Post by chaosvii on Mar 21, 2014 20:43:17 GMT
I do not ponder the pointlessness of the many plants & animals that no longer exist yet currently serve to power my many conveniences, my biochemical pathways, aided my ancestors to survive or farm or whatever. I do not do this because their lives and their deaths and that time long after all did something, all had an impact on me such that I cannot deny that their current non-existence indicates a pointlessness to their temporary existence. My evaluation of them changes nothing about what they achieved and what utility still exists long after the matter ceases to avoid the chemical equilibrium of death.
We all thrive on the corpses of creatures long gone, we all stand on the collective shoulders of men and women long dead, we are all ham-stringed by the crimes of our fore-bearers and we have yet to iron out all the political problems caused by callous people whose inequity lives on in their misinformed children and laws seeking to re-calibrate the scales that were so very unbalanced for decades.
What you do during your existence will contribute to the whole of humanity, for good or for ill. If you happen to have an afterlife too, bonus I suppose.
If one doesn't value one's contribution to other people's lives, then I suppose one could call most of what humans do pointless too. Individualism is great and all, but even as a largely asocial individual, I can't wrap my head around how such a distinction is worth making. Because there isn't an objective "point" that I can build a case for even if one has an afterlife (unless that afterlife is obscenely calibrated to be proportionately affected by the "otherwise pointless for the individual" acts).
If one values what one does contingent only on if one continues existing afterwards, absent anybody else's say in the matter, then I'm not sure what one is to do because I can't list any valuable acts there.
But then again I have no idea what the distinction of "pointless for the individual" is meant to express in such a context of valuable acts & purposeful existence so I may not be addressing what you are saying.
Conversely, if an individual adopts subjective purposes contingent on what they value as an individual, purposes irrespective of whether they get to experience an afterlife or not, then that individual can claim to have a point during one's existence. And in such a case, the individual sees the point in it, even if nobody else does.
For that matter, all of those subjective purposes could be for a fascist calling, or for the termination of the ego, or to become more intrinsically connected to an interpersonal network, or for service to a great leader's calling to them, to see to it that somebody else manages to land on Mars, to innovate a cure for something that they are never personally afflicted by. The individual could, for whatever reason, value acts that impact others far more than themselves, but you'd be hard pressed to convince them that what they do is pointless for them as an individual simply because they'll die one day and might not get to see the full scope of what they achieved.
