Vertebrates evolved a spinal column as a central structure for coordinating the movement of limbs. These limbs function as instruments through which the organism fulfils its most fundamental biological imperatives: survival and reproduction. The arms facilitate grasping, feeding, and tool use, thereby enhancing the organism’s capacity to thrive. The legs and feet enable multidirectional locomotion, allowing the organism to evade predators and seek more favourable environments. The head houses sensory organs that improve environmental awareness, further supporting survival and reproductive success. In this sense, each limb serves the overarching functional demands of the spine.With the emergence of the brain came consciousness, and with consciousness arose the ability to recognise patterns that could be exploited to improve survival and reproductive efficiency. Pattern recognition enabled the formation of social groups, the coordination of collective behaviour, and the refinement of strategies that increased the likelihood of persistence and propagation.Yet consciousness also introduced capacities that extend beyond immediate evolutionary utility. Humans developed the ability to reason abstractly, to imagine, to create, and to contemplate matters unrelated to direct survival or reproduction. We began to think for the sake of thinking. As a result, we now experience a continuous stream of reflection -- often concerning questions that do not contribute to the biological imperatives embedded in our vertebrate lineage.At the core of our existence lies the evolutionary drive to survive and reproduce. This raises a profound question: what purpose does abstract thought serve when it does not clearly advance these aims? The spine, as a metaphor for our evolutionary foundation, is indifferent to questions about the meaning of life; it is concerned only with the continuation of the organism. Yet humans have come to believe -- perhaps tragically, perhaps remarkably -- that there is more to existence than mere survival and reproduction. The persistent search for meaning appears not to be a useless byproduct of consciousness, but an attempt to justify the existence of consciousness itself.In generating theories of purpose, the mind may be engaged in a form of self‑preservation: constructing narratives that validate its own complexity so that it is not rendered obsolete by evolutionary pressures. In this sense, the mind mirrors the spine. It seeks to perpetuate itself for its own sake, functioning as a self‑sustaining system that has become aware of its potential purposelessness. Consequently, the mind continuously generates new reasons for its existence, striving to ensure that its capacity for reflection is not eliminated by the very evolutionary mechanisms that produced it.Your mind is trying to think of reasons for why it needs to exist (i.e. entertaining the meaning of life) so that evolution doesn't kill it off.
>>25206818I found the legless meta avatars that got zuckerberg laughed out of existence to be analytically rich.Why does Mark Zuckerberg long for a world where everyone's legs are irrelevant?Might that equalize things in a way his childhood self might find more just or desirable?Does he just never use his legs for anything ever? I wonder what his experience of his own body is like to him.Why does the world he would have all of humanity live the rest of history in completely remove the largest parts of our organism? Our leg muscles are the largest skeletal muscles, our femur and hips are our largest bones (not for me though my erect penis is my largest bone)I bet he has dreams of being unable to outrun predators.I'm tired of illiterates thinking evolutionart success begins and end with daily survival and the likelihood of fucking at least once in a life time. Abstract thought for its own sake has clearly created systems within human collective behavior that preserves and propagates the species. This "why is abstract thought so useless" bullshit is insane. Maybe if a tournament ape had abstract thought he would hate his mindless brethren who only wake to eat and fuck.These two points are not so unrelated
cool story bro
It's just a theory bro.
>>25206818Lefttard version of picrel
>>25206818Although I hold many of these views, if what you have provided are excerpts, they are well eludicated here. I will read this book OP.
Fairy tale nonsense that cannot be empirically verified nor confirmed outside of speculation.
>>25206818>beyond immediate evolutionary utilityThis functionalistic way of explaining evolution and change between species is so fucking dumb it's insane. It's such a reductive way to think to believe that surival and reproduction are the only reasons why animal species evolve certain characteristics, plus it keeps describing evolution as a series of lamarckian changes. This isn't the case."Evolution" is not progression; it's the introduction of random genetic changes into each newborn individual of a given species. This HAPPENS TO BE effective for survival (correlation) because, given certain sudden environmental changes, it allows for certain animals to survive regardless (e.g. mammals instead of dinosaurs). But these characteristics are never "evolved": they randomly appear in individuals and are selected through random changes of the environment. Nothing in this mechanism suggests at any stage that individual traits and characteristics are developed FOR THE SAKE OF survival and reproduction. They appear randomly and are randomly selected - this is what actual evolutionary theory says. As long as you keep charging life with purpose, be it even the propagation of life, you're not thinking scientifically: it is simply never confirmed by actual historical observation of genetic changes between animal species that there is a "drive" towards survival at the level of species rather than the indiviual. The individual WANTS to surivive, and the individual wants to have sex - not even necessarily to reproduce!. The species HAPPENS TO SURVIVE thanks to the interaction of randomly selected traits and a random environment.All this to say: consciousness may as well be just one of many possible random mutations. The fact that it happens to function well in relation to some purposes does not demonstrate in any way that it was evolved in order to serve these purposes but simply that, among innumerable mutations that happened not to function in relation to the current environment, consciousness currently happens to do it (right now, in this environment, on this planet, and for a limited time).It is infinitely deeper and infinitely more challenging for thought to begin from the idea that this stuff is random and has no purpose, and see where you can go from there without introducing pointless teleologies (x is for survival, y is for reproduction, z is for God, etc.: it's the same) to connect your observations.
>>25207500i think their claim is 'minds that come up with reasons to persist are more likely to persist' (correct me if i'm wrong, op). it's a logical statement that to me seems obviously - perhaps trivially - true. the question is: is it interesting, is it useful, does it create new connections in our knowledge? of all that i'm doubtful.
>>25207593Imagine being a retard that still believes in neo-darwinistic garbage in the year 2026.>They appear randomly and are randomly selected - this is what actual evolutionary theory says. >and are randomly selectedYou even fuck this part up, somehow.
>>25207593nice job casually violating both the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics, JIDF
>>25207593>But these characteristics are never "evolved": they randomly appear"Kant, Herder’s one-time tutor, convulsively disagreed. He saw that Herder, through stressing the telic identity of rationality and bipedality, was unduly naturalising reason: immuring it, limiting it, reducing it to a physiologic quirk. 8 To counteract this and reiterate the non-natural nature of rationality, Kant would take extreme measures, urging that rationality didn’t arise because of uprightness, but that (reversing the teleology, to sinister effect) uprightness arose because of rationality. And the proof? Precisely that uprightness, from the vegetative organism’s perspective, was profoundly and overridingly cataclysmic, a total organic disaster""Standing upright is something that could be occasioned only by reasons and never by causes—this is Kant’s gambit on the matter." "Borrowing from the opinions of the Italian anatomist Pietro Moscati (1739–1824), Kant unfurls his arsenal of orthograde pathologies, almost taking a sadistic delight in cataloguing their overabundance (it is rare that Kant indulges, but here he does)" "Kant wants to stress the irreducibility of the normative over the natural: to flaunt his discovery of the topic-neutrality and time-generality of the rulishness of the rational <...> and yet, from the perspective of the natural, this ‘purity’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘emptiness’ of the transcendental can only be encountered as an invasive malignance and nosological apostasy from the placidity of mere existence" "Kant ends up implying that hominization is infection" "Schopenhauer merely develops the Kantian suggestion. That is, for Schopenhauer, self-consciousness is simply malignance: from the perspective of an otherwise blind will it can only be appraised as an accidental pathology. The survival of ‘brainless abortions’ and evidence for the ‘spinal soul’ empirically demonstrate this: acephaly proves that intellection is superfluous vis-à-vis organic reproduction and vegetative survival.15" "He cites Dietrich Tiedemann as originator of this parasitological theory of neurulation. Another acephologist and phylogenetic cartographer of the spine, Tiedemann had indeed previously proclaimed that ‘the nervous system […] appears to us as a parasite’." "If the CNS is a parasite, then reality is itself the symptomatology of viral invasion (insofar as, for Schopenhauer, ‘reality’ simply is nervous simulation). Reality-function is infection. Not only delusions, but the entire world of representation"
>>25207593>>252078132/2"Hartmann, however, took this Kantian-Schopenhauerian trajectory yet further. Recall how Lewis would later portray Hartmann, the catalyst of Germany’s nineteenth-century pessimism controversy and architect of Weltschmerz, as an ideologue of decerebration for whom ‘no brain at all is required’. 23 Lewis was in fact under-representing the true extremity of Hartmann’s views on the matter, however. <...> Hartmann took this conviction to ever more metaphysically maddening heights. <...> Hartmann was himself ‘far too dramatic’ to suggest ‘so tame’ a world-historical climax as individualistic asceticism, abstention, and anti-natalism, since, as Saltus relayed, it is not only ‘the species’ but the very ‘principle of existence itself’ which ‘must be extinguished’ and torn out at the root.27" "the eccentric prince Vladimir Odoevskii (1803–1869) <...> "There emerges a caste of thanatic philosophers—an intellectual priest-caste, hierophants of death, midwifes of omnicide"" "global eudaimonia slides into global euthanasia and the ultimate therapeutic is unveiled as the denizens of Odoevskii’s future world decide to go out with a bang. The thanatical doctors pledge themselves to the ‘only true and unfailing ally against [cruel existence’s] contrivances—to nothingness’, and the world welcomes a Last Messiah (‘at last he came, the Messiah of despair!’). Upon his pontifications, the population of earth pronounces an end to the self-elongating farce of the central nervous system. Stockpiling all of civilization’s explosives and placing them hemisphere-to-hemisphere, they blow up the entire planet, in order thus to end the traumas of terrestrial neurulation" "Yet Hartmann’s full injunction enjoins more than the mere destruction of our particular terran biosphere" "our solemn task is thus to become the universe’s way of killing itself; for we can’t just destroy ourselves, it is our duty to destroy everything. This, Hartmann expatiates, is the apotheosis of all cosmic striving—‘from primitive cell to the origin of man’—and is the pinnacle of ‘utmost world-progress’" "The ‘tame’ Schopenhauer is here criticized and duly surpassed: for he ‘conceived the problem [only] in an individual sense’—thus obviating its categorical force. "
>>25206818The very early universe was too hot or dense for even atoms to form, and interactions were very simple because of it. Around 400,000 years after the big bang the universe had expanded and cooled enough for atoms to form, which made possible the formation of stars and galaxies. This was a creative threshold where the universe radically changed to allow for vastly more possibilities. The first stars forged the heavier elements of which rocky planets like Earth are mostly comprised of, which made possible for the emergence of life and all its possibilities. This in turn allowed for the emergence of consciousness and all its possibilities.The trend is clear: the universe is a creative process that grasps beyond its immediate realizations towards novel possibilities wherever it can. It has a famous trend of "increasing complexity" which means "the significance of elements to each other." It is a community of co-creators comprised of all types of entities: an ecosystem.Every human impulse to create, explore, discover and love is an extension of the primordial creative impulse of the universe. Human curiosity isn't a fluke of evolution that has mere "fitness value," it comes from the deepest nature of existence.The purpose of human consciousness is to grasp towards potentialities beyond immediate needs. Just referencing biological fitness isn't enough because it doesn't take into account the whole epic of cosmic evolution, of which biological evolution is a part.
>>25206818Physicalism is false
>>25207833That doesn't mean that whatever Jewish nonsense you surely maintain is true.
>>25207831>It is a community of co-creators comprised of all types of entities: an ecosystem.>The purpose of human consciousness is to grasp towards potentialities beyond immediate needs. Just referencing biological fitness isn't enough1/2"Indeed, having been cranially outsourced by the seventeenth-century invention of calculus, and fully automated with the explosion in computation following the Second World War, simulation (at last fully externalized from the CNS via prosthetic delegation) now comes to progressively reverse-engineer the very structure of possibility itself. 16 For a science that incrementally relies on simulation (in the form of forecast) is a science that, at least in part, creates its own objects. This, in turn, engenders the tendency for us to live, more and more, in a world entirely of our own making. The distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ progressively collapses, as we see today in fields ranging from synthetic biology to genome editing, from climate engineering to nanotech to materials research. 17 Now unfurling on a global scale, prediction computes contingencies and provokes real-world preventative procedures, yet the exponential thickening of predictive infrastructures breeds ever more—and ever more novel—contingencies to predict." "More precisely, they achieve metastability. To paraphrase Wiener, living organisms are metastable Maxwell demons whose stable state is to be dead." "Given that intellect tends towards environmental manipulation, then, any sufficiently advanced intelligence becomes entirely indistinguishable from its own environment. 29 ‘Brains’ the size of gas giants, neutron stars, or even entire globular clusters would be only the very beginning of this tendency" "What we perceive as cosmological constants could just as well be neurotic stereotypies as ludic deliberations. What if physics is sedimented catatonia rather than petrified play? And memory need not be of intelligent origin: physics may indeed be a sedimented mnemeplex, but a pile of garbage is as much a ‘chronicle’ as a score-sheet; indeed, most memories aren’t designed (let alone pleasantly ordered); whatever their medium, they don’t have to be ‘directed’ in order to perpetuate and persist" "rather than background noise being revealed as intelligently structured signal, instead signal is revealed to be noise suffering from a prolonged (yet ultimately unsustainable) self-delusion that comes to call itself ‘structure’. Such ‘delusion’, of course, is conceptualized along the lines of an auto-repressive tendency and is inwardly registered as *trauma*"
>>25207831>>252078462/2"the built environment externalizes our anatomical poises and desires, but such externalization in turn reprograms us from the inside out." "Civilization grows an ectopic unconscious—an outpouching of drive-mechanism and erotic-cathexes, extracranially exported—like the mutant spider in the short story ‘The Voices of Time’, whose artificially expedited evolution enables it to externally ramify its CNS by weaving extra-somatic ganglion networks instead of a web, fabricating an everted second brain." "temporality becomes a global secretion of the CNS: a dendritic ejaculate, a product of innervation, an offshoot of being immured within a nervous system. 8 This ipso facto means that alterations to nervous systems are transportations in time." "This ‘time-sickness’ afflicts organisms altered by intervention, <...> altered by a changing environment, stimulated and aroused by ‘levels above [their] existing nervous system’. To experience the radically accelerating changes of our built environment is to experience the future coming early—which, again, is indistinguishable from experiencing the drag of the past—and this demands of us new appendages and new ‘forms of intuition’, which Ballard registers as subtle changes to the nervous system" "Here we finally arrive at the core Spinal Catastrophist contention: that each threshold in life’s serial deviations from immersion (CNS-implosion spinal-wrenching glottogonous encasement) instates thanataxic impulses toward rupturous resolution (return) into the surrounding media" "Schelling accepted that nature strives constantly for ‘annihilation of the individual’ and that it longs to ‘revert to universal indifference’" "And, as the Naturphilosophen before him had nervously realised, total anamnesis is indistinguishable from annihilation. Indeed, Ballard prophesies that, at the lowest spinal-neuronic levels, organic self-inclusion completely evaginates into the ‘inhospitality of the mineral world’"
>>25207848>(CNS-implosion -> spinal-wrenching -> glottogonous encasement)typo
>>25207831>Just referencing biological fitness isn't enough because it doesn't take into account the whole epic of cosmic evolution"Blumenberg, who explicitly linked our bipedal gait and binocular gaze to our singular conversancy with ‘existential risk’ (Existenzrisiko), relayed an illustrative thought-experiment. 34 Suppose some future intelligent observer uncovers fossilized Homo sapiens but finds no trace whatsoever of our globe-spanning prostheses alongside. Quite rightly, all that this intellect would observe is a petrified primate. Possibly one with a peculiar posture—as well as a grotesquely enlarged brain-capsule—but nothing more than a simian, nonetheless. (Our deep future palaeontologist would have no clue, Blumenberg notes, of how radical an effect this glabrous imp had had upon the history of life and earth systems.) 35 This simple Gedankenexperiment lets us know that ‘the human’ has already left its own cerebrospinal system (that ‘living fossil’—that ganglion stack hailing from the Paleozoic sea-bed). Our self-image includes far more than our bones. We live and think and have our being ex situ; Geist moves inwardly only ab exteriori. Yet Blumenberg is quick to note that this entails that the actual ‘flesh-and-blood’ human is now no more than a parasite within its ramifying prosthetic nexus and branching everted plexus. Citing Alsberg’s conviction that artificial exteriorization triggers somatic atrophy, Blumenberg notes that parasites, also, gradually lose their own organs of self-sufficiency by way of piggybacking upon inputs from the host-organism. ‘Man likewise becomes a parasite within the technological sphere of life’: foregoing sensory ‘reality-contact’ (Wirklichkeitskontakt)—undergoing attenuation of its indigenous nervous chronotope—in pursuit of artefactual-ectopic replacements."
>>25206818>wake up and shill Mainlander nilhilsm>get mocked>wake up and shill Metzinger NPC’s model>get mocked>wake up and shill Benatar>get mocked>wake up and shillMoynihan>get mocked>wake up and shill Becker>get mockedOP doesnt seem to be having much success in his year long campaign of shilling materialistic reductionistic nihilism.
>>25207929>materialistic reductionistic nihilism>>25207813>Kant wants to stress the irreducibility of the normative over the natural>hominization is infection
>>25207651>>25207677NTA but what's the point of these snarky posts with no content? Just say *why* he's wrong instead of vaguely alluding to it like a little bitch.
>>25206818Consciousness is the primary force, originating the whole world. Consciousness evolves despite this, which is fascinating. The genres of the Cosmos undulate, and ultimately triangulate the dreamer back to the center.
>>25206818Just read Thomas Ligotti
>Spinal Catastrophism>making up fake scientists and authors is LE PROFOUND ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTATION>performative schizophrenia means I can say whatever slop I want and present it as real scholarship>it's everyone else's job to wade through my bibliography and tease out what parts are real, and what parts are made up>this is a DEEP and SUPER SMART commentary on OUR SOCIETY and shiietI'm so tired of these anti-truth wankers. We all know it takes way more effort to dispel bullshit than to craft it. You're not being clever. It's not cute.
>>25207989But it has a cool cover
>>25207989>making up fake scientists and authorsThose are references to CCRU Writings.And it's easy to tell them apart from the real ones.
People and animals see objects in terms of their use. Food is what you eat. Water is what you drink, etc.In humans this instinct is even more pronounced, as we evolved alongside tool use.Due to increased intelligence, humans are able to introspect, i.e. view themselves as an object.Therefore, humans look for their own use as an object.This is confusing because people use vague words like "meaning", when they mean "purpose", or "function". This has also led to ideas of a creator, which would imbue humans with a function.Of course, because this answer is formed out of ignorance of the question, this does not even solve the problem. The use of an object is how it is used, not what its creator intended it to be used for.
>>25208040>People and animals see objects in terms of their use. Food is what you eat. Water is what you drink, etc.This is refuted by the prevalence of animism in pre-agricultural societies; what you are describing is an artifact of Western capitalist (now global) thought and practice. The Western conception of animism is "the belief that everything have souls" which is framed in the terms of Western philosophy and religion. The animist engages with the world in relational terms, and perceives the world as shimmering with value and personality.An example is found in this documentary following the hunt of an African hunter from a tribe that are one of the last remaining endurance hunters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o His hunt is driven by empathy; his success is dependent on his ability to connect with the animal's psyche. After he kills the animal he engages in a ritual of gratitude and respect for it.Your perspective is little more than a secularized version of the thesis of the first chapter of Genesis:>26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”>28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”>29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
>>25206818>The persistent search for meaning appears not to be a useless byproduct of consciousnesswas someone thinking that or?
>>25208092Contrast that with this Lakotan prayer:All my relations. I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer…To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages. I thank you.To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.Thank you for this Life.
>>25208039>everyone knows Glorp Shitto, it's so obvious!Just because you're in the loop doesn't make it any less vandalistic.
