I usually arrive at this point after two pints of ale. It takes a rare mood to get there when you're sober, but it's nice when you can. I like beauty, I wondered where it came from sometimes, how humans evolved to recognize beauty and attribute it to things. What benefit beauty has on humans that might make them fitter, whether it made them happier and it gave them longer lives, or whether it prompted religion, seeing an agency behind beauty because it's hard to imagine it coming to be unintentionally. But I'm going philosophical now and I have to get ready for work, blarg. Aye though, it's good to see beauty. :-)
Emergent behavior is one of the coolest things in the world, for me... when unintended consequences combine to make a seemingly-coherent thing in its own right.
Perhaps this is why I'm not religious: I'm moved by the absolute lack of meaning and purpose in the world. Everything is so wonderful, and there's no reason for any of it... it just is. That's awesome.
I do admit it's a great source of contentment, it's easy to relax when you're in that frame of mind. Meaning and purpose are imposed on something when it's recognized, imposed by the recognizer, they infer these properties for themselves. If we see something sharp and spikey like a spear, we think its purpose is to puncture something, that's a natural conclusion, but the spikey thing might just be an icicle that's formed, or a shadow, or anything. That's veering a bit off topic though, not sure where I was going with that. I agree though that there doesn't have to be a point to something to make it worth doing. You can always retroactively attribute a point to it, if you wanted to
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P.S. we should hang out in Amherst this weekend
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-John
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Perhaps this is why I'm not religious: I'm moved by the absolute lack of meaning and purpose in the world. Everything is so wonderful, and there's no reason for any of it... it just is. That's awesome.
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