The universe is hostile

nyarlothothep

As it pertains to the human experience, discuss. I would prefer that if you're going to say its subjective you back it up and give examples which may not sit easily with it being so.

simplistic

I think that it is very complimentary to the human experience.I mean that if we are congruent with the reality of the universe it can be a very pleasant experience.

I always think of when I was a child and how fasinated I was with everything and as I grew up through my teens my desire to understand the world was eroded. I think that this was because childern only have their true selves showing. They show a deep fasination with there world and it seems that the universe is feeding their joy. As you grow up and develop an ego you try to shun the world and this creates a hostile enviornment for you to live in when you reject reality.


So the more you are interested in the universe the more it will be interested with you.

philologos

nyarlothothep wrote: »

As it pertains to the human experience, discuss. I would prefer that if you're going to say its subjective you back it up and give examples which may not sit easily with it being so.

Would you mind putting forward your reasoning?

It would be my view that much of the hostility arises from us as human beings.

nyarlothothep

simplistic wrote: »

I think that it is very complimentary to the human experience.I mean that if we are congruent with the reality of the universe it can be a very pleasant experience.

I always think of when I was a child and how fasinated I was with everything and as I grew up through my teens my desire to understand the world was eroded. I think that this was because childern only have their true selves showing. They show a deep fasination with there world and it seems that the universe is feeding their joy. As you grow up and develop an ego you try to shun the world and this creates a hostile enviornment for you to live in when you reject reality.


So the more you are interested in the universe the more it will be interested with you.

I agree with you to a fair degree. However, I think rather than a schism between different forms of perception I believe the more you learn about how the universe operates, its a pretty mean place out there, darwinian selection, a cold dark void, mans inhumanity to man all the way down to animals and instects ruthlessly competing against each other, complemented by viral infections, parasites, natural disasters and the very fact of entropy itself.

I don't think the universe is interested in anyone, it reminds me of the film grizzly man when Herzog states that as much as his subject stares into those bears eyes, anthropomorphizing it, it looks back disinterested and bored with food on its mind.

Joycey

nyarlothothep wrote: »

I agree with you to a fair degree. However, I think rather than a schism between different forms of perception I believe the more you learn about how the universe operates, its a pretty mean place out there, darwinian selection, a cold dark void, mans inhumanity to man all the way down to animals and instects ruthlessly competing against each other, complemented by viral infections, parasites, natural disasters and the very fact of entropy itself.

The only one of the above-mentioned things that I would consider to be "mean" is "mans inhumanity to man". I dont find there to be anything significant at all about there being a cold dark void, why should I? Darwinian selection and everything competing against eachother etc are the reason why we are here in the first place, to see them as being depressing or mean is something I just cant really relate to.

What I do find "mean" or distressing are things like preventable harm caused by natural disasters or disease or whatever, that we have created systems, for which we are all responsable, which violate the humanity of the majority of people on the planet in order that the elite may prosper. This has been the way, I suppose, the majority of societies have functioned since the birth of agriculture, however there is something I find sickening about it.

As for the universe as a whole though, cant find anything wrong with it . I feel much more wonder at its contents and the fact that I perceive it as having contents in the first place than I do hostility

Goduznt Xzst

Joycey wrote: »

The only one of the above-mentioned things that I would consider to be "mean" is "mans inhumanity to man".

Millions if not billions of living creatures on Earth right now are raping each other, eating/cannibalizing each other, murdering, defiling and performing every sort of despicable act to each other. The animal kingdom is a nasty place, full of hostility, where Social Darwinism is firmly in place.

Right down to our human societies. Would you let your child walk home alone along an unlit alley at night? Or would you leave your house unlocked when you go on Holiday?

You take precautions against your own kind because you know the hostility between humans is always present. You know there are rapists, murderers and thieves out there who wish to harm you. The society you currently live in amounts to nothing more than a flimsy veneer, an accepted truce by the majority. In an instant it can crumble like a stack of dominos.

Your society profits off the misfortune of the 3rd world to maintain the status quo. Everything around you, from your clothes to your fancy coffee is provided by the wasted lives of those who are forced to work for next to nothing for an entire existence.

Humanity is nothing more than a tiered pyramid of selective ignorance.

Joycey

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

Millions if not billions of living creatures on Earth right now are raping each other, eating/cannibalizing each other, murdering, defiling and performing every sort of despicable act to each other. The animal kingdom is a nasty place, full of hostility,

So it is and so it always has been. If it wasnt for the fact that it is so then we wouldnt exist in the first place to call it hostile. And I dont see how animals are really "hostile" to one another, it seems to me to be more the case as if they act somewhat analogously to a piece of computer software, which is programmed to act in a certain way according to certain inputs (eg cat sees mouse and pounces on it, lets it go, pounces again). These may be seen as hostile or not by us but to me, hostility is something fairly distinctively human, and implies something freely chosen, as do all emotions.

where Social Darwinism is firmly in place.

My understanding of social Darwinism is that it is supposed to apply to the human realms as opposed to plants/animals/microbes because otherwise it would just be Darwinism. I also see it as fundamentally neglecting something about being in the world in its account of human existence.

Right down to our human societies. Would you let your child walk home alone along an unlit alley at night? Or would you leave your house unlocked when you go on Holiday?

Though I do think there is a vastly disproportionate level of fear about peadophilia in Western societies in comparison to the actual risk involved (much less likely your child will be kidnapped, including being returned fully unharmed hours later, than that they will choke on their food), I probably wouldnt let my child out after dark no.

You take precautions against your own kind because you know the hostility between humans is always present.

No I dont. I dont believe hostility is the primordial relationship between two human beings. I think it is a fundamental flaw in the majority of individualistic ideologies to mistake it as such.

I take these precautions because there are now in existence certain structures, which violate the human integrity (in the sense of wholeness) of certain human beings who they exert influence on, ending with the fact that:

there are rapists, murderers and thieves out there

The society you currently live in amounts to nothing more than a flimsy veneer, an accepted truce by the majority. In an instant it can crumble like a stack of dominos.

Again I fundamentally disagree. A society IMO is not a truce. It exists at a much much much much much deeper level than this would suggest.

A society is not an extremely large number of entirely seperate individuals who each decide that the way in which they will best continue their existence is if they band together and form a 'truce', which ends their 'natural' state of brutality and nastiness and hostility etc.

Rather I would say that it is only by means of society that we even emerge as conceived individuals in the first place. A child learns to speak and to communicate with others before they develop any sense of self. If we take society to mean the shared context in which human beings dwell (context in the sense of space, like a city, but also abstract, relational context, like shared values, activities, projects, language, systems of thinking etc), then it makes no sense at all to say society is a veneer, we exist for the vast majority of our lives in society or through society.

Your society profits off the misfortune of the 3rd world to maintain the status quo. Everything around you, from your clothes to your fancy coffee is provided by the wasted lives of those who are forced to work for next to nothing for an entire existence.

As I write this I am drinking Sainsbury's Basics coffee so no joy there Im afraid :pac:, but I completely agree, that is some of what I said sickens me in my first post.

Humanity is nothing more than a tiered pyramid of selective ignorance.

It seems strange to me to define humanity in terms where the characteristic which appears to be that which most distinguishes us from animals (our capacity for abstract thought) is only implied negatively by saying we are its opposite. I see humanity as being an amazing thing, and I argue against the violation of it, on that ground. I fail to see where your motivation for wanting to do good for humanity (as I took you to be against the injustices you mentioned in your last paragraph) would come from if you really believed wthe quote above...

Back to Levinas I go.....

Goduznt Xzst

Joycey wrote: »

These may be seen as hostile or not by us but to me

I really don't want to reduce the argument down to semantics. The animal kingdom, by and large, is not affable to humans, it is hostile towards them.

Joycey wrote: »

My understanding of social Darwinism is that it is supposed to apply to the human realms as opposed to plants/animals/microbes because otherwise it would just be Darwinism.

True, it is unique to humans. But the principle behind it, that only the strong survive holds true. Remember we are ascertaining if the Universe is, for the majority, hostile. We can agree that the animal kingdom is hostile towards humans. For clarification, in this context, I am using hostile in the environmental sense.

Joycey wrote: »

Again I fundamentally disagree. A society IMO is not a truce. It exists at a much much much much much deeper level than this would suggest....

If we take society to mean the shared context in which human beings dwell (context in the sense of space, like a city, but also abstract, relational context, like shared values, activities, projects, language, systems of thinking etc), then it makes no sense at all to say society is a veneer, we exist for the vast majority of our lives in society or through society.

I have no doubt, within the individuals small social circles (i.e. Dunbar's number, et al), that there is a deep motivation to help their friends and family as it betters there existence to do so, but on the whole, large scale society is nothing more than a veneer of accepted constructs, held in place by threatened punishments.

Tell me, would you agree to live in an Anarchy? If not, why not.

Joycey wrote: »

I fail to see where your motivation for wanting to do good for humanity (as I took you to be against the injustices you mentioned in your last paragraph) would come from if you really believed wthe quote above...

Personal motivation for helping others can come from a number of sources. Experience of the issue first hand or personally... etc. Altruism feeds the primate mind in the same sense that the sight of a baby does or anthropomorphizing a pet does in humans.

Primates have evolved to exist in social circles, as this better creates an environment safe for propagating our genes. Like our evolved motivations for copulating, altruism feeds our evolved motivations for forming social groups (why is a chimpanzee motivated to groom those in his troupe?). It doesn't matter if we help people outside of our circle, or via proxy, the mental response is the same. We have evolved to want to secure the existence of others as it better enables us to safeguard our own progeny.

But above all else, those which affect our base senses the most will receive the most aid. It is not uncommon to hear of an individual who, having lived a life never caring about the impoverished in the third world, suddenly becoming actively involved in helping these people upon visiting them and seeing them, and having their existence impact on their senses.

It is also not uncommon for an individual who does donate to charity to suddenly cease all aid if it is needed to better secure the existence of someone known to them immediately within their social circle (i.e. a sick relative... etc).

When it comes down to it, mentally we tier how much we care for humans, with a pecking order as to how much we value their existence. Society has formed around this innate tiered system we each hold, to the point of accepting exploitation and brutality of those on the lower tiers. You and I and modern society as a whole endorses, daily, acts of inhumanity towards our kind that we would shout out against in outrage where our family subjected to it or where it visible to the naked eye.

Joycey

I agree with the vast majority of your post and take nearly all your points (but if you still see the universe as "hostile" I still disagree with you there), but...

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

I have no doubt, within the individuals small social circles (i.e. Dunbar's number, et al), that there is a deep motivation to help their friends and family as it betters there existence to do so, but on the whole, large scale society is nothing more than a veneer of accepted constructs, held in place by threatened punishments.

Tell me, would you agree to live in an Anarchy? If not, why not.

I think you are still fundamentally mistaking the nature of society in general as it functions in the life world of a being living in it, with some political system which serves to govern the humans who comprise any given society.

For instance: do you speak English because of the threat of punishment? Or rather, did it happen much more organically, whereby before you (as a fully constituted 'individual') had any alternative to speaking English you spoke it. You can make an abstract argument about how it is due to unconscious social pressures, or a drive to procreate that we speak English (because everyone else does). But IMO this doesnt account for what actually happens in consciousness of the person who speaks English. They dont think "im going to speak English so I get a ride later", or "if I dont speak English I wont be socially accepted -> wont ever get a ride", but instead they have some particular desire to which end they need to speak Enlish to achieve fulfillment of this desire. They know that performing the action will fulfill this desire, and so they carry out the act of communication which leads to fulfillment (eg, will you open the window please?). Arguing that the basis of this desire is down to our genes does not take away from the fact that the desire in itself is an end, we dont speak English in order to procreate, we speak English because we want to fulfill our desire, which is to hear the sound of the wind whistling in the window or whatever.

So I am necessarily engaged in the shared context of multiple human beings whenever I go out into the world and act. To say that I can opt out of such a context, or that it can disappear as if it were a veneer is not something which makes sense to me.

Although its interesting now that I think about it, because Levinas, who Ive basically stolen all of the above from, is actually motivated to write in part by the contemporary notion of the "end of the world" which he says harks back to ancient fears of the apocalypse and so on, but is actually grounded in, among other things, "the mutual impenetrability of minds opaque as matter, [...] the impossibility of the I rejoining the you", which seems to be something like what we are talking about. He talks about 'the end of the world' as being something like this moment where "the world", which is this shared set of relational contexts, is stripped away and we are left with something like the pure ego. However I think he means it in a more metaphorical sense,a conceivable state which will allow us to philosophically analyse the distinctions between the ego and the world which may not be disseminable in any way other than to posit this impossible scenario.

Existence and Existents is the essay/book that this comes from...

Altruism feeds the primate mind in the same sense that the sight of a baby does or anthropomorphizing a pet does in humans.

Thats interesting, do you mean altruism works analagously to those things or actually stimulates the same parts of the brain, and if the latter do you have any links to studies or anything? Not that ive referenced anything but Id like to read any information you have on that.