Our obession with self importance and is it justified?

Our human nature seems to influence the human race into believing in self importance, with individuals often believing that their world is more important that others around them. People often believe that there is a greater meaning or test and somethimes think that their world is individual to them. This of course is probably linked to the human self concious and the fact that it is much easier to live and think if you have a goal or destination to get to. But the burning question is, are we justified by thinking this way?

My favourite example is the thought that we, each as individuals have the world around us exclusivly for ourselves and that it is all just a simulation. This creates an interesting paradox, because naturally, you as readers would stop me here and tell me that your responses are human and invalidate this theory. But me as an individual can be none the wiser at this point, is your response just a simulated response to me? This is a question that I can never answer with any certainty.

The human nature in all of us drives these thoughts in my opinion with some very simple questions but with a very complex set of answers. Why?, How?, When? and Where? are my 4 favourite questions and even though they are one word questions, they create a quandry of potential answers. Human conciousness is exclusivly yours and you cannot get an insight into another persons conciousness as much as they cannot get an insight into yours. So are my questions, questions that can never be answered?

No takers? Really? I honestly thought this would inspire at least one response.

reply to post by michael1983l


well when u indicate that our responses may just be simulated answers it kind takes the fun out of responding unless of course this is a simulated question that im responding to

reply to post by michael1983l

My favourite example is the thought that we, each as individuals have the world around us exclusivly for ourselves and that it is all just a simulation. This creates an interesting paradox, because naturally, you as readers would stop me here and tell me that your responses are human and invalidate this theory. But me as an individual can be none the wiser at this point, is your response just a simulated response to me?

It's only me and you on this site buddy. The only reason I know you're real is that I write all the other posts.

There is a LOT of unwarranted self importance in this world of ours. Hell my posting is unwarranted self importance. I think I'm important enough that other people will want to read my drunken musings.

To be entirely honest I'm not quite getting what you are going for in the OP. Possible to elaborate? Do you think that people are too self centered and we should be more focused the greater good instead of our own wants/whims? I'm a little loopy from the allergy medicine so there is a good chance I'm missing something rather key though I did read the OP twice.

reply to post by Domo1


The crux of my question is to simply answer, is our conciousness unique in this world of ours or do we all share the same observations and experiences as a whole in this world?

Originally posted by michael1983l
reply to post by Domo1

 

The crux of my question is to simply answer, is our conciousness unique in this world of ours or do we all share the same observations and experiences as a whole in this world?

The human experience is one we all share, but we all experience it in our individual ways. I agree we have a sense of self importance, where we have separated ourselves from nature, building our own human made environments.

I'm always interested to think about what really separates us from animal's insects and bacteria.

Also one thing that bugs the hell out of me, is if you are born blind, what do you visualise in your dreams?

Originally posted by woodwardjnr

Originally posted by michael1983l
reply to post by Domo1

 

The crux of my question is to simply answer, is our conciousness unique in this world of ours or do we all share the same observations and experiences as a whole in this world?

The human experience is one we all share, but we all experience it in our individual ways. I agree we have a sense of self importance, where we have separated ourselves from nature, building our own human made environments.

I'm always interested to think about what really separates us from animal's insects and bacteria.

But can you say that with any real certainty, will there ever be a way to prove that theory? I think that is impossible to prove, it might be right, it might be wrong but that we can never be sure.

reply to post by michael1983l


On the nature of reality, there was a great BBC Horizon documentary that you should try and track down. Here is a clip from it. I imagine the rest is out there on the web.
Horizon: What Is Reality?



This is also a very good documentary exploring the topics of your OP

reply to post by woodwardjnr


Thanks, I will watch them when I get home from work tonight.

Originally posted by michael1983l
reply to post by woodwardjnr

 

Thanks, I will watch them when I get home from work tonight.

I think they will give you a better answer than anything I could possibly give.

Humans are self-absorbed on the individual and collective level. Everything we think is about how things are for human beings and esp. what goes on in our personal life. We are helpless to judge the world from our human experience. It would be extremely hard to stop focusing on our selves, or humans in general, and try to get outside of ourselves. Personally, I'm getting tired of people,

You will never be able to ask a question and have it answered by another person without filtering.

If you ask a question, you will have to hope that the person has a clear mind and do not have any emotional attachment to the words that you are using. After that, once you receive the answer, you will filter it through your beliefs and emotions. So, in a some perspective, you are always talking to yourself because you can only see through your own filters of belief and emotion.

Originally posted by michael1983l
No takers? Really? I honestly thought this would inspire at least one response.

This is a very complex issue, and not so easy to address. Obviously perception rules the experience of the human mind, but it can't be accurately asserted that objective reality is nonexistent. Otherwise, how is it that the mind itself can exist to perceive what it perceives? Right?

The human mind is a work in progress - always. If you can picture a fly ball, as it arcs out over the infield and into deep center field, what you're watching is akin to the corporeal development phase of the human mind, with the ball itself as the leading edge that we, each, as material human beings, experience of that development process. Now, if you can picture the trailing arc that would be visible if you used an extremely slow aperture on a camera to photograph that trajectory, then this is what the eternal human mind represents. All that resulting information that continues to exist even after the moments have passed by.

When the brain itself finally dies, that entire continuum of resulting information persists, and we call it the human spirit, or soul, or whatever your religion has taught you to name it. And it is self aware, and dynamic, and it is the whole you - in composition - as a result of every instant that you and your brain worked through, played through, pondered through, laughed through and lived through, from the moment of your birth.

As a material Homo Sapiens hominid, you can only ever know yourself from the perspective of that leading edge (represented by the ball in flight, in our analogy), but when you shed the brain and body, your perspective will be very different. Your knowledge of self will (potentially) be much more complete and comprehensive. That said, since you'll still be a perception-centric being (a blessing as well as a curse at times) there are no guarantees that you'll ever "get it right" concerning your knowledge of "what is" as opposed to what you perceive to be real.

And that'll always be the rub for you and every human being. Of course, that won't prevent you from being convinced that you know exactly what is real and what's illusion. It never has prevented anyone else from "knowing the truth" and the indications are that this won't ever change. The truth is that once you leave the material realm, there will be even less that's available to compare and contrast your perceptions with that can accurately be described as objective reality. That can end up being great, or really, really awful, and there are plenty of folks who end up needlessly placing themselves on the "more awful" end of that gradient, sadly enough. This is why establishing as much of an understanding of what is objectively real as you can, while stranded here in the material realm, is of such importance. That capacity will "rescue" you from a very crippling "reality" when you are finally free to craft your world within the eternal realm. It will certainly protect you from having a world crafted for you by someone else, and that's pretty priceless when you consider the obvious potentials that exist if this is not only possible, but relatively prevalent.

All in all, perception is a very complicated topic.

reply to post by NorEaster


Thanks that makes a lot of sense.

I had a dream recently that I was irrelevant. Still trying to understand it and especially struggling to express the raw experience in words.

The best analogy I have so far is imagining us as leaves on a tree. When we drop in the fall we become the compost for what comes next.

Our ego tells us we(ego) are unique and important, but that is not consistent with what I see in nature. Every thing in nature comes and goes, ebbs and flows.

Most of us believe in spirit or the soul. We set it up as something eternal outside of nature. Perhaps that is our way of protecting the ego as important. Perhaps, eventually, all we think we are becomes part of the fabric of nature for what comes next, and the we that we think is important a momentary thing....on a spec of dust.....on the edge of a galaxy....in a sea of galaxies.....in....

Originally posted by michael1983l
Why?, How?, When? and Where?

Just a single question instead of four perhaps?

Each of the four questions has a common goal, the reciept of information to fill a void. Sometimes something past, sometimes in the here and now, and sometimes in an imagined future.

Welcome to the human condition.

Rene Descartes is most known for his philosophical proposition "cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am.)

He concluded that because his 5 senses through which we perceive reality have been flawed before, that they are not trustworthy for identifying a purely objective reality. Therefore, all he can not doubt is the fact that he is thinking, and because he can doubt his senses, something must be doing the doubting, therefore it is proof of his existence.

I think this is what you are trying to convey in your post. You can only be absolutely sure of one thing, and that is the fact that you are thinking and experiencing something. This something is what we each call "reality," though we can never be sure what another person is experiencing, or if they are even experiencing at all and are a figment of our imagination.

reply to post by michael1983l


Wow, that's a really interesting question...... Maybe the same thing we do, but they can't make the same sense out of it we can?

These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness.

They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill.

And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.