I remember starting a thread about this question. I believe purpose/meaning has to be unique to the individual and, by corollary, to a particular species or genus or whatever category pops in one's mind.

I mean the meaning/purpose of a fish is to swim and swim well. A tiger must predate well and so on. What of humans? That which sets us apart from the rest of the living world is our mind, its higher faculties of logic and creativity. I believe, ergo, that cultivation and employment of these higher faculties define us.

As for science, it looks like it's at the top of the list of mankind's creative and logical achievements. It helps us understand, therefore manipulate, our world to our advantage. Scientists and mathematicians have to be rational AND creative, sometimes, I believe, at the very frontiers of these abilities.

So, according to me, yes, there is a greater meaning/purpose in immersing oneself in math and science.

What I'll not agree on is that scientists/mathematicians are morally good people. Like every other professional category there'll always be some rotten apples.

"In order to criticize Western science, you actually have to know and understand Western science".

Abandoning the correspondence theory of truth is not about ignoring the Enlightenment or Western science. In fact, Thomas Kuhn.s approach, which is an abandonment of the correspondence theory, has been taken up by plenty of empirical researchers in the cognitive sciences. If this is fashionable nonsense, then I guess the visual perception research of Alva Noe at Berkeley is fashionable nonsense.

I mean the meaning/purpose of a fish is to swim and swim well. A tiger must predate well and so on. What of humans? That which sets us apart from the rest of the living world is our mind, its higher faculties of logic and creativity. I believe, ergo, that cultivation and employment of these higher faculties define us. — TheMadFool

This is a bit dubious though. One of my themes is that humans don't just "do" things like "work", but we KNOW we do things like work. We are a product of our biology and culture, but we are also SELF-AWARE of this. Thus, this puts us in a weird position that anything goes as far as how we are defined. That was Sartre's main theme in radical freedom and authenticity. There is no set human nature, other than the freedom to play at things like "roles" or a "purpose". In other words, it would be circular reasoning to knowingly pursue a goal called "science/technology" as if it was our destiny, when it is something we are willfully doing in the first place! To combine this with Heidegger's "ready-at-hand", we must distinguish our ability to tinker and invent that comes as a result of necessity, vs. a purposeful/willful goal of pursuing technology. One does indeed seem to come naturally, but it cannot be something we think about as we are doing it, otherwise the natural-ness of the phenomena gets subsumed by our awareness of it, and it is no longer "natural", but a product of our personalities willing it to occur.

As for science, it looks like it's at the top of the list of mankind's creative and logical achievements. It helps us understand, therefore manipulate, our world to our advantage. Scientists and mathematicians have to be rational AND creative, sometimes, I believe, at the very frontiers of these abilities.

So, according to me, yes, there is a greater meaning/purpose in immersing oneself in math and science. — TheMadFool

I guess the big question is, WHY is it meaningful to create technologies? I've already discounted the idea you mentioned earlier, that it is our species' purpose. Any other ideas? Understanding the regularities of nature, usings specific and complicated maths to determine exact outcomes. What is it about this that makes this a bastion of meaning?

@Joshs and @old, feel free to chime in.

"

As for science, it looks like it's at the top of the list of mankind's creative and logical achievements. It helps us understand, therefore manipulate, our world to our advantage. Scientists and mathematicians have to be rational AND creative, sometimes, I believe, at the very frontiers of these abilities.

So, according to me, yes, there is a greater meaning/purpose in immersing oneself in math and science. — TheMadFool

I agree with Paul Feyerabned's views of science:

"Starting from the argument that a historical universal scientific method does not exist, Feyerabend argues that science does not deserve its privileged status in western society. Since scientific points of view do not arise from using a universal method which guarantees high quality conclusions, he thought that there is no justification for valuing scientific claims over claims by other ideologies like religions. Feyerabend also argued that scientific accomplishments such as the moon landings are no compelling reason to give science a special status. In his opinion, it is not fair to use scientific assumptions about which problems are worth solving in order to judge the merit of other ideologies. Additionally, success by scientists has traditionally involved non-scientific elements, such as inspiration from mythical or religious sources. He rejected the view that science is especially "rational" on the grounds that there is no single common "rational" ingredient that unites all the sciences but excludes other modes of thought He claims that far from solving the pressing problems of our age, scientific theorizing glorifies ephemeral generalities at the cost of confronting the real particulars that make life meaningful."

I'm not claiming science is perfect and it might have some dubious (materalistic) assumptions. However, no one can deny that it is a rational enterprise. In fact it boasts the most rational methodology of all human endeavors. Am I wrong?

I find it hard to swallow criticism directed at science using tools that are only possible because of science.

Scientists are fully aware of what they do. Of course many, perhaps most, will not choose their field with the overarching lofty goal of a purpose/meaning.

Yet, it won't take long for scientists and non-scientists to realize, in complete understanding of their choices, that science is the one true activity that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Yes, there's art and music but these are non-rational as far as I can see and so must be on a lower rung of the hierarchy of natures that define a human being.

Some might say that science is incomplete and there are other rational fields like philosophy that are non-scientific as it were. Nevertheless science is surely (I'm being optimistic here) going to make inroads into such issues as consciousness and thereof all other fields will be absorbed into science.

I guess the big question is, WHY is it meaningful to create technologies? — schopenhauer1

The gent scholar types want to think that understanding principles of science, and applications in technology provide some inherent meaning. Thus, by edifying themselves in the immersions in these topics, they feel they are participating in something grander or important. — schopenhauer1

Heidegger:
“modern science, as the theory of the real, is not anything
self-evident. It is neither a mere construct of man nor something
extorted from the real. Quite to the contrary, the essence of
science is rendered necessary by the presencing of what presences at the moment
when presencing sets itself forth into the objectness of the real. This moment remains mysterious,
as does every moment of its kind. ..The sciences are not in a position
at any time to represent themselves to themselves, to set themselves
before themselves, by means of their theory and through
the modes of procedure belonging to theory.
If it is entirely denied to science scientifically to arrive at its
own essence, then the sciences are utterly incapable of gaining
access to that which is not to be gotten around holding sway in
their essence. Here something disturbing manifests itself.”
If we accept that science itself “remains mysterious” it is possible
to challenge a variety of meaningful anthropomorphic narratives describing science.

Yet, it won't take long for scientists and non-scientists to realize, in complete understanding of their choices, that science is the one true activity that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. — TheMadFool

In what way does it separate humans from other animals? What objective purpose does it ultimately serve besides helping us guarantee our survival? (which is actually questionable seeing how it can also help us destroy ourselves)

Yes, there's art and music but these are non-rational as far as I can see and so must be on a lower rung of the hierarchy of natures that define a human being. — TheMadFool

What makes rationality the criterion that puts science above art or music?

Do you realize that rationality alone cannot tell you what to do? Rationality alone cannot tell you what goal to pursue. It is your feelings in the first place that give you goals, what you desire, and only then can rationality help you decide how to reach them, what you may do so you can reach them.

There is this widespread view of seeing logic and reason above everything else, without realizing that logic and reason in isolation can help us decide nothing.

So then what gives science a special status above art or music?

What do you make of that quote?

I mean the meaning/purpose of a fish is to swim and swim well. A tiger must predate well and so on. What of humans? That which sets us apart from the rest of the living world is our mind, its higher faculties of logic and creativity. I believe, ergo, that cultivation and employment of these higher faculties define us. — TheMadFool

It's a bit dishonest to the fish and tiger to describe them solely from what we see them do, while describing humans with having a mind because we are able to experience our own mind. Who knows what it's like to be a tiger or a fish, what their mind is like? Some people have a rich inner world, yet you wouldn't guess it from barely looking at them, based on the human-centric measures of what they build and how productive they are. Who's to say other animals don't also have a vivid imagination that is simply not apparent to us?

If some alien species were to observe our behavior, without taking into account our hypothetical mind, like we don't take into account the hypothetical mind of other animals, they could easily say the meaning/purpose of humans is to build more and more and spread like an invasive species at the expense of their environment.

↪Number2018 What do you make of that quote? — schopenhauer1

The gent scholar types want to think that understanding principles of science, and applications in technology provide some inherent meaning. Thus, by edifying themselves in the immersions in these topics, they feel they are participating in something grander or important. The fact that the world works in such a way as applying mathematically-derived, precise scientific principles to materials, processes, functionalities, etc. makes it such that their work is really "doing something", perhaps above and more so than those who are not engaged in these activities. — schopenhauer1

I mean that for Heidegger scientists themselves in principle cannot give a full and correct account on what are they doing. Farther, if one embraces this assertion, one can conclude that scholars undoubtedly are “doing something”; nevertheless, it is unknown in what they are taking part.
Of course, any scholar can have a kind of a feeling and tell stories about their personal experience; yet, all these accounts will always remain ungrounded and opened to a constant process of different interpretations.

Are there people on this forum who believe they are participating in something "grander" by: — schopenhauer1

Of course each one of us is "participating in something grander" just by being alive. Each one of us is a member of multiple communities whether he wants to be or not. Each of us is a member of a family and lineage, a citizen of a nation-state, a resident in a municipality, for instance. Each of us is a member of the community of living things, of sentient animals, of human beings, of sentient beings wherever and whenever they may be.

I'm not sure I understand the rest of your question. It seems you're taking issue with an idea you attribute to others, something about math, science, and technology being "meaningful" or "important". It's not at all clear to me what you're driving at.

I'm not sure how to coordinate your use of "important" with your use of "meaningful" and "grand". Are you asking whether people think pure and applied math and empirical science are "more important" than other human pursuits? Don't you expect that there are many different ways to tally up what counts as "important"?

I'm not sure I understand the rest of your question. It seems you're taking issue with an idea you attribute to others, something about math, science, and technology being "meaningful" or "important". It's not at all clear to me what you're driving at.

I'm not sure how to coordinate your use of "important" with your use of "meaningful" and "grand". Are you asking whether people think pure and applied math and empirical science are "more important" than other human pursuits? Don't you expect that there are many different ways to tally up what counts as "important"? — Cabbage Farmer

The minutia is where the job gets done. Those who know how to monger minutia to get shit done, can claim they are doing the real work. Everyone else is just jabbering. Thus, the meaning of life for them is the ability to compute minutia to get shit done. This is de facto justified by our very use of the things that are the outcome from the minutia mongerers.

I guess the big question is, WHY is it meaningful to create technologies? I've already discounted the idea you mentioned earlier, that it is our species' purpose. Any other ideas? Understanding the regularities of nature, usings specific and complicated maths to determine exact outcomes. What is it about this that makes this a bastion of meaning? — schopenhauer1

The way I see it people are driven by their desires. Maybe all our desires were selected through evolution. Some people have the desire to understand, to predict, to build cool stuff, to be famous, to feel better than, to help others. They use specific and complicated maths to fulfill one or several of these desires. Working on fulfilling their desires is what gives them meaning. There is inherently nothing there that makes this activity a bastion of meaning over any other.

But there are some people who see this activity as giving access to the ideal of Truth, to the absolute, to everlasting certainty in a world full of uncertainties, something unchanging that we can rely on no matter what. The desire of reaching this ideal may be again a byproduct of evolution. Some see this ideal embodied in an absolute God who governs an underlying absolute reality, and believe they can reach this absolute by worshipping it. Others believe there are absolute laws that govern an underlying absolute reality (which they may call laws of the Universe, of Nature, of Physics), and that uncovering them will give them access to the absolute.

The strength of the desire to reach this absolute may be the reason why some people see worshipping a God or attempting to uncover laws of the Universe as activities more meaningful than any other.

But then of course even if such Laws existed, what would happen once we uncover them and reach the promised land, the nirvana that we believe awaits us once we uncover them? We would have a great ability to predict the future, to ensure our survival, but what would become the meaningful activities once our survival is ascertained? I believe our state of mind then wouldn't be far from that of the people who dedicate their life to becoming rich, believing that riches will give them bliss, and who once rich find themselves purposeless and realize it didn't make them any happier.

@Joshs @Old @TheMadFool@fdrake@Number2018@Bitter Crank@darthbarracuda
Minutia mongering in general can be different things in different realms. I'll just give some examples in various layers.. but this reaches across all disciplines with their associated layers.

- Creating a really complicated spreadsheet with various interconnecting functions and formulas to extract complex data trends

-Programming using C# to create new software functionality connected with some SQL database.

-Creating the C# language using various advanced coding layers

-Creating machine code

-Designing the circuitry, memory, and motherboard components to allow the binary code to create information from electrical impulses and turn it into translatable machine code for higher programmatic purposes

All this is intensive minutia mongering. Life itself is about immersing oneself in the details in order to obtain some goal of survival, entertainment, or comfort. At the social level, these goals are intertwined with incentives and rituals to induce production and replication of resources, people, and the culture itself.

The opposite ideal is sleep. Slumber, off, rest, the desire for nothingness. To be rid of the detail, the minutia. This impulse is like that of Nirvana, sleep, being one with the universe or godhead, etc. It is akin to the most generalized form of being. We can never achieve this stillness or oneness though. As long as we are live and conscious, we are slaves to the minutia. Suicide itself, negates the very freedom of the hope that is desired, so even that is not an escape. One alive, there is nothing we can do. There is no catharsis in the desire to be "generalized" in nothing/god/death/nirvana/sleep. There is only repetitive, minutia mongering until death do us part.

The gent scholar types want to think that understanding principles of science, and applications in technology provide some inherent meaning. Thus, by edifying themselves in the immersions in these topics, they feel they are participating in something grander or important. The fact that the world works in such a way as applying mathematically-derived, precise scientific principles to materials, processes, functionalities, etc. makes it such that their work is really "doing something", perhaps above and more so than those who are not engaged in these activities. — schopenhauer1

First, I'm curious what some examples of this would be.

All this is intensive minutia mongering. Life itself is about immersing oneself in the details in order to obtain some goal of survival, entertainment, or comfort. At the social level, these goals are intertwined with incentives and rituals to induce production and replication of resources, people, and the culture itself.

There is only repetitive, minutia mongering until death do us part. — schopenhauer1

Yes. This is the way I see it:

We feel desires. These desires lead us to set goals and attempt to reach them. Without any desire we wouldn't do anything and would quickly die.

Our fundamental desires have no justification, there is no justification to our desire to live other than if we didn't have it we would die quickly.

People do things, because they experience a desire that leads them to do these things. The experience of the desire is what gives meaning to the act, without the desire the act has no meaning. Using a tool has no meaning if there is no desire we want to fulfill by using the tool.

So without experiencing the desire, anything anyone does can be seen as meaningless, including indeed all the minutia people immerse themselves in.

The people immersed in these activities see them as a tool to fulfill one of their desires. For instance, people "programming using C# to create new software functionality" may do it because that's what their boss tells them to do and they know that if they do what their boss tells them they will get money which will allow them to buy food to eat, to pay for a place in which they will sleep comfortably, to do fun activities, which is what they desire.

Some other people may do this very same activity of "programming using C# to create new software functionality" because they believe that the software once finished will help them or others in some way, which would be the desire that is fueling them.

Some other may do this very same activity to prove to themselves or to others that they are able to do some complicated task better than others, with the end goal to feel good about themselves and confident, which would be the desire driving them.

There are a whole bunch of different desires that could lead people to do a given activity, but the reason they do that activity is because they see it as a way to fulfill a desire they have, a desire that they experience. Their desire coupled with the belief that the activity is a way towards that desire is what gives them meaning to what they do.

This all led me to wonder where desires come from, if our whole existence depends on what we desire then where do our desires come from in the first place? Then I realized that we could see all our desires as evolutionary tools that were selected through competition for survival, that everything is as if we have the desires we do because they helped our ancestors/species survive in some way. As if we were machines controlled by our desires, attempting as best as we can to fulfill them, and surviving and reproducing and perpetuating the species in the process, in this grand cosmic game.

Lets unpack the adjectives that you use to flesh out your concept of minutia mongering. You've described it in terms of complexity, intensiveness, orientation toward fine details, something we are slaves to and may want to rid ourselves of, something we do as a means to an end, and the opposite of generality, which you seem to associate with nothingness and escape from experience.

The way that you've articulated the concept of minutia mongering, it seems that the more 'stuff' we are conscious of dealing with in our moment to moment experiencing of our world, the more it will fit the defintion of minutia mongering. Detail, complexity, intensity imply a quantitative element, all that magnitude of stuff we are burdened with fixing, figuring out, calculating, counting, manipulating, transforming.The greater the magnitude the more burdensome.

Your adjectives for minutia mongering are affective terms, describing what it feels like to be involved in a kind of experiencing that we don't particularly enjoy, that is tedious, somewhat boring and unfulfilling. What exactly is it about such experiences that make them less than satisfying to us?
Is it the sheer amount of 'stuff' that is the essence of minutia mongering, or is it the inadequate way in which that 'stuff' is organized, interrelated within itself and with respect to our goals? Think about what are called 'flow' experiences. When we are immersed in such experiences, time seems to fly by, we feel the opposite of bored, we don't consider what we are doing a means to another end, but its own end. But is a flow experience characterized by a paucity of 'stuff', the escape from detail? On the contrary, in such states of being we maintain a hyper-awareness of all that goes on around us.

What differentiates it from an experience of minutia mongering is that each moment 'flows' into the next. What makes this possible is that when we are engaged in a truly creative endeavor, we are able to assimilate new experience in a supremely , joyfully integral way with respect to previous experience.. The difference between a complex, intense, detailed experience that feels burdensome, tedious, boring and, enslaving, and one that is creatively satisfying and pleasurable is not the amount of 'stuff' we are aware of being immersed in, but the particular way we are immersed in it, how meaningfully we organize it. This meaningfulness is a function of our ability to make sense of its moments as purposefully and thematically related and relevant to each other and to our overarching goals and self-understanding. Spreadsheets and programming tasks can typically involve a mixture of the purposefully patterned and the arbitrary in equal measures. Important factors include who you are doing such tasks for, and how personally invested in the outcome you are(is this your own business, personal hobby, or are you a wage slave to a boss whose goals you are not personally invested in?). Writing a musical score or a novel or philosophical treatise will also involve a bit of both, but if they represent works of unusual originality the moments of profound satisfaction will greatly outweigh those of ambivalent, semi-bored 'minutia mongering'.

Generalization is an important element in flow experiences . You associated the term with sleep, nothingness and escape from experience, but , on the contrary, generalization, theorization and abstraction are synonymous with true detail oriented, complex thought. Generalization is about ordering lower order differences within higher order unifying syntheses. It lets you have your cake and eat it too, Generalization allows us to experience MORE detail than we can when an experience we are immersed in unfolds in a fragmentary, disjointed, arbitrary manner. 'Minutia' implies arbitrary. We only pay attention to each moment of experience when they are imbued with an arbitrariness. Watching the clock move agonizingly slowly while waiting for the school day to end illustrates how our sense of the speed of time is connected with the relative interruptedness and disjunctiveness of moment to moment experience. Don't mistake this restless bored attention to the clock as a hyper-awareness. One's memory for the later recall of the details of what transpired during such tedious events is not typically very impressive when compared to one's memory for what took place during a hyper-aware flow experience. Generalization gives you MORE, richer, denser , more integral experience than minutia mongering.

If, as you argued, the marginally effective ways of construing ongoing experience characteristic of minutia mongering are means of self-preservation, the the more effective and adaptive flow-type modes of creativity are even more conducive to self-preservation.

This all led me to wonder where desires come from, if our whole existence depends on what we desire then where do our desires come from in the first place? Then I realized that we could see all our desires as evolutionary tools that were selected through competition for survival, that everything is as if we have the desires we do because they helped our ancestors/species survive in some way. — leo

There is more than one way to look at desire besides thinking of it as separated from cognition and experience. It is only when we begin from a desire-thinking split that we are faced with a self-invented problem of having to explain how we are pushed(drive, motive) or pulled(environmental re-enforcement) into action. We inherited this quandry from the notion of static equilibrium used in the physical sciences, But a living system is not a static thing, it is a self-enclosed system of exchanges and interaction with an environment. It exists by changing itself, and thus is a dynamically equilibrating system.

A range of philosophical and psychological accounts abandon the arbitrary split in favor of a view of experience that begins with our always already finding ourselves in motion (not physical movement but experiential). so from moment to moment we find ourselves in changing circumstances as sense making organisms. 'Desire' is simply the particular way in which the world makes sense to us in our interactions with it. We find ourselves engaged and doing before we 'desire' to engage. This means that human experiencing is inherently anticipatory, purposive and goal-oriented.The world as it appears to us via our perspectival, goal-oriented engagement with it IS what desire is.
This always already being in active engagement with the world is something we share with all living systems. It is not a specific evolved mechanism but rather goes back to the fundamental basis of living systems as self-organized interactions. The question for us human is not how to explain desire but how to adaptively transform our perspectives such as to move smoothly through a constantly changing world.

We feel desires. These desires lead us to set goals and attempt to reach them. Without any desire we wouldn't do anything and would quickly die.

Our fundamental desires have no justification, there is no justification to our desire to live other than if we didn't have it we would die quickly. — leo

Schopenhauer called this initial state "Will'.

This all led me to wonder where desires come from, if our whole existence depends on what we desire then where do our desires come from in the first place? Then I realized that we could see all our desires as evolutionary tools that were selected through competition for survival, that everything is as if we have the desires we do because they helped our ancestors/species survive in some way. As if we were machines controlled by our desires, attempting as best as we can to fulfill them, and surviving and reproducing and perpetuating the species in the process, in this grand cosmic game. — leo

Ok, I'll go with this schema. It is the burden of these desires (that lead to more minutia) that I am concerned with. Once born, you are responsible for your desiring. To live in a society to "get stuff done" we need those desires to be driven to ever more knowledge, application, capacity, and aptitude for understanding and performing minutia. The opposite of this is sleep, nirvana, being immersed in some form of oneness feeling. It is the general, not the specific. It is rest not intense mongering and tending to the minutia. Once born, we are responsible to see the minutia carried out. The bird must follow its prime directive. The human must KNOWINGLY monger its minutia, live its daily life, constantly evaluating the situation, making conscious, deliberate decisions, that are more minutia mongering. There is no end to it once born.

Your adjectives for minutia mongering are affective terms, describing what it feels like to be involved in a kind of experiencing that we don't particularly enjoy, that is tedious, somewhat boring and unfulfilling. What exactly is it about such experiences that make them less than satisfying to us?
Is it the sheer amount of 'stuff' that is the essence of minutia mongering, or is it the inadequate way in which that 'stuff' is organized, interrelated within itself and with respect to our goals? Think about what are called 'flow' experiences. When we are immersed in such experiences, time seems to fly by, we feel the opposite of bored, we don't consider what we are doing a means to another end, but its own end. But is a flow experience characterized by a paucity of 'stuff', the escape from detail? On the contrary, in such states of being we maintain a hyper-awareness of all that goes on around us. — Joshs

I've discussed "flow" states many a-time. I KNEW someone was going to bring that up as some form of rebuttal about my idea of generalization, or to counter the idea that minutia mongering is negative. Flowing in philosophy, and flowing in technological-mathematical fields have two different outcomes. One is jabbering babble and the other "gets stuff done". One is just talk, the other takes materials, time, space, and turns it into stuff that does stuff to get other stuff done, and works with other stuff that does stuff that gets stuff done. Whether you are flowing, or painstakingly tediously making your way through a technological-mathematical problem, the outcome is that stuff is getting done. All that matters is that stuff is getting done that works and is functional, is usable, and takes the material world and does something with it, or so the people that are more "flow" in these realms might argue. I'm not discounting creativity, but creativity in solving the material-functional things that get stuff done is what counts. Next time you turn on your light, adjust the temperature, open the computer, walk on any material in your house, go to the bathroom, wash your hands, etc. etc. you'll know what I mean.

There is more than one way to look at desire besides thinking of it as separated from cognition and experience. It is only when we begin from a desire-thinking split that we are faced with a self-invented problem of having to explain how we are pushed(drive, motive) or pulled(environmental re-enforcement) into action. We inherited this quandry from the notion of static equilibrium used in the physical sciences, But a living system is not a static thing, it is a self-enclosed system of exchanges and interaction with an environment. It exists by changing itself, and thus is a dynamically equilibrating system. — Joshs

I simplified, but yes our desires are shaped by our experiences and beliefs, which themselves are shaped by our desires, in an interacting whole. It might be more accurate to see desire, experience and belief as three aspects of the same changing thing, which would give a more poetic aspect to existence than seeing us as machines controlled by our desires.

Ok, I'll go with this schema. It is the burden of these desires (that lead to more minutia) that I am concerned with. Once born, you are responsible for your desiring. To live in a society to "get stuff done" we need those desires to be driven to ever more knowledge, application, capacity, and aptitude for understanding and performing minutia. The opposite of this is sleep, nirvana, being immersed in some form of oneness feeling. It is the general, not the specific. It is rest not intense mongering and tending to the minutia. Once born, we are responsible to see the minutia carried out. The bird must follow its prime directive. The human must KNOWINGLY monger its minutia, live its daily life, constantly evaluating the situation, making conscious, deliberate decisions, that are more minutia mongering. There is no end to it once born. — schopenhauer1

I think I agree with you fundamentally, but where are you going with it?

The feeling I get is that you reject the idea that a life where we constantly "get stuff done" is more meaningful than a life spent doing nothing, you are against the idea that other people or society should pressure you to "get stuff done", which I agree with.

But also it seems that you are lamenting the fact that existence is the way it is, seeing desires as a "burden" rather than an opportunity, which leads me to think that you don't find life worth living, and that philosophy was a way for you to attempt to make it worth living (correct me if I'm wrong).

Many people don't do philosophy and yet would say that their life is worth living, that they're better off alive than dead. Some would say that it's because "they don't know better", but I think it's more simply that they have experiences that make their life worth living. And the feeling I get is that what you are fundamentally looking for and lacking is these experiences that make life worth living.

I have found that it is often our fears that take away the joy from life. So what are you afraid of deep down?

While on a surface level it appears that all we ever do is get stuff done, you are stating that from the point of view of looking at the world with your eyes alone. When we see with our eyes alone the world appears soulless, we appear as a bunch of machines getting stuff done endlessly. But that's not the whole world, because there are also feelings there that the eyes can't see. There is something going on in our minds that cannot be reduced to what the eyes see, that cannot be reduced to getting stuff done.

I'm not discounting creativity, but creativity in solving the material-functional things that get stuff done is what counts. Next time you turn on your light, adjust the temperature, open the computer, walk on any material in your house, go to the bathroom, wash your hands, etc. etc. you'll know what I mean. — schopenhauer1

The people I'd first want to thank for my home thermostat, computer, refrigerator and lights are the ones who installed them. They are the 'realest of the real' minutia mongergers. Next would be the ones who delivered the materials, and after them would be the corporate ceo's who created a business model , marketing, and distribution successful enough to stay in business and make these products available to people like me. I suppose next I'd thank the minutia mongerers who designed these products, which is the narrow group you seem to constantly refer to and glorify. but of course they are just one intermediate link(in terms of detail mongering) in a long chain of participants in bringing products to my life. After the designers-engineers, I'd thank the scientists who invented the physical, chemical-electrical-information theories that the designers merely applied. Then I'd give a big thanks to the abstract philosophers-logicians-mathenaticisns who preceded the scientists and provide the overarching framework within which the industrial and information sciences could develop a vocabulary. Apart from the progressively higher levels of abstraction and generalization we see in the sorts of models and plans used by the various groups involved in bringing products to me, as we move from transportation route to business model to design blueprint to scientific theory to philosophical position, there is another progression we see.

While each corporation and designer deals with a limited range of products, the scientist creates the possibility for many categories of products in a wide variety of industries to be developed. And the philosopher not only makes possible new modalities of material inventions, but new political, ethical , economic, educational and social arrangements as well. So as we move up the ladder of theorization and generalization, from business to design to science to philosophy-logic-math, the variety of human technologies, well beyond the merely material ones, that each participant makes possible expands.
Note another imporant fact about this progression toward generalization. Starting with the lowest rung of the ladder of abstraction, thinking machines are in the process of replacing the workforce. The blue collar manufacturing workers were the first to go, accounting and secretarial work is vanishing, soon transportation workers will be eliminated. It is only a matter of time before the design-engineer-programming minutia mongerers are replaced by machines. You wont have to worry about all those bored 'getting stuff done' drones any more. They will be obsolete. The pace of change is accelerating, and time will be too precious a commodity to waste on paying humans to do repetiiive 'minutia mogering' work when they will be better utilized in creative , intuitive tasks that machines will not be able to duplicate for a long time.

The whole notion of the relationship between what humans get paid to do and what 'works' is likely to undergo significant change over the next century as those aspects of our world we call merely functional move further away from human concerns as we increasingly cede control to our machines to take care of the sort of repetitive minutia of what 'works' . What will be left to humans will be the social and creative arts, politics, entertainment, education and the like. You know, the generalization racket.

All that matters is that stuff is getting done that works and is functional, is usable, and takes the material world and does something with it — schopenhauer1

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What it means for something to get done, to work, is relative to one's goals. If you're bored and miserable at your job , you are failing to get stuff done that counts for you, even if you are churning out product.. Your affective comportment is telling you this. There is no other measure of success at anything than our affectivity. It is what defines our values, our goals and their successful accomplishment. What ever you can accomplish through a mostly tedious , repetitive and boring career you can accomplish much more by replacing that meaningless job with one that feels satisfying, regardless of whether it is making what we call 'real' objects. Since the machines will eventually take over your job anyway, why not get a jump on the future? Why waste your life as a slave to a narrow materialistic view?

It may be that you havent found satisfaction in any other sort of thinking than what passes for you as pragmatic materialist drudgery, so you universalize what works for you into a general human principle. But holding that functional-materialist view may make one miss the eventual threat to one's livelihood from trends that are beginning to pick up speed.

Yes, there is minutia mongering at all levels. Remember, much of this view is simply cynical devil's advocate- trying to play the opposite view to make a point.

Let's take a step back here. The problem itself stems from being born. The individual is burdened with the responsibility of existence. Sartre called it "throwness" and Heidegger had his own name for it (I can't recall). But the cultural-historical-social-material world has been set up and played out long before us, the individual, got here, but we are to navigate and understand at least a small part its billions of webbings in order to live comfortably within it. There is a lot of talk of "flow", "creativity", and the like which has the "sound" of being some positive aspect, but to me rings hollow.

Existence is about the stress- the stress of living with others, the stress of getting by, the stress of finding comfort, the stress of finding peace, the stress of mastering minutia, the stress of labor, hell, it goes down to the very stress of our own desires as @leo stressed. It doesn't go away- robot paradise or not. Flow and creativity don't justify or compensate for the negative characteristics. If someone said birth entails all this, but you get to have flow states and creativity, I'd tell them to shove it where the sun don't shine- they can keep it. I see the hope for achieving flow states and creativity as just ANOTHER propaganda tactic thrown out there by psychologists and social scientists to make sure people are getting along well enough in society. That is complicity, not a justification for life's continuance.

Just keep minutia mongering.. get caught in the details of the trillions of interactions at all levels, and all layers. The new salvation is flow and creativity to add to the socially deemed worthy pursuit of output. Meanwhile, you were never born for yourself, nor can you be. You were always being used. But hey, the outcome of birth is that now YOU have to deal with the impinging factors of life.

Also, this kind of got off tangent and became about psychological states of flow, etc. What the main point is in a nutshell is that some people think that trying to master all the minutia of some topic inherently provides some sort of worth. Thus the more complexity you understand of a subject, the more your life is justified. By knowing the complexity of a subject matter, this somehow provides you more worth. This thread is trying to disavow this notion as well. No one explicitly states this of course, but it is implied. It's not knowing the general principles of life/universe/cosmos that they think is worthy, but the fact that they know very detailed information about life/universe/cosmos.. or the millions of subtopics of those very general categories. Thus, the minutia provides the meaning. As with many of my threads, I am disarming this view as well. You are not justifying your life or life itself or being born in the first place by desperately mastering minutia either. The false hope is the infinite amounts of information that can be "mined" and that one is "revealing" by trying to master the minutia. One may feel that they are literally "mining" existence. Since existence can be mined, and that there is so much to mine, this must "mean" something.

Meanwhile, you were never born for yourself, nor can you be. You were always being used. But hey, the outcome of birth is that now YOU have to deal with the impinging factors of life. — schopenhauer1

What the main point is in a nutshell is that some people think that trying to master all the minutia of some topic inherently provides some sort of worth. Thus the more complexity you understand of a subject, the more your life is justified. By knowing the complexity of a subject matter, this somehow provides you more worth. — schopenhauer1

I agree that there is no absolute objective justification or worth to anything, I agree that you didn't choose to be born, but I don't agree that you have to feel used, and I don't agree that you have to feel unworthy, this is just how you feel, because of your past circumstances.

Whatever you do, someone somewhere will find it useless. It doesn't stop people from doing what they do, because they find worth in it themselves, and they are not looking for an absolute justification that doesn't exist, the only justification they need is that they want to do it.

Sometimes people think only about themselves, or need your help, and make you suffer as a result. You can choose to interpret it as if they are using you, but you can also simply interpret it as if they think about themselves or need help.

I think that if you felt worthy, you would not have such a pessimistic outlook on life. You would not try so hard to find in things an inherent meaning that doesn't exist unless you give them a meaning yourself.

Existence is about the stress- the stress of living with others, the stress of getting by, the stress of finding comfort, the stress of finding peace, the stress of mastering minutia, the stress of labor, hell, it goes down to the very stress of our own desires as @leo stressed. It doesn't go away- robot paradise or not. Flow and creativity don't justify or compensate for the negative characteristics. If someone said birth entails all this, but you get to have flow states and creativity, I'd tell them to shove it where the sun don't shine- they can keep it. I see the hope for achieving flow states and creativity as just ANOTHER propaganda tactic thrown out there by psychologists and social scientists to make sure people are getting along well enough in society. That is complicity, not a justification for life's continuance. — schopenhauer1

The stress is how you feel about existence, many people feel like you, but many other people feel differently about it, it is a subjective interpretation rather than an objective thing. I think that what you should be looking at is why is it everything is so stressful to you, what is it that prevents you from finding joy in life. The stress stems from a fear. I know it's not an easy question, but what is it that you fear deep down?

This may seem unrelated to the thread, but I see it as the fundamental reason why you made this thread in the first place. On the surface you try to show people that there is no inherent meaning in anything they do, that there is no inherent justification to keep living, but they do see a meaning and a justification because of how they feel, how they feel is the only meaning and justification they need. And I think that if there was much less stress and much more joy in your life you too would see the meaning and the justification, which is why I think that what you're really looking for is joy in life, find out what prevents you from experiencing it, and then your quest for meaning and justification will be over. It is not the meaninglessness and the lack of justification that takes out the joy, it is the lack of joy that gives rise to the feeling of meaninglessness and the absence of justification.

When I was trying to form my own ideas about life, psychology, etc, in high school, the dominant traditions out there were psychoanalysis and behaviorism. I hated the way that they made humans the slaves of internal drives or environmental reinforcement. I felt instinctively they must be wrong but it took me a while to come up with an alternative. I read that William James was physically ill for years as a result of his struggle to extricate his thinking from the dominating straightjacket of Hegelianism.

I found my wasy out of the straightjackeet of drives and reniforcers with the help of Heideger(he's the one who coined the term 'thrownness'), Eugene Gendlin and George Kelly. Kelly, Gendlin and Heidegger abandoned completely the notion of 'drive' as a way of explaining human motivation. We are not slabs of meat pushed and pulled by social and internal strings.

Eugene Gendlin’s re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, thinking along with
Heidegger’s Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making as always beyond the reach of
normative social processes.

“We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always different and much more
intricate than the cultural generalities. A situation is a bodily happening, not just generalities.
Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's
implying of behaviour possibilities. Our own situation always consists of more intricate
implyings. Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken,
that the individual can do no more than choose among the cultural scenarios, or add mere
nuances. The ‘nuances’ are not mere details. Since what is culturally appropriate has only a
general meaning, it is the so-called ‘nuances’ that tell us what we really want to know. They
indicate what the standard saying really means here, this time, from this person.
Speech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual
incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is
both individual and social. The current theory of a one-way determination by society is too
simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require channels of information,
public discourses, instruments and machines, economic support, and associations for action. The
individual must also find ways to relate to the public attitudes so as to be neither captured nor
isolated. In all these ways the individual is highly controlled. Nevertheless, individual thinking
constantly exceeds society.”

And I think that if there was much less stress and much more joy in your life you too would see the meaning and the justification, which is why I think that what you're really looking for is joy in life, find out what prevents you from experiencing it, and then your quest for meaning and justification will be over. It is not the meaninglessness and the lack of justification that takes out the joy, it is the lack of joy that gives rise to the feeling of meaninglessness and the absence of justification. — leo

What happens if life really is bad. We tend to psychologize the badness and make it YOUR problem or MY problem. If it is your or my then it is not A problem in general. What happens if life is actually bad, but by psychologizing it, you are being complicit in perpetuating the badness by trying to correct the ones chiming up about it. Like a bad boss who doesn't want to hear complaints- shape up or ship out is the message. However, there is no improvement plan- it is just better coping techniques. Life itself can't be the problem though, right?

What happens if life really is bad. We tend to psychologize the badness and make it YOUR problem or MY problem. If it is your or my then it is not A problem in general. What happens if life is actually bad, but by psychologizing it, you are being complicit in perpetuating the badness by trying to correct the ones chiming up about it. Like a bad boss who doesn't want to hear complaints- shape up or ship out is the message. However, there is no improvement plan- it is just better coping techniques. Life itself can't be the problem though, right? — schopenhauer1

I agree to some extent with that, I have said numerous times in other threads how psychiatry focuses on making the individual adapt to the system we impose on him rather than changing the system so it becomes better adapted to the individual, pathologizing the individual rather than the system the individual finds himself in. But at the same time there are constraints about existence that are seemingly out of our control, such as the need to eat and the need to share this planet, so to some extent the individual needs to adapt to that if he wants to find his life worth living.

And these unavoidable constraints of existence cannot be what makes life really bad, because many people find their life worth living. So then the solution to get better for those who struggle through life lies in changing what can be changed, either changing the way society functions and the way we interact with each other, or the individual. I don't agree with psychiatry that the solution is to be found in drugs that we make the individuals ingest so that they can adapt to whatever system we impose on them, rather I believe that most if not all mental suffering can be traced back to fears, fears deeply ingrained that haven't been uncovered or that haven't been faced. If you could overcome your fears and find your life worth living as a result, would you see that as a coping technique, or would you see it as yourself having let go of your burdens and able to enjoy life?

Myself I have a deep fear of people, of being judged negatively, of being rejected, of being pointed at, of being mocked. I have come up with coping techniques, playing a role, being oblivious to others, thinking I'm better than others, but they don't solve anything, they only mask the fear and cause other problems, and worse than that they lead to stop seeing the fear as the underlying problem.

In society I feel regularly stressed, to the point of having sometimes dark thoughts and seeing existence as meaningless. Yet when I go deep in nature, far from anyone, I feel right at home in a profound sense, I thrive, I'm happy to be alive, and in these moments it makes it all worth it. The fear of people is still there, but there it is inconsequential because there are no people around. There I find life beautiful. Within society, on a few occasions I ingested a specific substance that had as a temporary effect to remove my fear of people, not because it made me reckless, not because it made me not care about anything, but somehow it made me see the beauty in people rather than seeing them as threats, and in these moments I could see how beautiful life can be without our fears. But this is impossible to see when your fears take hold of you, because they put a filter onto the world that prevents you from seeing the beauty.

But the real solution lies not in staying constantly deep in nature, or in ingesting that substance constantly, it lies in overcoming the fear for good. I am still afraid to face my fears, it isn't easy for me to talk about my fear of people, it wasn't easy for me to come and read what you might have answered to my previous post, what if he rejected me, what if he said that what I say is bullshit. I believe that one day I will succeed, to the point where the fear will be gone for good, where I will see the world for good without this filter that destroys life. I don't want to perpetuate the badness, I want to help you feel better, to help you enjoy life. Maybe because you remind me a bit of myself.

And these unavoidable constraints of existence cannot be what makes life really bad, because many people find their life worth living. — leo

It is bad for them too. I don't take much stock in self-reports at a particular time/place. Benatar did a good job indicating our psychological mechanisms for reporting "good" about "not good" things, specifically through Pollyannaism (optimism bias), adaptation (ideal/initial goals are changed to lesser goals because life doesn't meet them), comparison (if people are seen as having it worse, you must be better off).

Also, my own input is that when interviewing someone about "LIFE" there is social pressure and cues to make positive statements, not to sound too whiny or make dramatic pronouncements, or generally look like a Debbie-downer, so of course people will usually report they are better off. Also, indirectly, people who report "life is good" are interconnected with, and rely upon the labor, life-experiences, and hardships of those who do not agree. Further, things change. What people thought was good when generalized or with time might not seem so anymore.

But the real solution lies not in staying constantly deep in nature, or in ingesting that substance constantly, it lies in overcoming the fear for good. I am still afraid to face my fears, it isn't easy for me to talk about my fear of people, it wasn't easy for me to come and read what you might have answered to my previous post, what if he rejected me, what if he said that what I say is bullshit. I believe that one day I will succeed, to the point where the fear will be gone for good, where I will see the world for good without this filter that destroys life. I don't want to perpetuate the badness, I want to help you feel better, to help you enjoy life. Maybe because you remind me a bit of myself. — leo

I don't think there is a "solution" beyond recognizing the problem and perhaps simply not having more people- to not create a new person who must then overcome pain/adversity for a lifetime.

The implication is that "experts" in any field, by simply "revealing" complexities, are "revealing" some depth to the universe. The FACT of this depth itself means there must be "something" to it. Thus, by "expertising" people think they are substantiating something. The expertise electrician, the expertise logician, the expertise, mathematician, the expertise technician, it doesn't matter. By being experts, by having a handle on complexity, they think this confidence in "mining" a particular aspect of the universe (or simply a topic to no be so dramatic), is doing something inherently meaningful. This substantiates why we are born for them. We must mine complexity, keep making more and more knowledge-bases.. They might be completely "nihilistic" in statements, but then show their actual tendency to embrace a logos by their "expertising" and "mining" tendencies.