Velociraptor

Clustered Thoughts
2016-08-29 21:17:48 (UTC)

Forever?

"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."

Carl Sagan (I love him so much) said this and it's kind of sad and funny because he's dead. I get where he was coming from but at the same time it makes me think of that line from The Fault In Our Stars that was one of the only things I liked about that book: "Some infinities are bigger than other infinities."
First of all, although human lives are extremely short in comparison to the life spans of things like stars that take place on larger scales, they are infinitely more meaningful because they involve consciousness. A star can't experience anything until it becomes a human, until part of the matter from all of the billions of years that it existed before eventually becomes something capable of subjectivity. And the short life span of a human is filled with so many different sensations and feelings and thoughts and interactions that shape the world and the lives of other people in ways that are cosmically immediate and short term but of extreme importance to each of those people that in a way it has a lot more impact than that star's life (although of course without the stars no one would exist in the first place).
I guess it comes down to how you measure what constitutes forever (that kind of rhymed and I didn't mean it to haha). My lifetime will be the longest thing I ever experience and is therefore quite long to me. Other people will exist for longer than me but might have experienced life in a way that made it feel like they had hardly any time at all. I guess it could be argued that our respective subjective experiences don't change the reality of who had more time and that's obviously true in a literal sense, but I don't think anyone would deny that there was still a difference and it makes me question how importance subjective experience is.
When people deny the reality of/importance of subjectivity they're basically saying that after the heat death of the universe or whatever nothing that happened here and now, during humanity's brief existence, will matter. Maybe they're right (I mean it's definitely true that once we're gone humans won't have meant anything in an "objective" sense), but it depends on what it means to say something matters. Do things that have endings not matter? Or do they only matter during the time that they exist or continue to have an influence on the existence of other things? If we didn't change the universe in any way, did we matter? What if we left our initials on a faraway planet but nothing else - how much of a trace counts?
When people are dead they don't have consciousness anymore and even they can be said to exist in some form in our memories, unless they were famous everyone who knew them will also die soon and then no one will remember them and does that mean they were never important?
Maybe our brains are too highly evolved for our own good and they're making us create endless questions to yell at a meaningless universe. I think the human idea of meaning is (haha) actually meaningless and the universe, nature, has no concept of things having to exist for some purpose. Science asks how things work in a practical sense, not why they happen in a philosophical sense.
My thoughts aren't very coherent right now because it's getting late and even though this is supposed to be an informal place I still like to be logically coherent so I think I should go to bed.




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