Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)

meltingasphalt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 236 posts

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

#221

Post by beltsazar »

feoren wrote: post #215
beltsazar wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, where to start.. > I think I need to emphasize a point better: there are infinitely many objective measures. No one here or anywhere is arguing that there are no objective measures. Of course, there is! The question is whether there is an objective measure from which good or bad is determined. Or in a logical statement, whether this statement is true: There exists something that is an objective measure AND from…

> there are humans, albeit in minority, that take pleasure from painful experiences. And we should seek to act in such a way that, all else equal, those humans have opportunities to do so, except in those cases where allowing masochists to engage in self-harm ends up causing more harm to others in the long run, e.g. if it emboldens them to torture others or if it causes them to end their own life which would otherwis…

Unlike my discussions with other people in this thread, who also have different opinions, I don't think this discussion with you will ever be productive.

You just keep arguing against what I didn't support or even mention. You were focusing on nonessential details of imperfect examples, which should at least give a glimpse what I've been meaning all this time. Or maybe you really didn't understand of what my counter-arguments really are, after all.

> No, we absolutely do not all agree on this ... Nor do many people, especially pacifists, agree that soldiers are automatically good people.

> ...

> The answer is: it depends on the context. It depends on the people.

The fact that we—and people in general, e.g. pacifists you mentioned—don't agree what's moral or not just proves my point that it's probably impossible to define objective morality from physicalists' point of view. As I've said many times, the closest thing to objective morality is a concept of good or bad based on whether it's beneficial for survival or not. But even this, as I explained in other comments, has its own problems.

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

#222

Post by beltsazar »

feoren wrote: post #214
vacuity wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll get straight to the point. Abortion. Controversial topic, yes? People view it as a moral question, and it's a fairly direct reflection of one's moral values. Do you mean to say that a reasonable vision of the world based on everyone's moralities where there isn't a huge conflict? What compromise (if any) would be reasonable? Abortion is just one, albeit salient, example. People differ in small ways and in big wa…

> a reasonable vision of the world based on everyone's moralities I was actually careful not to say "moralities" as parameters of the model, because people's claimed moralities are often really awful representations of what they actually want, believe, or care about in life. Nobody is against abortion when their own daughter gets impregnated by a rapist or when it's their own ectopic pregnancy. Abortion is only contr…

> you can tell by the fact that everyone is pro-abortion when it's them or their daughter.

Wow. By the fact? Really? I thought there's a small chance that the discussion with you could be saved, but now you've said this, no, this discussion won't get anywhere, ever.

What you've been doing is coming up with an "objective" moral compass / objective function of life (maximizing happiness, minimizing suffering) that you strongly believe literally everyone will agree in such and such conditions. No, they won't.

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

#223

Post by vacuity »

shrimpx wrote: post #218
vacuity wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole thread seems ridiculous to me. It just looks like "people needlessly complicating how they think about life". Why do you have to permit yourself to do anything? At least appealing to a higher power justifies why you would feel restricted. Nihilism just isn't for me, I guess.

Things being "permitted" wouldn't occur to someone born recently in a secular context. This is a historical artifact in relation to the 1700+ year grip that Christianity had on people's minds.

I suppose so, but nihilism doesn't seem to mesh with religion anyways.

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

#224

Post by chronofar »

beltsazar wrote: post #205
chronofar wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that maximizing the chance for survival is the only ultimate objective function, or that it's somehow the only one that can escape "why is this desirable?" questioning, or that it is even coherent as an objective function in the long run (I see no reason to think the we'll run into technological limits that prevent us from deviating from natural evolution in the future for much, if perhaps not most of life…

First of all, thanks for the compelling discussion so far. > To be honest I'm now a bit confused on your position, as you explicitly brought up points in your previous post that elucidated some of the cracks in attempting to treat survival as the "one true goal": > ... > perhaps first I should ask how this line of questioning doesn't lead you away from survival as the ultimate objective function. To be clear, I don't…

> First of all, thanks for the compelling discussion so far.

Likewise thank you for the compelling discussion and clarifications.

> To be clear, I don't hold any strong position. All my previous comments are based on the assumption that the three premises I wrote in the very beginning of the first post are true, but I'm not arguing that those premises are true. I was just elaborating the implications if they were true: 1) To survive and to reproduce would be the closest thing to the ultimate purpose of life. 2) What traits we consider "good" or "bad" would actually be just what traits are beneficial for survival or not.

I think you need a few extra steps to get you from those premises to these conclusions. In fact, I'd suggest you may not even really be able to get from those premises to those conclusions, in particular I think you'd need to invoke "designers" (or "higher beings") imbuing purpose into the functional specifics of evolution to arrive there (thus contradicting one of those premises).

The premises as stated don't tell you much in the way of ascribing "purpose" to life, only how the mechanisms behind how it propagates and changes over time, just as Maxwell's equations do not define some "purpose" to electromagnetism but rather describe its evolution across time. And further the emergent systems that arise from these underlying processes, of primary importance for our conversation here consciousness and emergent from that society and civilization, need not owe all their properties to the mechanisms of the underlying systems (indeed this is what we often mean by emergence).

So ultimately I think that not only is survival not the "ultimate purpose," I think it's difficult to argue there is any intrinsic purpose there at all.

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

#225

Post by qsantos »

disadvantage wrote: post #17

> 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…

There is nothing special about 生きがい (ikigai). It's just Japanese for “reason for living”.

There is a wider phenomenon where people attribute deep meaning to mundane Japanese words, such as 改善 (kaizen, improvement), 引きこもり (hikikomori, recluse), or even 看板 (kanban, board). This sounds like a case of exoticism.

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

#226

Post by shrimpx »

vacuity wrote: post #223
shrimpx wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things being "permitted" wouldn't occur to someone born recently in a secular context. This is a historical artifact in relation to the 1700+ year grip that Christianity had on people's minds.

I suppose so, but nihilism doesn't seem to mesh with religion anyways.

As far as I understand, nihilism and existentialism were both reactions to the "death of religion". Nihilism concludes that everything is devoid of meaning. Existentialism concludes basically the same thing, but then is like "so let's go be ourselves and have fun, find ways to enjoy life" basically. I think this is where the "is permitted" part comes in.

But anyway nihilism is related to religion in the sense that it's a reaction to the end of religion.

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

#227

Post by nateb2022 »

adasdasdas wrote: post #29
CoastalCoder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 call it objective meaning. There is a single source of truth.

This is a grossly uninformed misrepresentation. Some Protestants do espouse the idea of sola scriptura, however these groups are largely the minority of Christians. The Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, and Anglicans/Episcopalians vastly outnumber the Lutherans, Pentecostals, Calvinists, and Baptists.

Catholic philosophy (Catholicism being the largest Christian group and approximately as large as all the other groups combined[0]) holds that faith and reason are the two pillars by which we can come to know truth. By faith is meant in general the knowledge received through revelation (e.g. the Bible). By reason is meant the workings of the intellectual processes, empirical evidence, and scientific knowledge.

Through the working together of faith and reason, we can come to know the fullness of the truth. The Bible is not the sole source of truth to Catholics. See also Fides et ratio by Pope St. John Paul II.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denomination... (data as of 2011)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_et_ratio

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

#228

Post by [deleted] »

nateb2022 wrote: post #227
adasdasdas wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 call it objective meaning. There is a single source of truth. This is a grossly uninformed misrepresentation. Some Protestants do espouse the idea of sola scriptura , however these groups are largely the minority of Christians. The Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, and Anglicans/Episcopalians v…

[deleted]

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

#229

Post by nateb2022 »

vacuity wrote: post #141
regus wrote: post #125

I have often heard people say things like "I don't believe the universe or our lives have any meaning, so I choose to make my own meaning." If the universe is meaningless, and all the things in it are equally meaningless (ourselves included). How is it possible to create meaning? How can a meaningless thing or action within a meaningless system have any meaning? I guess we could just declare that this thing has meani…

> If the universe is meaningless, and all the things in it are equally meaningless (ourselves included) That is an assumption in itself. No one is obligated to act under that premise. > How is it possible to create meaning? I guess we could just declare that this thing has meaning, but isn't this just a delusion? Like thinking 0 + 0 = 1? We perceive meaning all the time. This thread came to be because many people hol…

> That is an assumption in itself. No one is obligated to act under that premise.

No, it is not. By definition, "[t]he universe is often defined as "the totality of existence", or everything that exists, everything that has existed, and everything that will exist."[0]

If we hold that everything is without meaning, we cannot hold that anything has meaning. It would be a contradiction.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe

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

#230

Post by nateb2022 »

svieira wrote: post #211

> 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 Since science† doesn't have anything to say on the subject of purpose (since it's literally meta-physics that speaks on purpose) we're already off the rails. However ... > Few things are meaningful all by themselves; most derive their meaning from the things they point to. Of course, the buck ha…

Sapienti sat est.
Post reply on HN