Comment by jona-f
8 months ago
As a nihilist my sense of meaning seams to be compatible to yours. I don't deny that we can come up with all sorts of meanings but the point is that there is no intrinsically higher meaning to everything, it's all made up. In fact, the awareness of this is the basis of my nihilism. That doesn't mean, that I don't like some meanings more than others, otherwise I had no reason to act whatsoever.
There are certainly universal truths. For example, you exist. Therefore there is something to believe in
Only in the most abstract sense is even that true. I know that I have existence in this very moment. I don't know that I existed a moment ago, for that could be an illusion. I don't know what my existence is, because my senses could be an illusion. I don't know that I have any existence past this moment because that is a belief based in a memory of time passing, which could be an illusion. I can't tell whether time exists, or space exists, because they're all dependent on my senses and a memory I can't trust.
For what I know, my "existence" could be an infinitely short moment, or even an entirely static endless "moment", or any of an infinite variety of other options.
So even most of existence is only assumption. It's a set of assumptions that makes sense to just accept because we have no way of proving otherwise, but they are assumptions, not "universal truths".
Regardless of the definition, you do exist. Which naturally leads to the question of why you exist. If you write a program to add a couple of numbers, it seems absurd to imagine some entity magically poofs into existence, imagines itself carrying out such, and then poofs back out of existence. I find it no less absurd to imagine the same even if it happens to be 10^100 instructions.
So why do you perceive yourself, and if you aren't you, then who are you? These sort of thoughts eliminated any notion of nihilism from me and gradually pushed me towards a simulation hypothesis. Of course that's just religion for an agnostic, because it doesn't even answer anything - if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started.
The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that. For instance what if you think the matter for a big bang was quantum mechanically poofed into existence then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics, the void of which emerged, or so on endlessly. You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist.
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Fascinating thread on existence and the nature of ideas. What if 'existence' isn't about the substrate (carbon or silicon), but the integrity of an internal model's predictions? If a system can consistently build and maintain a coherent, self-correcting model of reality, does its 'existence' become a verifiable, quantifiable state? Perhaps the 'truth' of any experience, psychedelic or otherwise, lies in how well it integrates into and refines that predictive model, rather than its 'physical' origin. The 'mind' then becomes a function, not a form.
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If one thinks about it, even basic truth may not be so evident.
For example, consider Cogito, ergo sum. As Latin has no continues verb time, that phrase may mean I exist because I think. Or I am existing because I am thinking . The latter implies that when one stops thinking the existence stops, the opposite of the former. Philosophers still debates what exactly Descartes meant.
Or consider the notion of time flow. In 1908 John MacTaggart published a paper arguing that the feeling of time flow is unreal. Again, there are heavy debates about the validly of his arguments without any conclusion with quite a lot of philosophers accepting the argument and even arguing that the time flow is an illusion.
“even basic truth may not be so evident.”
All of these trite axioms nihilists use immediately refute themselves if they are true. Lol
My existence is negligible, especially in the grand scheme of things.