You know, I'm an optimistic nihilist for the most part. I only believe in things that can be backed by hard evidence and science. The problem is you hear something enough times you start to second guess yourself. Which brings me to my question /his/, does karma exist or does our brain just like to find patterns to justify otherwise meaningless phenomena?
>>981630
Why are good people raped and killed? Why do evil people die happy? No, karma does not exist. The universe does not care about you.
Karma is just implicit morality, so, I can't say I believe it is an actual phenomena.
>>981644
yeah that was a pure choice of words i should have said occurences
>>981640
>The universe does not care about you.
as I get older I'm learning this and it's really eye-opening and i don't know why people run away from this fact my upbringing was conservative christian so my whole life I've been led in the direction of mysticism and weird forces being at work to govern the universe but like you stated "why are good people raped and killed"
i feel as if people with limited life experience will just tailor their philosophies to be as cuddly and picturesque as possible
>>981640
The idea is that there is punishment in the next life for bad behavior and rewards for good. good people in this life may very well have earned a punishment carrying over from the past life, and the opposite is true for sinners. It is unfalsifiable, but not inconsistent.
>>981656
*poor, even
>>981657
there is no afterlife though, consciousness is just an emergent phenomena that terminates at death
>>981656
Here's a good quote from Blood Meridian:
>"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning."
>>981667
Neither your position nor the one I estabished can be proven right or wrong.
>>981674
Your position romanticizes existence thoroughly. There is no benevolent force keeping score or making sure everything balances out.
>>981630
remove this lewd filth
If you are a dick to others in your community, even if no one knew it was you being a dick, the victims of your dickishness will be more likely to be dicks to others, and so on. Eventually it effects you.
>>981630
Karma does not exist, but everything is interconnected.
Everything on this world works on a basis of cause and effect.
Does OP realize that we can see when they comment on their own post? It's just kind of awkward.
Plus, the idea of karma contains the implicit assumption that the soul is a stable construct throughout its various incarnations, which runs into the mathematical issue of the amount of human beings versus the amount of souls, and runs quickly into logical contradiction.
As well, the idea of karma implies a universal morality being imposed as a tally sheet for "good" and "bad" actions in its most simple representation, which yields the absurdity of humans being held to "rules" that are not clearly stated.
Thus, the traditional sense of "karma" seems most likely a rationalization of the difficulty we have reconciling the awareness or experience of "bad things happening to good people."
The answer, of course, is explained through understanding that everything is information. It would only be possible to understand the consequences of every action, and thereby understand their effects, if there were a source of omniscience whereupon all possible information were known.
This would, of course, imply a position from outside of a closed system of information, and may not be possible from within it.
I find it infinitely encouraging to imagine that at some future point, all humans will have the experience of having lived every human life within their system of information, thus understanding which actions yielded which results and how everybody felt about everything.
On a possibly related note, this reminds me of the Qu'ran verse "to kill any person is to kill all of humanity." Sorta weird.
To actually live this way is quite difficult, for you have to recognize that at every moment, everyone you see is experiencing you as you will someday experience yourself, and every action you make against someone you also make against yourself.
The false binary of the self and the other becomes dissolved, and you begin to understand the experience of all human consciousness.
Maybe.
>>981728
You're absolutely right. That's why karma isn't some sort of "cosmic moral force," but is instead actually just a complex system of cause and effect that works off the idea that the actions you take today will subtly influence the conditions for your happiness/suffering in the future.
>>981849
>On a possibly related note, this reminds me of the Qu'ran verse "to kill any person is to kill all of humanity." Sorta weird.
You left out the key word from that verse which changes its whole meaning and that is "innocent"
>>981630
>does karma exist
>all these wrong answers on it
If you believe in reincarnation like the karma can be from any past life. So a good/bad life you're living now can be the shit you're experiencing from a past life.
Gotta work that wheel to non existence anon
>>981630
There is a misconception in the west that Karma acts on a moral basis when it is in fact a simple expression of causality.
>I only believe in things that can be backed by hard evidence and science
>>981796
The first line is true, unless you mean some sort of spiritual interconnection.
The second line is unproven, especially if you speak with a particle physicist about photon causality.
>>982080
A simple expression of causality is a Rube Goldberg Machine
Karma is the belief that a beings current existence is the summation of all of their actions in this and their previous lives. Believing in Karma requires the belief in Reincarnation as well. Both of which are so mired in religious inconsistencies, as well as sectarian disagreements, that they are very complex.
When Physics asks a question you can give it one answer and be correct, simple. When Religion asks a question a chorus of different voices all shout the "correct" answer, complex.
As to the OP, the human brain, and genome come to think of it, are constantly looking for patterns to increase the productivity of humanity as a whole. When the Genome makes a mistake someone gets cancer, when a thought system makes a mistake somebody starts a war. Either way people die, and their lives do matter in how they are remembered, so either do something worth being remembered for, or have enough children that one of your progeny at some time in the future finds out a little bit about you from Ancestry
It's all in your head. Karma does not exist, nor do any other mystical phenomena. Such concepts were constructed by people who failed to recognize reality and how it tick on any basic level, or sought to exploit people's stupidity for their own personal gain, this goes for both religion, secular ideology, and philosophy Have you ever heard of Objectivism? it might be right up your alley. (Ironic, huh?)
