[HN Gopher] A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)
___________________________________________________________________
A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)
Author : nickwritesit
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-07-14 11:27 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meltingasphalt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (meltingasphalt.com)
| abdulhaq wrote:
| For a nihilist this feels like a lot of verbiage about meaning
| pcwelder wrote:
| > Supposing there's no ultimate, objective, metaphysical thing
| called meaning
|
| I disagree that there can't be a rationally derived objective
| utility function (purpose of life) that we can assign to
| ourselves.
|
| For one thing, we can objectively discard some types of utility
| functions, for example, the utility functions that have arbitrary
| discontinuity in time.
|
| One also might argue, for example, that utility functions should
| be approximately constant at time scales much smaller than our
| perception.
|
| If no single utility function, we can at least objectively find a
| class of utility functions (or purpose).
| gxs wrote:
| >> I disagree that there can't be a rationally derived
| objective utility function (purpose of life) that we can assign
| to ourselves.
|
| Ah, I love HN for these types of comments - I'm not even being
| facetious here.
|
| The author casually dismisses the idea that you make/find your
| own meaning, then spends the rest of the article doing exactly
| that.
|
| He's trying to find an explanation for the general case, yet in
| the end it will be his own personal opinion explanation.
| Interesting article, nonetheless.
| catsarebetter wrote:
| I've found that the antidote to pessimistic nihilism is
| optimistic nihilism. Going from the "world has no meaning, why do
| anything" (perhaps existentialist) to meaning the "world has no
| meaning, why don't I just do a bunch of things?" is a reasonable
| leap.
|
| The antidote to nihilism itself could be to accept lack of free
| will. Accepting lack of free will means that you get to enjoy the
| passage of time. Jimmy Carr said this and I really like it.
| Relinquishing control in a way that you allow your nature and
| your perception of the world to unravel itself to you. Ironically
| it makes the journey so much more beautiful.
| shrimpx wrote:
| This reminds me of Dostoevsky's saying "God is dead, therefore
| everything is permitted".
| vacuity wrote:
| This whole thread seems ridiculous to me. It just looks like
| "people needlessly complicating how they think about life".
| Why do you have to _permit yourself_ to do anything? At least
| appealing to a higher power justifies why you would feel
| restricted. Nihilism just isn 't for me, I guess.
| catsarebetter wrote:
| That's philosophy in a nutshell haha.
|
| Some people tend to be thinkers and others are doers.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article):
|
| _A Nihilist 's Guide to Meaning_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12078784 - July 2016 (249
| comments)
| pmarreck wrote:
| > This may be nihilism, but at least it's good-humored.
|
| Whiffed on the fact that humor itself here is meaning. Explaining
| away positive experiences as "illusory" (which is, without
| evidence that it IS in fact "illusory" instead of just being
| conjecture based on currently-known facts, simply "gaslighting"
| to me), is the problem of nihilism (IMHO).
|
| Anyone ever consider the odd fact that every nonliving thing in
| the universe always tends toward higher entropy, but living
| things take this weird (and unexplained, thus far, to me) detour
| into lower entropy/higher organization, at least for a time
| (until death permits entropy to take over again)? That to me is
| particularly peculiar, and seems to fly in the face of
| materialist arguments that basically equate life to "non-life,
| but with more steps".
| supazek wrote:
| >living things take this weird detour into lower entropy
|
| Take a look at "Into the Cool" by Eric Schneider and Dorian
| Sagan. It's about as academic as it can be while remaining
| accessible. It's basic premise builds off of the truism that
| "nature abhors a gradient" and attempts to lay out a theory
| that the gradient of solar energy falling on the planet (along
| with a plethora of other rarer factors) generated higher-
| complexity constructs as a way to absorb and reduce that
| gradient. There are plenty of non-living phenomena in nature
| which are subtly very organized but which result in net
| increases in entropy in the longer term. One of the examples
| described in the book are a kind of voronoi cell pattern that
| emerges when heating a thin layer of oil which succeeds in
| reducing the temperature gradient very effectively. Even if it
| isn't a hard hitting proof of _the_ abiogenetic mechanism it is
| still a very interesting read.
| photonthug wrote:
| Other places to start reading about entropy in biology:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01318-z
| pmarreck wrote:
| oh wow, this DOES look fascinating. Thanks!
| photochemsyn wrote:
| One example of non-living matter tending towards lower entropy
| is the formation of mineral crystals in void spaces in rocks.
| This does require a high-energy input, i.e. heated water
| dissolving large volumes of silica which later slowly
| crystallize. The entropy of the silicon and oxygen atoms in the
| quartz crystal is lower than that in the dissolved aqueous
| state.
|
| Similar effects are postulated to be involved in the origin of
| life, with energy sources like oceanic hydrothermal vents
| providing the energy sources driving the synthesis of complex
| organic molecules which eventually developed the capability of
| self-replication, aka decreasing randomness, increasing order,
| lowering local entropy.
|
| A mechanistic 'non-living' model of life, entropy-wise, could
| be a waterwheel driven by a river (of sunlight and geothermal
| energy) which operates a sawmill, a steel mill, a chip fab, a
| robot factory, a paper mill and a printing press - with each
| generation of robots building more waterwheel-based units based
| on the instructions (DNA) provided by the printing press. This
| all relies on a robust source of energy, since the Gibbs
| equation (dg = dh - tds) says that for a process to move
| forward, the energy release (dh) must be greater than the
| entropy reduction (tds) that it is coupled to. Such a system
| meets all mechanistic definitions of life without being
| alive... a philosophical conundrum I suppose.
| [deleted]
| cosmojg wrote:
| You reminded me of this old article: "A New Physics Theory of
| Life" https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-
| theory-o...
|
| I've always thought of biological life as being the macroscopic
| analog of enzymes. We're literally big balls of protein
| catalyzing reactions and overcoming activation energies to
| accelerate the heat death of the universe.
| ta20220714 wrote:
| "If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found
| out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in
| the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should
| never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."
|
| - C.S. Lewis
| mawadev wrote:
| Absurdism > Nihilism
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| How ironic. People (excerpt from article) "from an early age
| learn to accept the basic meaninglessness of the universe" then
| go on to write an article titled A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning.
|
| All of science is based upon human intuition axioms, yet people
| reject some human intuitions and accept others so stubbornly. A
| video which discusses this among other things:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNlEtBZxML8&list=PLcnL9bB-q3...
| grog454 wrote:
| I think the purpose of life is clearly demonstrated by what it
| does all the time: resist and reverse entropy.
| jononomo wrote:
| "Science taught me that it's all just atoms and the void, so
| there can't be any deeper point or purpose to the whole thing;
| the kind of meaning most people yearn for -- Ultimate Meaning --
| simply doesn't exist."
|
| Sheesh, what kind of BS science did this guy get taught? Science
| discovered the Big Bang, which is essentially a proof of God's
| existence, and the more science we do around the molecular
| biology and the origin of life the more obvious it becomes that
| life was intelligently designed. At this point the existence of
| life can be considered a definitive proof of the existence of
| God.
|
| This guy got a second-rate science education for sure.
| nurettin wrote:
| "Big bang cosmology proves (my particular brand of) The
| Almighty God" is what is known in the academia as "Facebook
| science".
|
| It may sound great, it may conform to your beliefs, it may be
| satisfying to say, and feel just right. But I'd imagine out of
| the thousands upon thousands of papers published on the topic
| of big bang cosmology, there would be just one which says "oh
| and by the way this is definitive proof that a God exists".
|
| And none do.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| > Nor was I satisfied with the obligatory secular follow-up, that
| you have to "make your own meaning."
|
| > ...
|
| > I mostly adopted the attitude of ... existence is fundamentally
| playful.
|
| Sounds like you've made your own meaning!
|
| > This may be nihilism
|
| It's not. Literally, nihilism ends at "life / existence has no
| meaning". Trying to put a positive or negative spin on it takes
| it away from nihilism. Or, positive nihilism is closer to
| Hedonism, and negative nihilism is curmudgeonisn.
|
| I think I hate philosophy.
| more_corn wrote:
| I disagree with this definition of nihilism.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Howso? Not attacking, curious what your definition of
| nihilism is.
|
| I don't know the proper term, but nihilism, as a word, stops
| itself short. I almost think "nihilists" are like centrists,
| they need to shit or get off the pot
| ryanklee wrote:
| There is a whole strain of nihilism called positive nihilism
| initiated (explicitly) by Nietzsche.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| "However, Nietzsche thought of nihilism as a disease, calling
| it 'pathological.' He argued that we should strive to rid
| ourselves of it."
|
| So if Nietzsche argued we should use "positive" (/active)
| adjective to rid ourselves of nihilism, wouldn't that mean
| that putting a positive spin on it removes the nihilism?
| reliablereason wrote:
| Very few words about meaning as i would define it, but lots of
| words about things in life that have emotional value.
|
| Meaning as would define it is this: "The purpose or a description
| of something (as described within some context)/(in relationship
| to some model)."
|
| A core difference between my view and the authors view seams to
| be that the author somehow starts with the premise that the
| sentence "what is the meaning of life?" is somehow a valid
| question. With that as a start the author manufactures a context
| around the question that answers the question, by doing that the
| author reframes the question in to a new question that can be
| answered. The new question is however not the same question as
| the original one and the answer is thus not the answer to the
| original question.
|
| The original question lacks a context and is thus an invalid
| question, invalid questions can not be answered(only reframed,
| then answered).
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| Everybody in this thread better forget all this BS if they want a
| shot at happiness and satisfaction.
|
| Go lift weights and stop living inside your head, we were never
| made to be so comfortable to have time to ponder these concepts
| ryanklee wrote:
| It's important to touch grass, yes, but dismissing the project
| of figuring this stuff out is unwise. There is a reason that
| these problems keep coming up for people, and it's not because
| they aren't hitting the gym enough.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| It's because people are too comfortable, we evolved to think
| about the next 24 hours, not the next 24 billion years.
|
| If you didn't do the former you'd literally die, now that's
| not true anymore, but it doesn't mean that we are equipped to
| do the latter, and in fact those who try always end up with a
| huge burden of anxiety and unhappiness.
|
| The same mental energies should be focused back again on the
| next 24 hours. We are not at risk of death in the next 24
| hours anymore, but we should be able to find the subtle
| differences that make our day better.
|
| A better brand of coffee, exercise, walking the dog, talk to
| strangers, join a club or a sports team etc.
|
| It's not that grandiose compared to discovering the true
| nature of reality or the writing the "guide to meaning"
| (whatever the fuck that means) , but at least it's real,
| actionable and doable, NOW!
| ttctciyf wrote:
| What's next, a solipsist's guide to social interaction?
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| A hedonists guide to temperance.
| WJW wrote:
| Epicurus would approve.
| guerrilla wrote:
| As would utilitarians, per context anyway.
| nullindividual wrote:
| This is a new one to me, so forgive me if this is answered, but
| wouldn't solipsism require that the individual be able to
| manipulate their own reality as it posits reality is personal
| in construction? Similar to a lucid dream state.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Not really, for all intents and purposes we are a brain in a
| jar with a bunch of electrodes sending signals.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Ok, that perspective makes more sense. Thanks!
| thenerdhead wrote:
| > I have a degree in philosophy, but haven't read any of the
| classic literature on this subject, so I'm almost certainly
| reinventing the wheel.
|
| This shows when you call both Watts and Vonnegut a nihilist.
| Absurdism for example is not the same as nihilism.
| bamfly wrote:
| Vonnegut wasn't "a nihilist" (not... many people are, really?
| Approximately zero? Not in some all-encompassing sense,
| anyway--"I'm a nihilist" usually means subscribing to some
| philosophy that features nihilistic elements in _some parts_ of
| it, or to having accepted, specifically, existential nihilism
| as a ground truth for one 's further exploration of philosophy)
| but definitely expresses elements of existential nihilism in
| his writing, which is what people usually mean when they say
| stuff like "I'm a nihilist" or "so-and-so is a nihilist":
| rejection of (the possibility of) objective meaning or purpose.
|
| Nihilism's a feature of positions/schools more than some
| philosophical school of its own, and that feature's strongly
| present in much of Vonnegut's work. Existential nihilism is a
| _key element_ of absurdism (which you mention)--in a
| philosophical sense, and in the places where that intersects
| with literature, not necessarily in the colloquial senses of
| the word.
|
| In some areas, sure, Vonnegut's not particularly nihilistic. I
| don't think it'd make any sense to associate him with moral
| nihilism, for instance.
|
| Watts, IDK, he's on my to-read list but it's a looooong list.
| loughnane wrote:
| That quote is weird. In technical fields you wouldn't read the
| classic literature (mechanical engineers don't read Euclid),
| but there's no fear of reinventing the wheel since modern books
| take account of fundamental works; if not by name then for sure
| in content.
|
| I'm surprised how you can get a philosophy degree and then be
| afraid of "reinventing the wheel". I suppose the author is
| self-aware enough to know what he doesn't know... but still.
| It's odd.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I just don't understand how you can get a philosophy degree
| without a course on like "Classics of Western Philosophy" or
| similar.
|
| Technical fields have similar fundamental courses...
| bamfly wrote:
| It's more like a math major speculating on some possible
| route to a proof of a hard problem without having dug
| _specifically_ into the literature on that problem in
| particular, such that there 's a good chance they're barking
| up a proven-unproductive tree or ineptly re-discovering
| something well-known to those who _have_ so-studied.
| loughnane wrote:
| Which is a fine thought experiment for a person to go
| through and at the same time a waste of time for anyone to
| read.
|
| I don't begrudge the author for writing it, blogging is in
| large part a "this is what I'm thinking about, take it as
| you will", and that's ok. Just noisy.
| grrdotcloud wrote:
| I am always curious why one continues to believe the beliefs that
| lead to pain, suffering, and unhappiness.
|
| Even if correct is being miserable worth it?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| what does it matter if it's worth it? You can only genuinely
| believe what you acknowledge to be true, and your happiness has
| no bearing on what is true, there's no choice involved. The
| moment you attempt to abolish what you believe, being aware you
| do it only because it causes you pain, it doesn't even work,
| you're just sort of trying to desperately gaslight yourself.
| Reminds me of a short poem by Stephen Crane
|
| _A man said to the universe:
|
| "Sir, I exist!"
|
| "However," replied the universe,
|
| "The fact has not created in me
|
| A sense of obligation."_
| guerrilla wrote:
| You're looking for pragmatism. Look up William James' Will to
| Believe.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Maybe the belief gives meaning which avoids confronting
| nothingness and meaninglessness.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| It's morally repulsive to me to believe something just because
| it makes me feel better.
| sezycei wrote:
| Why?
| pmarreck wrote:
| (I wrote this whole comment to you only to find out just
| now that you deleted the original comment. Sorry, I had to
| convey it somehow. LOL)
|
| I understand your confusion about using "entropy" outside a
| thermodynamics context, and you're absolutely correct to
| point out that the term "entropy" originated in the field
| of thermodynamics. However, the concept has been extended
| metaphorically in other fields to describe systems of
| complexity and order. It's in this latter, metaphorical
| sense that I'm using the term.
|
| Now, let's apply this to living systems. Organisms are
| highly ordered, containing complex structures at various
| scales from cells to organs. They can maintain and even
| increase their internal order, or decrease their "entropy,"
| by consuming energy from their environment (like food).
| This is the "detour into lower entropy" I was talking
| about.
|
| While this seems to contradict the second law of
| thermodynamics, remember that organisms are not closed
| systems - they constantly exchange energy and matter with
| their environment. The increase in order within the
| organism is more than offset by the increase in disorder in
| the environment, resulting in an overall increase in
| entropy in the universe. This is completely consistent with
| the second law of thermodynamics.
|
| What I find fascinating is that life can maintain this high
| degree of organization for such a long period of time,
| despite the natural tendency towards disorder. This is not
| to say that the process is unexplained; science has a lot
| to say about how this happens, but rather that it's a
| remarkable (and seemingly unique) characteristic of life.
| Does this make more sense? I hope this clarifies the
| concept a bit.
| [deleted]
| xyzelement wrote:
| // It's morally repulsive to me to believe something just
| because it makes me feel better.
|
| If you have an equally valid choice to believe something
| positive or negative, why would you chose the later?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Those are good morals.
|
| But if you have that kind of moral impulse, are you really a
| nihilist?
| pmarreck wrote:
| I agree that feelings are not arguments and that beliefs
| should be justified by arguments, and not feelings.
|
| And yet, if you believe your spouse "is the one for you" but
| have no hard evidence to back it up, but you _feel_ it with
| every fiber of your being, you will still make a gigantically
| life-impactful decision about this person that is COMPLETELY
| inarguable. :P
| z3c0 wrote:
| If it's morally repulsive to do otherwise, wouldn't this
| stance be for the sake of feeling better?
|
| I do agree with you; I just love the barber paradox as well.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Good point, I'm basing my rejection on my repulsive
| feeling. I'm not familiar with philosophy but I'm sure
| there are philosophers that have built up arguments on why
| a life based on seeking truth and logic is worthwhile.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "Science taught me that it's all just atoms and the void, so
| there can't be any deeper point or purpose to the whole thing"
|
| Is this type of misunderstanding of what Science is that common?
| It's painfully lacking and I can't tell if it is written as
| sarcasm...
| vacuity wrote:
| Ah yes, reject religion on the grounds that God is
| unfalsifiable and then proceed to...proclaim an uncertain, if
| not questionable statement as the objective truth. Sometimes
| what people call "science" should really be called a mirror.
| "Science tells me that..."
| mistermann wrote:
| > Is this type of misunderstanding of what Science is that
| common?
|
| _Extremely_ common. Unless there is a substantial silent
| majority that believes otherwise, I suspect it has become the
| overwhelming norm amongst the general public, as well as a non-
| trivial percentage of actual scientists.
| kafkaesque wrote:
| This is a great point. When I was studying philosophy in
| university, an extremely common roadblock to moving the
| discussion forward was that people (professor and students)
| were philosophizing about specialized topics that they
| themselves were not well informed on or held no expertise in. I
| think this is the problem with philosophy adding practical
| value to people's lives in general. We seek answers to
| questions that require specialized knowledge in areas in which
| we don't have sufficient knowledge in.
|
| The discussions that were more fruitful were the ones where the
| professor asked if there was someone who majored in that
| specific subject in the class, and that person would be used as
| an expert to speak to whatever thing we were questioning, and
| since it was philosophy, we would question everything.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Stephen Hawking actually wrote about the importance of
| physicists finding a theory of everything so physics could
| stop moving so quickly. Our scientific understanding of the
| universe has advanced and changed so rapidly since the early
| 20th century that no layperson without extremely specialized
| training has any hope of grasping the current state of it.
| This includes philosophers and public intellectuals, but even
| just average people on Hacker News who have no idea how wrong
| they are just because they aren't keeping up with new
| developments. If we could slow down the rate at which new
| developments happen, maybe there'd be some hope of regular
| people catching up to it. We could learn a canonical,
| comprehensive model in primary school, and what we learned
| would still be current and accurate decades later when we're
| armchairing all of the narrow technical experts in our blogs
| and discussion boards.
|
| This isn't even just about laypeople versus physicists. Lee
| Smolin has written about string theory becoming a crisis in
| physics because 1) it takes so long to understand any of it
| mathematically, that by the time anyone has done so, sunk
| cost fallacy precludes them from ever giving it up, and 2)
| other physicists responsible for peer review also don't
| understand the math, but don't want to admit it, so they'll
| let near anything through to publication even when it's
| probably nonsense.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Yep, it's literally false. Astrophysicists estimate 5% of the
| universe is visible to us. Modern calculations say dark matter
| comprises about 27% of the Universe. Whatever else is out
| there, we truly do not know.
|
| https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/big-questions/what-universe-made
| tivert wrote:
| >>> "Science taught me that it's all just atoms and the void,
| so there can't be any deeper point or purpose to the whole
| thing"
|
| > Yep, it's literally false. Astrophysicists estimate 5% of
| the universe is visible to us. Modern calculations say dark
| matter comprises about 27% of the Universe. Whatever else is
| out there, we truly do not know.
|
| No. At worst it's only technically false, but broadly on the
| right track. If you're a materialist/physicalist; and Science
| requires you to take that position, at least
| methodologically; so "it's all just [particles, fields,] and
| the void."
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I don't understand that. Are there any differences when
| used here, in this context?
|
| https://wikidiff.com/literally/technically
| interhater wrote:
| [flagged]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's funny that a materialist would say it's all 'particles
| and void' when our current understanding only accounts for
| a few percent of the universe...
| arpyzo wrote:
| Between atoms and the void (which is not even a thing science
| recognizes), there is a potentially infinite amount of
| knowledge yet to be discovered. I use the word "infinite"
| literally here. Not only that, but it's possible some aspects
| of the universe and existence are undiscoverable by humans.
|
| Who is to say that purpose cannot exist within this? It is
| unknown and possibly unknowable.
|
| I believe the author has drawn the wrong lessons from science.
| regus wrote:
| I have often heard people say things like "I don't believe the
| universe or our lives have any meaning, so I choose to make my
| own meaning."
|
| If the universe is meaningless, and all the things in it are
| equally meaningless (ourselves included). How is it possible to
| create meaning? How can a meaningless thing or action within a
| meaningless system have any meaning? I guess we could just
| declare that this thing has meaning, but isn't this just a
| delusion? Like thinking 0 + 0 = 1?
| vacuity wrote:
| > If the universe is meaningless, and all the things in it are
| equally meaningless (ourselves included)
|
| That is an assumption in itself. No one is obligated to act
| under that premise.
|
| > How is it possible to create meaning? I guess we could just
| declare that this thing has meaning, but isn't this just a
| delusion? Like thinking 0 + 0 = 1?
|
| We perceive meaning all the time. This thread came to be
| because many people hold some meaning or another to the topic,
| the thought of discussing it, or something else along those
| lines. There is no reasoning to this phenomenon. It is not even
| an axiom, something taken to be true and not provable (or
| disprovable). If we didn't ascribe meaning to things then this
| conversation wouldn't be happening. I don't live in a world
| without meaning because I just don't. I couldn't imitate a
| bacterium if I wanted to. Now it's just a matter of whether I
| find it permissible for me to act on personal desires.
| feoren wrote:
| It has meaning because we want it to have meaning, and that's
| enough. The universe didn't come with meaning a-priori. We're
| not here because the universe has meaning; it's the other way
| around: the universe has meaning now because we're in it, and
| we choose to ascribe meaning to it. It's not 0 + 0 = 1, it's 0
| + 1 = 1.
|
| Think of it this way: does a pretty, shiny rock on the beach
| have meaning on its own? Not really. But if a human finds it
| and loves it, and it brings joy, now it has meaning. And that
| human treasures it and passes it down generation by generation,
| and now it has even more meaning. And now someone looks at this
| rock and thinks about their great, great, great grandmother
| finding it on the beach, and thinks about their great, great,
| great grandchildren receiving it in turn, and it brings them
| joy, and the meaning continues to increase.
|
| The universe is a pretty, shiny rock that humans have found.
| gooseus wrote:
| Long post and having only skimmed it for now, I think I mostly
| agree... though I don't think I could ever call myself a
| nihilist.
|
| The last section captures what I've tried to say in my own (not
| currently online) writing on the subject of life, existence, and
| purpose/meaning.
|
| > As far as we know, we and our societies take the prize for
| being the most complex structures the universe has yet evolved.
|
| This is where I end up in a lot of my own musings on the subject.
| Another point I typically make is that we KNOW that the immense
| diversity and complexity that exists on Earth will end in the
| future, unless some intelligence is able to spread life outside
| of Earth.
|
| Personally, I think that one of the most important human
| activities should be actively trying to seed other nebula, stars,
| and planets with archaic life, since this increases the overall
| probability that life will continue to evolve somewhere, even if
| humans fail to expand beyond Earth.
|
| We could be parallelizing the process of life across worlds and
| creating potential for other interesting life to evolve to solve
| the unique problems of other parts of the universe. By spreading
| life from Earth, we also increase the likelihood that future
| intelligence could find evidence of our (and each others)
| existence, which would be _very_ interesting (for them), and
| could help them get through the difficulties we face now.
|
| I'm not sure how you resolve the opening of "we're just here to
| fart around / dance" nihilism with what you mention at the end
| about how Earth, life, and humans being the most complex and
| interesting thing going in the universe, but I like the
| style/format, and I'm definitely going to give this a longer read
| later. Thanks for sharing!
| verisimi wrote:
| >> As far as _we know_ , we and our societies take the prize
| for being the most complex structures the universe has yet
| evolved.
|
| > This is where I end up in a lot of my own musings on the
| subject. Another point I typically make is that _we KNOW_ that
| the immense diversity and complexity that exists on Earth will
| end in the future, unless some intelligence is able to spread
| life outside of Earth.
|
| "Knowing" is NOT a group activity. Either one knows (because
| one has personally verified whatever-it-is) or one
| believes/assumes/hypothesises.
|
| PS
|
| The point of my comment being that if one doesn't understand
| what "knowing" is, I don't see how it is possible to approach
| finding "meaning".
| gooseus wrote:
| I say that "knowing" is very much a group activity, in fact,
| it's the only way one can even approach certainly that what
| one "knows" isn't just a hallucination or a dream.
|
| We can only "know" by verifying that what we experience is
| consistent with the experience of others, this is the essence
| of repeatable scientific experimentation and peer-review in
| science... which is the group effort of improving the extent
| and accuracy of what we know, as a group.
|
| You can argue for solipsism if that's what you want, but you
| ought to know you'll only be arguing with yourself.
| disadvantage wrote:
| > Personally, I think that one of the most important human
| activities should be actively trying to seed other nebula,
| stars, and planets with archaic life, since this increases the
| overall probability that life will continue to evolve
| somewhere, even if humans fail to expand beyond Earth.
|
| I think merely one Voyager Record[0] is not enough. We need to
| be sending millions of these in all directions right throughout
| space, and spaced out over decade intervals. Then there's a
| greater possibility of discovery/contact. We already do this to
| some degree with the Arecibo message[1], but probes like
| Voyager are better IMHO.
|
| [0] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
| gooseus wrote:
| I agree to some extent, though I think the trade-off of
| sending lots of messages into space is lower than sending
| "seeds of life".
|
| A message has encoded information that can communicate
| something we're trying to express to another life form, but
| what is that? How will they respond and what will that
| response be?
|
| Much of the point of sending a message to other life is to
| find other life that can respond to us... but if we can't
| manage to make ourselves sustainable then a response may
| reach us too late for it to matter, I pessimistically think
| this is a very likely scenario.
|
| Sending out millions/billions of seeds, and targeting worlds
| where we believe we'd arrive at an early-ish period of
| planetary development, we could potentially jump-start the
| evolution of life on multiple worlds. Perhaps these worlds
| develop their own intelligent life, or maybe it becomes a
| world filled with non-intelligent biodiversity with billions
| of new species with millions of new physical and chemical
| innovations that a future intelligent race (maybe even
| humans, assuming my pessimism is misplaced) could learn from.
| jmdeon wrote:
| I believe this is existentialism, not nihilism. They both start
| from the premise that the universe is inherently meaningless, but
| in existentialism you can create meaning while in nihilism you
| cannot.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I'm an inverted existentialist and a post-nihilist. My
| explanation may be a little silly to read.
|
| Existential dread is a weird psychological state for people who
| need the psychological comfort of ultimate or external meaning,
| it starts with laying awake at night telling yourself "things
| matter" and hearing that quiet rebuttal.
|
| "What if nothing matters".
|
| Pulling that thread organically leads people to existentialism,
| they are raised to insist that life "must have meaning", and
| then reject it.
|
| Existentialism is for people who were inculcated with some
| permutation of "god", just world phallacies, ultimate meaning,
| and/or a belief in a "sensible" reality and found the obvious
| holes.
|
| And just like nearly any position there are strong
| existentialist and weak existentialist
|
| If you are born dead, if you know nothing matters, you don't
| lay awake at night, you just avoid going to bed at night
| because "nothing matters"... and if this is really your deep
| down than your existential thought becomes inverted.
|
| "What if everything really does matter."
|
| And then you spend the rest of your life trying to push
| discovery and research forward. Existential dread turns into a
| sort of existential hope and nihilism and the most common
| expressions of existentialism appears to come from an arrogant
| place of certainty, or an emphatic wish fullfillment, or a
| cocksure defeatist state.
|
| I'm just one person, I know some things but there is far more I
| don't know than do... so.. what if it does matters?
|
| Pushing humanity's bounds of knowledge and having a thriving,
| dynamic society that can prosper and fund the pursuit of that
| question is perhaps the only important thing.
| smif wrote:
| What about a third option, "everything may or may not matter,
| but the answer to that question is currently inaccessible to
| us (and possibly may always remain inaccessible)"?
|
| In this way you could be led to a kind of inverted Pascal's
| wager, where you can't reasonably go down the nihilist route
| because everything might just might matter, but you just
| don't know. You also don't know in which ways it might matter
| if it does, so you don't really have a conclusion to draw
| about where to go from here.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Pushing humanity's bounds of knowledge and having a
| thriving, dynamic society that can prosper and fund the
| pursuit of that question is perhaps the only important thing.
|
| I love your view, and how you described it helped me think.
|
| I've learned a lot thanks to everything that's available
| online and I know a lot now, but there's still so much I
| don't know that I want to share and improve knowledge
|
| It's both for myself and others, and I don't need much more
| meaning in life than this!
| disadvantage wrote:
| > In lieu of meaning, I mostly adopted the attitude of Alan
| Watts. Existence, he says, is fundamentally playful. It's less
| like a journey, and more like a piece of music or a dance. And
| the point of dancing isn't to arrive at a particular spot on the
| floor; the point of dancing is simply to dance. Vonnegut
| expresses a similar sentiment when he says, "We are here on Earth
| to fart around."
|
| Ikigai[0] is worth exploring if you find yourself questioning the
| grand meaning of things:
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
|
| > The Oxford English Dictionary defines ikigai as "a motivating
| force; something or someone that gives a person a sense of
| purpose or a reason for living". More generally it may refer to
| something that brings pleasure or fulfilment.[1]
|
| > The term compounds two Japanese words: iki (Sheng ki, meaning
| 'life; alive') and kai (Jia Fei , meaning '(an) effect; (a)
| result; (a) fruit; (a) worth; (a) use; (a) benefit; (no, little)
| avail') (sequentially voiced as gai), to arrive at 'a reason for
| living [being alive]; a meaning for [to] life; what [something
| that] makes life worth living; a 'raison d'etre'.
|
| Personally though I've found the pursuit of this philosophy very
| hard to integrate into life. It's one of life's hard problems. It
| means somehow intersecting 'play' with 'work', but as many people
| say: 'work is something people don't do voluntarily'. Hence its
| name: 'work', we don't naturally want to do it. But if you can
| make work as a form of play, you already are living in Ikigai.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I don't think making work a form of play is feasible (perhaps
| easy is a better word) for most people, simply because of the
| nature of their job. Without some creative and exploratory
| aspect, it's just menial, boring, devoid of any stimulation.
|
| I am lucky enough that my work is such, but I got extremely
| lucky and basically made it my reality.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| I think the way to look at it perhaps is that there is an
| element of challenge in play and an opportunity to win. So a
| job can be boring and menial but you have the opportunity to
| be the best in the world at what you're doing and you can
| treat every day as a challenge and opportunity at excellence,
| and in turn any job can be fun.
|
| You could easily look at chess as menial, boring, and devoid
| of any stimulation but it's possible to find fun in that.
| Everyone should stop taking everything so seriously and
| challenge themselves to be the best.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I believe that I am the kind of person who can find
| something interesting in [nearly] everything, chess is
| interesting in that it is [functionally] infinitely and
| thus can be infinitely creative.
|
| This creativity doesn't exist in Sisyphean tasks. It's one
| thing to say one must imagine Sisyphus was happy, and
| another to be Sisyphus, and be happy, or rather, to be
| content.
| lisper wrote:
| > We are here on Earth to fart around.
|
| Except that we're not. We are here on earth to make copies of
| our DNA. There are some ancillary effects of this (like sex and
| eating and the internet) but it's not like life doesn't have a
| purpose at all. It's just not a particularly hifallutin' one.
| haswell wrote:
| This is a perspective rooted in a human understanding of
| biology, which is ultimately just a language and labeling
| game to make sense of observed phenomena.
|
| If we're here to make copies of our DNA, then one has to ask
| what the DNA is here for, and we're back in the same place.
|
| The point someone like Watts is making is that even if we're
| just DNA replicators, that which is being replicated holds
| this capacity for playfulness and the enjoyment of play,
| which confers some broader notion of playfulness to the
| conditions that brought about our DNA.
|
| I recently watched "My Octopus Teacher" (worth a watch), and
| watching the behaviors of the featured octopus as it goes
| about it's daily life doing octopus things, even including
| what appears to be literal playtime with schools of fish,
| it's easy to see the point Watts was trying to make.
| lisper wrote:
| > one has to ask what the DNA is here for
|
| DNA is not here "for" anything, DNA is a Thing That
| Happens. Given the right combination of atoms, a source of
| energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will
| appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over.
|
| > that which is being replicated holds this capacity for
| playfulness and the enjoyment of play
|
| Sure, but that's just a side-effect of the process. It's
| not the reason we exist.
| haswell wrote:
| > _DNA is not here "for" anything, DNA is a Thing That
| Happens._
|
| I agree, and my point was that saying:
|
| > _We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA._
|
| Just kicks the can down the road. We're not here to make
| copies of our DNA any more than DNA is here to make
| copies of us.
|
| > _Sure, but that 's just a side-effect of the process.
| It's not the purpose of our existence._
|
| So, too, are we, as is replication itself. It happens to
| be the only reason the process continues, but it has no
| inherent purpose any more than playfulness does. It just
| is. This could also be framed as: we _are_ the process.
|
| > _Given the right combination of atoms, a source of
| energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will
| appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over._
|
| All of these things happened before Darwin was involved,
| and while I understand the point you're making, I'm
| calling this out because Natural Selection is again just
| a language and labeling game that maps the process
| relative to our experience of it and our understanding of
| various scientific disciplines.
|
| None of this brings us closer to a "purpose", per se.
|
| The statement that "existence is fundamentally playful"
| is not a claim about purpose either. But rather, an
| observation about how things appear to be, based on our
| ability to understand them.
|
| Some people would also say that existence is
| fundamentally mathematical.
| lisper wrote:
| I think we're basically in violent agreement here. The
| only thing I would point out is that there is an
| asymmetry: reproduction can exist without playfulness (I
| don't think bacteria do much playing). But playfulness
| cannot exist without reproduction. That's the reason I
| think it's fair to put reproduction in a more primary
| role.
| haswell wrote:
| I guess I'm not sure what one is supposed to conclude
| about that asymmetry, or if it makes sense to compare
| reproduction and playfulness in that way. What is the
| primary role you're referring to?
|
| Existence can be fundamentally a lot of things. One isn't
| taking away from the other.
| lisper wrote:
| I'm just saying that there's a hierarchy of emergent
| phenomena. At root everything is governed by the
| Schrodinger equation or something like that, but from
| that you get chemistry, and from chemistry you get
| biology, and from biology you get technology, and from
| technology you get Nintendo. Each of these are strictly
| dependent on the ones before in the list. You can't have
| chemistry without physics, you can't have biology without
| chemistry, you can't have technology without biology, and
| you can't have Nintendo without technology. But none of
| these are the "meaning of life", they are just the causes
| and ancillary effects of life.
| fatfingerd wrote:
| You won't fill the role of farting around for much more than
| a day, a month or a century without taking certain respective
| steps.
| disco_framework wrote:
| Sure but that doesn't mean the two ideas are incompatible.
|
| In fact the act of making copies of our DNA might be a great
| example of playful work. Sex is fun and it has the capacity
| to spread our genes.
| lisper wrote:
| > the act of making copies of our DNA might be a great
| example of playful work
|
| That's an interesting idea, but I don't buy it. I think
| playfulness requires a brain.
|
| How would you distinguish "playful" chemistry from "serious
| work" chemistry?
| disco_framework wrote:
| I know what you're saying but I think we may have lost
| the plot here.
|
| The original link was about finding meaning after all,
| right?
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, but the comment I was originally responding to was
| that "we are here on earth to fart around".
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Or is there a better abstraction? We're here because
| intelligence is good, an organizational force. We're here to
| do that as approximately as we can.
| lisper wrote:
| Oh how I wish that were true, but unfortunately at the end
| of the day Darwin is running the show. Intelligence exists
| not because it's "good" but because genes that build brains
| that can solve problems reproduce better than genes that
| don't.
| maxbond wrote:
| > Oh how I wish that were true, but unfortunately at the
| end of the day Darwin is running the show.
|
| This is just essentialism. We can draw that line at any
| arbitrary point. I can say Darwin isn't running the show,
| Einstein is. You can try to point out the ways biology
| effects our lives and argue that it should hold a more
| privileged position, and I can wave it away and insist
| you're being sentimental. "I wish that were true, but
| we're just rocks that happen to think and reproduce,
| nothing more."
|
| And just as credibly, I can say that things are at the
| level of human abstraction and that life is about farting
| around. I can point out how profoundly conceptions at
| this level effect our lives, and argue that it should
| hold a privileged position.
|
| You're free to set your standard and the arbitrary point
| you prefer, but that doesn't devalue anyone else's
| decision.
|
| It's just a philosophy that doesn't resonate with you
| because you have a different perspective, that might make
| it less useful to you but it isn't really a mark against
| it. I don't eat steak and have no desire to, but I don't
| argue when people say that steak is delicious.
| lisper wrote:
| The reason Darwin is revered is that he discovered some
| important emergent structure in natural processes that is
| not immediately evident from Einstein's field equation
| even if it turns out that the latter entails the former.
| But "we are here on earth to fart around" doesn't follow.
| maxbond wrote:
| I will immediately concede I am wrong if you can show me
| how democracy, monogamous marriages, and a night on the
| town obviously emerges from darwinism. Or from biology
| more generally.
|
| If you can't use biology to explain society, then based
| on your reasoning about why Darwinism is preferable to
| relativity, I think you should reconsider whether or not
| this is true universally rather than for you in
| particular.
| lisper wrote:
| There's a stock answer for monogamous marriage:
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-secret-
| evolut...
|
| Democracy and a night on the town are a little more
| challenging. Both are actually pretty recent inventions,
| having existed only for a few thousand years, which is
| nothing on an evolutionary time scale, and the jury is
| still out over whether either will survive in the long
| run. (Personally I'll give you long odds against.) But
| the short version of the answer is that genes have only
| very indirect control over the brains they build, and
| sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own (so
| to speak) and goals of their own, some of which can be in
| direct conflict with the goals of the genes that built
| them. For example, birth control pills are an quite
| literally an existential threat to our genes. So in the
| long run one would predict that our genes will tend to
| build brains that have an instinctive aversion to things
| like birth control. But the dynamics of human societies
| are off-the-charts complicated and non-linear, so who
| knows?
| maxbond wrote:
| > There's a stock answer for monogamous marriage
|
| This article is just supposition. "Monogamy forms the
| basis of complex social networks." As opposed to
| polygamy...?
|
| "Females preferred reliable providers to aggressive
| competitors." Pretty impressive how their attitudes were
| preserved in the fossil record.
|
| The article is pretty clearly written from the
| perspective that polygamy is weird and unnatural, noting
| that we have an "imperfect record " of monogamy - as if
| societies where this was the norm were a mistake.
|
| The article goes on to make it clear this is a
| controversial idea, not one that has wide acceptance in
| this community. If you have a better article or a better
| argument to present I'll check it out, but I don't see
| why I would accept this argument.
|
| > But the short version of the answer is that genes have
| only very indirect control over the brains they build,
| and sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own
| ...
|
| > But the dynamics of human societies are off-the-charts
| complicated and non-linear, so who knows?
|
| I think you've conceded the point.
| kevinwang wrote:
| The nihilist argument is that we're not here "to" make copies
| of our DNA. It just so happened that each of our ancestors
| were were good at making copies of their DNA (and thus we are
| good at making copies of ours). But outside of religions,
| there's no evidence that this is an obligation.
| afpx wrote:
| Animals don't just expire after reproductive age. They live
| on to help their kin, species, (in the case of Humans) most
| life.
|
| That's where I find purpose: in being useful to others.
| lisper wrote:
| Sure, but that still all comes back to Darwin. Reproduction
| involves a lot more than just fertilizing an egg.
| nkingsy wrote:
| I should have stopped at the beginning like the author
| recommended. I wholeheartedly agree with "play" as the central
| element.
|
| And by play I mean to fully engage and enjoy the activity at
| hand. To be detached enough to stop and take stock of what's
| going on, to poke at things and see what happens, to care nothing
| for "time invested" because you know you enjoyed that time and
| will enjoy your time spent digging back in the other direction.
|
| It is so so easy to lose that playful approach. Thousands of
| times per day I find myself drifting into attachment and boredom
| and some days I start there and never get out. It think this is
| probably the real benefit of meditation: building muscles to
| redirect yourself back to playful detachment. Maybe tomorrow I'll
| start a practice.
| beltsazar wrote:
| If physicalism were true, and abiogenesis happened without any
| intervention of "higher being"(s), and Darwinism were correct;
| then life wouldn't be meaningless. Neither would its purpose be
| determined by each individual. Life would have exactly two
| objective purposes: to survive and to reproduce.
|
| It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just
| happens that a species that survives and reproduces will continue
| to live.
|
| That also means that there's no good or bad. There are only what
| traits are advantageous to survival and what traits aren't.
|
| For example, being trustworthy is "good" because trust within a
| group is a prerequisite for achieving a relatively advanced
| society like Homo Sapiens has built. Breaking into someone's
| house is "bad" because otherwise we would only be as advanced as
| other primates that take each other's territories all the time.
|
| But when you think about it, there are "good" things that aren't
| advantageous (or even are harmful) to survival, and there are
| things advantageous to survival that are considered "bad" by most
| people. Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick
| a less controversial example, but probably not the best one:
| eugenics.
|
| So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there
| even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some
| higher beings say so?
| feoren wrote:
| When you say "survival" in terms of Darwinian evolution, you're
| really talking about survival of specific genes. Why should we
| choose to be beholden to the primal "desires" (if you'll grant
| me the intentional stance) of our genes? We are the AI that our
| DNA invented that turned around and overthrew it. The planet is
| ours now, not our DNA's.
|
| There are many other things that evolve too: ideas, memes,
| viruses, and many more if you relax "evolution" to simply mean
| "progress", like my own knowledge and the capabilities of the
| human race. It's myopic to focus on genes alone.
|
| > eugenics
|
| Eugenics takes for granted the idea that some "genetic purity"
| is good for its own sake. Why? Why is a world with fewer, but
| "genetically superior" people, (and more genetically similar),
| better than a world with more people and more genetic variety?
| That's not even necessarily good even if you myopically focus
| on the actual gene pool, much less if you take all the other
| aspects of humanity into account.
|
| > So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is
| there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea
| that some higher beings say so?
|
| Yes, there is: we all collectively decide properties of the
| world we'd like to live in, and we try to guess what kind of
| world future generations would also like to live in, and then
| we call those actions that ultimately improve those properties
| "good" and those that lessen those properties "bad", and we can
| even partially rank actions based on the integral of their
| effect on these properties from now until the end of the
| universe (allowing a Net Present Value calculation to avoid
| infinities, to acknowledge our imprecision of future outcomes
| and preferences, and even to simply prefer utility now over the
| same utility later). We try to maximize happiness (in its
| various forms, some more important than others) and minimize
| suffering (ditto), taking diminishing returns into account so
| we don't just make one dude trillions-happy at the expense of
| everyone else. This has infinite degrees of freedom and
| requires perfect knowledge of the future, so we know it's not
| actually possible to achieve, but it gives us a direction to
| orient our moral compasses and strive to get as close to this
| perfection as we can.
| vacuity wrote:
| Objective, huh. Anyways, here's a problem in your last
| paragraph:
|
| _We_?
| andrewjl wrote:
| > Life would have exactly two objective purposes: to survive
| and to reproduce.
|
| Why does abiogenesis and Darwinism being correct lead to those
| two being the objective purposes for humans?
| kogus wrote:
| As it says:
|
| It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just
| happens that a species that survives and reproduces will
| continue to live.
|
| Without a creator, there is no real "purpose" at all.
| Everything came from nothing, will end as nothing, and is
| ultimately irrelevant. Everything.
|
| As a Christian, I sometimes look over into that chasm and
| wonder how atheists bear it.
| Drakim wrote:
| What actually changes if there is a creator though? Isn't
| it exactly the same, it "just happens" that a creator
| created a species and that species survives and reproduces.
| As you yourself say, it's merely a tautology to define
| purpose into existence, but the same is true even if a
| creator is involved, it's still just something that
| "happens".
|
| Something was created by a creator. Now what? Where did
| purpose come from?
| kogus wrote:
| Presumably the creator created with purpose. If I make a
| chair, it fulfills its purpose when it serves as a place
| to sit. It does not serve its purpose if someone uses it
| to awkwardly dig a hole.
|
| Likewise if God made me to, say, love and forgive others,
| I can either serve my purpose or not. But the purpose is
| given to me by the intent of the creator.
| Drakim wrote:
| If "purpose" is simply the intent of a creator, the words
| used to describe what the creator intended when they
| created, then I don't see the great loss in not having
| it.
|
| Imagine your father always wanted a child, and for the
| child to take over the family business. Is your life
| without merit, utterly void of value, if you become a
| fireman instead? After all, you are not fulfilling the
| purpose, the intent, of those who created you. Anything
| outside their specifications is meaningless nihilism,
| right?
|
| Personally, I think there is more to "purpose" than this
| definition, it's a very small definition that does not
| truly compass what people mean when they talk about
| purpose.
| vacuity wrote:
| I'm an agnostic (absolute, textbook definition) but I
| disagree. As a human with consciousness and free will
| (whether that's an "illusion" doesn't make a difference
| from where I'm standing), I define meaning in my life. Not
| all consciously, but I have thoughts and desires. If it'll
| all be irrelevant when I die, why should I care? I'm not
| dead yet. If there is no afterlife, I won't be around to
| care. If there is, I'll figure it out on the fly.
| vacuity wrote:
| I'm not sure why parent involves abiogenesis, but as they go
| on to say, surviving and reproducing aren't really purposes
| (as in motivation) but self-evident truths. Something made to
| replicate itself into more things that self-replicate and so
| on.
| Drakim wrote:
| Self-evident truths of what exactly?
|
| Surviving and reproducing are facts of live, they are
| descriptive facts. What you ought to do with your life is
| not descriptive, but prescriptive.
|
| You cannot derive prescriptive statements from descriptive
| facts.
| vacuity wrote:
| I didn't say you could. GP didn't seem to either.
| Drakim wrote:
| Fair enough, but I felt you implied it by calling them
| self-evident. That's the sorta phrasing usually used when
| people try to wrangle meaning out of facts.
| vacuity wrote:
| I guess I have to join advertising or PR now. _sobs
| quietly in corner_
| scottLobster wrote:
| My perspective is that if there is any objective "meaning" to
| be known, we are as incapable of understanding it as
| mitochondria are incapable of understanding why they produce
| ATP.
|
| We don't "know", in the objective scientific sense, whether
| anything has any meaning, but it's useful to act as though it
| does. Useful being defined as reducing suffering/providing
| reward for ourselves and, on the scale of the species, for
| others. People search for meaning because finding it relieves
| suffering and provides reward, and people generally encourage
| others to find meaning because there are generally benefits to
| the species as a whole. Perhaps it's just a sophisticated way
| for our DNA to ensure its own propagation, perhaps there's
| something more to it, perhaps it's a random outcome of
| mutation. But it does relieve suffering and provide reward.
| That's good enough for me, there's plenty to do between here
| and the obvious limits of human knowledge that's likely to have
| far more impact on how we live.
|
| It's like if we're living on one of those flat-earther maps,
| and we can see the edge of the world, but there's lifetimes of
| uncharted territory between here and that edge. You can sit
| still and impotently focus on the edge, wondering if whatever's
| beyond it means that the world itself is meaningless, or you
| can explore the land in front of you and try to make something
| good happen, without particularly worrying about what's over
| the edge. Maybe one day we'll collectively get there and find
| out, but there's no way for you and I to do so in our
| lifetimes. So why worry about it?
|
| Of course if you want to claim that science and logical
| analysis is the be-all-end-all of existence, and you're
| unwilling to accept the unknown will likely remain unknown with
| our current biological capabilities, well I'd say "have fun"
| but you certainly won't. You'll just continuously suffer of
| your own accord, unwilling to accept any relief, continuously
| staring into Nietzsche's abyss until your organic form expires.
| If there is a metaphorical hell brought on by sin, that state
| would certainly be a candidate (the sin in this case being
| pride).
| adasdasdas wrote:
| Can "nihilists" stop conflating rejecting objective meaning with
| having no meaning (nihilism).
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| This topic interests me, but I've never really studied it.
|
| Would you mind sketching out your take on it?
| adasdasdas wrote:
| It goes back to the answer to the question of, "what is the
| meaning of life", or its darker brother of a question "why
| bother living when you can kill yourself and end the
| suffering".
|
| A Christian might respond with, "God tells me to live and
| spread the gospel, raise children, and feed the needy". A
| Christian will tell you that this is how you ought to think
| too because all truth comes from the bible, which is why I
| call it objective meaning. There is a single source of truth.
|
| An atheist might say, "I find meaning through living life,
| understanding the world, human connection, etc". This person
| will usually readily admit that what makes them happy might
| not make you happy. Hence, subjective meaning.
|
| A real nihilist in my opinion would probably kill themself
| because there is not purpose in life. A fake nihilist will
| say, "I can make sense of my suffering" which makes them not
| a nihilist because they found meaning.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Now I'm wondering what definition of "meaning" people are
| using for this issue.
|
| I wonder if the fuzziness of the term leads to people
| unwittingly talking past each other.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| 100% agree, meaning in this context can usually be used
| interchangeably with, purpose, reason to live, value,
| etc.
| maxbond wrote:
| A "real nihilist" might kill themselves (hey, is anyone
| needs to hear this, don't kill yourself, and definitely
| don't kill yourself because of a thought experiment [1]),
| but most of the nihilists I've met have adjusted to their
| perspective and responded to it in a healthy way. (I'm not
| gunnuh engage in a Scotsman argument about whether that's
| disqualifying. But I'll grant there's an obvious
| survivorship bias there.)
|
| It turns out that believing in meaning isn't always
| necessary.
|
| [1] A friend mine put this very well once. We were talking
| about Meno, and Socrates' refusal to flee Athens, dying
| instead on the principle he'd entered into a sort of social
| contract (please excuse the ahistorical terminology) with
| Athens.
|
| "I've never heard Socrates talk about the social contract
| before," my friend said.
|
| "I refuse to die over a minor fucking principle."
|
| Dying for a thought experiment isn't romantic. Being
| rational in all things is actually undesirable, because not
| everything functions under rational principles (or we
| wouldn't need the concept in the first place, it would just
| be the air we breathe).
|
| In the same way that everyone can make a cryptosystem they
| themselves can't break, everyone can create a logical knot
| that they can't untie. It's a parlor trick, and not a
| reason to die.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| Well that's why I believe most nihilists aren't actually
| nihilists. Also, I don't think believing in meaning has
| anything to do with nihilism. In fact, the sentence kind
| of implies you are speaking of objective meaning which is
| what grinds my gears.
| bamfly wrote:
| "Being" a nihilist is kind of a weird idea anyway. It's
| more a feature of (parts of) various other world-views or
| approaches to certain aspects of philosophy, than, like,
| some thing all its own.
|
| Pessimists, broadly, are closer to a real definable
| "school" to which one might credibly assign hypocrisy at
| failing to follow through and off oneself (though there
| are various valid reasons that may still not really be
| fair). A famous example of this kind of philosophy in pop
| culture is Rusty in True Detective, who explicitly labels
| himself a pessimist, and who carries on not because he
| believes there's a reason to that he could defend
| philosophically, but because he "lacks the constitution
| for suicide", as he puts it himself. Though, again, even
| the pessimist school comes up with justifications for
| going on living (they just tend to lean more romantic,
| than couched in reason).
|
| TL;DR I think you're wrestling a ghost with this true- or
| not-true nihilist deal. I think the colloquial use of the
| term admits cases and views less-strict or
| precise/complete than you're insisting on, usually being
| a shorthand for some _limited_ and _specific_ case of
| nihilism (e.g. existential nihilist) that doesn 't
| necessarily mean what you're expecting nihilism to mean,
| while some more-formal-and-strict version that exists as
| an all-encompassing School of Nihilism isn't really _a
| thing_ to begin with.
| maxbond wrote:
| > Well that's why I believe most nihilists aren't
| actually nihilists.
|
| Let's suppose for a moment you're mistaken. How would you
| recognize evidence to the contrary, were you to receive
| it? If you met a nihilist, you'd dismiss them, right?
| It's an approximately unfalsifiable construction.
|
| > Also, I don't think believing in meaning has anything
| to do with nihilism.
|
| It seems like you call it "purpose" and I called it
| "meaning?" I'm a bit confused on that point. Am I
| misusing terminology?
|
| > In fact, the sentence kind of implies you are speaking
| of objective meaning which is what grinds my gears.
|
| I meant meaning writ large, subjective or objective. If
| there's a different phrasing that wouldn't have contained
| this unintended implication I'm open to suggestions.
|
| An example of a line of thinking you might accept; a
| nihilist could decide go on living, just because they
| feel like it. It's entirely rational (and let me be
| clear, you don't need to avoid suicide on rational
| grounds anyway, it's entirely acceptable not to kill
| yourself for arational reasons) to decide you don't want
| to die because you're curious about what will happen if
| you don't, or because you think it would be an unpleasant
| endeavor, or because you've just adopted it as an axiom
| that you should go on living without any justification.
| There is no contradiction there.
|
| Really, presupposing that a life of suffering should be
| ended _is_ asserting the existence of a meaning to life,
| just a negative one instead of a positive one.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| > Let's suppose for a moment you're mistaken. How would
| you recognize evidence to the contrary, were you to
| receive it? If you met a nihilist, you'd dismiss them,
| right? It's an approximately unfalsifiable construction.
|
| I think it's almost tautological. But most people are on
| a spectrum, there are extremely nihilistic people who
| still care about their mothers for example. But yea, I
| think that the spectrum of nihilism is just the inverse
| of the spectrum of willingness to live.
|
| > presupposing that a life of suffering should be ended
|
| I'm not prescribing action, I just think it usually ends
| up this way.
|
| > An example of a line of thinking you might accept; a
| nihilist could decide go on living, just because they
| feel like it.
|
| I believe many people live like this, but not because
| they are a nihilist, but because they don't do
| introspection and/or take meaningful things in life for
| granted, because just a tiny bit of introspection would
| reveal that there are many many things you find
| meaningful in life, even if its something basic like,
| security, health, or peace. If you take these things away
| from a person, they will probably contemplate their
| existence and try to figure out why they should go on
| with life.
| maxbond wrote:
| I'm gunnuh be blunt, and I mean no offense, but from what
| I've read of your arguments in this & adjacent
| subthreads, it seems you don't really understand what
| nihilism is and are actually talking about depression and
| suicidal ideation.
|
| You're saying very insensitive things about real people
| and a very touchy subject, and you've had multiple people
| explain to you at length what it is you've misunderstood
| about nihilism. I think you should take a step back and
| take another look at that, I'm not sure you've accurately
| estimated the weight of your words or the sturdiness of
| your foundation.
|
| This is as one human being to another, if I think I
| recognize a certain pattern of thinking and am asking you
| to reevaluate it, it's only because I've had that pattern
| of thinking in my own mind and someone else has drawn my
| attention to it in the past.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| You're right in that I might be callous in the way I
| write, but meaning/purpose is very relevant to life and
| death, and I really dislike when people spread a message
| of meaninglessness in the form of nihilism. Now there
| might be language challenges here, but I believe that
| people with narrow definitions of meaning will struggle
| to find meaning because a persons thinking is somewhat
| bound by language. My view here is largely inspired from
| Camus[0]
|
| [0]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/#SuiResAbs
| [deleted]
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| > A real nihilist in my opinion would probably kill
| themself
|
| Nihlism is acknowledging that many if not all aspects that
| result in "life" are pointless. I fail to understand how
| that equates to no will to live life. There is only
| irrationality to living while acknowledging the
| pointlessness of it. According to the nihilist, every other
| justification is flimsy at best, so justifying the
| pointless is equally irrational to them.
|
| Regardless, I think there are a lot of misjudgments about
| such philosophy, particularly with associating with some
| destructive impulse or depression etc.
| dsmithatx wrote:
| Agreed. I became a nihilist as a teenager and still
| believe life mostly has no meaning. Humans will all die
| and the earth will keep turning. I don't really believe
| in an afterlife.
|
| At the same time a person gets miserable going against
| the grain of society and thus you learn how to be content
| and how to keep your emotions in check. I do not see any
| conflict in these two things. I see it as the survival
| skills of a nihilist.
|
| Your natural instinct will be to prosper in this life, it
| doesn't mean there is a bigger meaning than farting and
| dying.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| [flagged]
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| You're encroaching on ideas of self and self-
| actualization now, all very different from attributing
| meaning to aspects that result in or are related to life.
| Neither wanting to protect yourself or others is against
| Nilhism per se, mainly I think because acknowledging the
| pointlessness of something does not immediately or
| unequivocally make something else reasonable or
| justifiable. For example, if I say I don't eat fish it
| doesn't necessarily mean that I am okay with you punching
| me in the face etc...though, it would make a nice Monty
| Python sketch.
| YellOh wrote:
| Seems like a weirdly stringent test for nihilism. If a
| nihilist believes there is no meaning in living but also no
| meaning in dying, why would they default to dying?
|
| A lot of built-in taboos (e.g. against bodily damage) make
| living a "default" human choice, and unless you're also
| burying the assumption that without meaning one should
| actively seek death as soon as possible(?), it seems like
| nihilists could keep riding the default until they got
| sufficiently bored of it.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| When I think of nihilism, I think of depressed people who
| can't pick themselves up to do anything because of a
| feeling of hopelessness, or a man experiencing a mid life
| crisis wondering what he's worked so hard for. These
| people often resort unhealthy coping mechanisms or even
| worse, suicide.
| YellOh wrote:
| You're equivocating between your stereotype of nihilism
| and what "real nihilists" "should" do to be considered a
| nihilist. Nihilism != depression, even if there is
| overlap, and it's useful to let the words have different
| meanings.
|
| There are a decent number of people who are nihilists
| without meeting your assumptions above (though they're
| probably less salient, as if someone seems functional &
| not-miserable, people don't usually bother to ask whether
| they're a nihilist).
|
| Nietzche defines nihilism (partially) as those who oppose
| the affirmation of life which is _kind_ of related to
| what you say here... except the affirmation of life
| requires a "yes" to life such that "all of eternity [is]
| embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed,"[0] which I
| think plenty of (functional, happy-ish) people do not
| experience.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzschean_affirmation
|
| [Footnote: Nietzsche is writing _against_ the nihilism he
| saw in his own time, not in favor.]
| adasdasdas wrote:
| I'm not equivocating anything, my test for nihilism is
| very simple, "do you have anything meaningful in your
| life". What I mentioned earlier are symptoms or forms of
| nihilism.
|
| What I hate is when people describe nihilism as "Well, I
| don't believe there is meaning but also I find
| satisfaction in the small things in life" or "There's no
| point in life, the point of life is to live". It's always
| the same pattern of rejecting objective meaning and
| thinking that's the same as having no meaning.
|
| Fwiw, I'm in favor of Nietzsche's definition too, but I
| don't want to introduce a whole host of loaded words to
| an already confusing topic
| YellOh wrote:
| Does someone occasionally getting small satisfactions
| equal them thinking there is meaning in life? If so,
| we're using very different definitions of meaning. I
| think people can think there is no meaning _and also_ be
| capable of occasional positive experiences.
|
| (I don't understand the second quote so can't comment on
| it.)
|
| One of my favorite poems is Be Drunk[0]. Would you take
| someone agreeing with the "thesis" of Be Drunk (thinking
| it's necessary to numb yourself against meaninglessness
| through diversions like alcohol or poetry) as unable to
| be a nihilist, because they are capable of distracting
| themselves from meaninglessness?
|
| [0] https://poets.org/poem/be-drunk
|
| -
|
| ETA: I don't think "is there anything meaningful in your
| life" uses the word "meaning" in the same was as the
| question "does life have meaning." Maybe the below
| commentor was totally correct about us all talking past
| each other, because the first question seems to ask "does
| anything reliably bring you joy" while the second asks
| "is there a purpose to existence." Someone could have
| things that matter to them while still thinking existence
| is purposeless.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| To get out of the morbid tone of the thread, I do want to
| say that, I think we probably mostly agree. I just want
| to reframe the conversation from, "despite the lack of
| (objective) meaning, build your own meaning" to "meaning
| is all around us, you just need to look a little harder"
| because the former is a very negative perspective on life
| in my opinion, and it can come from a place of
| resentment.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| You're assuming it's natural to assign a negative value to
| living. If future suffering is a reason to die, why
| shouldn't future pleasure be reason to live?
| bamfly wrote:
| There exist multiple good, free encyclopedias of philosophy
| online:
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi
|
| https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/nihilism/v-1
|
| https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/
|
| Stanford's is probably the best-regarded of the bunch--you'll
| struggle to find a better brief introduction to most topics,
| than it provides, especially for $0. Skipping e.g. Wikipedia
| and going straight to the SEP, for philosophical topics, is
| usually a good call.
| notnaut wrote:
| The universe has no ethics. Humanity has no ethics inherent,
| besides that which is directly encoded in our dna. That
| doesn't mean it's not good/useful for people to have ethics.
| That doesn't mean it's not a meaningful pursuit, to people in
| a context. It's just that the context holds the value, rather
| than the thing itself.
|
| I think nihilism often goes beyond this though.
| jona-f wrote:
| Yes, to me rejecting objective meaning is nihilism, what do you
| call it? What you call nihilism, i might call radical nihilism
| or extreme nihilism. Yes, taken to the extreme, it would lead
| to total apathy, as there is no reason to do anything (Also no
| reason to kill yourself btw). But you can still have nihilism
| as the foundation of your philosophy. That would probably be a
| contradiction to you, cause you take nihilism very literal. And
| yes, by your definition any known nihilist is a fake nihilist,
| otherwise you wouldn't know them.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| > Yes, to me rejecting objective meaning is nihilism, what do
| you call it?
|
| The word closest to rejecting objective meaning is just non-
| religious because objective meaning is mostly a religious
| phenomenon.
|
| What matters is that the alternative is NOT just nihilism,
| but also existentialism.
| jona-f wrote:
| Existentialism is one of those philosophies based on
| nihilism in my book.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| That's fine if you want use your definition, but most
| existentialists consider nihilism the common enemy in a
| society without object meaning.
| [deleted]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Logic is a convenient tool, and it underpins mathematical
| reasoning and thus all mechanistic explanations of the universe.
| This does seem to imply a lack of meaning due to predetermination
| if we follow Descartes... but that's all fallen down due to all
| sorts of revelations, including quantum indeterminancy, special
| and general relativity, and sensitive dependence on initial
| conditions in the world of physics, and incompleteness (Godel)
| and undecidability (Church-Turing) in the mathematical world.
| Mathematics is now like a castle floating in the sky, holding
| itself up by its own bootstraps, and physics is as much
| probability as it is predictability. We can go to great efforts
| to create systems that provide the illusion of predictable,
| logical behavior (e.g. computers), but cosmic rays still flip
| bits occasionally.
|
| I've adopted this viewpoint as a result:
|
| "Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical
| universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one
| step beyond logic." - Frank Herbert, Dune
| jeffrallen wrote:
| > Deep down, maybe I still yearn for more than dancing and
| farting.
|
| Got me to smile with that, thanks.
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