A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning • Hacker News Board

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#231

Post by anotherdev » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 4:30 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #214

seanp2k2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But the cosmos exists! Consider who created it!" The difference to me is in being satisfied with an answer that you accept on faith vs one you can prove, though things like many-worlds possibly confound this exploration.

The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer. Science provides tentative answers that iteratively home in on the truth: Newton's theory of gravity wasn't wrong, it was incomplete, so it was replaced by Einstein's, which covers all the corner cases we've since learned about. In science a failure is considered progress. If we can disprove a theory, it increases our u…

>The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.

>Religion on the other hand offers absolute truth statements.

See my other comment here for another perspective on faith and religion[0]

In particular, the what happens after you die issue is applicable as it is one where we may never have conclusive evidence for the answer this side of life.

>The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.

As a Christian, my answer is I'm confident in my beliefs, but not 100% certain. I could be wrong as could you.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12084049

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#232

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #214

seanp2k2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But the cosmos exists! Consider who created it!" The difference to me is in being satisfied with an answer that you accept on faith vs one you can prove, though things like many-worlds possibly confound this exploration.

The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer. Science provides tentative answers that iteratively home in on the truth: Newton's theory of gravity wasn't wrong, it was incomplete, so it was replaced by Einstein's, which covers all the corner cases we've since learned about. In science a failure is considered progress. If we can disprove a theory, it increases our u…

> The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.

No, you don't.

To be a strict empiricist, you have to be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer, and there's other approaches to knowledge which also require that, but, while empiricism (and some of the others) may overlap with atheism, there is no requirement of willingness to accept uncertainty attached to atheism (agnosticism, which by the conventional definition of "atheism" usually used now, is a subset of atheism, certainly requires a willingness to accept "I don't know" on at least one point.)

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#233

Post by idanoeman » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #181

voxic11 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A start-up that mostly flourished after they were bought out by the enormous Roman Empire.

There was enough flourishing before to prove the point.

Prove what point? Take off your retrospective determinism glasses for a second and note that for any alien species, there's probably going to be a few religions which have double-digits of the population. These religions started from nothing at some point, so of course they look extremely tenacious in retrospect, when in fact any other equally viral religion could have taken their place if history had played out slightly differently.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#234

Post by ZenoArrow » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

ctrlalt_g wrote: post #230

ZenoArrow wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hedonism/ "Psychological or motivational hedonism claims that only pleasure or pain motivates us. Ethical or evaluative hedonism claims that only pleasure has worth or value and only pain or displeasure has disvalue or the opposite of worth." I'm mainly concerned with the second category, since the first is more of a question for psychology and neuroscience. Anyway, you're constr…

> but it doesn't match what I've seen from the behaviour of hedonists. it matches what i've seen. > Furthermore, they aren't 'pain avoidant' they are 'pleasure seeking', there's a big difference. no one is arguing that > I don't think what I said was unclear you put words in my mouth and then made up two other irrelevant arguments

> "it matches what i've seen."

Describe the behaviour of the hedonists you know.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#235

Post by cholantesh » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

anotherdev wrote: post #229

cholantesh wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Throughout the ages there were and are great rational thinkers who profess faith in God. (e.g. Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton) This form of argument could quite easily be used to justify other beliefs. Newton, for instance, was also a practitioner of the occult and alchemy. Pascal regarded medicine as unholy. Even purportedly rational thinkers have their blind spots.

That is true. Some of the most evil people in history were rational/logical to a fault. I will not follow them or believe in their ideologies. However, I mentioned them (Pascal, Newton) not to justify faith in God, but to dispel the false notion that theists are all irrational and/or theism cannot be rational.

Right. I think I agree with the general thrust of your previous comment: all worldviews/metaphysics ultimately require leaps of faith of various magnitudes.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#236

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

cholantesh wrote: post #223

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Hitchen's Razor?

I try not to police grammar, but it ought to be Hitchens' or Hitchens's. On a side note, he is sorely missed in a lot of contemporary conversations.

I agree. I did not agree with everything he wrote, but everyone of his articles were insightful and I came out a better person for having read and thought about them.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#237

Post by milcron » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 6:30 PM UTC

ctrlalt_g wrote: post #195

milcron wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's using too narrow a definition of pleasurable. Isn't the (pleasurable) time spent with your parents worth the trade-off of caring for them? Hedonism isn't necessarily restricted to physical pleasure. There are emotional and intellectual pleasures as well.

You can move around the definition of pleasure, but then you end up with situations where pain as a means to pleasure is indistinguishable from pain as equal to pleasure, which undermines the whole premise of hedonism (that only pleasure has value).

How could you possibly end up in a situation where pain is equal to pleasure? I think pain would only be considered positive when it leads to greater pleasure.

Epicurus has a great hedonistic philosophy [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus ], here are some abridged excerpts from the wiki page:

    Epicurus' philosophy is based on the theory that all good and bad derive
    from the sensations of what he defined as pleasure and pain: What is good
    is what is pleasurable, and what is bad is what is painful. If pain is
    chosen over pleasure in some cases it is only because it leads to a greater
    pleasure. Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence because it often
    leads to pain.

    Although Epicurus has been commonly misunderstood to advocate the rampant
    pursuit of pleasure, his teachings were more about striving for an absence
    of pain and suffering, both physical and mental, and a state of satiation
    and tranquility that was free of the fear of death and the retribution of
    the gods.

Humans have a wide range of pleasures, of varying degrees of richness and sophistication. People sometimes object to hedonism on the grounds that it makes us no better than swine in the mud. But I think that reflects a poor opinion of humanity. Don't we get pleasure from symphonies, poetry, and great works of art?

Epicurus himself said he could be content with water, bread, weak wine and a "pot of cheese".

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#238

Post by gnaritas » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 10:31 PM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #180

gnaritas wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one can make ones own meaning is objectively true, that there exists outside meaning is only subjectively true as there's no evidence such an outside force exists while ones own existence is not in question, so no, what I stated was objectively true while what most people believe is only subjectively true.

>what I stated was objectively true while what most people believe is only subjectively true It's not really, but of course you believe it is. Nobody wants to believe that their beliefs are just as arbitrary any anyone else's.

It isn't a matter of what I believe, it is objectively true that people can "can" choose their own meanings in life; that is not a belief, it is a fact, this is objectively demonstrable by the fact that people do exactly that and you'll find many people in this thread saying exactly that.

It is also objectively true that people can choose to rely on an external source of meaning, but it is only subjectively true that external objective meaning exists precisely because it cannot be objectively demonstrated that the source of said external objective meaning actually exists, therefore it is a subjective belief that there is objective meaning outside ones self.

It's notable that you're selectively quoting leaving out exactly that part that explain the logic behind said statement. You're either unable to discern the meaning of objective/subjective, or you're being dishonest with the selective quoting. Either way, you're incorrect. If you want to continue to debate this, you must demonstrate the logical flaw in either of the two above paragraphs.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#239

Post by lliamander » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:13 PM UTC

bobwaycott wrote: post #165

lliamander wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside. In my experience, they do focus most of that measurement internally. Christians attend Sunday morning sermons, weekly Bible studies, confess their sins to one another, read the Bible, read books on Christian living, etc. all in an attempt to measure themselves against the tenets of thei…

In my experience[0], most religious people use their religion to create and foster a sense of difference with Others, and do not keep the focus internally. American politics is a crucible of religious sources of obligational determinism locked in combat with secular forces. If you genuinely think you've found meaning, it's not selfish to keep it to yourself, until such time as someone asks for your thoughts in their…

>In my experience[0], most religious people use their religion to create and foster a sense of difference with Others, and do not keep the focus internally.

Having lived in both religious and secular communities, it seems to me that tribalism is a human universal. Secular people have no trouble judging the religious by secular standards. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just not clear about what the secularist complaint is at that point.

Also, my point was not that Christians (and religious people in general) never pass judgement on the rest of the world, but that most outsiders don't see the investment Christians make in subjecting themselves to scrutiny by the standards of their beliefs.

Complaints about religious hypocrisy are sometimes relevant, but sometimes they are a red-herring.

> American politics is a crucible of religious sources of obligational determinism locked in combat with secular forces.

Could you clarify what you mean by "obligational determinism"? The only google search results I could find lead me back to this thread.

> If you genuinely think you've found meaning, it's not selfish to keep it to yourself, until such time as someone asks for your thoughts in their own search for meaning. Which means it's likely to only happen with people you've grown close enough to that they open their private selves to you.

I'm as annoyed by the door-to-door evangelists as the next person (I think there are better approaches) but if you genuinely think other people might be missing out on eternity, then isn't it a bit schadenfreude to not reach out to them at all?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I can respect a secular person who says to a religious person "please don't talk to me about religion". Assuming the secularist agrees to do the same, the theist should generally respect that wish. I can also respect the secularist who engages theists and attempts to dissuade them of their beliefs. It makes no sense to me that secularists should ask theists in general to keep their beliefs private, as if they were talking about the color of their underwear or something.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#240

Post by lliamander » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:23 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #185

lliamander wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside. In my experience, they do focus most of that measurement internally. Christians attend Sunday morning sermons, weekly Bible studies, confess their sins to one another, read the Bible, read books on Christian living, etc. all in an attempt to measure themselves against the tenets of thei…

>But if you genuinely think you've found salvation and meaning, isn't it kind of selfish to keep that to yourself? And isn't it stupid not to double-check the evidence and figure out how to demonstrate the ostensible truth you've gained to others?

That depends. If your definition of epistemic justification is some variant of Positivism, then my answer is "no".

If your definition of epistemic justification is not so utterly self-defeating, then "yes", but then we can no longer automatically infer that religious beliefs are unjustified.