truth value of an unproven conjecture would be neither true nor false. Hence, meh. It's a non-classical logic, so the principle of bivalence is dropped. — Banno

Doesn't it make more sense to say the truth value of unproven statements is unknown (it is true/false, we just don't know which) instead of neither true nor false.

Nothingness is pure and poetic. Life tend to be fulfilled with unpleasantness. When an individual is aware of everything around him it has more chances of suffering pain due to conciousness.
But if you say to me that there is nothing after death I would take it as the pure freedom act. No more hate, disgrace, pain, disappointments, illnesses, etc...
For me nothingness after death is the real Nirvana. No more complaining about literally everything which "fulfilled" our lives. — javi2541997

There are probably many ways of dealing with nothingness, yours is one of 'em. Another way would be at the very least grapple with it in an attempt to understand what it is while we still have breath in us.

X: Don't be scared, it's nothing! See?
Y: You fool, nothing is precisely what scares me!

:rofl:

Einstein did. — Yohan

Indeed, the scientific method requires what Einstein himself went the extra mile to convey to neophytes and veterans in the field - imagination.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. — Albert Einstein

Probably. :up: — 180 Proof

:grin:

Reverse racism! Yeah, kinda like where an illness is used as treatment for the very same illness. You can't rectify discrimination with more discrimination; no, not even when the polarity has been flipped. There's got to be a better way, oui mes amies?

As fire drives out fire, so love love logic, eh?