Sorry I’m depressed af and need answers. Are y’all even real? What if y’all are just part of the program to torture me? What if this is a test? What if this is a VR simulation and the societal collapse is just moral character test to see if I would be do anything about it? Like imaginr a society in the far future like 26th century and in a history class where people are wondering “why didn’t the 21st century humans rise up against their oppressors” and then this VR simulation is just testing the students “what would you have done”
(Sorry for the bizzare question, its just brain chemicals acting weird today :P)
I had a sort of similar problem once and a therapist asked me if I knew what a cairn was. It’s a pile of rocks usually from biggest to smallest, maybe in the woods or whatever. Point is it has no place being there in nature, but yet there it is. The obvious conclusion is that someone made that. With intention. Then he asked me to look at the nature of the universe, DNA, all of it. It has order. It shouldn’t exist, but there it is. Something made it with intention. Still not sure I buy that, but his point made sense. Wether you constructed this or not, it’s here, and has order and intent. So even if it’s all fake and you made it up, you made up one hell of a fantastical and wonderful thing that mostly defies explanation. Countless studies toil away attempting to explain it. But they can’t. And neither can you. Doubly so if you are the one who created it. Appreciate the complicated nonsense.
If I could just argue with your therapist for a moment - cairns (Cairns) are well researched and understood human creations, whereas we have exactly zero evidence the universe was made with intention, and definitely no evidence that there’s any intent or any point to any of it.
All that said, I respect the perspective of gratitude and radical acceptance.
No argument here. The dude was always pushing religious tones, but I’m not into that. But ultimately he wanted me to accept my reality, real or not.
A therapist pushing their personal beliefs on you is the kind of ethical violation state licensing boards will usually take seriously, fyi
To be clear:
When you “make” a cairn, you’re reorganizing stuff that already exists. In fact, whenever we say “make”, we usually mean modifying something that already exists.
It’s reasonable to assume that a painting has a painter. We have experience with how paint behaves over time when left alone, and it doesn’t assemble itself into a painting by default.
We don’t have first-hand intuitive experience with how cosmic amounts of matter behave over time. But we do have measuring tools and mathematical models, which give us a pretty good view of how it does seem to assemble itself into Earth-like places and even the prerequisites for life itself.
And we also have a good enough understanding of Earth’s history to know why we’re missing the ability to measure some of the most interesting steps here on our planet.
Buuuut all of that is pointless to our question anyway. Because we’ve been talking about whether “makers” are necessary to reorganize matter over time. And you made a leap from that to “making” matter and time itself. That is something for which we do not have an analogous experience.
If “making” means taking raw materials in a “before” time and combining them into something else in an “after” time… how do you “make” the very concept of “making”, and “when” does that occur if it must be “before” the concept of a “before”?