11–20 of 88 posts
"Nihilism: the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless;" Oxford. Concise and seems pretty clear to me. While the article is well written, it doesn't really adds much IMO.
Huh. I did maybe a couple decades of applied nihilism, as presented by Landmark Education. It helped me a lot, given that I'm bipolar and prone to pessimism and depression. So this makes sense to me: > If, as I suggested earlier, nihilism and pessimism are opposites, then nihilism is actually much closer to optimism. But not this: > Such a lack of awareness is the point of nihilism, as nihilism is all about hiding fr…
"Nihilism: the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless;" Oxford. Concise and seems pretty clear to me. While the article is well written, it doesn't really adds much IMO.
Citing an entire university system (or the press I can’t tell)? Why not the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy? It’s very high quality and trivially citable with a url.
Nihilist: the payoff matrix is zero, people have been brainwashed to perceive a non-zero payoff matrix Pessimist: the payoff matrix is negative Cynic: players refuse to cooperate, so we're stuck playing with a net negative result Apathetic: this game is boring
Pessimist: the expected value less than or equal to 0. It's a meaningless game of chance, and it doesn't matter what you do.
Existentialist: the expected value is 0, but if you score 10 points, we'll call it a win.
Cynic: you think that the expected value is positive. You idiots only act like you're not playing to win.
Huh. I did maybe a couple decades of applied nihilism, as presented by Landmark Education. It helped me a lot, given that I'm bipolar and prone to pessimism and depression. So this makes sense to me: > If, as I suggested earlier, nihilism and pessimism are opposites, then nihilism is actually much closer to optimism. But not this: > Such a lack of awareness is the point of nihilism, as nihilism is all about hiding fr…
That would be https://www.landmarkworldwide.com/ ? I'd never heard of it/them. It asserts "designed to bring about positive, permanent shifts in the quality of your life—in just three days", but you mention "couple decades". Comment?
And yes, the Forum lasts three days. But there are many other courses. Most lasted just one weekend. Some were one weekend a month for maybe six months. One lasted almost a week (Six Day).
And for much of that time, I was taking seminars that met more or less weekly. Those are often focused on enrolling everyone you know in Landmark. But leaders have considerable discretion, and some of them focus far more on content.
The prices are all reasonable. The Wisdom Courses are considerably more expensive, but also more fun.[0]
0) https://www.landmarkworldwide.com/advanced-programs/wisdom-c...
Nihilism is a complicated subject. Like feminism, it's a word that means a wide range of things to different people. One person's take on nihilism obviously is their operating definition more than a single decisive statement on the subject.
I discovered nihilism before I even understood that it was a thing. I came to a realization that, until I had some clear evidence to the contrary(even then I'm not sure I could let go of my skepticism), there is effectively an exception to every rule that we conceive of and that our view of existence is almost completely tainted by the way in which we perceive it. Thus, I have to accept that people in my reality are also perceiving reality in an entirely unique way, in which case I can't truly begrudge them when they act out. Essentially, I became a moral nihilist because there's no way I can reconcile my view of the world with idea that morals are objective and not contingent on circumstance. (which isn't to say that I'm a moral relativist)
I doubt that most people who call themselves nihilists are truly nihilists or even have the kinds of views on nihilism that I do. It's an identity that most people arrive at not through their own inward exploration but as a response to the world acting upon them. I would argue that's true of most belief systems, though it's probably more transparent with nihilism since it's the rejection of something, so it's not as if there's a coherent doctrine that so-called nihilists can use to bullshit others.
Nihilism goes hand-in-hand with atheism, doesn't it? If you don't believe that the Universe is operating according to the scheme(s) of some kind of "divine being(s)", it's hard to see where any "meaning" would come from. It's just mindless and possibly deterministic motion. That is unless you can somehow derive "meaning" as an emergent concept and see it as significant. Desires originate in biology that has evolved t…
One problem that I think has long been overlooked is the foundation of human rights. Only in the past roughly five years has there been much scholarly contribution on the matter.
What could possibly ground human rights? And if they have no ground, then aren't they simply the same as the preference for, say, peeing standing up vs peeing sitting down?
I found the irony here rather amusing.