Does this obviate the issue that one has to assign the definition of meaning somewhere in the graph? ie Meaning is subjective, and it has to be inserted to propagate down.
A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
131–140 of 261 posts
Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are presupposing a suicide bomber somehow had a bad life. I am rejecting that assumption and saying a swat team and the person their shooting could both have lived a great life. Following the rules of society results in lower friction, and is generally a net positive trade off. That does not mean it's always the correct path. After-all George Washington could easily have been shot as a traitor. It may seem the st…
No, I make no assumption about the the suicide bomber. I'm say he didn't do anything bad. He could kill thousands. Not bad. The reason is that "bad" is meaningless. There is no such thing as right or wrong in a materialistic view. Aesthetics doesn't get you there. If the bomber things that the death of thousands looks good, it is. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
You are trying to add morality where there is zero need for it. "Tell me why that is wrong? ... You cannot interfere with them"
My point was you don't need to say what someone did was "bad" to stop them. As long as more people prefer an ordered world then the dissidents can be dealt with.
If majority rule says giving to the homeless is a capital offense then so be it. Physics and thus biology are going to impose a few rules. Further, completion kicks in at the social level. But, that does not mean Anarchy is "bad" just out competed.
Thus, while morality does not impose any rules collective groups of people do. Not because might makes right, but might exists and there is no right.
PS: At the extreme at one point I realized I was being paid in part to help maintain nuclear weapons. Not because I believed in them instead I liked money and other people want them.
Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Selfish behavior is almost always short-sighted behavior. Only with the assumption that leaving the world in a "better" state (and bearing in mind opinions differ wildly on what that means) is the correct thing to do in terms of value/meaning. Like, to the extremist - violent pursuit of their ideology gives their lives meaning. Vilifying selfishness is a weird position to my mind.
I'm not trying to villify selfishness, only address the criticism that usually follows this kind of statement. People look at any philosophy that says love yourself first and say it's just embelished selfishness, self-worship, narcisissm. They imagine it might lead to a Mad Max style dystopia of perpetual war. There's a time for destroying and rebuilding things, but the kind of hostility that people usually associate…
> If I contribute to my environment, I'm improving my own situation.
Yes, but a truly selfish person could improve their personal situation much more effectively by pillaging the commons, since any contribution you make to the environment is shared, but any money you can put in your pocket is for you alone.
The fact that you even think about the environment shows that you either don't have a easy way to profit from environmental degradation, or you're not a rational purely selfish utilitarian.
> What I'm saying is that it's possible to love yourself and serve yourself while still making things better for everyone without any kind of contradiction in motivation.
It's possible, but that just shows that you're not a truly selfish person since doing that takes more work. Truly selfish people think of ways to benefit themselves first, without regard for its impact on others.
> more a symptom of lack of long-term planning
If that were really the case, then over a long period of time you'd expect corporations that were bad at long term planning to get evolutionarily selected out. The fact that this doesn't happen means that either you're wrong, or there are very strong evolutionary forces that support short-term thinking.
Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's rather hypocritical though, right? Athiests measure religious people with their conceptions of science and reason, why can't it go the other way?
Speaking entirely for myself here as an atheist, I think most of us just want to be left alone to believe what we believe without having religious people constantly approaching us with "Well, you don't know Jesus, that's why you believe X,Y, Z." As if they're somehow certain that a God exists and that we simply aren't enlightened enough to see it.
I agree, but having some close Christian friends, I can tell you that some of them indeed are certain about some things. That's what they call faith.
Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
#135> So: meaning isn't a substance, but rather a feeling. In this way, it's a lot like beauty. If I understand correctly, author is saying, that you can't measure nor exactly define meaning, and then building follow up logical chain based on that axiom. If so, then it's just wrong, because all human feelings are results of biochemical processes inside a brain. They arise in exact situations and they are predictable as p…
Modern science is a long way from mapping physical states to feelings.
And even if we could, it still doesn't explain why certain physical states cause certain mental states: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/#Explangap
Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
>One can find much more objective meaning to existence without outsorcing it to some imaginable friend. Care to elaborate on this? I'm an atheist myself and I've been struggling with this a lot.
Philosophy has many different shades and colors (Philosophy of language, science, mathematics), and there is also a "branch" asking questions related to the meaning of life. I can't tell you where you could/should start, because I feel like I would already influence you too much by taking some sort of choice away from you. I will link a few essays I could find that are available for free and are not too long. I'm alr…
Interesting that you seem to be like me in wanting people to find their own path instead of influencing them in one direction too much. My meta is that this gives them more ownership over their chosen path, from which they'll potentially derive more pleasure and more meaning :)
Trying hard to have people make up their own mind can be hard for dating, though.
Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the thing; having a whole pantheon of gods, each of differing levels of 'goodness' neatly solves the problem of evil. (so does postulating one true god who isn't entirely good or entirely evil.) The problem of evil is only a philosophical problem insofar as you postulate a god of infinite ability, infinite knowledge and infinite goodness. Obviously, such a god contradicts the world as we see it. remove any one…
Relevant quote: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" - Epicurus
The flaw with this logic is it presupposes a standard of good that may be applied to a god. Under most monotheistic systems, the god is the definition of good. So anything that it does, including not preventing evil, is still good.
Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
#138Meaning is what you feel when you act and others benefit, regardless of the effect that action has on you. Happiness is when you benefit, regardless of who acted or why. In order to have a happy, meaningful life, you have to contribute to people who accept you and have those efforts reciprocated. Lots of smart people find survival in the selfish sense very trivially easy. If you do not seek out opportunities to contr…
You have no logical grounds for your first sentence. As a result everything else collapses. Meaning is whatever a person defines to have value to them in a material world. They enjoy rape, the it provides meaning. You can't tell them they're wrong because it hurts others abstractly, and can't concretely if that's part of what makes it so meaningful to them.
There is nothing stopping someone from being a great white shark aside from the threat of violence from the group. If someone can figure out how get around that, like with home made genetic manipulation for viruses, well, they get to have their own meaning spread across the world.
Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me you're thinking of Christianity in terms of its popular atheist parody, in contrast to the respectful, thoughtful view of the OP. A number of things you've said are simply not true, others are not in proportion. There are a lot of problems to grapple with in epistemology and ontology, some of which you've identified. This isn't the place to debate them, though. A great book to start with though, is Mir…
I'm an atheist, yes, but I'm hardly living in an echo chamber where I'm only exposed to parodies. I was raised as a Christian (although I was never a believer), live in a majority Christian country and my family as well as many people I interact with in my life are still Christian -- whether they actually believe in it or merely identify as Christian socially. Most Christians I know are either religious because of pe…
"But the cosmos exists! Consider who created it!"
The difference to me is in being satisfied with an answer that you accept on faith vs one you can prove, though things like many-worlds possibly confound this exploration.
Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many fundamental problems with hedonism, but hedonism avoids dealing with the problems because that's its nature.
What are the inherent problems with hedonism?
Small example: not taking care of your parents when they get old because it's not pleasurable.