NIHILISM THREAD

This, so much fucking this.
I will be long forgotten in a thousand years, humanity will no longer exist in a billion years. Why would I care though? Why should such distant future impact my life decision?

Yes. Thank you. Oh god that is a simply wonderful post.

>There is no reason to muddy up philosophy and science with feelings--especially misplaced feelings.
Would philosophical nihilism be indifferent to this happening?

>In fact, it's just an atheistic interpretation of the universe.
To expand on this, I've never seen any reason why the existence of a god would change any of this. For example, why would god's opinions on morality make something objectively wrong or right. What would that even mean?

No, we can find subjective value in philosophy, science, and latex porn, we just acknowledge the lack of intrinsic, objective value.

I thought it would mean something like a difference between there being a cosmological hierarchy and the case where there is none, where you might be able to say with the former that "right" morals "fit" in the cosmos in a way that "wrong" ones don't. But it seems like it's dependent on an afterlife for that to mean anything more, and for there to be a sin or karma system running to causally give it consequences and bearing. Does that seem right?

>is there purpose in the universe
I dunno how you can spend time thinking about that shit when there are more pressing matters to attend to, such as: is steel heavier than feathers?

Not sure how even the existence of an afterlife would change anything. Lets say that there is a god, and if I don't do what he says is right, he sends me to hell. Why Ought I care? Sure I'll suffer, but why Ought I care about my suffering.
Also, even if there was some cosmological hierarchy of opinions on what's right and wrong, objectively, why is one person who's higher on the hierarchies' opinion better than someone's who is lower. And even if it were, why, objectively, Ought we care?
At least that's how I look at it.

common sense? kekekekeke

Well Limmy, whats the ratio between the steel and feathers?

But steel's heavier than feathers

God damn it Limmy. 1.1 kilogram of feathers is heavier than 1.0 kilograms of steel. You have veered us off this meme course because of your faulty reference. Terrible show of form. Come now. Back to the academy in athens with you.

god damn im so autisic and bored someonefucking shoot me

But isn't whether you ought to care a different question than what it would mean to speak about morality being right or wrong?

I guess in looking at your other question, would it seem right that sometimes the believer would be fine answering with "because they're stronger than we are", where in the case of a god or gods we're talking about "beings" stronger than anyone? I'm trying to think about this even apart from what Christianity might say, so the Greeks with their pantheon for example. I guess whether we ought to care in that case depends on if "hell" is utter destruction (=death according to atheism) or if it's torture, where I suppose we could intellectually say it's no biggie, but the issue seems more important if we have to actually deal with it.

>'Purpose' is a word used to describe what humans make use of an object or idea (or whatever).
No. That's what nihilists want the work to mean. Religious people want the word to mean something completely different

I don't think so.
>"because they're stronger than we are"
why Ought we care if they're stronger than us. How does that make what they say on morality objectively correct.
"if "hell" is utter destruction"
Why ought we care about utter destruction. What I'm saying is that there is no objective fundamental value. If there were than we could say "you ought to care about utter destruction because X" and I wouldn't be able to say "why ought we care about X". But whatever one might actually fill X in with, I would still be able to question it.

Let me ask you this
Does infinity exist anywhere in this universe ?
Does absolute zero exist anywhere in this universe other than your aenemic imagination?

>Why ought we care about utter destruction.
I thought I was conceding as much by saying "whether we ought to care in that case depends" on how we understood hell. In that case, it certainly wouldn't matter.

>why Ought we care if they're stronger than us. How does that make what they say on morality objectively correct.
It would be "objectively correct" in the sense of having the status of natural laws (where not following good morals causally puts you in what afterlife equivalent of hell we care to look at), and it would have such authority by being established by a deity that's either the primary cause of all things or the most powerful (such as to establish it for a cosmos), or a combination of those two elements. This is without getting into whether any of that would be true or not.

>What I'm saying is that there is no objective fundamental value. If there were than we could say "you ought to care about utter destruction because X" and I wouldn't be able to say "why ought we care about X". But whatever one might actually fill X in with, I would still be able to question it.
Sure, ok, but I thought I was addressing a hypothetical: how might speaking about morals as being "objective" work, without even getting into whether that's true or not.

Is this.... a good frogpost? That's a first.

Because the idea of some godly purpose has been the dominant ideology for thousands of years

A true nihilist wouldn't reply to this thread.

here's your new years reading on the subject

aeon.co/ideas/whence-comes-nihilism-the-uncanniest-of-all-guests

good but way to short article by one of slate star codex's followers. has good blog all about nihilism too.

Was Spinoza first nihilist in history??

Lucretius def was before him.

>how might speaking about morals as being "objective" work,
Oh I have no idea. I've been asking Christian apologists that for years, and they haven't come up with anything. Also, I know this isn't the point of you saying it, but how would a deity being the primary cause of all things mean that it decides what is objectively right and wrong. I don't see how one follows from the other.

>Heidegger
>nihilist

it's not a good frogpost

sunypress.edu/pdf/54101.pdf

How do you defend nihilism without referring to value judments or normative claims??

I think it would work the way we think causality in physics works, right? It would have to be related to some systematic element of the cosmos. You do action X and you land in heaven after death which brings you closer to what I guess would be argued is perfection of Being, or you do action Y and get tortured for the rest of days with no relief.

>how would a deity being the primary cause of all things mean that it decides what is objectively right and wrong. I don't see how one follows from the other.
The only way I can think of for that to make sense is if you were to bring in structural considerations (like the above), but then also what morality "means" is something closer to degrees of perfection or completeness of being. Like the difference between a seed inwardly at work in becoming a tree, and the tree itself. And the difference between the tree and whatever gnarled mess of growths sometimes comes about from an unhealthy seed. To tie that together with morality, it might mean the perfection or perfectibility of the human being to become fully what it is as a being, and it has this inner nature by the primary cause that made it. But that's super abstruse, and it might make sense theoretically, but without any of the satisfaction of bringing in or defending the value of any of it. Something like that is pretty close to what Aristotle's on about. Ethics for him is less about being good or moral and more about what our possibilities as the kinds of beings we are seem to be.

The point is just that humans need a higher authority to validate what they value for the sake of feeling safe. That's why people say nothing has meaning without the existence of God, because they always felt unconfident and scared.

By holding the negative position. We're not making a claim. We're waiting for evidence of objective value.

That's not the point. That's literally never been the point of religion.

Confidence, courage, what have you, is had by any individual who feels that way. It has nothing to do with how much you know compared to anyone else. It's how you think of yourself. Read some damn Plato.

Also, Religion, if anything, makes people less confident. Especially considering how the world exists today.

>By holding the negative position. We're not making a claim. We're waiting for evidence of objective value.
1. why?
2. >"negative position", >not making a claim wow are you from r/atheism? brainlet detected

Gotta love the /r/atheism brainlets.

"hurr I'm not making a claim"

ok then stop talking fucking brainlet

1
>1. why?
Because that's how you form ideas based of a pragmatic theory of truth.
2
>2. >"negative position", >not making a claim wow are you from r/atheism? brainlet detected
Not an argument.
3
samefag
4.
You asked how we can defend it without appealing to value judgements or normative claims and you get upset by the answer. Kind of a brainlet move.

>You asked how we can defend it without appealing to value judgements or normative claims and you get upset by the answer. Kind of a brainlet move.
no you. Think about what you said for a second and you'd realize that it relies on hidden value judgments and normative claims. Especially because you said "pragmatic theory of truth" like JESUS FUCK HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY BE A NIHILIST AND A PRAGMATIST JESUS FUCKING CHRIST BRAINLET

Is Nihilism the extreme examination of life where one accepts its chaotic and spontaneous nature? I get into depressive states, mostly triggered by boredom, where I get stagnant, but any advances I try to make in my life in terms of decisions, learning or improvement just overwhelm me and trying to calculate all the discrete paths of action and I just feel like disintegrating in he continuum. All the searches for purpose just collapse on themselves and I'm left with nothing, asking what is the point of anything.

Anyways:
1) Negative position is a value judgment
2) There's no way to defend holding the negative position without appealing to epistemic norms
3) Epistemic norms are still norms
4) Therefore by using norms you are presupposing that nihilism is false
5) Therefore your argument is incoherent

>Is Nihilism the extreme examination of life where one accepts its chaotic and spontaneous nature?
Nihilism is what happens when you're a nerdy upper-middle-class white straight male and a girl rejects you

What, did you think of that when you were 16? You are deeply confused my friend.

By your understanding, a nihilist doesn't see a purpose in the cosmos, but DOES see a purpose in human invention, activities, life, etc. This is wrong.

A nihilist sees no purpose at all. CDs are for playing music right? No, no purpose. It's better to do right then wrong? Nope. Is it better to feel pleasure or agony? Doesn't matter. This is nihilism, no ethics, no beauty. They do not deny the existence of ethics and beauty, but they deny any value structure. Ugly is no worse than beautiful.

The central tenet of nihilism is an interpretation of metaphysics. There is this "Reality" that takes up all of existence. And you could think of instead pure nothingness encompassing existence, this is the Void, O, the empty set. The nihilist says that the universe we live in might as well be nothingness, they say if everything was actually not real that wouldn't make a difference. {1}, could as well be {0}.

By contrast, the anti-nihilist believes in meaning. Metaphysically, this means there are things outside of reality that can be aimed towards. The Abstractionist recognizes that to even try to evaluate Reality by any measure, such as asking if Reality is real, or what is the difference between Reality and Void, that implies a system outside of Reality that you can use to evaluate reality on. So what this looks like when you ask if Reality is real, you must have some idea of the Non-Real which does not have the property of being real. So if all of existence is Reality, then hyper-existence would encompass Reality, Non-Reality, and the Void. {1, i, 0}.

Void is nothing, it can have no attributes. Non-Reality has infinite attributes since it encompasses the infinite outside of the bounded realm of Reality. So the belief in the infinite Non-Reality is precisely the belief that there is something more to life. Non-Reality is not in our reach of Reality, but we can point towards Non-Real things, we can move towards them. The feeling of joy you feel when you converse with friends, the feeling of elation when listening to good music, the feeling of fulfillment when you overcome you limits. These feelings, are not real. It is not actual fulfillment that you experience, but what is happening in your life at that moment resembles this attribute in the Non-Reality that IS true fulfillment, TRUE meaning, which is impossible to have in any measure in reality. Meaning is infinite, you are finite. Meaning is a nonsensical concept within the realm of reality, but can exist in true form in Non-Reality. And the fact it exists in hyper-existence, means you can move towards it, and try to manifest similar qualities to it in your life. That's God, that's atheistic spirituality, that's anything that claims there is meaning.

So in contemplating Reality in his mind, the nihilist has already supposed God, God being the system outside of the system of Reality.

I'm taking my cues from Nietzsche and Heidegger, so anyone else's analysis might well vary, but nihilism (according to them) seems to be not the discovery of there being no innate value to anything, but rather the inability or secession of holding values altogether. A Heideggerian example might be the attitudes of depression or boredom where things that held personal value no longer do in the fog of those attitudes (though I think he'd add that their "Being" in the process becomes obliterated such that you wouldn't even recognize them as "being-around" at all).

At least you used proper premise-by-premise based argumentation, I can appreciate that. But..
>2) There's no way to defend holding the negative position without appealing to epistemic norms
Wrong. I can just do it because I want to. I need to be convinced of something before I believe it. That's not me saying that that's the correct way of thinking, that's me explaining how my brain works. If your ideas can't be demonstrated to be true to me, then I won't believe them, even if they really are true. That's just how it is.

You may be right, but in that case we people who refer to ourselves as nihilists because we don't believe in innate value will just find a new name for ourselves.

>Wrong. I can just do it because I want to. I need to be convinced of something before I believe it. That's not me saying that that's the correct way of thinking, that's me explaining how my brain works. If your ideas can't be demonstrated to be true to me, then I won't believe them, even if they really are true. That's just how it is.
Well not believing in something is still a belief. So now you've made yourself incoherent. Try again.

>Well not believing in something is still a belief.
no it isn't. try again

>tfw you want to prove someone wrong on the internet so you reconcile science and religion

lol
be·lief
bəˈlēf/Submit
noun
1.
an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.

yes it is.

What's the difference between "I don't believe there is an even number of people on the planet" and "there is an odd number of people on the planet"

In addition I can keep asking "why" forever and if you're honest and don't give memes, when we ignore all the value judments and norms that I'm sure are there, we'll get to a point where you have basic beliefs that aren't supported by evidence. What then? Should you throw out all your beliefs?

christ I cannot stand r/atheism's broepistemology

dude

dictionary definitions

lmao

fuck off to reddit brah

Anyways nihilism is most definitely a belief.

The difference is that one is making a verifiable claim and the other is rejecting one.
This isn't complicated.
>we'll get to a point where you have basic beliefs that aren't supported by evidence.
At least you're being interesting. What kind of basic belief?

>dictionary definitions
If you have a different definition from the colloquial one, that's fine. But you can't get upset when people don't know what you're talking about. Just tell us your definition and we can talk.
>Anyways nihilism is most definitely a belief.
Some forms of it certainly are, my form is not.

Okay the issue with your line of argument is that you already rejected that distinction (see above when you said that youre rejecting a positive claim (whatever the fuck that means) and somehow that advances nihilism)

>At least you're being interesting. What kind of basic belief?
This is epistemology 101 you should know this if you read a fucking book once in your life

>Some forms of it certainly are, my form is not.
If you "didnt have a position" on the matter then why are you even arguing?

Anyways see the law of the excluded middle ("not P" is very much a proposition)

Also the naive form of positivism is loaded with norms (e.g. "dont accept anything you dont have evidence for" is a norm that youre assuming in this case)

>This is epistemology 101 you should know this if you read a fucking book once in your life
Be specific, what kind of basic belief. Something along the lines of "I exist" I am experiencing things" correct?

>and somehow that advances nihilism
I'm not arguing for nihilism, I'm explaining why I don't believe you.

>I'm not arguing for nihilism, I'm explaining why I don't believe you.
Yes you literally are

>If you "didn't have a position" on the matter then why are you even arguing?
>I'm not arguing for nihilism, I'm explaining why I don't believe you.
And I'm not even saying that the law of excluded middle is correct, I'm just saying that my brain unavoidably operates this way.

you explicitly said earlier that you can defend nihilism "by holding the negative position" then you denied that this supports a belief

also if nihilism isnt a belief then what is it?

>aeon.co/ideas/whence-comes-nihilism-the-uncanniest-of-all-guests
Looks good but couldn't figure out what it was getting at by nihilism since it didn't explain what it was. Guess it was just explaining simply how it comes about?

Looked at the blog and ran across

>The problem, that which they all get at, is nihilism. I’m somewhat hesitant to adopt the word – like all words it has baggage – but not to do defeats the project. Bear in mind, though, that what I call “nihilism” is much broader than it’s normally considered: anti-natalism, Lovecraft, materialism, etc. are symptoms of it, not its standard-bearers. Nihilism is the default of society, not a theory adopted by its outcasts. Indeed: many of those outcasts who most loudly proclaim their nihilism are, in the final analysis, reactions against it.
I mean this looks cool I guess, but where does he actually discuss it?

why do I care how your brain operates and how does this lend any support to your incoherent positions

Good Post. I understand better.

>Yes you literally are
Not an argumaent

you tried to explain how you could argue for nihilism then you failed

I don't expect you to care. I'm saying that that's how it works as an explanation for why I don't believe you when you say there's intrinsic value.

I said any argument for nihilism necessarily fails

therefore per the principle of sufficient reason we should not be nihilists

>you explicitly said earlier that you can defend nihilism "by holding the negative position" then you denied that this supports a belief
Yes, and?
>also if nihilism isnt a belief then what is it?
For me its the rejection of the premise that innate value exists, but if you ask different people you'll get different answers.

I don't think I did, but ok.

>I said any argument for nihilism necessarily fails
I get the feeling the the disagreement here comes from equivocation nonsense. In other words, it seems like we're thinking of different ideas when we see the word nihilism.

>For me its the rejection of the premise that innate value exists, but if you ask different people you'll get different answers.
okay well I dont think you can defend this without referring to non-factual claims (e.g. "you shouldnt accept the existence of anything you dont have any evidence for" or occams razor and the like) so it becomes incoherent

well if your definition of nihilism is "im skeptical of the plausibility of higher meaning type stuff" then its nothing more than a truism

plausibility of higher-meaning type stuff*

>okay well I dont think you can defend this without referring to non-factual claims
Well, I can. For example, I wouldn't say, "don't believe in things without evidence." I simply say that I don't believe in things without evidence because my brain doesn't work like that.

uhhhh yes, here i think:

samzdat.com/2017/08/12/thats-amore/

he def skirts around the definition of it, but his series called "uruk machines" builds up to it. lotsa cross pollination of ideas from the last psychiatrist if you ever read it, which is also a pretty good blog about nihilism (which he identifies with narcissm)

Why would I care what you think

Im saying supporting nihilism is categorically impossible

"My brain is wired to be nihilist" isnt support in any way

Seems like were on the same page then
>Why would I care what you think
I honestly don't know.
>Im saying supporting nihilism is categorically impossible
Well I guess I'm proving you wrong or we disagree on what nihilism is.
>"My brain is wired to be nihilist" isnt support in any way
Agreed, but is reason enough for me to be a nihilist.

Wait, am I misunderstanding something from this debate? Why should skepticism count as nihilism?

...

>When your only argument is an unoriginal, poorly drawn strawman, alongside the millions of other unoriginal, poorly drawn strawmen

i'm not even a nihilist but this meme is getting out of hand

The positive position or active nihilism is just as much as an illusion as a cult is, you creating your own meaning is like painting a sun on the wall to avoid the dark night, it’s still an illusion and not the natural way of this nihilistic universe in which you reside in, surely there must be an answer other than being positive/careless or “making/creating” a meaning

>The point is just that humans need a higher authority to validate what they value for the sake of feeling safe
Y-yeah, this is why religion pushes us out of the animal kingdom (base biological, social and emotional desires) to value the higher values over them. Some go as far as to say that many religions are anti-life due to this internal conflict they bring to us. However, I would emphasize that religious desires also exist and that they need to be fulfilled just as well as the banal values (eating).

We also have to remember that arachnophobes want to fuck spiders, because those evil bigots must be motivated by fear of their own identity.

Even if there's an "eternal" afterlife
Or even if there's an "eternal" god etc etc.
Not even that will last a "1 with a billion billion zeroes" years. Oblivion awaits in the end.
Or you God won't get bored, or that you won't get bored?

>It's absurd.

Only you can give yourself meaning, only you can choose what's "worth it", for you.
Both nihilism and spirituality is absurd. (Unless that's what gives---you---meaning.)

oh and
youtube.com/watch?v=8CX0yzTxtJo
>any books for this feel? (what Hades be sayin)
Is this still uncharted territory?

>Only you can give yourself meaning, only you can choose what's "worth it", for you.

You call Nietzsche a nihilist ONE more time, you illiterate piece of shit, and I'll throw you into the fucking SUN.

You can be given purpose, but it's "up to you" whether that purpose has any value.

Reminder that caring about opinions and beliefs is an illness

>t. never read Descartes
Also stop samefagging yourself with fake replies trying to make it seem like your post is good, dumb frog poster.

Oh. So Nietzsche DOESN'T discuss nihilism? I thought I was just reccing relevant authors to OP, but apparently I was just throwin mad props to them as nihilists. Silly me.

>death negates the possibility that there is a point
Good thread. OP is a faggot as usual.

This helps. Thanks user.

Was TLP really about Nihilism? I don't think I caught that when reading his stuff.