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

41–50 of 236 posts

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

#41

Post by maxbond »

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 "real nihilist" might kill themselves (hey, is anyone needs to hear this, don't kill yourself, and definitely don't kill yourself because of a thought experiment [1]), but most of the nihilists I've met have adjusted to their perspective and responded to it in a healthy way. (I'm not gunnuh engage in a Scotsman argument about whether that's disqualifying. But I'll grant there's an obvious survivorship bias there.)

It turns out that believing in meaning isn't always necessary.

[1] A friend mine put this very well once. We were talking about Meno, and Socrates' refusal to flee Athens, dying instead on the principle he'd entered into a sort of social contract (please excuse the ahistorical terminology) with Athens.

"I've never heard Socrates talk about the social contract before," my friend said.

"I refuse to die over a minor fucking principle."

Dying for a thought experiment isn't romantic. Being rational in all things is actually undesirable, because not everything functions under rational principles (or we wouldn't need the concept in the first place, it would just be the air we breathe).

In the same way that everyone can make a cryptosystem they themselves can't break, everyone can create a logical knot that they can't untie. It's a parlor trick, and not a reason to die.

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

#42

Post by photochemsyn »

pmarreck wrote: post #4

> This may be nihilism, but at least it's good-humored. Whiffed on the fact that humor itself here is meaning. Explaining away positive experiences as "illusory" (which is, without evidence that it IS in fact "illusory" instead of just being conjecture based on currently-known facts, simply "gaslighting" to me), is the problem of nihilism (IMHO). Anyone ever consider the odd fact that every nonliving thing in the uni…

One example of non-living matter tending towards lower entropy is the formation of mineral crystals in void spaces in rocks. This does require a high-energy input, i.e. heated water dissolving large volumes of silica which later slowly crystallize. The entropy of the silicon and oxygen atoms in the quartz crystal is lower than that in the dissolved aqueous state.

Similar effects are postulated to be involved in the origin of life, with energy sources like oceanic hydrothermal vents providing the energy sources driving the synthesis of complex organic molecules which eventually developed the capability of self-replication, aka decreasing randomness, increasing order, lowering local entropy.

A mechanistic 'non-living' model of life, entropy-wise, could be a waterwheel driven by a river (of sunlight and geothermal energy) which operates a sawmill, a steel mill, a chip fab, a robot factory, a paper mill and a printing press - with each generation of robots building more waterwheel-based units based on the instructions (DNA) provided by the printing press. This all relies on a robust source of energy, since the Gibbs equation (dg = dh - tds) says that for a process to move forward, the energy release (dh) must be greater than the entropy reduction (tds) that it is coupled to. Such a system meets all mechanistic definitions of life without being alive... a philosophical conundrum I suppose.

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

#43

Post by adasdasdas »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #38
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…

Thanks! Now I'm wondering what definition of "meaning" people are using for this issue. I wonder if the fuzziness of the term leads to people unwittingly talking past each other.

100% agree, meaning in this context can usually be used interchangeably with, purpose, reason to live, value, etc.

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

#44

Post by adasdasdas »

maxbond wrote: post #41
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 "real nihilist" might kill themselves (hey, is anyone needs to hear this, don't kill yourself, and definitely don't kill yourself because of a thought experiment [1]), but most of the nihilists I've met have adjusted to their perspective and responded to it in a healthy way. (I'm not gunnuh engage in a Scotsman argument about whether that's disqualifying. But I'll grant there's an obvious survivorship bias there.)…

Well that's why I believe most nihilists aren't actually nihilists. Also, I don't think believing in meaning has anything to do with nihilism. In fact, the sentence kind of implies you are speaking of objective meaning which is what grinds my gears.

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

#45

Post by fellowniusmonk »

jmdeon wrote: post #35

I believe this is existentialism, not nihilism. They both start from the premise that the universe is inherently meaningless, but in existentialism you can create meaning while in nihilism you cannot.

I'm an inverted existentialist and a post-nihilist. My explanation may be a little silly to read.

Existential dread is a weird psychological state for people who need the psychological comfort of ultimate or external meaning, it starts with laying awake at night telling yourself "things matter" and hearing that quiet rebuttal.

"What if nothing matters".

Pulling that thread organically leads people to existentialism, they are raised to insist that life "must have meaning", and then reject it.

Existentialism is for people who were inculcated with some permutation of "god", just world phallacies, ultimate meaning, and/or a belief in a "sensible" reality and found the obvious holes.

And just like nearly any position there are strong existentialist and weak existentialist

If you are born dead, if you know nothing matters, you don't lay awake at night, you just avoid going to bed at night because "nothing matters"... and if this is really your deep down than your existential thought becomes inverted.

"What if everything really does matter."

And then you spend the rest of your life trying to push discovery and research forward. Existential dread turns into a sort of existential hope and nihilism and the most common expressions of existentialism appears to come from an arrogant place of certainty, or an emphatic wish fullfillment, or a cocksure defeatist state.

I'm just one person, I know some things but there is far more I don't know than do... so.. what if it does matters?

Pushing humanity's bounds of knowledge and having a thriving, dynamic society that can prosper and fund the pursuit of that question is perhaps the only important thing.

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

#46

Post by photochemsyn »

Logic is a convenient tool, and it underpins mathematical reasoning and thus all mechanistic explanations of the universe. This does seem to imply a lack of meaning due to predetermination if we follow Descartes... but that's all fallen down due to all sorts of revelations, including quantum indeterminancy, special and general relativity, and sensitive dependence on initial conditions in the world of physics, and incompleteness (Godel) and undecidability (Church-Turing) in the mathematical world. Mathematics is now like a castle floating in the sky, holding itself up by its own bootstraps, and physics is as much probability as it is predictability. We can go to great efforts to create systems that provide the illusion of predictable, logical behavior (e.g. computers), but cosmic rays still flip bits occasionally.

I've adopted this viewpoint as a result:

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic." - Frank Herbert, Dune

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

#48

Post by more_corn »

c-hendricks wrote: post #40

> Nor was I satisfied with the obligatory secular follow-up, that you have to "make your own meaning." > ... > I mostly adopted the attitude of ... existence is fundamentally playful. Sounds like you've made your own meaning! > This may be nihilism It's not. Literally, nihilism ends at "life / existence has no meaning". Trying to put a positive or negative spin on it takes it away from nihilism. Or, positive nihilism…

I disagree with this definition of nihilism.

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

#50

Post by YellOh »

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…

Seems like a weirdly stringent test for nihilism. If a nihilist believes there is no meaning in living but also no meaning in dying, why would they default to dying?

A lot of built-in taboos (e.g. against bodily damage) make living a "default" human choice, and unless you're also burying the assumption that without meaning one should actively seek death as soon as possible(?), it seems like nihilists could keep riding the default until they got sufficiently bored of it.

Post reply on HN