aph, i can predict which threads are yours just from the title. earlier today i knew you started the laci peterson thread, too. same with "my trip to manhattan" the other day. hehe anyway, HERE'S THE TRUTH! at the point of birth, you have no purpose at all (except for maybe reproducing). YOU can give meaning to your life, but we are not here for any real reason......except for that our parents had sex of course. this may seem bleak to some, but not at all to me. instead of looking at it as we have no purpose, just think of how amazing life is. that we're even here is incredible. i don't need to have a purpose. we're all just animals living on earth for a short time. try to make the best of it. an interesting subject, imo, is how much of your life is really under your control. of course there are some things under our control, but think of how much of it is not under your control, too. just about all my friends i met in a pretty chaotic way. the fact that we're communicating right now is pretty much chance. think about how much of everything else is chance, too. in the end, i really think it just comes down to doing a lot of things so that you create a lot of opportunities for yourself.
I have reached certain conclusions, yes. New information would give me cause to re-evaluate those conclusions.
Technically, the question is probably undecidable with the tools at hand. But that does not stop people from taking sides. Even if some giant space alien craft or god-like apparition appeared and said "I made the universe", I am not sure how one would come to trust the declaration. Wouldn't it be too easy for scam-artists from a superior civilization to pull off some god scam on an unsuspecting primitive planet? What is interesting is how a dynamical phenomenon such as evolution can create organisms that act as if there were a purpose and that that purpose is worth dying for. Perhaps the universe had no purpose at the big bang, being merely random outcome of physics, but the inexorable forces of evolution are leading toward a more purposeful universe. If you think that terraforming and Dyson spheres are possible, then perhaps people (or some civilization) will remake the universe to suit their own image and self-evolved purpose. Interesting topic. Cheers All, Traden4Alpha
btw, here's another truth... all these people that say everything happens for a reason.....yea right. well, there are probably laws to the universe, but events in your life don't always have some secret meaning..... here's an example..... some guy gets in a car accident, loses both his arms. someone might ask, "how are you able to go on after that?" then they'll say something like, "i believe everything happens for a reason." uhh no....it happened because it happened, nothing personal to you. the physical events that caused the crash are why it happened. THAT IS ALL. if you survive a plane crash and everyone else dies, there is no hidden meaning to it--YOU JUST GOT LUCKY. no god spared you so you could live on and do something with your life or something. sorry to rain on some of your parades. i have a good bullshit detector. i know when something makes sense and when it doesn't. i speak the truth...but go ahead and disagree if you want!!!!
Luck is a term used historicaly by those who couldn't see what was happening from a cause and effect perspective. When people used to get disease, they thought it was luck, until they discovered germs via refined instrumentation and uderstood the cause and effect relationship. That you see no further than the limits of your own mind and senses, that doesn't mean necessarily that there isn't more going on than meets the limits of your perceptions. You can only speak from your reality, not for all others.
wait, wait, wait! please do not mistake me! imo, everything has a real explanation. the explanation just may be complicated or not easily known. kind of like the stock market....things happen, but since it's just a big mess, you can't always know why everything happened.....but there still were reasons why it moved. here is the only way luck has meaning to me... an easy example is..... say we had a million monkeys make stock picks....just because of the large number, there would be some that traded good. i would say the ones with good results were LUCKY because they did not really do anything to shape their outcome..... just because of the large number, there would be ones with the best results....but it wasn't really that they are great traders. OK, so.....777, i don't really disagree with anything you said above. HOWEVER, where i will disagree is when you claim to know beyond what we know. i admit i don't know. you religious people take the next absurd step and actually claim you know.
Gordon, Here is what you wrote about luck: "if you survive a plane crash and everyone else dies, there is no hidden meaning to it--YOU JUST GOT LUCKY. no god spared you so you could live on and do something with your life or something. sorry to rain on some of your parades." You don't really know if there is hidding meaning, do you? All you could say is that "I don't see the meaning in it."