from a "life is all there is" standpoint?
1. why not?
2. we like to understand things, for the sake of understanding them.
3. we like to understand things in order to come up with technical solutions to problems which make life less pleasant than it could be.
4. Understanding how the mechanisms of life work might just possibly teach us how the mechanisms of death work, and allow us to switch off those genetic factors leading to decrepitude and death.
all, from a life-is-all-there-is, perfectly sound reasons based entirely on natural self-interest.
happy, now?
" teach us how the mechanisms of death work, and allow us to switch off those genetic factors leading to decrepitude and death. "
Hey, hurry up. will ya?
I think people survived for a long time without philosophers and professional pundits to explain the meaning of life.
The only thing that makes a noticable difference in ordinary people's well being is medicine and dentistry -- both products of science, and both resisted by luddites.
"Why not?" is not an answer to "Why?"
2. we like to understand things, for the sake of understanding them.
3. we like to understand things in order to come up with technical solutions to problems which make life less pleasant than it could be.
Both 2. and 3. are related to improving our condition. What is the evolutionary mechanism at play? Survival? Probably. If so, then when we embrace the goals of 2. and 3., we are assigning a purpose to the process of evolution that is illusionary. There is no purpose.
4. Understanding how the mechanisms of life work might just possibly teach us how the mechanisms of death work, and allow us to switch off those genetic factors leading to decrepitude and death.
Why is immortality preferrable to non-existence? What does it accomplish? According to natural selection, creatures have a survival instinct because those without one died off. Again, that is a process. To seek immortality as something desirable is to mistaken the process for a purpose. A fly may flee your swatter without knowing why. (All the flys that didn't have the flee function are flat). But we as humans know better. The jig is up. We seek to improve our condition because our mutation led to a survival instinct while someone else's did not. Now that we know, how do we pretend it is anything else? Why do we?
all, from a life-is-all-there-is, perfectly sound reasons based entirely on natural self-interest.
happy, now?
I was already happy.