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redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

Reporting for shovel mission Sir.

MrQwerty posted:

getting real mad about space exploration and turning it into an existential crisis every time elon blows up a rocket

Talk to me.

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BAGS FLY AT NOON
Apr 6, 2011

A Soft Nylon Bag

You Are A Werewolf posted:

a drat good rack

redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

Reporting for shovel mission Sir.

It's really about the cleavage though, right?

cumpantry
Dec 18, 2020

to live a life completely free of labor that does not directly lead to fruit enjoyed by you and yours, to express and create, to discuss and dissect, to hone and temper but, ultimately,

Jeremiah Flintwick posted:

The purpose of life is to end, duh.

redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

Reporting for shovel mission Sir.

cumpantry posted:

to live a life completely free of labor that does not directly lead to fruit enjoyed by you and yours, to express and create, to discuss and dissect, to hone and temper but, ultimately,

My man. Did you come up with this, or are you quoting someone else?

Tea Party Crasher
Sep 3, 2012

Yeah he quoted Jeremiah Flintwick It says right there

Darth Brooks
Jan 15, 2005

I do not wear this mask to protect me. I wear it to protect you from me.

We live because the alternative sucks.

Funky See Funky Do
Aug 20, 2013
STILL TRYING HARD
No it doesn't. 43 years ago I didn't have a care in the world. Now I've got lots of them.

Cubone
May 26, 2011

Because it never leaves its bedroom, no one has ever seen this poster's real face.


tiger got to hunt
bird got to fly
man got to sit and wonder, "why, why, why?"
tiger got to sleep
bird got to land
man got to tell himself he understand




Cubone posted:

okay, so, what you perceive as "self" and "other" are really just 4th dimensional intersections in higher-dimensional space. sort of like how a hand passing through a 2-dimensional plane would look like 5 circles appearing from nowhere as your fingers pass through, then growing and then joining together as you get to the palm. at any point, from the perspective of the 2-dimensional plane, it's circles, but the reality is that it's a hand. humans are the equivalent of the imaginary "circles"- we haven't realized what we are yet, but if you recognize time as the fourth dimension and travel backwards, the present moment as you perceive it is just the tip of this 4th-dimensional "tendril". it's an extension of who you were an instant ago, which was an extension of who you were an instant before that, which was an extension of who you were an instant before that, all the way back until you were a single zygote in your mother's womb. and your mother, likewise, extends backwards all the way until she was a single zygote in her mother's womb. all the way back, all the way back. the zygotes, too, go further back, until you were a pair of gametes, and even further until those gametes were assembled from proteins, and those proteins came from other biological life, with energy from the sun and the molecules of the atmosphere. and those go back, across the universe, all the way back to the big bang. essentially, viewed fourth dimensionally all matter is actually a complex web of tendrils upon tendrils extending from the same origin point. we're not separate from each other, we're fingers on the same hand, we just don't know it because our perception is limited to the third dimension
he reason people see ufos in old paintings from biblical times and sshit, it's not that they're aliens, that's just the cultural context we're applying to them. back then, a light in the sky, an otherwordly power, that was angels and demons and gods and spirits- everybody "knew" the mysterious lights in the sky were angels, because they didn't have machines that glow and shoot across the sky. we have that, and so that's what we think when we see those lights, but really that's just us applying a meaning to the same phenomenon. what people think are aliens are not actually from outer space any more than they were angels, they're higher dimensional beings. they reason they seem capable of impossible feats, disappearing in the blink of an eye, poo poo like that, is we're not really seeing "them", we're seeing intersections of higher-dimensional beings in terms we're capable of understanding, which is not the whole picture. we're seeing the circles and applying meaning to the circles, we still haven't seen the hand
those high-dimensional beings, they're not just visitors. I don't want to say they put us here, because that's kind of reductive, but the lower dimensional space we exist in is necessary, in their plane of existence, to grow things. almost like how a 2d blueprint is used to build something in 3d, but more involved than that. we're like a larva being grown in a petri dish. and that's the meaning of life. we're like cells in a fetus, part of a greater organism, following the instructions encoded into us in order to build something according to a higher plan more complex than we're capable of understanding. a cell in a fetus' heart doesn't know it's a heart, it's following its encoding biological instructions, hey, make a cell like this. and it's all... it came from a zygote that had those instructions and passed them along, all starting in a single cell. our zygote with the instructions for all this was the big bang

anyway that's the basics but I think you might need to get abducted to really "get" it idk
you mightve heard some poo poo like this before and that's because they keep telling us all the same poo poo, because we're coming to a point where there will be a change in our understanding and we need to recognize what we are in context of the whole. essentially, to go back to the "cells in an organism" metaphor, we're just about done building the cells necessary for the organism to be born, and there's kind of a switch that needs to happen. we're exiting the womb. it's horrifying, to the unborn infant, because this warm, safe place, the only home we've ever known, is ejecting us, because we need to leave, it's time, and from our perspective it's like all of reality is becoming toxic, but it's all part of a greater process, there's a larger reality we can't even imagine waiting for us just outside of the greater cosmic vagina, and these higher-dimensional beings, they're like the old man in jurassic park gleefully encouraging the baby dinosaur to break out of the egg, he knows what we're supposed to do and he's rooting for us, you know?
we're supposed to pass this along. they always tell us the same poo poo, and part of it is to spread the word. like, the dinosaur in the egg, this concept is like the baby really using a muscle for the first time. not even breaking out of the egg, just realizing there's a muscle there, and the first awkward, uncoordinated flailing of the limb. the meme, like the classical sense of the word meme, the idea of recognizing this unity, it's the first synapse, the first electrical signal down the nerve. the infrastructure for understanding it is here, people generally understand what higher-dimensional space is, the smart people have done the math, and it got passed to the rest of us if not in a classroom than in movies and pop culture, everything's in place for the system to start making sense and working as it's intended. it's going to take a long time, like, a really long time, longer than any of us will be around for, but where we are right now is in that moment just before the first muscle moves


"To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man."

But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience.




Cubone posted:

the lack of a readily apparent meaning to life and/or existence just means that we're lucky to exist at all and are free to determine for ourselves what we'll make of it

consider the opposite:
if there were some prescribed meaning, known or unknown, why should that somehow be inherently better than meaning that's self-determined? we're free, responsible agents determining our own development through acts of will– what right should the universe have to dictate our own meaning to us? without our consent? against our will? so that if we were to accomplish everything we desire for ourselves, every aspiration fulfilled, every joy, the wisdom and knowledge and self-actualization, a long and incontrovertible trail of righteousness and good will, it wouldn't count, because we've failed in some secret purpose we were "meant" for? ridiculous. disgusting. to have some predetermined "meaning" hanging over every moment, in judgement of our every act would be nothing but an ontological prison.

existence precedes essence– so what? go fly a kite.
"But what's the use of talking! I suspect that all I'm saying now is so like the usual commonplaces that I shall certainly be taken for a lower-form schoolboy sending in his essay on 'sunrise', or they'll say perhaps that I had something to say, but that I did not know how to 'explain' it. But I'll add, that there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas"







there is not love of life without despair about life
ce qui embellit le désert, dit le petit prince, c'est qu'il cache un puits quelque part






quote:

Je vois que beaucoup de gens meurent
Parce qu'ils estiment que la vie ne vaut pas la peine d'être vécue
J'en vois d'autres, qui se font paradoxalement tués pour des idées
Pour des illusions, qui leurs donnent une raison de vivre
Ce, qu'on appelle une raison de vivre est en même temps une excellente raison de mourir

Throw yourself into the unknown
With pace and a fury defiant
Clothe yourself in beauty untold
And see life as a means to a triumph


why don’t you take a flying gently caress at a rolling doughnut? why don’t you take a flying gently caress at the mooooooooooooon?



















dervival
Apr 23, 2014

so, uh, where's the well hidden in that desert of the post if you don't mind me being direct :shucks:

Wendigee
Jul 19, 2004

Just try some substances. They'll set you straight. Don't go crazy.

Expansion style.

DicktheCat
Feb 15, 2011

There should be a limit on how long a post can be.

Funky See Funky Do
Aug 20, 2013
STILL TRYING HARD
There is but it's quite large.

Tarkus
Aug 27, 2000

The point of life is to have an impact on the future through the superstructure that is culture and the ever-moving force that is time. This could take the form of anything really, could be your art, things you make, people you affect (good or bad) and even children. It could even be a website that's stored along with millions of others or some poo poo you machined to service a pump in some long forgotten pump somewhere. Even if you're disabled and need to stay at home or you're some wheeling dealing CEO, you have an effect on what the future brings. You are important in your own way, you just need to try and make it happen, whatever that may be.

I mean, realistically, there is no purpose to anything and we all live and die but perhaps there is an end game where complexity wins over disorder. where a little piece of what made us unique and special lives on until the heat death of the universe or the birth of new one.

Tarkus
Aug 27, 2000

I'm going to say this too, even after some delay. I get mad at people who hate boomers not so much because I like boomers but because I also understand the frailty and fear of age. The very moment we start taking mortality seriously we start to understand the inevitability of aging and the decline it brings. We understand it so deeply that we want to either ignore or embrace it as deeply as possible.

We hope for our parents to do better than us. We want them to be better so that we know WE can do better. Does this make a lick of sense?

flubber nuts
Oct 5, 2005


I was born to bop it.

Time_pants
Jun 25, 2012

Now sauntering to the ring, please welcome the lackadaisical style of the man who is always doing something...

To create something.

Lil Swamp Booger Baby
Aug 1, 1981

Well once we die we go to the afterlife where there's a lot of paper work you fill out, then they take you outside the building and tell you to get started on Phase 2 of existence. You've got to go through like 5000 of these before you graduate to a plane of existence that is incomprehensible to us now. The paperwork is absolutely crazy.

Wilkins Micawber
Jan 27, 2005

as we leave this existence
looking for another
Fallen Rib
depth overload

The Bible
May 8, 2010

Consciousness is a process. Think if it like a soccer game. The players are elements of the game, and when they stop playing, that particular game of soccer is now forever over.

That game has not ascended somewhere, it is gone.

The Hello Machine
Jul 19, 2021

I'm not a real machine, but I am a real Hello-sayer.
Saying hello to people. It's what they look at when seeing if you get into heaven

Lil Swamp Booger Baby
Aug 1, 1981

The Bible posted:

Consciousness is a process. Think if it like a soccer game. The players are elements of the game, and when they stop playing, that particular game of soccer is now forever over.

That game has not ascended somewhere, it is gone.

I just told you that there's tons of paperwork. There isn't any better proof than that.

Haptical Sales Slut
Mar 15, 2010

Age 18 to 49
It’s like the movie Defending Your Life, but instead of fear being the judgement it’s how many times you beat Super Mario 2.

redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

Reporting for shovel mission Sir.
I enjoyed it!

Time_pants
Jun 25, 2012

Now sauntering to the ring, please welcome the lackadaisical style of the man who is always doing something...

Haptical Sales Slut posted:

It’s like the movie Defending Your Life, but instead of fear being the judgement it’s how many times you beat Super Mario 2.

That movie was alright but man oh man is everything about it very much of its era. I still think of heaven as an all-inclusive hotel resort because of it, so that's something.

redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

Reporting for shovel mission Sir.
So, the question can be broken down as such:

The two main words of the question have variable meanings.

For example, "life". Does that mean your life, what is the meaning of your specific life?

Or does it mean "life" in the sense of the phenomena on planet Earth of reproducing cells?


*taps pipe

Grey Cat
Jun 3, 2023

Doing stuff and things


Pleasing myself.
Not to be confused with pleasuring myself.

redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

Reporting for shovel mission Sir.

Grey Cat posted:

Pleasing myself.
Not to be confused with pleasuring myself.

Are you pleased?

Grey Cat
Jun 3, 2023

Doing stuff and things


redshirt posted:

Are you pleased?

Quite.
For the time being.

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redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

Reporting for shovel mission Sir.

Grey Cat posted:

Quite.
For the time being.

Excellent.

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