Discussing "Nothingness" - Page 4

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On May 26 2012 08:40 RodrigoX wrote:
This video is a very secular perspective. It is essentially making sense of the secular perspective concerning death. However, I think this is not where the argument should be. If you read further, I think an actual argument that will go somewhere will happen.

I'm going to try and be incredibly deep here.

Now, speaking in terms of philosophy, as a human being. You have lots of questions to answer. You have lots of unknowns to define. You have areas of anthropology, cosmology, ontology, epistemology, ethical questions, political questions, economic questions. You have things to figure out. Death is one of them.

Now, the question is, how do we define things like death, life, what is right and wrong, all the above areas. Well, how do we define anything? We define things based on comparisons. Right light, and dark, good and evil, everyone has heard this before. But it does go farther than opposites. How do I know what a BMW is? I compare it to a prius. I really know what a BMW is if I compare it to a horse, a baseball glove. I know if I take gasoline, and compare it to all the things that a car has, I would figure out that gasoline would make the car run. Right, the more things there are, the better I can define something.

So, therefore we argue, that if I was to know about something, It would be best to know one hundred percent of that something. And if everything, helps me define everything, I will only know 100 percent about one individual thing, if I know every single individual thing and use each one to compare them to each other.

So thus comes into question, is that where do "things" end. Now we come into realms where people should know something. Right, do we end things at the ends of human perception (the 5 senses (6 if you count body language) or do we go beyond the senses, and go into outside of human perception, the supernatural, where God, Nirvana among other religions would exist and end "things" there.

This is now where Im getting back to the first paragraph. People get very very confused when arguing or debating. You know, people debate whether gays should marry or not. Essentially that is going to get you nowhere, if a Christian is taking the identity and characteristics of God, and comparing them to the concept of homosexuality, and an atheist isn't. You have completely different definitions of the concept of homosexuality, and it is impossible to get anywhere if you are defining things differently.

So now, the question really is, where do "things" end. Essentially we just need to know about everything that exists. Right, if there are infinite things, we are never going to get a 100 percent definition of something. An "end" can happen anywhere. Lets say that there is just a proton and an atom in the universe, and that is all that exists. Right I would know 100 percent of the universe. I know a proton makes up an atom and an atom is made up of protons. That is all I could possibly know in the universe. And thats the goal really.

So to skip a few steps, we can say, that I can have 100 percent of a definition in a closed system. Right, so essentially, that I could just use my 5 senses, the limit of my human perception and succeed in knowing everything. I would know the right answer to all ethical questions because i compared each to everything in the universe, and what works and what doesn't. So we don't need more than our senses to have 100 percent of a definition. So saying that, why would we go outside of our senses, giving faith (which is not an optimal thing to do) that there is a supernatural plain of existence (a very complicated subject speaking of) that I can use to define things, when I could not do the action of faith, which is suboptimal to have a definitive answer to the question of death, life, and right and wrong.

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