111–120 of 148 posts
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>(more accurately: we cannot infer an Ought from an Is). Oughts cannot mean anything in the first place unless they ultimately reduce to some kind of is-checkable fact.
This would give you Nihilism. Theism disagrees.
The Is-Ought Problem and the Open Question Argument are not so conclusive as to justify nihilism.
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The historical problem is too many children surviving childhood. The oldest son gets the farm, the youngest gets nothing. The solutions have been things like: - subdivide the property (not sustainable) - The younger son goes to the military, or the frontier, or... - The younger son courts a daughter in a family with no sons
There are only three possible outcomes. - Increase the death rate (war, disease, etc) - Establish an equilibrium and plan for a given number of living beings, preventing the formation of new ones until there are free resources. (Attempting to defy this will lead to the previous or next outcome.) - Expand in to new areas to provide more SPACE!
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The historical problem is too many children surviving childhood. The oldest son gets the farm, the youngest gets nothing. The solutions have been things like: - subdivide the property (not sustainable) - The younger son goes to the military, or the frontier, or... - The younger son courts a daughter in a family with no sons
There are only three possible outcomes. - Increase the death rate (war, disease, etc) - Establish an equilibrium and plan for a given number of living beings, preventing the formation of new ones until there are free resources. (Attempting to defy this will lead to the previous or next outcome.) - Expand in to new areas to provide more SPACE!
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>The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. So what? I fail to understand how this supposedly renders our lives more or less meaningful.
If (universe==indifferent) meaning=null; Anecdotally speaking most people get through their day to day tasks thinking that somehow it all matters in the end. If nothing really matters, and best you can do is be your own little streetlight(to paraphase Kubrick) you are faced with the problem on what to choose as your meaning. Pick anything, it will do. That is scary.
Why?
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But why do you think productivity is any less absurd than non-productivity? And why is intelligence relevant to absurdity? Is a butterfly's life any more absurd than a human's? Humans and humanity don't have goals. The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. And it is certainly not our goal to be creative, productive, efficient. We make up goals for ourselves to give subjective meaning to our lives, an…
>The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. So what? I fail to understand how this supposedly renders our lives more or less meaningful.
Every human must experience and keep on experiencing or otherwise taking your life might be more less painful than living it.
Existentialism argues that we create our own meaning by living life and exercising our free will. Nihilism counters that there is no meaning and so nothing matters. Absurdism is the acceptance that life is ridiculous and by defiantly laughing at it we can live authentically.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
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If (universe==indifferent) meaning=null; Anecdotally speaking most people get through their day to day tasks thinking that somehow it all matters in the end. If nothing really matters, and best you can do is be your own little streetlight(to paraphase Kubrick) you are faced with the problem on what to choose as your meaning. Pick anything, it will do. That is scary.
> If (universe==indifferent) meaning=null; Why?
No natural law, no nothing -> pure chaos
Put it another way, indifferent universe strongly points to us being a complete accident, our qualia so cherished by us just an absurd joke.
So meaning being null means there is no ultimate answer not even 42.
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I will never forget a lottery winner statement. She won a huge amount of money in the lotttery. She went out to dinner with her family to celebrate. The next morning her husband woke up in complete liver failure. Both were MD's and her final statement at the end of the interview was "Life is truly random." I think about that quote too often.
Yep but there's statistics that are pretty reliable.