Holden,
Thank you for the explanation. All three,Schopenhauer, Hinduism and Budhism are difficult subjects. My ignorance is vast so the only thing I know is we are in an age–an era of depravity that the Hindus call the Age of Kali where violating laws is unnecessary because all crimes are legal since we are in a corrupt civilization. In short, we can shout "Long live crime".
I also read that the Buddha believed that health, strength, beauty, culture, learning, and wealth were vanities and that in Hinduism, the Buddha appears as the ninth avatar of Vishnu. For the Hindus, sin exists because man is made with hunger.
There are crimes because of a design flaw. This design flaw makes man nourish himself by slaughtering other species.If humans could live on chemicals, there would be no crime and destruction. I am sure you already know this.
Supposedly the last words the Buddha said were: “Doubt everything. Find your own light!” and I read that in 1963 in Saigon a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, in a lotus position at a crossroads, saturated with petrol, burned himself to death, protesting the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. It was useless because the war there continued until 1975.
If we are robots, it would be strange to ask about human consciousness and intelligence. Maybe these are preconceived ideas that were implanted into us, human beings. So that we believe ourselves to be what we are not.
Why were we born? What is thinking for if we are to die?
All what we believe, think, feel, touch, see and hear, taste, is pointless if we are to age, get sick, and die. If we were robots, could we have souls? Absurd question for a machine. Absurd question for anyone implanted into a sack of rotten flesh and bones.
We are product, designed, Who knows?, there must be an engineer behind all this. If human beings are guinea pigs
The little I know is that the ancients believed that our thoughts were light. As light is everywhere so information is everywhere. Everything is psychic, they believed. They said that humans did not invent anything, they just picked things from this circuit of light. We do not invent, we remember. Abstract thoughts are implanted into human beings. If we did not have language, we would have to roar like a tiger if we were angry.
I think that it will be very difficult for human beings in a near future to believe in a spirit able to transcend beyond this matrix, this artificial intelligence. I think the scientists will have to prove that the sun and the stars are natural. Maybe they are simple bulbs coming from other entities in this universe. Like a virus that gets into our system,for this mycroscopic being our body is an entire universe.
So we could be in a virtual world and as science, technology and robotics increase human knowledge, it will be complicated for us to keep faith in a spirit and transcendence. If the programmers confined us into a human body, what could happen if we are confined into metal like the cyborgs? Maybe we are already cyborgs and we just don’t want to know.
I can imagine the programmers laughing at the sorrows of the human cyborgs. Because these cybors have been already programmed to ask these questions. If we are indeed a creation, our future has been programmed or predefined with a sense of utility.
Stay safe and ride safely too.