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That was the point of my caveat, actually, the "whether they say so or not." Nihilists still act as if things are true and kinda negate their own point. That
by Helianthus16 16y ago
That was the point of my caveat, actually, the "whether they say so or not."
Nihilists still act as if things are true and kinda negate their own point. That guy who wrote a tome about meaninglessness and then offed himself at Harvard wrote a poem about meaning and finding it _through_ belief in meaninglessness.
That's a little besides the point, however, because I think it fundamental that it is only after experiencing meaninglessness that we are free to create meaning. How do you know what's really important to you? It's what you do after you don't think anything matters.
There are people who are _actually_ nihilists, who _actually_ cannot bind meaning functionally anymore. They are some subset of schizophrenics, I suspect.
If you really, fully believed that not meaning nor truth existed (which is a contradiction since the justification for the argument must use the concept of truth) you would be unable to function.
tl;dr the theory of meaninglessness is useful as an abstraction but it is not a practical reality.
- tree_of_item 16y agoI don't think you are addressing the concern that the GP brought up. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty is not an essay about nihilism. Briefly, [Mathematics] will be seen as the creation of finite human beings, liable to error in the same way as all other activities in which we indulge. Just as in engineering, mathematicians will have to declare their degree of confidence that certain results are reliable, rather than being able to declare flatly that the proofs are correct.
- Helianthus16 16y agoThat was intentional. As he could not or did not condense the points of the paper (partly because he didn't personally agree) I did not have anything to work with; as there wasn't a link to the article, I did not have anything to read; as my point was never about mathematical certainty the question of mathematical proofs being true is irrelevant. As described in your quote, mathematical truth is not the same thing as whether any thought can be true. Though while I'm here, I'd say that it's some weird ego-thing that humans think they've 'created' math while simultaneously thinking it's flimsy. Math is a property of the universe.