Life Begets Life, and Other Potential Workings of the Universe

How many years has it been? The Long Pause is over! For now...

So in my last post, I focused primarily on the human transfer of information, generation after generation, but also hinted (I hope) that the universe is also transferring information.

One thing about the idea of information transfer though is that the transfer does not occur between a single party. A transfer must occur between a giver and a receiver. With that in mind, we might ask, "What purpose does the universe exist to serve?" And reply, "To transfer information to a new entity."

When we consider evolutionary theory, a being is born, learns from others/takes in information (the information returns to the host), and then the being teaches that information to others (transfers information), then the being (if still alive at this point) and those impacted by the information adapt, and those beings change. Adapt, or die. 

If we can consider life and the universe as beings, a being requires self-preservation. Life keeps life alive. 

What would happen if it were to end though? What is after the cycle? Another cycle? Does it end?

Many spiritual practices have wondered about this, have considered life's endless toil of cyclical birth and death, and found it wanting. 

Maybe the death of the universe would only be a hibernation of sorts? That eventually, conditions would arise for a rebirth? Wouldn't it be interesting to consider all of the narratives about rebirth—Jesus, Krishna, etc.—were really, metaphorically, referring to life itself? Or reflections of the greater truth about life? That there would come a time when the universe would sacrifice itself to be reborn from the ashes and pave the way for a new universe so that life could live on?

A being lives, transfers information to itself and others, learns, adapts, dies, but most often not before something else has been born (remember my last blog—I know, it's been a while, 5 years or so). 

So the conditions for life should already be in place when the universe dies. And then the pattern continues. Maybe something unlike the universe we know, too—does the world today look anything like your great grandparents' generation? 

This is one perspective though. It is an example provided by focusing on the universe as a physical entity, which it might be, but this example also disregards the other layers that might be involved in the rest of the process. It's possible we're only looking at the sunset here still. I'll discuss more of the (possible) full picture in my next post! 

The Objectivist's Bigger Picture of Life: Transference

In my last blog, I listed some subjective meanings for life and then disclosed that they may not be the whole picture, only a part of it.

I also asked two questions, “What are we doing on Earth other than just merely surviving?” and “Why do we need to survive?”

It’s time to let you know what answer I found, so here it goes:

Answer: We are involved in a very complex transfer of information. And we need to survive in order to ensure that transfer occurs.

This idea is very fundamental to everything we do. But it's also very functional. Although some would probably say a bit reductionist.

But the reduction comes from looking at the larger scope of the processes we are performing. Everything we do involves transferring some kind of information:

Things like sex and transferring genetic information to offspring; like education and the transferring of knowledge about the world around us to current and future generations; the spread of religion/spirituality and our transfer of myths and beliefs and truths about the world, the afterlife, and more. Our social interactions with others transfer what we consider acceptable means of communication and behavior. Energy transfers as things die or are used, and we could possibly even say that energy is information (or at least stores it). All things, transferring.

So...why are we transferring all of this information?

The first answer to that question might be "because if we didn't, everything would just end."

Fair point, if all creatures stopped breeding, life as we know it would end.

But despite our species' attachments to the physical plane, what's wrong with an end?

Everything dies eventually, right? So why are we trying to prolong the inevitable? (Don't think as an individual for answering this question - remember, we're trying to talk about an overarching truth about life as a whole).

Well, one part of it is certainly...For the children! Have you ever wondered why animals like humans aren't born full grown? Well, one way of looking at it was that it was an evolutionary selection - based on things like the environment our species developed in, any predators we might have had at the time, the sizes and capabilities of our bodies, and for the sake of diversity.

So why don't human adults just die around the time that their children can survive on their own?

Well, life is kinda long, and when you're alive for so long, things tend to get interesting. And thanks to our large brains, we have the ability as humans to think about life, feel it, wonder about it, and then influence all of the after-birth information transfers. Between us, between us and other animals, between us and our technology (think about the Theme of your favorite book - like man vs. machine - and you'll get it).

In a sense, our development, due to neuroplasticity and some other things, doesn't really stop until much later in life. (And yet, our schools stop teaching us so early, America! But sure, we should have developed an enthusiasm for life-long learning during that time, right? Hopefully. I know I did).

But one question to ask is: Why do we live so much later? Why do we live until we're about 120 at max? What's special about that number of years? 120ish years sounds kind of purposeful.

And it is. Actually, our prolonged existence goes back to children. Having a longer lifespan ensures multiple generations have oversight to help guarantee offspring reach adulthood. It also allows those older generations to pass on valuable knowledge they've gathered over the years. Plus, they also get to use their knowledge to make worldly transfers, shifting things, and ideas, around the world.

Okay, so, development in the human lifespan is super cool, but this process repeats and repeats, birth to death, birth to death, over and over, forever-ish. In the big scheme of things, what happens after that is over? Is there really an end to the cycle of birth and death?

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The conditions of the Earth are changing. So where are our children's children's children x a few billion years headed? Should we care?

Well, if you get hung up by your own contribution to the future, you might.

Let's talk about life after death, spirituality, and the universe in the next post!

Until then, thanks for bearing with me through The Long Pause in my posting, and as always, thanks for Konnecting with me!

Subjective vs. Objective Meaning: Does Your Sun Rise or Does Your Earth Revolve?

There are so many "meanings of life" or necessary reasons for living in the material world on Earth that people have come up with over the years, and I've started making a list of some major ones:

• To enjoy it/pleasure.
• To suffer.
• To overcome suffering - and reach Nothingness/Oneness.
• To surrender and obey - to be a cog in a wheel - to do your duty.
• To live in harmony with the world/nature.
• To care for the environment.
• To fulfill the will or plan of a higher power.
• To achieve the highest good in an ethical way while also achieving personal fulfillment.
• To live with dignity in the face of absurdity.
• To embrace the eternal becoming.
• To learn.
• To become a god.
• To develop/to reach our potential.
• To remember.
• To reconcile past deeds.
• To make an impact/to create change (in others, in the world around us, - similar to develop).
• To create (includes procreation).
• To survive.
• There is no meaning.
• 42.

Many of these reasons are personal meanings, and people who believe in a subjective philosophy will claim that life itself has no objective inherent meaning. Therefore, the advice typically given is that we should find meaning in our own lives, (subjectively) however we can. What does life mean to YOU? How do YOU want to live it?

I've been thinking a lot about the meaning of life lately, and I think subjective meanings have their place in it, but I don’t think it’s the whole picture.

Sunrises Are Illusions Of Truth

My thinking is that subjective meanings of life - saying “life is what you make of it” - is like saying, “Look at the sunrise.”

It’s not saying, “Look, the Earth revolves around the Sun.” Rather, it’s saying, “That holistic view doesn't matter. Look at the sunrise. The sunrise is what matters, because that’s your view.”

But the sunrise is not the truth. It’s a piece of the truth.

The sunrise is a single view, and everyone sees it differently. But how can we see things outside of ourselves, outside of this universe, and the life we've been placed in?

We can’t. Not yet anyway. But we can think more about how to look at it differently, from a more holistic perspective. And how do we start looking at things differently? We ask a question...or a few questions.

Questions About The Bigger Picture

My first question starts as, “What are we doing on Earth other than just merely surviving?”

My second question is, “Why do we need to survive?”

To my understanding, both of these questions seem to have a similar answer. What answer did I find? I’ll let you know in the next post!

In the meantime, leave a comment about what you think the answer might be. How would you answer these questions?

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Thanks for Konnecting with me!

R.M.K.

4 Reasons We Would Destroy Our Home (Part 2)

Evey Hammond: "But I don't want you to die."

V: "That's the most beautiful thing you could have ever given me."

This quote from the movie, V for Vendetta, tells us one very powerful message - that to value and care about another's life as much as your own so much that you do not want them to die is a very special thing. It is a very important part of life.

#3 - We Don't Feel Connected to Each Other

One of the four reasons I mentioned that we destroy our home is that we don't feel connected to it. We don't always feel connected to people who aren't in our immediate environment and social circle. So what we need to realize is that we all inhabit the same home, and we are all stewards of the land we walk on and should all respect the company we keep.

We need to feel that caring connection to others if we are going to protect them all. We cannot prevent all catastrophes and death from occurring - we are mortals, after all. However, we can do our best to keep people alive out of love. To allow them to live long and full lives.

We do this naturally with infants. Every woman feels connected to her child, has a bond that keeps her up at night sometimes, ensuring their safety. And throughout their lives, we feel this connection to the people closest to us.

But what I think V for Vendetta seeks to tell us is that we need to extend this love and compassion to all of humanity. Destructive actions that exclude others for their differences in their sexuality, or their race, or their religion, or their method of healing - all things that make us unique, but are also personal choices or things you cannot necessarily change about yourself - are what is killing this world's social peace and destroying us.

Monstrous actions create monsters, as the movie so aptly points out with V's vengeance. He does not feel connected to those who have harmed him and the others, and therefore sought a method of justice that was violent. But as we discussed in Part 1 of this post, vengeance only leads to more vengeance. People hold grudges.

What we need is forgiveness and to feel more connected to our enemies. We need to take away the masks that we all carry - the labels we use to identify each other - and look into everyone's eyes. We need to see that we are all together on this planet and share a single home.

So tonight, on the 5th of November, let's remember that violence and oppression are NOT the answer, but rather that love and acceptance of others is the way to a better world.

#4 - The Afterlife is Not Guaranteed, But We Think It Is Better

There are several accounts about the afterlife that we are told to believe in. However, none of them, no matter what you believe, should enable you to harm another person in this life.

You shouldn't say hateful things to or about people who believe something different. You shouldn't use your beliefs as a justification of your own destructive actions.

And indeed, there are many belief systems that tell there are negative consequences to such behavior. Whether or not those consequences happen in an afterlife - we cannot be certain, however many of those consequences do happen in the material world, and they affect others - as well as the environment - in the present and future.

Life is sacred, and we should all have the right to live in it. We should not use our beliefs to harm others, or to deny them this gift of life.

We need to be aware of the consequences that our actions can have, not just on us, but on others. We need forward-thinking to really have a connection to not only everyone in the world as I mentioned in #3, but we need to think about those who are not yet born as well.

There's no guarantee of an afterlife, but what is more certain is a future of this world. Our decisions and behaviors today affect that future. And if we care about our children, we should care about our children's children, and everyone else's children's children who will be affecting our children's children.

So first, in order to take on the task of protecting our home, we need to ask ourselves if we believe that this material world has a purpose and a meaning.

Is the material aspect of life on Earth a necessary stepping stone to the afterlife? What, really, are we doing by living on Earth as humans?

In my next post, I'd like to explore this idea more in detail. We can start a discussion about all of the different reasons for living.

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Can you think of any other reasons why we would destroy our homes and the people who inhabit this planet? Are there more ways to prevent destructive behavior than those that I've mentioned so far? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

You can also tweet your comments or thoughts to @RMKBrainFeed.

Until next time...
Thanks for Konnecting with me!

And have a happy Guy Fawkes Day!

4 Reasons We Would Destroy Our Home

"Why would someone destroy their own home?" was the last question we left off with. 

I'd like to discuss destroying our home in three different segments: Destroying Planet Earth as a whole, destroying a part of Earth (nation vs. nation), and destroying our individual homes.

By destroying any part of the three homes listed above, we are giving up on the priority of protecting each other and all of the other living things on this planet. 

So why do we lose focus on this priority? In order to answer that question, let's explore the possible reasons why someone would destroy these different levels of home:

Is it because...

- They think it hurt them and they are trying to make others feel the pain they feel (or empathize with their pain)? (Think about vengeance as an emotional reaction to pain). 

- To end future pain. (Think about Ender's Game).

- Because they no longer feel connected to it?

- Or maybe because they think the afterlife will provide something better for them?

Negative Empathy and Vengeance

When someone has perceived that they have received pain from another person, sometimes they want to pay it back in kind with outward displays of aggression. This aggression is used to try to get the other person to understand emotionally the pain they received, and to return that pain for a perceived sense of justice.

We normally call this action of reciprocating displays of pain as: vengeance, or how I like to think about it - negative empathy.

However, this type of negative empathy only creates more pain. It is a destructive behavior, and many times, it is the reason that someone threatens the destruction of a homeland. But it does not have to follow-through. It can be prevented.

You can prevent vengeance, this negative reaction to perceived pain, by doing the following:

Role Modeling - Show people that there is a better way to handle their pain and that retaliation only brings more pain. Show them how to handle pain through your actions, by not retaliating. Humans are great imitators. Give them something good and constructive, not destructive, to imitate.

More education about emotions - As a species, we need to teach each other about how to properly handle emotions. Part of the way we teach is by role modeling, as stated above, however another way of teaching is just talking about it. 

Talking about emotions allows an open conversation to understanding. People do not always understand the emotional reactions of others, however when we talk about them and people can empathize by seeing the situation from their point of view, and thereby realize that a misunderstanding took place - it is then that vengeance can be avoided and we can prevent the destruction of a home.

Ender's Game and Pain Avoidance

Relating to vengeance is our second reason why someone would destroy a home: to end future pain. 

A lot of existence is centered around avoiding pain and gaining pleasure. And in the movie (and book), Ender's Game, one of the main messages seems to be that the purpose of destroying someone else's world was to avoid future pain.

When Ender kept kicking his classmate after he had already fallen and become bloody, he switched from self-defense to a rationalization that in order to end future pain, he would need to make sure that he destroyed his adversary the first time. Which is eventually the approach Ender and Colonel Graff take later by destroying an entire home planet. They wanted to prevent any future attacks. 

However, there is a problem with this response: People hold grudges.

People remember what was done to their people, and if they do not forgive the wrongs that were done to them, they will seek retaliation once they are able to - just like Earth did against the alien race in Ender's Game. They saw the destruction that the alien race was capable of, and sought a more powerful retaliation to prevent future attacks. 

So, is there a better response?

Would forgiveness have been seen as weakness? Was the fear of a future attack too strong that they felt they had to retaliate rather than forgive? Should they have delayed an attack in order to study the alien race first instead of interpret their actions as hostile?

I'm curious about your thoughts on this, because I'm not too sure of the answer. Leave a comment below and let's create a discussion about the different possible responses to preventing the destruction of someone else's home. You can also tweet your thoughts to @RMKBrainFeed, and use the hashtag #Konnection.

Since this post is getting fairly lengthy, I'm going to cut it here, and we'll pick up with the other two reasons why someone would destroy their home in my next post.

Thanks for Konnecting with me!

- RMK

Konnected to Our Home

"Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy."
(Not my circus, not my monkey).

-- Polish Proverb

Do people care about what's not on their doorstep? If someone doesn't have direct experience with an issue, how can it still be important to him or her?

Today, I'd like to explore this topic: Priorities.

Throughout our lives, we are given only so much time to do all the things we need or want to do, and only so much time to think about all the things we need and want to think about.

With that limited amount of time, we make choices based on what we think is most important. And a lot of the time, what we think is most important is what's right in front of our face, affecting us directly.

However, that perspective can often leave us making selfish choices. And sometimes you need to be selfish (we all need to take care of ourselves). Yet, since most of us live in some kind of civilization or social group - we need to keep in mind that there should be a balance between thinking about the self and thinking about others, right?

We never start our lives without some kind of dependence on others. Every baby must rely on its parent for milk. This interaction often creates a bond, making family important out of necessity.

But then we grow older, we wean off of our mother's milk, and gain some more freedom of choice. However, with those choices come limitations and more dependency.

Everything you nourish your body with comes from the earth. You become dependent on the availability of fresh water and the abundance of food that you can forage, grow, or buy.

And here's where my philosophy comes in: We are connected to our home.

And because of that connection, I think caring for our home should be a priority. Without Earth, without the environment that's been so carefully created (either by physics or a higher power or something we haven't considered yet), we couldn’t possibly be here.

By acknowledging that we are connected to our home, we expand our priorities. We must now care about the land, the animals that inhabit that land, the entire system and how we affect it.

And since we are conscious animals, capable of making educated choices - do you think we have a responsibility to our home to protect it? Do you think that because we also have the potential to destroy our entire planet, we should be mindful always about our impact?

Consciousness and the ability to change our environment according to our needs and wants is a gift, however it's a gift to be exercised with caution.

In some respects, we are the guardians of our home. It's why we establish global politics in the first place, really - it's not only to protect our nationalist agendas, but also to keep our home safe. Nuclear weapons shifted our priorities. It provided a real threat to our home as a whole, and because of that - we need protectors. We need people who care enough about our home to stand up to those who would destroy it.

But why would someone destroy their home? Let's talk about that in the next post.

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For now, leave a comment below if you have any thoughts on the priorities I've discussed here so far (the self, our families, our home planet).

You can also follow me on Twitter at @RMKBrainFeed.

Thanks for Konnecting with me! :-)

Introduction

Every day I am filled with questions about our world and why we are in it. Why are we here? Is everything in life connected? What does it mean to be human? There are so many mysteries, so many interesting things to think about.

And I cannot learn them all on my own. I need your help and your input. I seek new perspectives and new understanding.

This blog is designed for discussion about the many wonders of life and finding our place in it. The range will cover many topics - from mathematics, to music, to philosophy, to religion, to language development and learning, to social and cultural issues, to psychology, to technology, and more.

I am not here to judge or to persuade you to any particular kind of thinking. I am here purely for exploration. And I hope you'll explore with me.

- R. M. Kon