Well, there seems to be no ultimate purpose. Life will take whatever purpose you want to give it. No purpose, if it gives you happiness, is a less perfect purpose. It could be a simple or complex reason, but its aptness will only depend on its ability to motivate you / make you happy and nothing else.
We are but a speck of dust in the unraveling of the universe, and there is no less or more important purpose if we consider the scale at which we exist. We all have risen from this earth, and to it we shall return in time. But for the time we are here, let's not squander away our precious time. Let's do something to make it count for ourselves.
I was reminded of how much people like Steve Jobs and Mahatma Gandhi were fond of walking. Jobs turned the act of taking a walk into a management tactic, and Gandhi converted the walk into a political weapon with his salt satyagraha.
I remember doing Sign Language recognition through Kinect in my Master's thesis. I did it for a vocabulary of 140 words of Indian Sign Language with a success rate of 70% using the Machine Learning approach. Here is the video of the prototype that I built:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oqD-_UCHxQ
There is this oft-repeated idea in modern culture: do what you love, and love what you do. But how do you find your passion? How does a person know what to aim for in life? I think it is the extra curricular activities that you do which determine if you'd find your passion. All the time that you spend in tinkering with stuff, reading books, playing games, hanging out with friends after school is the time you could find that. It is true that those passions change with age, but with any luck and a good teacher / parent) those passions could become your vocations. I remember the intial scene of the movie 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron' and realize that childhood is that time when we are free to experiment, unfettered by society's rules.
Schools teach us how to be disciplined and work hard, but a creative and a critical mind requires more to survive. It requires an atmosphere of similar kind of people, a place to keep on practicing its creativity.
"...and I suspect that a more free-wheeling, anarchic organization is the secret of our greater capacities of creativity, imagination, thinking outside the box and all that, and the price we pay for it is our susceptibility to obsessions, mental illnesses, delusions and smaller problems."
Great observation! Isn't it true that the geniuses of this world have very often been afflicted with mental abnormalities? Take the most brilliant mathematicians, engineers, scientists; so many of them faced such problems. There indeed seems to be some connection between the mind's capacity to innovate and create and its capacity to suffer delusions and obsessions. Take examples of Gödel, Turing, Tesla, Hemingway, etc.
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/mad-geniu...
>geniuses of this world have very often been afflicted
Maybe so, but don't forget, there is no "normal" human being. We create the criteria of genius, normal and mental illness all in order to fulfill our social needs. It's possible we categorize certain individuals as genius and afflicted just so we can deny them the fruits of their labor. It's possible we create the concept of normalcy just so we can leverage techniques of mass manufacturing and social control.
It's possible that innovation without being identified as a genius is a smart way to escape the disadvantages of being labelled afflicted. It's possible Dennett's newest change-of-mind is just an update to the fairy tale that tells those in charge how to handle workers for the maximum effect and least disruption.
After all, who wants anarchic disruptions in the social order? We want reliable electrical networks and food delivery, not creative, experimental protests. So instead of heeding the words directly of those with insight, appeal to their ego, call them geniuses, strip their innovations to the bare minimum and label them as crazy or problematic to keep them separated safely from others. (cough) Torvalds (cough) RMS.
Maybe so. Even though I am not aware of any studies of this kind of a link between insanity and genius, the kinds of afflictions I am talking about are not imaginary. They are real mental disorders like OCD, bipolar disorder etc.
> Isn't it true that the geniuses of this world have very often been afflicted with mental abnormalities?
In a manner of speaking. People who prefer conformity, who think everyone should be the same, can't resist labeling smart people as "afflicted". This is a practice with a long history. The most recent, wildly popular effort was called "Asperger Syndrome", one that's just now being abandoned because of the damage it caused.
To someone who thinks everyone should be the same, anything that sets one apart in a behavioral sense is a "mental abnormality". But evolution by natural selection requires diversity, so in a more basic biological sense, it's the people who want everyone to be the same that represent the abnormal state of mind.
> Take the most brilliant mathematicians, engineers, scientists; so many of them faced such problems.
The problems faced by bright people are mostly caused by their dumb neighbors' belief that everyone should be like them.
If your mind can range over a wider variety of ideas, you're more likely to discover good ones that others haven't discovered yet. You're also more likely to discover ideas that are completely batshit insane, because you've got fewer filters to prevent yourself from taking them seriously.
What is the point in having such _days_? Consequently, shouldn't we also have a Scientists' day, an Actors' day, a Plumbers' day, blah blah? Everyone has a place in the universe. All we have to do is never to forget our true calling.
That's the heritage of Soviet Union, where people of labor were the cornerstone of ideology. Consequently every profession got the day to celebrate. I haven't seen it in any other country.
It varies country by country, but I'm pretty sure you'll find various aspects of humanity being celebrated on specific days (women, father/mother, workers, and so on), sometimes even at the UN level (i.e. theoretically worldwide). The point is to get mainstream attention to the achievements and problems of specific and necessary roles which would otherwise be mostly overlooked.
In some cases the celebration is named after the activity (e.g. fighting cancer), but meaning is exactly the same -- would calling it "Programming Day" suit you better?
Those days do exist, eg. Plumber's Day is April 25th.
They are taken about as seriously as Programmer's Day in most of the world (ie. not much, most people have no idea they exist, even people in that profession).
It really does not matter if there is something more serious like a vulnerability in the question. And so what if the link was a covert advertisement, the community is still benefitted if a popular product is put under the scanner. It is a win-win.
except for the part where there is no actual vulnerability, it was actually a design decision[1], and the author of the article was raising ridiculous scaremongering questions that he knew the answers to in order to attract more attention.
