UKH

It just occurred to me earlier that on the off chance there is a purpose or reason for the universe existing, then there's a good chance that life has no part in it, just a random inconsequential occurrence.

What are your thoughts, or other musings?

In reply to The Potato:

I was picking my feet watching the telly earlier and I was wondering why do we have toenails?

In reply to The Potato:

In an infinite number of multiverses of infinite size, everything is possible. 

Simple.

In reply to The Potato:

I like potatoes.

In reply to The Potato:

Why is bellybutton fluff always blue?

In reply to The Potato:

You keep excellent company.

In the novel "The Triumph of Time" (1959), James Blish makes his characters experience the end of the universe.

One of them  makes the point that "even the many regularities of nature which had been discovered since scientific method had begun to be exploited were simply local discontinuities in an overall scheme whose sole continuity is chaos.

Touring the universe by ear alone, you would hear nothing by a horrifying and endless roar for billions of years; then a three-minute scrap of Bach which stood for the whole body of organised knowledge; and then the roar again for more billions of years. And even the Bach, should you pause to examine it, would in a moment or so decay into John Cage and rapidly merge with the prevailing unmitigable tumult".

In reply to aln:

Why do men get bellybutton fluff and women don't? (Or, to be more precise, I don't so I assume women don't??)

In reply to girlymonkey:

I reckon hair has something to do with it.

I have a slightly interesting, in a slightly disgusting navel-gazing sort of way, anecdote about bellybutton fluff. Some years ago I had surgery that left my bellybutton a bit pocket shaped. It now collects fluff like you wouldn't believe, I have to empty it every day. And the fluff matches my shirt! I reckon the reason most people's fluff is always the same colour is that it takes days to collect, so it's always a mixture. 

In reply to The Potato:

Why do we have lips? 

In reply to aln:

So you can tell which end to put the food in?

In reply to Maggot:

I don't think so - rather, in an infinite number of multiverses of infinite size, everything possible, no matter how unlikely, must exist.

There could still be impossibilities, which couldn't exist - infinity times 0% chance is still 0% chance.

In reply to The Potato:

The stoics had a lot to say about this. 

They believed in divine providence, this is the idea that there is a higher power in the universe that has good intentions, although this power was not omnipotent like the Gods of monotheistic religions. This is in contrast to the epicureans who believed the universe was chaos and atoms.

They distinguished humans from animals by our capacity for reason. Unlike animals we need not be dragged around by our impulses.  

They said we should use that reason to define ourselves in the universe. We are not the things around us that are beyond our control, such as what others do, the weather, our status in society, wealth or even our bodies. The things that are meaningful and in our control are our will, attitude, actions and opinions. 

The stoics said we should neither flee suffering or chase pleasure and fundamentally we must overcome these impulses so that we can carry out our ultimate duty which is the love and service of humankind. 

In reply to freeflyer:

Did the characters in James Blish's novel go to the restaurant at the end of the universe?

In reply to Lankyman:

I was picking my feet watching the telly earlier and I was wondering why do we have toenails?

Climbers must be tortured - natural order of things.

In reply to The Potato:

Ask the White Mice

In reply to So that we don’t burn our throats with hot drinks. We didn’t realise the danger of the straw that the waitress put in our daughter’s hot chocolate until she was screaming in pain.

In reply to The Potato:

Why do I exist?

Officially.

My dad going to a registry office seems a rather casual start from which everything* else flows.

*passport, NI number, taxes, banking, driving licence, polling cards...

In reply to The Potato:

It's a widely disseminated trope but it's the best that I've encountered that says "You are the Universe experiencing itself", I can settle for that.

In reply to veteye:

No but that book has a spaceship with the best button ever invented: when you press it, it says "do not press this button again".  Now every online transaction system has one.

Blish had some fab AI characters though - the City Fathers. As it was written in the 50s, they were mainframes that rattled around on tramways in order to make the right connections. They were pretty cool. If you did something which threatened the survival of the city, they had you shot.

In reply to wercat:

Pan dimensional beings if you please

In reply to broken spectre:

Yes this is the conclusion I came to and have accepted for the past 20 or so years. Life is the universe's way of experiencing itself, like sensory organs.

In reply to The Potato:

Realising you have no purpose, consequence or relevance is remarkably liberating. 

In reply to girlymonkey:

Do people with outies get belly button fluff or is it only innies? Life is full of big questions...

In reply to The Potato:

A theory I read today reckons there's a single solitary electron in the universe busy travelling backwards and forwards in time being everywhere at once https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe#:~:text=The%20one%2De....

In reply to broken spectre:

I prefer to think of each electron as a point of presence of a field entity where it tangles with other fields to form a congealed lump

If you "Twang!" it then ripples spread out through the field to affect other points of presence.  We have used this since the C19th as Wireless.

In reply to The Potato:

I would be interested to know the reason for the 3 downvotes, not that it matters