An old question which bugged philosophers of all ages and places: what is the purpose of our life?
Is happiness the goal? What results in happiness? Or is there/should there be a purpose for life? Can't we just live like a cow? Is a cow happy? Or just plain dumb? Ignorance is bliss after all and cows hardly cry and seem to be at peace with themselves. Since we are humans, we seem to have a lot of desires, unlike cows.
Desire is the root-cause of all misery according to Buddha. The lack of desire should come from an actual self-realization that desire is meaningless. I suspect such a philosophy will lead to a civilization in decline, which abandons/devalues all things material. (How much of this affected India is anyone's guess!) These ideas contrast with the ideas of disinterestedness in the result of one's action (nishkama karma) but not in action itself and the importance given to all the four stages of human life - student, householder, retired and renounced - in Gita.
I believe, the purpose or meaning of life does not lie in some end goal, but lies in the pursuit/action itself. I mean there is not enough time in one human life to know all that is there to know, to do all that is there to do and to feel all that is there to feel. So experience the life.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Free will vs. Determinism
One of my first blogs (Probability and human will and Fate, time n God) here is about whether we really have free will or is it all predetermined. Since then, I realized that many people have been trying to answer similar questions.
Princeton is conducting a series of lectures on the so called Free will theorem. There is an interesting discussion regarding the same in slashdot recently. Here, free will is roughly defined as any behavior that is not determined by the past. The fascinating aspect of the theorem is that it roughly implies that if we have free will, then so do elementary particles (like electrons).
My knowledge of quantum mechanics is very limited to understand the theorem completely. May be when I get more time to read and learn about it, I can understand better.
Princeton is conducting a series of lectures on the so called Free will theorem. There is an interesting discussion regarding the same in slashdot recently. Here, free will is roughly defined as any behavior that is not determined by the past. The fascinating aspect of the theorem is that it roughly implies that if we have free will, then so do elementary particles (like electrons).
My knowledge of quantum mechanics is very limited to understand the theorem completely. May be when I get more time to read and learn about it, I can understand better.
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