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How could one come to the conclusion to be nihilistic? They would need to experience enough, and then say "the meaning of all the events of my life led to beli

How could one come to the conclusion to be nihilistic? They would need to experience enough, and then say "the meaning of all the events of my life led to believe there is no meaning". So, to come to that conclusion is a paradox, because reaching that conclusion is done through assigning "no" meaning.

guerrilla 5y ago
You might get something out of this [1] article, especially it's section on nihilism but the preceding sections on requirements for their being meaning will probably be helpful to you. Who I really recommend is Camus and sartre who wrote quite a bit about it and how to live with it. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/ 3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
deleted 5y ago
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causality0 5y ago
That depends on how you define meaning and significance. A perfectly rational machine might decide that since the universe is going to run down and die a cold death regardless of anything the human race might do, everything is meaningless. Fortunately I'm not a perfectly rational being and I don't get a choice about whether temporary happiness and prosperity mean something.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  It's not necessary that something ending implies that it is meaningless. A piece of pie can taste good even if you're going to run out of it. I'm not saying there's a meaning to life, I'm just saying that's not a reason that there isn't.
croes 5y ago
Did you find any meaning in all of this. It's always the same circle of birth, reproduction, death until the end of mankind, nature, earth, sun, universe. Whatever comes first.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  We’ve got agency to decide which. And maybe, trillions of years in the future, we discover a way to reverse even entropy.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    But why does having infinity suddenly give meaning? I like the following take on infinity https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html >P.S. Writing this post made me much less likely to pick “infinity” as my answer to this week’s dinner table question. Imagine living a Graham’s number amount of years.8 Even if hypothetically, conditions stayed the same in the universe, in the solar system, and on Earth forever, there is no way the human brain is built to withstand spans of time like that. I’m horrified thinking about it. I think it would be the gravest of grave errors to punch infinity into the calculator—and this is from someone who’s openly terrified of death. Weirdly, thinking about Graham’s number has actually made me feel a little bit calmer about death, because it’s a reminder that I don’t actually want to live forever—I do want to die at some point, because remaining conscious for eternity is even scarier. Yes, death comes way, way too quickly, but the thought “I do want to die at some point” is a very novel concept to me and actually makes me more relaxed than usual about our mortality.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      Is there some possible world where there is meaning?
acituan 5y ago
It is a failure in continuation from the ground of being to a view on the totality of the existence. No one has a problem finding meaning in the minutiae of their here and now; they avoid pain, they feed themselves, they breathe. They conform to the meaning of the signals (mostly pain) that demand we do these things. At this level, everything is meaningful. Then we scale up temporally (longer spans of times) and spatially (wider spans of space); we can think about tomorrow, we find it meaningful to go to grocery store and get our favorite ice cream etc. A couple of scale ups later sometimes, something wrong happens and we can find ourselves in the ultimate scale; totality of universe; (assumed) "creation" and "death" of the universe. Even only from a computation perspective; we don't fully 'understand' this scale, our intelligibility is limited in comparison to the 'objects' at hand (hyperobjects if you will); we're using symbolic processing to make sense of it but we can't frame the ultimate frame, we can't compress this information very accurately (yet). At that point some folks show up with their propositions that are harder to refute because everything is hard to compute to begin with. They shine light to certain possibilities (light bringer pun is intended), they conflate current state of not knowing with unknowability, or worse non-existence. They conflate our intelligence with intelligibility of the universe. They go "there is no single organizing principle, because that sounds a lot like god" and can't explain how multiple organizing principles can share the same space if they are not bound by a common one. They claim pure stochasticity and ignore the physical reality we have been conforming to through evolution; or principled approximation to its first principles; that we can compress reality into formulas, while noise really wouldn't compress. They have no good idea on how to relate to the existence of existence. Nihilism is the result of such cognitive distortions at this level. The problem is not actually about being at the top of the scale, it is to omit the continuity from our daily scale to it; it is skipping the intermediary steps that mislead us. That's why they can conceptualize complete stochasticity at top while perform perfect faith in meaningfulness of gravity. In neoplatonic tradition this is countered with practicing the anagogic ascent, in stoic traditions with the view from above practices. In modern times however we only have DIY spirituality without proper grounding in what have been tried before. Throw some McMindfulness, read a translation of Nietzche, performatively worship the god of market normativity and you're already confused enough. Blog belongs to a person who has "founded, managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics company.", this is their hobby (as they admit) and bunch of people talk about it. This is how new nihilists are made.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

guerrilla 5y ago

You might get something out of this [1] article, especially it's section on nihilism but the preceding sections on requirements for their being meaning will probably be helpful to you. Who I really recommend is Camus and sartre who wrote quite a bit about it and how to live with it. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/ 3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

causality0 5y ago

That depends on how you define meaning and significance. A perfectly rational machine might decide that since the universe is going to run down and die a cold death regardless of anything the human race might do, everything is meaningless. Fortunately I'm not a perfectly rational being and I don't get a choice about whether temporary happiness and prosperity mean something.

guerrilla 5y ago
It's not necessary that something ending implies that it is meaningless. A piece of pie can taste good even if you're going to run out of it. I'm not saying there's a meaning to life, I'm just saying that's not a reason that there isn't.

croes 5y ago

Did you find any meaning in all of this. It's always the same circle of birth, reproduction, death until the end of mankind, nature, earth, sun, universe. Whatever comes first.

Robotbeat 5y ago
We’ve got agency to decide which. And maybe, trillions of years in the future, we discover a way to reverse even entropy.
- pixl97 5y ago
  But why does having infinity suddenly give meaning? I like the following take on infinity https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html >P.S. Writing this post made me much less likely to pick “infinity” as my answer to this week’s dinner table question. Imagine living a Graham’s number amount of years.8 Even if hypothetically, conditions stayed the same in the universe, in the solar system, and on Earth forever, there is no way the human brain is built to withstand spans of time like that. I’m horrified thinking about it. I think it would be the gravest of grave errors to punch infinity into the calculator—and this is from someone who’s openly terrified of death. Weirdly, thinking about Graham’s number has actually made me feel a little bit calmer about death, because it’s a reminder that I don’t actually want to live forever—I do want to die at some point, because remaining conscious for eternity is even scarier. Yes, death comes way, way too quickly, but the thought “I do want to die at some point” is a very novel concept to me and actually makes me more relaxed than usual about our mortality.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Is there some possible world where there is meaning?

acituan 5y ago

It is a failure in continuation from the ground of being to a view on the totality of the existence. No one has a problem finding meaning in the minutiae of their here and now; they avoid pain, they feed themselves, they breathe. They conform to the meaning of the signals (mostly pain) that demand we do these things. At this level, everything is meaningful. Then we scale up temporally (longer spans of times) and spatially (wider spans of space); we can think about tomorrow, we find it meaningful to go to grocery store and get our favorite ice cream etc. A couple of scale ups later sometimes, something wrong happens and we can find ourselves in the ultimate scale; totality of universe; (assumed) "creation" and "death" of the universe. Even only from a computation perspective; we don't fully 'understand' this scale, our intelligibility is limited in comparison to the 'objects' at hand (hyperobjects if you will); we're using symbolic processing to make sense of it but we can't frame the ultimate frame, we can't compress this information very accurately (yet). At that point some folks show up with their propositions that are harder to refute because everything is hard to compute to begin with. They shine light to certain possibilities (light bringer pun is intended), they conflate current state of not knowing with unknowability, or worse non-existence. They conflate our intelligence with intelligibility of the universe. They go "there is no single organizing principle, because that sounds a lot like god" and can't explain how multiple organizing principles can share the same space if they are not bound by a common one. They claim pure stochasticity and ignore the physical reality we have been conforming to through evolution; or principled approximation to its first principles; that we can compress reality into formulas, while noise really wouldn't compress. They have no good idea on how to relate to the existence of existence. Nihilism is the result of such cognitive distortions at this level. The problem is not actually about being at the top of the scale, it is to omit the continuity from our daily scale to it; it is skipping the intermediary steps that mislead us. That's why they can conceptualize complete stochasticity at top while perform perfect faith in meaningfulness of gravity. In neoplatonic tradition this is countered with practicing the anagogic ascent, in stoic traditions with the view from above practices. In modern times however we only have DIY spirituality without proper grounding in what have been tried before. Throw some McMindfulness, read a translation of Nietzche, performatively worship the god of market normativity and you're already confused enough. Blog belongs to a person who has "founded, managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics company.", this is their hobby (as they admit) and bunch of people talk about it. This is how new nihilists are made.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]