The Universe?
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which on average, does not exist.
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Once I’m done with it, sure, why not.
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If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life’s fundamental truth: that life’s only purpose is life itself.
-Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Looking God in the Eye”
Man’s unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
-Academician Prokhor Zakharov
Yes, yes, we’ve all heard the philosophers babble about “oneness” being “beautiful” and “holy”. But let me tell you that this kind of oneness certainly isn’t pretty and if you’re not careful it will scare the bejeezus out of you.
-Anonymous Lab Technician, MorganLink 3DVision Live Interview
I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won’t you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment.
Everything I know, I learned from Sid Meier first
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I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?’ So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.
-Ranger Marcus Cole, Babylon 5
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And seems to be getting less existy as time goes on.
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I’m fairly positive that it would score big points with the GCL1).
1) Global Cabal of Literalists
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Wouldn’t they point out that existentialism isn’t nihilism?
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Well, you grow with the tasks you perform. And so does your liver.
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Your chart has helped me enormously with my studies of the wild @popobawa4u. Thank you.
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‘the secret to life is in the liver’
I’m all for making the effort, the greater good is still worthwhile.
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At the 4:00 minute mark, the narrator says, “If our life is all we get to experience, then it’s the only thing that matters”.
He continues, “If the universe has no principles, the only principles relevant are the ones we decide on. If the universe has no purpose, then we get to dictate what its purpose is.”
Around 5:32, he says, “If this is our one shot at life, there is no reason not to have fun, and live as happy as possible. Bonus points if you made the life of other people better. […] Do the things that make you feel good. You get to decide whatever this means for you.”
Right. That was my point. This is a scientific explanation and philosophical defense of objectivism; the default state is making yourself happy. You only get “bonus points” for helping with other people.
The video just “assumes” that being kind and helpful is a reasonable thing to do, but doesn’t really explicate why. Within the context of the video, if nothing matters except what I say matters, then kindness to others is selfish, something I do because it makes me feel better, makes me feel like a better person, provides some kind of gratification.
So every selfish asshole who thinks they’re the center of the universe can simply point to this video and say, “Don’t blame me, I’m an optimistic nihilist.”
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I pointed out that it’s not much of a cabal if everyone knows about them.
Then the jerks wouldn’t let me in their club.
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… as if selfish assholes needed a reason or an excuse.
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I don’t know that I am anywhere on that chart, but I have casually described myself as an “optimistic nihilist” before, and have been watching the topic with interest.
I grew up a sort of existentialist, but a bad one (non-representative) where I question “authenticity” from very different perspectives than Sartre and others. An analogy could be “freedom of religion” - and how many modern people interpret it to mean that one is free to subscribe to any religion, including no religion at all. So it is with meaning in life generally. It means for you what you think it does. But I reserve the right to know that any meaning I ascribe to it is probably some mutually-affirming hodge-podge that I find comforting, so I tend to be skeptical.
In my teens, I was delighted to learn that there was a popular philosophy called “objectivism” - and was then horrified by how far they missed the mark. Randians and such are actually subjectivists who are in denial and (like economists and financiers) use the trappings of objectivity to excuse the sublimation of their self-serving biases. Here’s the question where “objectivism” goes “>poof<”: Which is more objectively probable; that you matter more than anybody else because you are you and that makes you special, or that you are simply programmed to assume this to be the case? Objectively there is no reason assume that one’s own subjectivity trumps anybody else’s.
In Julian Jayne’s pop-science speculation The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he speculated about how humanity used to inhabit an entirely different model of awareness based upon archetypes, and were not truly conscious agents in the modern understanding until societal structures and language facilitated conventional discursive thought. But this still finds most Western minds living in ancient models such as the mind/body split, the mysterious objective/subjective divide, and the notion that an organism is… one organism, with an essential character, which is literally in-dividual and coherent because it constructs an identity. I think that people are beginning to move past this model as well.
What people perceive to be “self” is an artificial construct, and quite discontinuous. Those with “dissociative personality disorders” may very well have a more accurate understanding of self and identity construction than others do. Nobody has ever been their identity, it is a simplified shorthand. And just like modern people don’t get upset over most matter being void rather than structure, I think they will eventually come around to seeing their sense-of-self as patterns of fleeting tangibility without feeling threatened. By analogy, what most think of as a river is not the essential attributes of its contents, but only its circumstances. It is recognized by the constance of its surrounding geography, by precisely what it is not. Meanwhile the actual contents are never the same at any discrete points of space or time. It is a pattern, described by an arbitrary set of circumstances.
The main difference is not whether or not there is or can be meaning, but whether there can realistically be said to be individuals to find or ascribe meaning. There are selves and agents, but they interpenetrate and overlap rather than existing discretely.
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