Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958) • Hacker News Board

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#211

Post by taneq » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 12:06 AM UTC

Fraterkes wrote: post #83

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #14

I remember reading this in college and coming away with the feeling that what he was proposing was impossible. I didn't know what my Abilities were and how they relate to the others around me such that I can use them effectively. Not only that I didn't even know what I desire aside from food and sex. Luckily I was on a career trajectory and had quite a bit of experience ahead of me so I took solace in the idea that w…

I think a large part of the problem is that when people talk about finding "happiness" they are actually talking about "winning at life". Which is impossible of course. Every time that you do something that you think will make you happy, and you ask yourself 'is this it?' you allready know the answer, because someone who's satisfied wouldn't ask 'is this it?'. And if you spend years thinking about "finding happiness"…

> [W]hen people talk about finding "happiness" they are actually talking about "winning at life". Which is impossible of course.

Winning at life is a process, not an event or a one-off result. It can be anything from really enjoying a hot chocolate while watching a sunrise, to nailing a product demo, to that first (or third) date with your crush.

Winning at life is not something you can be 'done with', except maybe by dwelling on and reliving past wins. But then isn't that a kind of winning, too?

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#212

Post by ue_ » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 12:13 AM UTC

toomim wrote: post #17

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #14

I remember reading this in college and coming away with the feeling that what he was proposing was impossible. I didn't know what my Abilities were and how they relate to the others around me such that I can use them effectively. Not only that I didn't even know what I desire aside from food and sex. Luckily I was on a career trajectory and had quite a bit of experience ahead of me so I took solace in the idea that w…

Did you not desire to write this comment?

This is an interesting concept, and I think that desire has two faces: the first face of desire is desire driven for greed and aversion and delusion, as described in Buddhism. Principally, desire for becoming, desire for non-becoming and desire for sensual enjoyment (i.e enjoyment via our six senses, counting the intellect as a sensor and ideas being the objects we sense with it), as is taught in Buddhism.

The second kind of desire is that which you do not attach to. The outcome of these desires, whether accomplishing what you want or not, does not affect your mind. You don't crave these outcomes, or thirst for them.

In my opinion the distinction between "good" and "bad" desire isn't nearly as important as the distinction between what causes suffering and what alleviates suffering. Sense pleasures cause suffering when we attach to them.

AndrewKemendo's problem lies in the lack of contentedness, not lack of happiness. No matter how many sense pleasures we choose to indulge in, they are all impermanent and unstable, all ending, all unsafe.

    The entirety
    of a mountain of gold,
    of solid bullion:
    even twice that
    wouldn't suffice
    for one person.
        Knowing this,
        live evenly,
        in tune with the contemplative life.

    When you see stress,
    and from where it comes,
    how can you incline to sensual pleasures?
    Knowing acquisition
    to be a bond in the world,
        train for
        its subduing.

    - The Buddha (SN 4.20)

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn04/sn04.020.tha...

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#213

Post by armitron » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 12:22 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #89

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yea those close to me hate it. Everyone else seems fine cause they only see the professional side, so as far as they know, everything is just A OK Great! Not only family but I have a high stress business to run and people counting on me! Thanks for taking the time to write that out though. In reality, all you write is correct generally. This wasn't intended to be a mini-therapy session, but for what it's worth th…

If I may add 2cents: It sounds like you're potentially depressed, or just happen to be a nihilist. This is not necessarily bad. It can, in fact, be a virtue. With true nihilism, comes true freedom to do anything. Right now happiness is the greatest unifying force in our society. Everyone has to be happy. It's a dictum you listen to from birth to death. Be happy. Acquire things. Do this, do that, give us money, spend…

There are two forms of nihilism, active and passive.

Passive nihilism can be found in Schopenhauer, Zen, Buddhism, Vedanta, detachment from the self and the fulfillment of idle fantasies [desire]. It is related to a monastic/ascetic lifestyle and can be very hard to deal with or fully espouse when one lives an active life inside modern western society (too many distractions).

Active nihilism is best described by Nietzsche, in his concept of the Ubermensch or the Antichrist. This is a strong individual who creates and projects his own morals, imposing his own Will upon the world whilst living his own life as a work of art. John C. Lilly's concept of metaprogramming and various mystical "systems" can also be seen as forms of this discipline.

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#214

Post by qu4z-2 » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 12:29 AM UTC

armitron wrote: post #201

sireat wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are back to Ecclesiastes without the tacked on Epilogue but with a touch of Blade Runner. I have two problems with this realization(not that it makes it any less true). First, anything truly goes then and we are back to "might is right". Any state/laws some subset of humanity creates is no less right than any other subset of humanity which includes various levels of psychopaths. First problem is not such a bad one…

You are deluding yourself when you think you actually have a choice. A chaotic dynamical system moving between (or sitting at) attractors doesn't leave much room for Free Will.

That all depends on how you define "choice", surely.

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#215

Post by faktorialas » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 12:54 AM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #43

jknoepfler wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try getting good at something you're bad at, like, for example, appreciating your life and the lives of those around you. "Yawning void of nothing" is a pretty hilariously inaccurate description of a family and all the life experiences you describe. I would experiment with the hypothesis that perceiving value and experiencing it as such are skills you lack but others possess, that may be improved through deliberate p…

I would experiment with the hypothesis that perceiving value and experiencing it as such are skills you lack but others possess No experimentation necessary, it's blatantly clear that's the case. that may be improved through deliberate practice Perhaps. Or maybe it's just trying to distract yourself from reality through what are commonly accepted "values." Hard to know. I read all those studies about "happiness" comi…

If you're talking about studies in psychology and why they perceive happiness as such, it's because they're not philosophers. They're merely trying to learn things about something that is actually important, even if not the full picture of what is important. Because that's what their method allows them to do effectively.

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#216

Post by faktorialas » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 1:05 AM UTC

gglitch wrote: post #200

AstralStorm wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This way lies hedonism.

In Aristotle's view, there was a meaningful distinction between pleasure, which led to hedonism, and happiness, which is fairly abstract and depends on virtuous conduct performed with the right mindset. Edit: if I recall correctly. This is from The Nichomachean Ethics.

There's all kinds of ideas about the word the Greeks used for this, eudaimonia. The translation has shifted, and they tend to not even call it happiness anymore.

The new translations seem to mean something more like what you note here, rather than what we, westerners would call happiness.

And it's a much better goal in life, isn't it?

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#217

Post by brokenmachine » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 1:24 AM UTC

apatters wrote: post #194

triangleman wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way? Are you sure, based on what the parent wrote? Perhaps he was not clear about the difference between "finding meaning" and "finding your own meaning", but few people are clear about that. A search for meaning, personal or otherwise, does not necessarily lead to hedonism--to get there you have to throw out all kinds of useful things, and it doesn't really get you very far, and eventually life loses meaning…

No, he's right. If you abandon the notion that there's anything which possesses an intrinsic or higher meaning, it's almost inevitable you'll end up gratifying your most basic instincts first because they're the strongest. At least until they're sated. The only thing I don't get is why more people don't do it. People walk around with all sorts of hangups and narratives about why they're denying themselves and they ta…

But how much do you dial it back?

The problem for me personally is that hedonism, while fun for maybe a couple of hours, inevitably leads to more complications and suffering than happiness over the next day, the next week or the next year.

A more measured, but peaceful life with many smaller (not big enough to be disruptive) happy moments has been my solution and I've mostly been satisfied with that.

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#218

Post by CuriouslyC » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 1:28 AM UTC

jshevek wrote: post #162

CuriouslyC wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to why, when faced with unpredictable phenomenon, you chose to go with the hypothesis "everything is random" rather than "everything is choice" when you have an experience that appears to be choice, and would probably have a hard time naming a truly random phenomenon.

The parent didn't say "everything is random", nor anything that absolutely requires this viewpoint. To declare that "everything is choice" strikes me as putting one's beliefs ahead of inquiry.

"To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots"

Due to Bell's theorem, we know that either there is inherent uncertainty in the universe, or the whole bedrock of science gets called into question. If properly informed by physics, the view that we are robots must follow from the view that the uncertainty in nature is uncontrolled, i.e. purely random according to some distribution. Given that we have a subjective experience of choice, this presents the alternate hypothesis that the uncertainty is the result of choice constrained by preference. These aren't the only two possible hypotheses, but remember that all hidden variable models have been effectively ruled out, so no deterministic hypothesis is permissible. I would of course love to hear any plausible alternatives you could present.

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#219

Post by bbcbasic » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 1:36 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #64

Is finding goal in life so hard and complicated? Why not settle with "do something that helps survive, expand and evolve human species"? Of course, the deeper question is why we want to do that? But until we figure that out, isn't that a worthy goal to pursue?

> "do something that helps survive, expand and evolve human species"

Sex?

Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

#220

Post by CuriouslyC » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 1:47 AM UTC

scalio wrote: post #170

jshevek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent didn't say "everything is random", nor anything that absolutely requires this viewpoint. To declare that "everything is choice" strikes me as putting one's beliefs ahead of inquiry.

Indeed, when I say life has no meaning, I don't mean that it is devoid of rules. Quite the contrary is true, since our modern life revolves around mathematics. In that sense, the universe is exquisitely meaningful, it's full of mathematical meaning, but that's not massively useful for us humans trying to figure out how to spend our time.

At the small scale, the world is unpredictable. As the scale grows, for well behaved linear systems the law of large numbers kicks in, and you get predictable, mathematical behavior. For complex nonlinear systems, however, the unpredictability of the small scale can "propagate up" and render the system at the large scale completely unpredictable.

Remember that mathematics is just a model, not the territory. For starters, you have incompleteness; for any formal system you can make true statements that are unprovable. Additionally, two constructs which are central to mathematical analysis, infinity and truth, don't exist.

For hundreds of years epicycles were used to model the orbits of the planets. Now we're elevating grand theories that embed the universe in an 11-dimensional manifold.