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A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

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Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#111

Post by PartiallyTyped »

speak_plainly wrote: post #30
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#112

Post by lisper »

disco_framework wrote: post #105
lisper wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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?

Yes, but the comment I was originally responding to was that “we are here on earth to fart around”.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#113

Post by ta20220714 »

“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

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#114

Post by lisper »

maxbond wrote: post #109
lisper wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 we…

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.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#115

Post by maxbond »

lisper wrote: post #114
maxbond wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 we…

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.

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.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#116

Post by bamfly »

adasdasdas wrote: post #44
maxbond wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)…

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.

"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.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#117

Post by beltsazar »

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?

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#118

Post by nonameiguess »

kafkaesque wrote: post #95
mensetmanusman wrote: post #32

"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...

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…

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.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#119

Post by catsarebetter »

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.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

#120

Post by bamfly »

thenerdhead wrote: post #8

> 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.

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.

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