Comment by nathan_compton
19 days ago
As a person with a doctorate in physics who basically totally believes that life has no fundamental meaning at all and that most humans are cursed to believe it does despite it being ultimately harmful to them (from my point of view, I hope that is obvious), I think your take is wrong in a lot of ways.
As far as I can tell very, very few people, scientists or otherwise, feel the way I do about the meaninglessness of the universe. As you might imagine, I know a lot of scientists and I don't think any of them are even soft core nihilists, so your characterization of the reaction of people to some kind of mush of science and philosophy and spirituality seems wrong to me. From my point of view, everyone loves that kind of bullshit. They can't get enough.
You are part of the universe. You can create meaning. So, the universe has meaning if you create it. Meaning is an emergent property of letting hydrogen sit around in a gravity well for a long time.
I guess I just don't see the point of aggrandizing my personal goals and desires as "meaning," at least in the sense that people usually mean it. What I want is just what I want and the world would be a better place if people could just accept that about themselves as well.
isn't this survivorship bias? e.g. people who genuinely feel highly nihilistic, that there is no order, structure, meaning, etc. are very unlikely to be successful--and also unlikely to continue choosing to be alive
I don't see why believing that life has no inherent meaning would lead to not wanting to be alive. I think this is all the result of random cosmic accident yet I'm having plenty of fun.
Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.”
Just one more thing you teleologists tell yourselves. I'm alive and successful, I just don't delude myself about the universe giving a shit about it.
It may be that people need to believe nonsense about the cosmos in order to "maximize productivity" but I do not think that is the case.
I see two different assertions
1. The universe doesn't care about you
2. Life has no inherent meaning
Do you mean to conflate these two? Do you find them merely agreeable, or do these propositions depend on each other?
6 replies →
That doesn't make you nihilistic, more of an absurdist.
1 reply →