johnny black

A couple of people have made comments to the effect of "your actions have big consequences over time", but that's just not the case. The butterfly flapping its wings idea is a reference to chaos theory, basically the study of non-linear math. Chaos theory tells us that some things have huge effects, but not everything, in fact not most things. Millions of butterflies create trillions of flaps every day, it's doubtful that more than a handful in history have ever had an effect over more than ten yards. Human lives are the same way, most of us will die, and from the perspective of someone in a parallel universe in which you died during childbirth, nothing will be noticeably different.

If you do somehow affect the world in a significant way, what of it? You probably won't even be aware of what it was that you did. Space travel is as likely to come about because you got killed by a drunk driver and the person you would have married ends up marrying someone else thus setting off a chain of events, as it is to come about because of some thought provoking comment you made to someone based on your education and hard work. You can't predict what effect your actions will have over the long term. Humanity may have a better chance to survive in the future if you kill yourself tonight, there's no way to tell.

But really, why should you even care whether humanity survives after you die? You are a pattern of atoms, when that pattern can no longer hold itself together it will cease to care about other patterns. The atoms certainly won't care what pattern they're in. In the end, they are just a pattern themselves, and they will break down. Humanity is just a bigger pattern of which you will be a part for a short while, like an atom that is part of the pattern of you. Why should you care about the future of the humanity pattern any more than an atom should care about the future of your body pattern?

Most people want their kids or ideas or both to live on. We are told that selfishness is bad, and meeting the needs of people we do not know is a greater good than just caring about the people we know. We venerate people like Mother Theresa who live out these values. Yet there are people who think the humanity pattern is a blight on the larger planetary ecology pattern and should be eliminated. Are we being selfish as human beings if we disagree? Our values are arbitrary, inconsistent, and thus impossible to attain, not that we can do more than take a random stab at them anyway, because our limited perspectives cannot see the long term effects of actions that we will no longer care about in a hundred years anyway.

Is it liberating to realize that your actions don't matter? Sure. Is it a superior way to live? No. The universe doesn't acknowledge any actions as being superior. We all end up exactly the same. That doesn't stop you from making choices, but it does make those choices irrelevant and meaningless. The person who discusses philosophy and thinks about what they should do is no better or worse than the person who tortures and murders women to satisfy his control fantasies, or the person who acts at random, or the person who kills themselves and makes no more choices at all.

Nothing is worth doing any more or less than anything else... however you want to state it, it's the same thing. It's a choice, in the same way that having a choice between two doors that lead to the same room is a choice. Why even bother to make it?