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If a person is "truly and deeply nothing" then how is that person making decisions? I can understand feeling like nothing - but something has to exist to have a

by pygorex 15y ago

If a person is "truly and deeply nothing" then how is that person making decisions? I can understand feeling like nothing - but something has to exist to have a feeling of nothingness in the first place.

alnayyir 15y ago
Pop philosophy doesn't stand up to that kind of logical scrutiny. It's usually bike shed painting rationalized by ego or emotion. I love the near-perfect unintentional parody of the Jewish tale of three old men arguing over who was most unworthy.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I do not mean "truly and deeply nothing" in some sort of sense that it is impossible to perceive you, or in the sense that somehow you should be depressed. I meant "nothing" in the sense that in the cosmic scale of things, no matter what you do, nobody will ever remember it and it will make no significant difference ten thousand years after you are gone. Yes, in a very temporary way, you have the properties of existence, but the time-frame is so narrow, your impact so minuscule, that the limit approaches zero. I'm not sure if there is some other word for it -- nothing seemed the most appropriate. This is not nihilism. As I said, understanding the astonishingly small (and basically non-existent) nature of your life is one of the necessary steps to understand what it really means to exist in the first place. That is, as Paul says, if you think you are X or Y, then you are never freed to be a better version of yourself. This is because you are comparing yourself to some external standard that you can never be. Likewise, if you think that somehow "being a better person" is a journey that leads you somewhere that has lasting consequences you are also lying to yourself -- it really doesn't matter. What you need to understand that it is the daily decisions to be a better person that matter, not the comparison between yourself today and some future state that you are headed towards. This is the same mistake that Paul describes, only he is talking about comparing yourself to some label, while I am talking about comparing yourself to some future version of yourself that you are headed towards. Does that make sense?

by pygorex 15y ago

alnayyir 15y ago

Pop philosophy doesn't stand up to that kind of logical scrutiny. It's usually bike shed painting rationalized by ego or emotion. I love the near-perfect unintentional parody of the Jewish tale of three old men arguing over who was most unworthy.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

I do not mean "truly and deeply nothing" in some sort of sense that it is impossible to perceive you, or in the sense that somehow you should be depressed. I meant "nothing" in the sense that in the cosmic scale of things, no matter what you do, nobody will ever remember it and it will make no significant difference ten thousand years after you are gone. Yes, in a very temporary way, you have the properties of existence, but the time-frame is so narrow, your impact so minuscule, that the limit approaches zero. I'm not sure if there is some other word for it -- nothing seemed the most appropriate. This is not nihilism. As I said, understanding the astonishingly small (and basically non-existent) nature of your life is one of the necessary steps to understand what it really means to exist in the first place. That is, as Paul says, if you think you are X or Y, then you are never freed to be a better version of yourself. This is because you are comparing yourself to some external standard that you can never be. Likewise, if you think that somehow "being a better person" is a journey that leads you somewhere that has lasting consequences you are also lying to yourself -- it really doesn't matter. What you need to understand that it is the daily decisions to be a better person that matter, not the comparison between yourself today and some future state that you are headed towards. This is the same mistake that Paul describes, only he is talking about comparing yourself to some label, while I am talking about comparing yourself to some future version of yourself that you are headed towards. Does that make sense?