Everything Happens For A Reason (page 2)

cofty

Everything happens for a reason. Physics is the study of those reasons

You are equivocating about the word 'reason'.

If you are implying agency then that has nothing to do with physics.

Things happened before reasoning existed (in human terms) reason is the calculated and accumulated knowledge of our evolutionary process. I cannot speak of any form of reasoning (if any) outwith the scope of my brains limitations.

Room 215

Of course everything happens for a reason; the great "why" seems to me the foundational proposition of science. Quantum physics represents an effort to explain the nature of light, among other observable phenomena.

Vanderhoven7

Some things happen for a reason; some don't.

jws

Yes, most things happen for a reason. Doesn't mean there was motive or intelligence behind it.

Why did somebody die of a heart attack? Genetics and lifestyle were probably the reason.

Even chance. Why did you meet your best friend? Because you both happened to be in a situation to meet.

Is there a grand scheme or somebody manipulating fate? I do not think so. I seriously doubt there is anything with that power.

But it is something comforting we tell ourselves to feel better. Like saying a dead person is in a better place or that now their suffering is over. It's the positive outlook to think everything happens for a reason and foreshadows something better to come because of it. But I don't believe in that.

Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho

@galaxie: "I cannot speak of any form of reasoning (if any) outwith the scope of my brains limitations."

You'd be surprised.

There’s this idea in Jungian psychology called The Circumambigulation. Jung basically believed that you had a potential “future self” which would be, in potential, everything that you could be, and it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things. And the things that you’re interested in are the things that would guide you in the path that would lead you to maximal development.

While that sounds like a metaphysical or even a mystical idea, it’s actually not. It’s a really profoundly biological idea. Your interest is essentially captured by the things that will lead you down the path of better development. We basically rose out of the dirt and the muck three and a half billion years ago and here we are, conscious, but not exactly knowing what it IS that's guiding our individual thought systems on this lifelong journey.

It was through developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, that I began to understand that our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream. That dream is informed in a complex way by the way we act. All of us act out things in a way we don’t always understand. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t need a psychology, a sociology and an anthropology, etc because we would be completely transparent to ourselves - and we’re clearly not. We’re much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way we behave contains way more information than we know.

It was Freud who popularized the notion that your actions, your perceptions and your thoughts were all informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that were not part of your voluntary control. I find that an incredibly strange thing. It’s one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories, which are something like: you’re a loose collection of living sub-personalities, each with its own set of motivations, perceptions and emotions and rationales. And you have limited control over that. You’re like a plurality of internal personalities that’s loosely linked into a unity.

We know this because we can’t control ourselves very well, which is one of Jung’s objections to Nietzsche’s idea that we could create our own values. Jung didn’t believe that, especially after interacting with Freud, because he saw that human beings were deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control. But no one really knows how to conceptualize those things.

The cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines. The ancient people thought of them as gods. For example, rage was a god. The god Mars possessed a soul who was feeling that emotion, causing that person to say what it wanted to say. And it didn’t just inhabit an individual - it inhabited everyone, including animals - and lives forever. So you have this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body in politic like a thought inhabits the brain.

LONG STORY SHORT: We can derive from the psychoanalysts that there are things inside you that are happening that control YOU instead of the other way around. I’m sure there’s a bit of reciprocal control, but these internal manifestations of subconscious spirits (so to speak) determine the manner in which you walk through life. Perhaps it is THIS reason that everything you've done in your life has happened.

galaxie

@wake me up.....sounds like someone elses reasoning ( based on idea) is of profound interest to you, theories are all very well, but anything with a 'biological ' basis should require evidence before i buy it. Best wishes.

Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho

@galaxie: “sounds like someone elses reasoning… is of profound interest to you”.

Well, of course. That is the case for all thinking people. Perhaps some are more conscious than others of the fact that thoughts don’t just appear in our minds out of nowhere. Often, as you indicated, they’re someone else’s thoughts - someone long dead, in many cases. Even the words we use to think are utterances of people who have been long dead. Consider your seemingly innocuous disposition of requiring evidence before you “buy it”. That’s hardly an original stance, yet if we were to critically deconstruct each and every phrase, thought and idea that one another uttered, we’d find ourselves spending days at a time trying to get through a single conversation.

I’m not sure why you put “biological” in inverted commas. Were you simply quoting me? Or were you unable to connect the principle of human biology with our quest toward maximal development within our species? One just needs to take a glance at drama, mythology, literature, art - even the very discussion we’re having on this thread - to see a common theme of humanity’s struggle to rise above its animal forebearers and become more conscious of what it means to be human.

Charles Gillette

So then, the earthquakes in Haiti and the tsunami that took millions of lives..happened for a reason what reason can we give for the Holocaust. Ask those individuals not to worry it all happened to you for a reason. I just cannot accept this. Blueblades

Jehalapeno

What do you mean by “happen for a reason”? Do you mean they happen to affect something in the future? That I don’t believe.

But earthquakes do happen for a reason. That reason being that tectonic plates in the earth crash with each other.

Holocausts happen for a reason. That reason being that man frequently underestimates the capacity of their fellow man for committing evil acts.

But they didn’t happen because of fate.

However, for everything that happens to mankind, you can point to a root reason that caused it to happen.

Everything Happens For A Reason

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