Forgive me, but you strike me as the kind of person who uses fancy words and lots of them to cover for their own logical errors/personal flaws/ignorance. You used 5 times more words than were needed just so you could explain a fifth as much.
Haha.
I speak as I do out of both capability and love. I am capable of writing this way, enjoy writing in this manner, and enjoying read things in this manner. It is expression. To be able to use the english language as an art form to form poetry and meaning is quite simply exhilerating, and I adore exploiting - or atleast, attempting to exploit - this potential. Furthermore, this is how my mind thinks, these are the words that sprout forth from my mind to describe the feelings that emerge. These feelings, these words; they emerge from my head as Athena did Zeus's.
Besides, you personally claim to not understand anything I said. It's kind of presumptious and ignorant to then try and say, because you did not understand, that there was no actual meaning in the first place. In fact, I found the fact that you became defensive towards my non-hostile comments and postulations hilarious. Anyway. You didn't understand anything I was saying; but that's alright, you basically admitted that at the beggining. I'll reiterate and try and respond to what you're saying.
I was postulating as to what you meant by 'losing sleep' and offered up several potential reasons that I extrapolated/have become familiar with in regards to why you would do so.
The two I mentioned, being:
'if one thing were different, we would be so different now! we might be just like the apes and not even have conciousness!'
'No! Being so close to apes means that we're just apes anyway... If we're just apes, what does it matter?'
And I refuted both points.
I said nothing about it being flawed or stupid to look back at the past and wonder, or experience wonder; I said worrying or getting scared over how close things have come to being different - and getting tied up at that point - is pointless. The reason its pointless, is because it has already occured. Probability is irrelevant to the past because its nothing but questioning and determining the chances that something will occur. It doesn't matter what the chances of something happening are, when it's already happened - because regardless of those chances, it happened. That's that.
And, given the fact that to me the evidence speaks of a deterministic, clockwork universe; I personally believe it could be no other way. From the very origin of the universe, that famous and bewildering first moment of time and existence as we have come to know it, the order of events has been inherently set. Cause and effect.
Can it be interesting? Yes. Can it be a learning experience? Yes. etc. etc. etc. but losing sleep over it is dumb, because the implications of what is
now are the same.
You tout consciousness as this thing that just popped out of nowhere, and you claim that it does not matter in the slightest. But I am here to tell you that, in fact, it DOES matter. It matters very much. It means the world to most of mankind, because defining what exactly sets us apart from the rest of the life on Earth has been a subject of furious research and debate ever since man became aware of his own existence. Entire schools in the ancient world were devoted to that sole subject. It is not a small matter.
Wrong.
I was not saying that conciousness is just this thing that popped up out of nowhere and doesn't matter:
I can only question as to the origins of conciousness itself, though I imagine it has its origins in an expansion of instinct and increase of general intelligence.
What I was saying was, if the second scenario I mentioned up above was true; what does it matter where it came from? It exists now. Conciousness is self-evident. And whether it came from God, or it came about through evolution, that doesn't change what it is or how important it is to us. My 'doesn't matter' remarks were in regards to the
origin of conciousness.
Don't get me wrong. I love history. I love thinking about the past and studying it, past society, the evolution of man and life both spiritually and biologically, it's fascinating. But there is no reason anybody should let a more naturalistic take on our origins - or alternatively "grim" and "meaningless" takes - depress them. It doesn't change who you are, how you think, how you feel. This is why I could never be a nihilist.
So, I don't understand why you bother questioning this debate.
I question the debate because the answer is, especially at this point in time, not that hard to grasp. We have a unique biological identity. We have a spiritual and intellectual, sentient identity that is unique to us. That is what defines us as human.
