151–160 of 236 posts
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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.
I didn't say you could. GP didn't seem to either.
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This topic interests me, but I've never really studied it. Would you mind sketching out your take on it?
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 c…
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I didn't say you could. GP didn't seem to either.
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.
> 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.
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…
Technical fields have similar fundamental courses...
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…
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).
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It's morally repulsive to me to believe something just because it makes me feel better.
// 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?
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> 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.
Whether people suffer or not, whether people are good to me or not, whether I am good to other people are all important, even if our life here is temporary. Yes, in the long run all will be forgotten, but in the short run, the long run doesn't matter. Suffering and joy are to be managed in the meantime; we can experience both directly, and we can get satisfaction and meaning indirectly by helping other attain joy/avoid pain. That is something that we can demonstrate to be true here and now, something that is beyond dispute.
It seems to me we should work on the here and now and not spend so much energy trying to curry favor to better our position in a hypothetical afterlife.
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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 fi…
How can something be moral or not in the face of meaninglessness. Just to use a ridiculous example, if I poop in the woods, that poop has no meaning to me so you can light it on fire or eat for all I care. However, if I work hard and buy a car, that car has tons of meaning to me so I do care if you light it on fire, or eat it.
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// 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?
Ideally you choose the one with the better logical argument. Feelings or consequences shouldn't factor in it.
> 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…
> 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.
I knowingly married a woman who is unable to bear children. We adopted two, and I don't feel in any way that my life is less for not spawning.
Here is a hypothetical: in scenario 1, you are an average Joe and have three kids. In scenario 2, due to your dedication to medical research, you never have kids, but you develop a new drug that eliminates diarrhea and saves millions of lives every year. Do you really think scenario 1 is a more meaningful life than scenario 2?