Life.
[London drawl]Wassit all abaht then?[/London drawl]
"Buggered if I know," would have my usual response for the last 35 years, revealing that I - like most - had no sure view of the point of it all. Sure, there's the significant stuff like falling in love, raising a family, and they're pretty important if you're lucky enough to do them. But I don't think they provide enough of an answer.
So what does? What is the answer to the big question of "Why are we here?". If you can only count on life, death and taxes :-) then its pretty hard to think of what the whole outcome is, or why bother to do some of the trickier, riskier stuff. Why fight, why strive, why push yourself to the limit, why grow?
[Warning, crazy idea approaching...]
How about the possibility that this world is simply preparation, the gym, the classroom, a chance to prepare for the life beyond a carbon-based life-form? If you will consider the possibility that life isn't over when you die, then all of this, even me bothering to put notes in a blog (that doesn't exactly attract a huge audience), is just part of a long road on my own development, an incubator if you will, where I get to try out life based on cause and effect, where I am challenged to grow in my attitudes towards others and how I behave towards my surroundings. In heaven it would seem unlikely that we'll have physical bodies to harm, so we perhaps need to learn to behave down here, with limited strength and finite ability.
I'm trying more and more to take the properly long-term view these days, although I'm still a fair way from living my life this way, since I can no longer consider that it's all suddenly over just because your heart stops when your body dies.
2 comments:
Technically it's not the heartbeat stopping, but the brain activity, that finishes our existence.
From all the science we have we can infer that our 'self-awareness' is not independent of the brain and as such we totally cease to exist after the brain stops.
In science/philosophy this is called Mind-Brain dualism and I'd recommend you to have a glance at what skeptics think about that.
Unfortunately as, you correctly point out, science isn't at a final stage of being able to explain self awareness. I agree of course that our physical selves totally cease to exist when the brain stops, but then I'm not really talking about the physical :-)
Bottom line is - can you really expect to get a handle on everything using science, unless the one who created everything lets you?
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