Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?
Foreword
This article was originally written in Chinese back on May 9, 2021. Since I am building an English website, for consistency, I decided to translate this article into English. However, this work has not yet been done. It is because I dumped this whole article into Google translate and I didn't even have the time to take a look at it. I believe some parts of this article below might be a little bit ambiguous, or even unreadable. Once I have enough time, I will sit down, take a look at it, and translate the article by myself.
Louis
5/6/2022
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Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?
Tomas Nagel once wrote a very interesting book called What Is It Like to Be A Bat. Nagel tries to explain what "experience" is from the perspective of a bat. In this book, Nagel writes:
"Both sonar and vision are regarded as perceptional experiences. While it is possible to imagine what it would be like to fly, navigate by sonar, hang upside down and eat insects like a bat, that is not the same as a bat's perspective."
Although scientists can clearly explain what sonar positioning is, and we can roughly imagine flying like a bat, sonar positioning, hanging upside down, and eating insects, we will never truly experience being a bat.
In fact, it's not that the gap between species is that we can't experience the feelings of bats. Even as a bat, we can't really experience the feelings of another bat. That is to say, "bats" in Nagel's book, as a metaphor, represent a subject in the philosophical sense: "An individual can never understand the consciousness of another individual."
What is consciousness and what is experience?
Consciousness has always been a difficult problem discussed by scientists and philosophers, and until now, people have not given a clear definition of consciousness. In Wikipedia's explanation of the term "consciousness", a phrase from John Searle is applied: "After waking from a dreamless sleep, unless again falling asleep or entering a state of unconsciousness, the perception, sensation, or the state of awareness." To put it simply, consciousness is a state in which people perceive the outside world, while experience is the product of consciousness and the feedback of the human body to consciousness.
How does the human body perceive the world? Humans have five senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. We understand the world through those sensations. Make a hypothesis: If a person loses all his senses, does the person still have consciousness? Interestingly, although the senses are scattered all over the human body, the senses are all formed in the human brain. So, is the aftertaste of memory, or imagination, also a kind of consciousness? (In fact, imagination is strictly a reconstruction of memory, because all human imagination is based on memory, just like the absurd monsters imagined by human beings can find their shadows in reality, and want to escape from this. This kind of bondage, one can only call it "no image, unimaginable", such as God) such a process obviously brings a different experience, such as recalling being criticized by a boss a week ago can be painful, and imagination and Time spent with lovers makes people happy. The feedback brought by the organic feeling is the mental emotion, that is, pain, happiness, excitement, depression, etc. This process also corresponds to consciousness and experience.
If a person is born deprived of feelings, will self-consciousness be formed at all? Without experience, there is no memory, and without memory, there is no consciousness, without consciousness, there is no experience, and without experience, there is no memory.
So a normal person, can he understand the world correctly? The answer is no. Thinking about the way we perceive the world, vision is the image produced by photons acting on the retina, processed by the brain, hearing is the feeling formed by the interaction of air vibrations and the eardrum, and then processed by the brain, and all sensations are the same. In other words, sensations are images produced by the brain after a person interacts with information. Humans can and only perceive the world with the intention of the brain. In fact, everyone is blind and touching the elephant. No one knows what the real world is like, and we have no way of knowing. So since we can't understand the real world, is it possible that our information is false and meaningless, and is it possible that consciousness is just a self-deduction of the human brain? We know atoms, quarks, but we can never really feel them.
This is also an aspect that existential nihilism wants to express. The essence of nihilism is doubt and negation. Existential nihilism believes that existence does not exist and existence is meaningless.
Often "no", or more precisely "nothingness", this thing is more profound than "existence" or "existence", people can't imagine nothingness, and even a little thought can't be given, because once you can Thinking about nothingness, nothingness is not called nothingness. Scientists are so terrified of nothingness that they try to explain it, but in vain. They even defined "ether", trying to use this kind of thing to understand nothingness, but in essence, they are all empty. That is to say, the above-mentioned person who is deprived of feelings is actually meaningless. In a sense, he was not born at all, and there is no such person at all. His "life" is actually a kind of "death" in a realistic sense.
Existence is life, nothingness is death, and experience is actually a continuation of life.
If life is likened to a playground that is about to close, then each individual is a tourist who has received a ticket. No one tells you what to do. You can experience all the facilities in the playground, you can also sit in a daze, and you can even leave the venue early. We don't know where we came from before we enter, we don't know what to do after we enter, and we don't know where to go after we exit. But everyone should take something with them so they don't feel too sorry before leaving.
The famous artist Paul Gauguin once created an oil painting called: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? This oil painting contains Gauguin's profound thinking on the philosophy of life. Gauguin experienced the loss of his daughter and suffered from syphilis. He tried to commit suicide by taking arsenic but failed because the dose was too small. After a near-death experience, Gauguin seems to have been inspired to create. In Tahiti in 1897, Gauguin began to conceive this huge painting, a concluding painting.
Analyzing the elements in the painting, the first thing I see is probably the person in the middle of the painting, like Eve, who picks mangoes, she symbolizes the joy of the world. Moving to the left, another child, an adult, and an old man are lined up one by one, symbolizing the life of a person, and above it is a cold stone statue, which symbolizes the underworld and death.
Since every individual will eventually die, then what is the meaning of life? Aside from the individual, if the individual is for the continuation of the group and for the development of common cognition, then if cognition has boundaries, where is the other side? For example, if human beings can someday start colonizing exoplanets, where will my footsteps end?
Humans have tried their best to find the antidote to the ultimate problem of philosophy, but there has been no progress. The explanation I can give is also very superficial: experience as a continuation of life. Feel the joy, feel the pain, feel all the feelings. Some people say that a life without regrets is actually a kind of regret. If the way we perceive the world is not real, the only real thing we have is our experience. Perhaps Gauguin really gave up his job at the stock exchange and came to Tahiti to paint. Listen to the call of yourself, find the truth in your heart, and magnify the experience. Maybe this is the medicine of life.
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