Click here to support the Daily Grail for as little as $US1 per month on Patreon

The Nature of Existence

By Gregon

Here’s yet another documentary exploring the minor question of The Nature of Existence:

What if you asked the religious experts, gurus, scientists, and everyday people of the world why we exist? Why are we here, and what are we supposed to do about it? What started the Universe, and was it a mistake? Does God exist, and why does he seem so interested in our sex lives? After exploring the phenomenon of Trekkies, filmmaker Roger Nygard took on The Nature of Existence. Nygard wrote down the toughest 85 questions he could think of,roamed the globe to the source of each of the world’s philosophies, religions, and belief systems, and interviewed people who have influenced, inspired, or freaked out humanity.

His travels highlight the words of such luminary figures as Indian holy man Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Chinese Taoist Master Zhang Chengda, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind, wrestler Rob Adonis, confrontational evangelist Brother Jed Smock, novelist Orson Scott Card, director Irvin Kershner, Stonehenge Druids Rollo Maughfling & King Arthur Pendragon and many more….

Applying an investigative approach to a spiritual quest, the film is a humorous and uplifting journey, presenting some of the most challenging ideas and extraordinary people you’ll ever see.

And here’s the trailer:

The documentary begins showing this month at selected cinemas across the U.S. Full details and more information are available at the official website.

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
Related

7 Comments

  2. The Final Frontier
    When I was a child, I was certain that the “final frontier” lay in Space.

    I grew up to be a teen, and then I realized that there was a closer “final frontier” to be explored: our own oceans.

    But, as I grow older and older, I get the feeling that we as humans are at an impasse. That in order to keep on with our journey as an intelligent species, we must finally face that which has stared us in the face all along: the nature of our own existence.

    Until we do, I fear we won’t be able to advance much further into solving and/or exploring those other aspects of our reality.

    Human consciousness is the REAL final frontier for the XXIst century. And we’ve barely given a small step inside of it.

    1. I was exactly the same as a
      I was exactly the same as a kid. Space seemed the great unknown.

      The hard problem of consciousness does seem intractable, but the easy problem is being probed from many angles. I don’t think it is entirely fair when I see people saying it is entirely un-progressed. There are testable ideas at least. Perhaps by the end of our lifetimes their may be an answer forming towards that.

      Ideology seems to be the issue. I refrain from saying problem since I am not sure whether it is. Many belief systems elevate ideology above systematics. If we are energy beings from another dimension then perhaps ideology is more important than physics and biology in understanding this issue.

      Some things can be measured and answered, such as ‘Is the temperature of my cup of tea above 50 degree’s?’ It has a definitive answer. Something like ‘Should education or health care be free at the point of use?’ or ‘Should we pay disability benefit to people who are poorly sighted?’ do not have any answer you can measure. They are ideological. This difference between questions that have answers and those that develop ideology may be crucial here.

      Does the universe care about the ideological? Many belief systems join the moral and ideological stances into one and embed it in the fabric of meaning, so maybe. (So caring for your neighbour, or doing other good, becomes a reason why we, and by extension the universe, exist)

      The hard problem of consciousness is going to be difficult to crack, perhaps impossible given its ideological nature (is an AI that can behave in every way like a human conscious?, is a Dog? or an amoeba?). Even harder might be if the meaning and reason for the universe is based on the whim of a deity, in which case the answer might be fundamentally ideological and wholly un-understandable through study.

      Do people here think there is much hope to answering the question if the answer remains, or truly is, ideological?

      1. hard question
        One reason why the question of consciousness will remain intractable is that we keep moving the goalposts.

        We are not anywhere near understanding what it actually is. But we have found out quite a few things, and what we have found is all purely mechanical. Well, chemical and electro-chemical and computational. Many people have worked hard on these things. Of course we can say, with justification, that they haven’t found any miraculous or spiritual stuff because they were looking into the mechanical side of things.

        There haven’t really been innovative new findings from the spiritual side of this as far as I know. But then many believers in this approach have considered the problem solved for a long time, so why would they do much looking.

        On the constructionist side (is “constructionist” a word?), there have been advances towards building conscious machines. Not that we have any of those, but we have machines that can do decent decision making, for special environments. And decent scene analysis, and similar things like that. I would consider that making progress towards consciousness, even though it is far away from it, and probably we will never get there with the methods used. But it does help our understanding to develop things further, and perhaps exclude more things that are not consciousness.

        However, this last part is how we move the goalposts. Whenever we do manage to explain something with mechanical means, or duplicate something with mechanical means, we say that this wasn’t really part of consciousness to begin with.

        That of course leads to the position that some people hold – by the time we are done with the subject, we won’t have found an explanation for consciousness, we will just have eliminated all aspects of it.

        If they are right, consciousness is an illusion. But then, who is being fooled? is it just me?

        1. You fool! 🙂

          If they are right, consciousness is an illusion. But then, who is being fooled? is it just me?

          You & me both 😉

          Look, we’ve been discussing how there’s not enough money to go to Mars, or to install a meteor shield, or going to Europa or another cool space project you can think of.

          But what of the money used to study those quirky aspects of human consciousness?

          Dr. Strassman hypothesizes that the pineal gland is responsible for secreting DMT. So far it’s not been proved. Ok, so, how much money and resources does it take to study this further?

          And what of the straining situation our guest blogger Julie Beischel faces with her own investigation?

          The answer is obvious: there’s only so much money that can devoted to science, and the people in Academia dictate what deserves more funding and what doesn’t —please don’t take this as an attack on ‘Science’ itself…

          I think this impasse would only be solved when someone like Rboert Bigelow decides to fund those kind of research. Problem is, that tycoon won’t feel obligated to share the results of those investigations with you and I.

          1. Both right.
            Earthling, I think you hit one of the nails on its head. I wonder whether this has been the case with all the natural sciences. The scientific project if I can get away with calling it that has been very much about taking back explanations from the spiritual (which laid claim to everything it could get its hands on) and slowly redefining the natural world as natural. We are still playing with concepts though. We have equations describing electrons, but they do not come with a label declaring them non-spiritual, just understandable; to some perhaps. There is a funny line dividing the two into camps (ideology?), but I would contest that it is removable if we want. Perhaps we simply understand aspects of the spiritual mathematically now. This strange division seems more understandable if you accept that the ‘spiritual’ has not in fact been a description of anything other than ideological positions; then the boundary between natural and spiritual can be allowed to evaporate as a human artefact rather than a universal one.

            I can envisage an argument against that along the lines of the spiritual being mysterious events, not just interpretation, but it laid claim to so much in the past (such as volcano’s, storms, illness etc) that any interpretation of unknown phenomena is surely just as likely to fall under the influence of ideology as at any time in the past; with the key point being that we do not know.

            Either way, I think it is worth considering whether the boundary, which perhaps is diminished in such things as Pantheism, is illusory, existing as it does not in reality, but in language. Or something like that.

            RPJ,
            I agree. I used to find that argument more dissatisfying than I do now after a year here, but not so much any more. I guess there are trends that come and go with time. Sometimes it is claimed that ideology dictates interpretation. I still generally feel this is overstated, but ideology can definitely control funding. String theory could be a waste of resources, but popularity is enough. I guess the difference would be if ideology propped up string theory as a working answer when it didn’t work. Maybe this can be seen in models of the Big Bang being propped up even though they cannot explain everything (as it is claimed on some websites). It is still possible to have a part of the puzzle without having it all though and obviously it is not wise to throw that part away when you think it is part of the whole. Clearly it isn’t all a giant failure or we wouldn’t have leapfrogged in the last 200 years. Competition and diversity across countries and civilisation can promote growth. The lack of progress just seems strange to me if it is all real. How hard can it be if it is supposedly so easy that all you need is a tape recorder or a block of wood with some letters on it and a glass.

          2. Phantom boundaries

            We have equations describing electrons, but they do not come with a label declaring them non-spiritual, just understandable; to some perhaps. There is a funny line dividing the two into camps (ideology?), but I would contest that it is removable if we want. Perhaps we simply understand aspects of the spiritual mathematically now. This strange division seems more understandable if you accept that the ‘spiritual’ has not in fact been a description of anything other than ideological positions; then the boundary between natural and spiritual can be allowed to evaporate as a human artefact rather than a universal one.

            I like this. A lot 🙂

            I can envisage an argument against that along the lines of the spiritual being mysterious events, not just interpretation, but it laid claim to so much in the past (such as volcano’s, storms, illness etc) that any interpretation of unknown phenomena is surely just as likely to fall under the influence of ideology as at any time in the past; with the key point being that we do not know.

            I don’t know if some folks look more at the mysterious aspects of the spiritual ideology, rather than the purposeful one. Obviously, some people like to be kept in the dark —less of a struggle. But the majority of people try to find a meaning in events that relate directly to them.

            I agree. I used to find that argument more dissatisfying than I do now after a year here, but not so much any more.

            Yeah, I’ve noticed your tinfoil hat is beginning to fit quite nicely lately 😛

            How hard can it be if it is supposedly so easy that all you need is a tape recorder or a block of wood with some letters on it and a glass.

            That’s a really good question. I don’t claim to know the answer; maybe it’s got something to do with the personal meaning I was writing above. Some people would settle just fine with the results given by the tape recorder and the block of wood; other people will demand more —and it’s hard to blame them.

            In the end I guess it comes to the effect the given interpretation you accept has in your personal journey.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mobile menu - fractal