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A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

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

#131

Post by lisper »

maxbond wrote: post #115
lisper wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#132

Post by lisper »

afpx wrote: post #123
lisper wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Sure, but that still all comes back to Darwin. Reproduction involves a lot more than just fertilizing an egg.

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

#133

Post by vacuity »

kogus wrote: post #129
andrewjl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

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.

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

#134

Post by Drakim »

vacuity wrote: post #130
andrewjl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

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.

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

#135

Post by loughnane »

bamfly wrote: post #122
loughnane wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

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.

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

#136

Post by lisper »

haswell wrote: post #124
lisper wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#137

Post by Drakim »

kogus wrote: post #129
andrewjl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

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?

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

#139

Post by feoren »

beltsazar wrote: post #117

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 cont…

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.

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

#140

Post by maxbond »

lisper wrote: post #131
maxbond wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 lon…

> 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.

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