the_nihilism_question amaranthus caudatus This isn't a religion thing, seeing as how i_worship_no_god but i wonder... if none of it matters then why have principles or causes? should i then just embrace all of the corruption and degradation? should i just take to destroying everyone and everything in sight to speed the inevitable knowing that whatever value was placed upon it was all just the overinflated figment of someone's imagination so then it's all for nothing? cool, then that means no atrocity should be off_limits, i can demean and devour all of it and it won't mean shit 011021 ... silentbob exactly the point. 011021 ... Dafremen Fools rush in to answer the questions that only a fool would ask. 011021 ... amaranthus caudatus someone told me that the value we place on things and people exists nowhere else but in our minds that's what provoked this question. it made me wonder if that person then believed that their own principles were thus invalidated by their statement in other words it was, on one level, a personal challenge, and on all other levels was purely rhetorical 011022 ... u24 you decide if it matters or not. if everything is subjective, then there cannot be an answer to this question; if everything is subjective, then nothing is objective. the answer lies within you. 040624 ... zeke meaning is a human construct. from the inside of meaning things matter in a relavitistic sort of way. seeking absolutes is a way of not taking responsibility for ones own truths and values. an ethical system is no less valid because it is based on rational first principles rather than external sourced moral precedent. live by your own truth; it is all any of us have. live well. 040624 ... - - 060724 ... ivyducktwilightseto if you don't believe or care in anything, then what is the point in living? why don't you just kill yourself? 060725 ... z i believe in the universe and it's passage through time. i care about experience. why would i want to stop all that wonder by dying? i do not get why a lack of absolutes makes so many people feel so desolate. i live, i feel, i know. 060725 ... somebody whether you get it or not changes little. for many people, a lack of absolutes, i.e. gods and goddesses or the idea of intrinsic meanings (though i realize that you, z, accept neither), is a recipe for despair. i, in turn, am surprised that this surprises you! 060725 ... z i am not surprised by it, just mystified. it seems like most people are raised with certainties at the center of their world view. i was not. i am not equipped with the emotional machinery to fully comprehend what it is like to have those certainties in questioned. i have never had them. for me nihilism is my natural state, not one which i have adopted. it is simply the way i know the universe. i am not susceptible to the certainty meme. i am profoundly immune to ideas which require active faith, not by inclination, but because of my lack of exposure to them at all. this does not incline me towards erratic, unethical or selfish behavior, because i have been taught to create my own standards. i am my own worst critic. it is not an easy way to live, but i know no other. 060725 ... amaranthus caudatus I mainly wrote this because the person who provoked my query all those years ago is/was in the habit of establishing one standard for theirself as it related to belief and behavior and one for others, and that one usually more strict and unforgiving. it was my diplomatic way of chiding someone for what i saw as an increasing tendency toward hipocrisy 060725 ... Ptolemy DCLVIII The impression, Z, which I receive from your repeated mantra that "Meaning is a human construct" is that you regard it as an absolute, or a certainty. It has been your one-line response in dozens of discussions. You have even responded to someone's questioning the truth of that statement by merely rephrasing the same statement! That is fine, but that is the very thing you say mystifies you. I am only proffering this for your contemplation... obviously I stand to gain nothing regardless of your response. I, too, was raised without the external introduction of absolutes. But I soon internally realized the near-absolute inadequacy of linguistic communication (or other communication, for that matter). The majority of what it is to be me is beyond verbal expression. This led my early teenage self to reject everything, both religious and scientific, abstract and concrete, as a clever facade erected by the desperate egos of men. Therefore I soon found "all values baseless, nothing to be known, and everything incommunicable" : Nihilism. As a result of later life experiences, I fully rejected the rejective "anti"philosophies of nihilism. But I remain skeptical of our ability to know anything outside of the self, given the ease with which misinterpretation can infest the bridges between abstraction and the concrete. Thus my wariness towards, say, Monotheisms or Physics. An aside: if you believe there is validity to the sciences, you are not a nihilist! Perhaps you mean to say you are an atheist? Most people who claim to be nihilists later can be witnessed inadvertantly expressing a faith in something, or finding meaning somewhere: two big no-nos for a nihilist. 060727 ... DannyH Why assume that a lack of moral certainty and a denial of inalienable values will necessarily lead to destruction. More likely it will lead to a state of contemplative inaction. Hitler and Stalin were not nihilists. Their belief in order, social purpose and the perfectability of human society led them to incalculable destruction of life. More often it is the attempt to impose order or to shore up a belief system that leads to murder. Violence is essentially an instrument of control and most instruments of control are either inherently or by implication violent. Nihilists tend not to be particularly interested in controlling anyone. 060728 ... tessa I think I am a nihilist. How can I tell? Is being very confused and uncertain part of it? 060728 ... z ptolomy: Nihilism, Self-consistency, and Paradox Nihilism is often described as a belief in the nonexistence of truth. In its more extreme forms, such a belief is difficult to justify, because it contains a variation on the liar paradox: if it is true that truth does not exist, the statement "truth does not exist" is itself a truth, therefore showing itself to be inconsistent. A formally identical criticism has been leveled against relativism and the verifiability theory of meaning of logical positivism. A more sophisticated interpretation of the claim might be that while truth may exist, it is inaccessible in practice, but this leaves open the problem of how the nihilist has accessed it. It may be a reasonable reply that the nihilist has not accessed truth directly, but has come to the conclusion, based on past experience, that truth is ultimately unattainable within the confines of human circumstance. Thus, since nihilists believe they have learned that truth cannot be attained in this life, they look upon the activities of those rigorously seeking truth as futile. However, this interpretation is open to the same criticism as above, since, barring mystical revelation, the only way the "truth" of nihilism can have been learned is from within the confines of human experience. An attempt at reconciliation may be made in the following way: I have logically deduced that I cannot obtain absolute truth (as opposed to logical truth) with logic. Thus, from the confines of human experience, I am convinced (by logical reasoning) that I cannot obtain absolute truth. The nihilist, then, cannot profess to know something absolute, but he can say that, in terms of the human method of problem solving (logical reasoning), absolute truth cannot be obtained by human logic. wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism i believe that rhetorical arguments which must rely on pure language constructs for their validity, while very entertaining, are highly suspect. philosophy is a way of thinking about things so that they may be better understood, but it relies on artificial models, mere constructs. the choice at the outset to relegate all assumptions to a maybe state provides the opportunity to "tinker" with these model's variables and subsequently to produce different truths. consequently, i see life as a giant thought experiment in as much as i choose to understand it in this way. nihilism, for me, is more a recognition of the limits of my ability to apprehend certainty than it is a cosmology or an ontological assertion. do not get lost in the language. words are not ideas (as i am fond of saying here). that i sometimes make a declarative sentence, does not (for me) necessarily require an absolute principle to validate it. you may feel free to assume that i am referring to my consensual_reality, and not asserting a universal truth, especially when the assertion is about the source of truth. but then i think you probably knew that. 060728 ... z oops: ptolemy 060728 ... anti-matter I think I have caught the nihilism how can i tells is being an pontificating pompous ass one of the symptoms? 060728 ... Ptolemy DCLVIII Z, your response was very interesting. While I had already read the Wikipedia entry, your personal words were very much in "sync" with a lot of my own views ... and phrased much more cleanly. As I now see that we are (perhaps) similarly aligned on the matter of linguistic obtuseness, I shall commence with plans to agree with you on a more regular basis. Thanks! 060728 ... Sincerely - Dearest Anti-matter, You may indeed have caught the nihilism. However, being a pontificating, pompous ass more likely a product of being a proud of one's asininities whilst engaging in pontification. Nihilism has nothing to do with it. Ptolemy DCLVIII 060728 ... anti-matter nihilism is how an asshole describes his viewpoint on the world. "life is bullshit, nothing means anything, I don't believe in anything...you're all wrong, therefore I'm right" nihilism carried as far as it can go sounds a lot like LaVey's Satanism where, "do what thou wilt will be the whole of the law" If you care about anything, if you cherish even one thing, whether its an idea, person, whatever, than how can you truly be a nihilist? If you care about nothing and do whatever you want because nothing means anything, than you're really just an asshole no matter what pretty words you use to wrap up your ideals, or lack therof find a philosophy that isn't stupid, fucktards 060801 ... pluie wow did a nihilist bite you when you were little? 070123 ... z is what we believe a choice? do we have any control over what is true to us? can we elect to change our basis for belief, our world view? for me, the answer is no. i believe what i believe. the particulars drift a bit as time passes, but my core remains very much the same. when i hear of people who have major changes, reversals or drastic changes in beliefs, i cant help but wonder if the seeds of that change were not already within. i also wonder how permanent those changes will be. then again my perspective on beliefs is skewed by my unbelief in all things spiritual. that is not to say that i do not respect others views, only that i see them through the lens of my own condition. i assume that we all do. so, is it possible to really change what you know as the nature of reality? 070124 ... sameolme I don't know. Can we, the the slaves of our conditioning know freedom? I don't know. 070124 ... - - 080122 ... - - 090303 ... other quality of life. 090303 ... unhinged faith_vs_nihilism ? 090303 ... unhinged nihilism_vs_faith ? 090303 ... unhinged balls 090303 ... unhinged buddhism_vs_nihilism aahhh my heart smiles to read my early proclamations about my faith i had lost sight of it in the past year i_still_believe yep buddy i think i'll be buddhist for life (although i think i knew that the day i put ink on my body in the shape of characters in a language i could barely pronounce representing something i barely understood. the sight and sound of those things resonated in me in a way i immediately understood on a level i rarely felt. ) the sun is shining today that is a good enough reason 090303 ... amaranthus caudatus I realize now that the person who provoked my question all those years ago was being a rank hypocrite. my sensibilities and beliefs were ripe for their trampling, but that one would brook no such treatment of theirs 090303 what's it to you? who go blather from