exchristian

Oh, what you typed isn't crap, haha, and dang, you don't have to prioritize this before some tough upcoming work! I'm not suddenly going to off myself upon having these thoughts (rather, I want to keep positive experiences going), so I'll still be here to read—but I appreciate the care nonetheless.

Like Flagstaff and monocle don't really exist, except that we do. You don't give names to ants. It's just ants.

I'd rebut that by saying that's only because they all look identical to us, and their more basic form of organism limits them from exhibiting drastically different behavior as people can way more observably demonstrate. I don't know if scientists have studied whether bugs can identify each other; perhaps they can. Perhaps even their sense of the passage of time is different from ours.

We don't need a higher power for that.

This isn't a matter of "need," though; we basically can't turn back to thoughts of a deity because of the massive logic defiance alone anyway, among other things. Rather, I would also raise uncertainty over this:

we are the colony.

I just don't know about that. Sure, society makes us relatively much safer off than we otherwise probably would be without it, but we still very much have our own individual independence or else there wouldn't be anywhere near as much social rebellion and harm done to others, from Luigi's shooting to the auto-denied claims equally. We are a part of society and can either continue supporting it, trying to change it, or actively leaving it or even antagonizing it.

I just don't see any overarching reasons to prioritize one or the other beyond:

• evolutionary altruism
• fear of discomfort
• feelings

In light of the eventual death of even society (that's an assumption I'm making, I'll concede, sure), one can't claim to take any particular one-of-the-above-actions versus anything else... beyond merely wanting to do it or not. Anything else is a false sense of nonexistent moral superiority over the other possible actions/reactions. One only helps the colony/society because it makes one feel good, but death still ultimately obliterates all—and all values with it. I guess that is where the crux of my developing, reluctant philosophy lies.

So it's like we couldn't have ended up anywhere else because that's what we have decided to do. This conversation is what we've decided to do. This is the question of free will.

The indeterminability posed by quantum physics—specifically quasars—would like to have a word with you. There is some interesting stuff here to suggest that bugs aren't all instinct, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_Cognition