An (Ideally) Objective Analysis Of Everyday Life

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Ok, I've been wanting to have this discussion with someone for a long time, and I thought maybe this would be a good place to do it. Many times when I try to have this discussion, people often respond with emotionally charged, supportive answers to my questions instead of helping to speculate on possible practical solutions. I can also be very aversive to what strikes me as BS (sometimes it's actually BS, but more likely it's just something that annoys me when I hear it for reasons unknown to me), which frankly, happens often in such philosophical discussions.

Anyway, I was wondering how many of you describe yourself as more of an observer than an active participant in life. That's pretty much how I feel about it, but it doesn't seem to be too common of a mentality (or maybe it is and they are all as hermit-like as I am). It's not that bad, as I don't consider myself to have much self-esteem problems per se (unless you consider sometimes questioning the workings of your own thought process to a point of mental paralysis low self-esteem), and when it comes to other people I don't feel all that attached or give them much thought when I'm not with them, but I likewise don't avoid them and know that they are capable of having interesting conversations, fulfilling a sense of companionship, and being helpful from time to time.

The problem, however, is everyday life. I cannot make myself believe something that I feel isn't true, no matter how hard I try. Also, I haven't heard of very many ways to view life that aren't deluded to the point where I can't believe them. I suspect that reality and space-time is just a computation of whatever is happening at the most fundamental level of nature (which I sometimes wonder is even possible for humans to comprehend), and all the higher levels of abstractions are just arbitrary details. I also feel like I do not have the cognitive ability to process everything I want to learn, so I'm just lost in these heavy, vague, concepts.

This is the trouble with atheism: You end up only seeing the parts and not the whole. But even then, most atheists see value in life. More so, since they believe this is their one and only go-round. You seem to be describing life as "the matrix", an illusion not worthy of our consideration. But even if we are just accidents, a microscopic anomaly in a near-infinite cosmos, why not embrace it? No, you can't possibly understand it all, nobody can. But our descendants can, and will. So rather than asking, "What's it all for?", perhaps you can ask yourself, "What can I do to help?"

I have no idea if your post is more in reference to science, religion or psychology, but...

It seems to me that some of the greatest scientists created a "theory" based on an initial "belief"...at least that's my limited assessment.


Personally, I tend to be a dichotomy of myself - I want facts and proof, yet I find many (unproven) theories and beliefs to be fascinating. I enjoy speculation and abstract ideas - even those which are impossible to prove (and some of that is frustrating), but it's still fun to think about.


If my entire world was only based on what I could prove and know to be fact, I wouldn't have as much thirst to learn or pursue more knowledge.

Edit: PS - I tend to be more of an observer than active participant, except when I'm doing my "own thing" alone.

But that's just me, and I tend to be "weird".

first of i think the problem you run into when asking the question are you participant or observer in life, is the social aspect. Nts undoubtedly would think of social life. I myself think of nothing related to people.
The same goes for the phrase ''get a life'' meaning you do not have a life if you are not actively involved in some form of social interaction. I never understood this get a life thought i find it silly and sad.
Just looking at this difference in thinking makes differences between myself and others much sharper, normally i like to forget.

I think what it comes down to is that we are all observers of life in our minds. I think being in nature for example a forest is as close to life as you can get, a town is not anywhere as alive to me even though its full of movement and noise. So when i picture myself in an environment with lots of life (plants,animals maybe some people but i prefer not because 90% of people want to take your attention away from life).
i can come to no other conclusion that although my body is alive and its the same kind of life as plants/animals i am still not actively participating in living. Do you live through your body or your mind. For me i live mostly through my mind and spend most of my time observing and not actively living. When i am observing it generally involves thought, and actively taking part is when i am not thinking.

The act of thinking itself means you are not participating, i do not think it is possible to think about something without disconnecting yourself from that thing. so you place yourself on a seperate level in relation to the things you think about stepping out of the zone where that thing is living.

not thinking means active living and thinking means observing for me.
Nt point of view is not related to thinking or not thinking, it has to do with taking part in social/culture activities.

Here's the challenge that I think comes in when and if you ask NT's to give you ground on this. There's guilt coming from the other direction with the awareness that you wouln't simply be an 'observer' if people included you more often. The sense is still that you're an observer because that's what's been done to you by other people. Regardless of whether or not you're nauseated by the mere thought of having people classify you as a 'victim', you can control your own psychodrama but you can't really do much of anything about theirs.



And the last part obviously varies. I've met plenty of NT's who can be great conversationalists and are up to talk about anything (same for aspies), and I've also met plenty of NT's and aspies as well who are offended quickly by any conversation that goes over their head. It seems like the catering is done for the feelings of the lower denonimator and hence even the better conversationalists try to avoid intelligent conversation in their presence.


Exactly the same here. I can perhaps see nuances of how white lies help societies or help psychologically but I've never had the luxury of coasting on them and perhaps I learned as a kid - other people are allowed to have those, not me.


Well, there's physical material experience but you also have the 'I' experience to contend with and, at least for us, we can't ignore the later much. Good example: LSD, a chemistry conversation is as dry and boring as any kind of scientific discourse when conducted directly in its own jargon, however through the 'I' experience its a much different thing. It seems like we have greater difficulty digesting information or really keeping things objective where science and the 'I' experience start folding together too closely; mainly that the variables and desired outcomes also become hazier and less and less objective (this is also why economics, worldview, what economies should or shouldn't be, what societies should or shouldn't be, are nearly impossible to bring down to scientific analysis and properly simplistic solutions).


It sounds like you want to pay more attention to a couple things: a) Chaos Theory and what it implies, not about lack of determinism (which it doesn't imply randomness IMO) but what it tells us about the complexity of events and our ability to ever truly have 'all' of it in our knowledge. I have a feeling that until the day I die I'll hear the weatherman say '70% chance of rain on Tuesday' and realize that in the most literal sense he's spouting other fiction - that there's no such thing as a 70% chance - something either happens or it doesn't.

Similarly things look foggy more often than not when you're still missing variables. When that happens you have to figure out - some other, or several other variables, are mucking up/muddying the results. What are they? As you can start really drilling down and identifying those variables, and even where those variables come from, the why, etc., the easier it becomes to at least make sense of what it is you can't easily make sense of as well as why. From there your educated guesses will tend to get better and better with practice.

Thanks for the tips guys.

What?

Anyway, OP. I'm not quite sure what you mean.

Humans can never have a total understanding of the world around them. We experience what we experience, and we interpret that information however we want. First, what we see and how we interpret it is heavily influenced by our family, where we live, etc. Secondly, our perceptual motor system is flawed. For example imagine if you are color blind or something. Those 'colors' still exist, we just can't perceive it. Or even further, what is color anyway? Each species perceives it somewhat differently.

We will never understand anything in it's true form. Only the way we interpret it to be.

What are you trying to observe anyway? Everything? What kind of stuff do you find to be BS anyway?

BS(noun)-[ideal definition]-a statement or idea that is poorly conceived yet spoken with certainty and authority [actual definition]-something that annoys me when I hear it

Plus, I don't want to know the details of everything, just have an understanding of the fundamental level.

Wasn't asking for a definition, OP. I wanted specific examples.

I see life as the process of shifting mattter around. Daily, we move matter from one place to another in a never ending flux. We move food in to our mouthes and excrete it in a different manner. We move our meat bodies from place to place. We shop, which is a way of moving matter from the shop and in to our homes and cash from our pockets and in to theirs. Life, one big movement of matter in a continual state of flux.

Atheists believe in one big merry go round? Probably, let's just hope it is just the once and that we don't have to live it again and again. That's just depressing (see eternal recurrence).

I don't know if I feel like an active participant or an observer. I don't feel that we have any choices that we can really make, with everything being decided for us as I am a hard determinist; every choice we make is predetermined by our nature and experience in the past. So, in that case, I guess I'm an observer. However, it still bothers me emotionally, so I guess I'm not as detached as I would like to be.

The matrix like idea isn't such a bad idea except it makes you feel trapped in a false reality. One can only hope that this is a false reality and one day we will wake up, as if from a coma in to a universe that isn't a product of Darwinistic natrual selection. Funny how a Darwinistic view makes the world make so much more sense. Anyway, didn't some guy do his thesis on why we are likely living in a virtual (simulated) reality? It was quite a good read, with some really good points made. Sadly, it isn't testable. Simulation argument.

Well, there is a catch with this as well. To say one feels like the perpetual observer is still a subconscious attempt at divorcing the 'I' experience from the merry-go-round and its perhaps one we do for practical reasons, like the humans/animals linguistic divide we have but essentially everything we ever think, say, do, even want, is technically piped into us. None of our thoughts or feelings are necessarily ours because there is no I or us technically in any separate way. Human beings are really much more filters and conduits for natural forces in the same way that something like a river or stream would be. Similarly we are little more than delivery mechanisms and easements like many other things that move in nature.

As for the fear of eternal recurrence - I suppose its not that bad unless you're worried about reincarnation or having an I experience start again after every time you pass. I wouldn't want that either but at the same time, hopefully if we don't blow ourselves up we'll have at least an increasingly higher quality set of I experiences coming at us for as long I suppose as we can keep ourselves alive as a race.

Eternal recurrence says that I will be reincarnated as myself and live the same life over and over. It's not a good thought. When I die, I doubt there would be a heaven, though that would be good. The most I think I should be able to realistically expect is a long long rest. Not to be born again as a snotty child.

$%^&, yeah, that would be awful. At the same time however it seems difficult to get my head around the mechanisms of something like that. To say that there's w wormhole associated with consciousness that we get sucked right back through to our birth upon death not only seems profoundly negative, unless I'm missing something it just seems like a passing concern someone once had rather than any kind of educated guess based on any evidence to this effect.

Another thing I just thought I could mention as an aside; I hope it doesn't sound hippy of me to say it but I had plenty of times in my early 20's that made me think that, if there is any form of reincarnation, that it is forward linear and that we may have some things that seem uncannily familiar - from nowhere seemingly - that stem from the past. I still remember being up in Toronto for a three day rave, being in an aircraft hanger which was the trance main stage, and the dj threw down a track that - really to me - hit me in a way that nothing really has before nor since. The best anology, it was like memory of some ancient Atlantean national anthem, placed in an electronic motif. I had plenty of times as well where I'd hit, not literally but in my minds eye where I'd have a bit of an internal 'white out' and feel like I grabbed a thought, an idea, etc. from something like the 'peaceful meadow' beyond. While yes, these days I kinda doubt some of the integrity of those experience and particularly in the later cases since I believed something like that was there and I was consciously reaching for it my mind was likely fabricating it as well. All the same though, the first experience and some similarly like it really make me wonder - if we do have any kind of reincarnation that loops between birth and death, how things like that would ever work their way forward.