Hi everyone. I ran across this forum on a Google search and decided maybe I should get some feedback here. Unfortunately, my troubles are not brought on by a single event. Therefor to make sense of everything I have to give a little background. I apologize for this and I'll try to keep it short.
I am a 20 year old male. I don't mean to sound pretentious, but I'm pretty intelligent. I think that's why I have so many problems. I tend to analyze things to ridiculous lengths. Around the time I turned 18, I became interested in science. But a little after I turned 20, I came to a realization that I haven't been able to recover from: everything is pointless.
Maybe you believe in God. Being a strict adherent to scientific method logic, I do not believe in a god, though I would not dare say that I am certain one does not exist. In your response to this, please do not try to push a religion on to me.
What is important about
a universe without god is that there is no such thing as right or wrong, good or bad. The reason being that if the universe was not designed to be a certain way, then it just is that way, so everything just is. Good and bad are labels that we project onto things based upon how we feel about
them. And because what one feels about
something is unique to that person, it is subjective. There is no such thing as objective good or bad without a god.
I was fine with all of that. But then I started thinking about
the nature of subjectivity. We all make judgments about
things based upon how we feel about
them. But why do we feel as we do? Because we use emotions to process information. But why do we have these emotions? Because we are animals, and as animals we need direction & drive. If we did not have feelings about
things to direct us, we would simply do literally nothing.
Love is an expression of an ancient relic of
natural selection: sexual reproduction. Love is genetic programming, and the desire for it in some form is found in everyone. Happiness is a rewarding experience, meant to direct us toward biologically beneficial actions. And so on for each of the emotions. Emotions evolved because they were successful at giving life direction. Without emotion, a life form can only behave reflexively with its environment (direct input/output). And so they give us general directions of behavior that have an evolutionary track record of biological success.
After I realized this, when I interacted with people I began to find myself quite sullen. For now I see everyone as animals, totally unaware of how they fulfill biological functions. They think they are living life autonomously, but they're really being driven mechanically, by their innate emotions that make quite simple computations.
There are other things troubling me as well. Did you know that outside the mind, there is no such thing as color? The visual cortex, responsible for vision, colors in the world for us based upon the electromagnetic wavelengths of the light that bounces off objects. As it turns out, for everything that we do & experience, there is an area of the brain corresponding to the function. For instance, the fusiform gyrus recognizes faces. When it is lesioned, a condition known as prosopagnosia ensues, where the person can no longer understand faces. Another example is the prefrontal cortex...it is involved in planning and adherence to moral conduct. And so with each area of the brain being a separate functional component, I can't help to feel that my reality is a rough smorgasbord of interpretations of the world, which working in conjunction give me the illusion of consciousness. I feel like I exist, but deep down I know that I don't, that I am really 100 billion neurons working in tandem.
And so with this perspective, my life has become quite boring and pointless. I am not motivated to do anything. I don't enjoy interacting with people. I'd like a girlfriend, but at the same time I'm bothered that my biology controls me like that. And there is also the difficulty of finding a girl who is even remotely like me...it's impossible in the situation I'm in. I'm in debt. I can't even get a job (I've been trying for months). I don't have fun doing anything, except . And I'm getting bored of . Honestly I don't know what to do.
Post Edited By Moderator (getting by) : 12/19/2009 8:51:45 AM (GMT-7)