Human Life Meaningless

I have yet to encounter a person who believes that everything just boils down to chemical reactions, that can explain to me why causing a "human" chemical reaction to cease by cutting off it's oxygen supply is anymore morally noteworthy than cutting off the supply of oxygen to a reduction oxidation reaction.

Thanks for the bump, user who agrees with me but doesn't want to admit it

Not an argument

Not an argument

Higher hedonics my brah. We seek climbing from the pits of defeat and we seek mountains which allow us to transcend defeat. And then after staying in home of the Gods, we seek to go to the underworld once more.

Higher hedonics.

And videogames are just bits and pixels. So boring, who would want to play one?

its always the simple minded ones

Why is nihilism so popular? Even the most braindead normies love to talk about how meaningless life is. How did it get this way?

Well, there's the rub. It might all just be reactions.
It also might not.
We don't understand the mechanisms sufficiently. But you are right that pleasure and pain are baseless.
Read the Tao Te Ching.

We replaced the mental models of being tied to God, and to the stories about God, with shit-tier models where low-level human hedonics is the primary judge of moralities and values.

If you view life through a shitty engine, you'll only see shit.

Those Tao cunts are how I ended up like this

Taoism in this century is fucking stupid

Not Taoism
Laozi didn't go far enough
He recognized the doctrine without words but didn't continue on it
He lived in a state of simplicity in order to achieve happiness
It's actually the springboard of the buddhadharma

hipster tier religion

nice

Read the fucker and get back to me
If you understand even three of the poems I'll shit a brick
It's not even a religion; only the idiots actually WORSHIP Laozi and the Way

yes life is meaningless
so what? why should that be an impediment for your own happiness?

Literally just do whatever the fuck you want. It doesn't matter whether there is "meaning" to it. What difference does it make?

>nihilism means everything is shit
Pleb.

I have had this conversation with my brother, who majored in Pscychology and Neuroscience. He argues that pleasure is the main driving force for all of our actions and decisions and that pleasure is merely dopamine in the brain. Thus he finds it odd that someone would not immediately jump into Nozick's experience machine. So this has led to 2 arguments: is pleasure the ultimate end good that we are all striving towards? and is pleasure merely a chemical balance in the brain.

To the second point about dopamine I put forward a simple question which he proceeded to ignore and dismiss. It is basically the question about piety from Euthyphro but applied to pleasure. Is something pleasurable because dopamine is released in the brain or is dopamine released in the brain because something is pleasurable? It is a common argument that dopamine being released and thus the experience of pleasure is in response or a reaction to certain stimuli and experiences. Let's suppose that one decides to give a large amount of money to charity and feels pleasure for doing so. Do they feel pleasure because they did a good act, thus causing dopamine to be released? or was dopamine simply released which then made the act of giving pleasurable?

This leads into the other argument which is the question, was the intention behind their generosity merely to get dopamine and pleasure? or was dopamine released and pleasure felt because they did something "virtuous" and unselfish? It comes down to whether or not pleasure is the end goal or merely a by-product when one does something "virtuous" or "good". So is the main driving force behind our actions and decisions simply the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain or are we driven by something else which sometimes produces dopamine and pleasure?

I think people focused too much on whether or not religious stories were true or factual. When people started turning away from religion, whether that be because they "became enlightened by science" or just didn't believe that someone walked on water, then they sort of threw out or discarded religious stories. However they disregarded the strength and power of these stories which is their meaning. These stories helped to "articulate" or try to make explicit certain themes, ideas, and understandings that are implicit in us. The specifics of stories may be vastly different yet some of the themes and basic narratives of these stories seem to track cross culturally. These stories also gave a type of narrative or meaning to everyday lives. It could be something as simple as saying focus on being a good person and don't be overly greedy. If you get rid of all these powerful and meaningful stories then we sort of lose that narrative flow to our lives and thus some meaning.

>just the body seeking pleasurable chemical balances.

>being this ignorant

i slapped myself across the face for no reason once proving pleasure isn't everything

there's also pain aversion