
Nothing Matters - tosh
https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/nothing-matters
======
beebmam
Suffering matters. Because we all are capable of experiencing it. And it
should be the basis for systems of morality, and therefore help guide our
decisions.

~~~
Xcelerate
This is sort of my thought process as well; the universe is unjust as long as
suffering exists in any form at all. Whether this has any sort of inherent
“meaning” is sort of beside the point, because suffering doesn’t have to have
deeper meaning to be horrible in and of itself.

~~~
AlexanderDhoore
So you want to eradicate all suffering? You know the easiest way to do that
right?

~~~
Xcelerate
Stop having children? I’ll admit, it’s a very nice idea in theory, even though
I don’t plan to follow it myself.

~~~
ralmeida
I believe parent comment meant that if all humans were to somehow stop
existing at once, there would be no humans suffering.

~~~
lostmsu
He has a pretty weak argument though: green also exists. And most experience
it directly.

~~~
ralmeida
I’m not sure I follow - what do you mean?

~~~
lostmsu
Existence and commonality of something does not make something an important
topic.

~~~
ralmeida
I don't mean to read minds here, but the only way I was able to parse your
message is that "something" refers to suffering, and it seems you're implying
that suffering exists and is common, but is not necessarily an important
topic?

Or did I misunderstand something?

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AcerbicZero
This is a good example of accepting nihilism, and then immediately rejecting
nihilism because nihilism doesn't matter. Well done.

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robbrown451
Ok, I remember the first time I got high and tripped out on whole
nihilistic/insignificance thing.

You can also go the other direction, and think about the mind-boggling
complexity of a single cell in your body, and all these cells working together
to form, say, a tiny thought in your brain. We're pretty spectacularly
significant, if you compare us to small things rather than big things.

Regardless, you'll have to define "meaning" for me before you can convince me
that it's all meaningless. I have a definition for it that works for me, and
it is relative and dependent on perspective.

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watmough

        I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and 
        don't let anybody tell you different.
        Kurt Vonnegut
    

Yup. Gotta keep some perspective.

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hprotagonist
A very old wonderment indeed.

 _These are the words of the Quester, David’s son and king in Jerusalem

Smoke, nothing but smoke. [That’s what the Quester says.] There’s nothing to
anything—it’s all smoke.

What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your
fingers to the bone?

One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes—it’s
business as usual for old planet earth.

The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again—the same
old round.

The wind blows south, the wind blows north. Around and around and around it
blows, blowing this way, then that—the whirling, erratic wind.

All the rivers flow into the sea, but the sea never fills up.

The rivers keep flowing to the same old place, and then start all over and do
it again.

Everything’s boring, utterly boring— no one can find any meaning in it._

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jensvdh
Sounds like someone discovered Nihilism?

~~~
alasdair_
>Sounds like someone discovered Nihilism?

... and then rejected it.

~~~
pritambaral
> and then rejected it.

Or, it can be said, they went on to discover Optimistic Nihilism.

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joshuakelly
Alex, you should crack open some Nietzsche. I recommend Zarathustra of course.

~~~
tracyshaun
Agreed. Seems like Alex just discovered a useful thread of thought that Uncle
Fred found and rode for many years. To say, "nothing matters", is just the
beginning of that wild ride to living vitally in the eternal return.

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simmanian
From an interdependent worldview, the question that nihilism poses loses any
meaning, because we accept that all things are meaningful in relation to some
things, and all things are meaningless in relation to other things. Nothing
stands on its own. Nothing is meaningless or meaningful. All things are
perceived in relation to others. I believe a great number of people are ready
to leave the dualistic worldview that dominates the world today.
Interdependent worldviews will inspire many solutions to some of the major
problems the world currently faces.

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AlexanderDhoore
"the Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek
inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any in a
purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.

"The stranger" by Albert Camus is available as an audiobook on youtube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Wlj2JkEec](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Wlj2JkEec)

I listen to it in my car!

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gugagore
Related Kurzgesagt video: optimistic nihilism
[https://youtu.be/MBRqu0YOH14](https://youtu.be/MBRqu0YOH14)

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dagav
Life being so small and fragile doesn't make us insignificant, it makes us the
most significant thing in the universe. What is happening on this planet
matters, because each individual human matters, because your experience and
your suffering are real. Your experience is profound on a cosmological scale,
because you are the only thing within the universe which can experience it.

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Skunkleton
Nothing matters; therefore meaning is meaningless. Please feel free to assign
meaning as you see fit, and go about your day as normal.

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Aeolun
> Nothing we ever do will ever be remembered or matter.

I am not so sure about this. Our data based society pretty much guarantees
that a lot of information about what any one of us did will make it into the
future as long as the species (and tech level) survives.

Even more so if we get off-planet. But yeah, ultimately that doesn’t really
matter to the main point of the article.

~~~
dyeje
On a long enough time scale, everything is forgotten.

~~~
Aeolun
Forgotten, but not gone.

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t-h-e-chief
He missed the best part: you, your consciousness, what in folklore we would
call your soul, is nothing more than a sidecar pilot program for the phenotype
your dna has 'chosen' to create. The selfish gene only cares about the self
gene.

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flywithdolp
The problem with being smart is that it make you realize so many things that a
non-smart person will never understand.

Many of those things, are likely to make you sad, and some of them might even
make you question your own existence

~~~
niea_11
This reminds me of a quote from Dostoyevsky : "Pain and suffering are always
inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men
must, I think, have great sadness on earth."

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Svoka
Lets put some P in PhD. I mean, like two thousands years was quite enough to
say everything about nihilism.

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wowmomwow
I think I was 8 when I had these thoughts. They seemed meaningless, so I moved
on.

~~~
wowmomwow
Really, though, it is the beauty that matters....

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_Microft
D'oh, first thing I had to think of while reading the article was the
definition of _edgelord_ in the Urban Dictionary.

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=edgelord](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=edgelord)

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egdod
You’re welcome to think it’s meaningless, and I’m welcome to disagree.

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throwaway0xb
The other day I was listening to a podcast with Sam Harris and Richard
Dawkins, two people that annoy me to no end, but I'm a glutton for punishment.
In the podcast they made the point that if a man were to pursue his true
biological imperative in modern society, he would just get paid to donate
sperm all day at a sperm bank. That was a joke obviously but it speaks to a
kind of simple, outcome-oriented way of looking at who we are. But the truth
is we did not evolve to procreate, we evolved to have sex. The distinction is
subtle, but it's there. We are amazing creatures but our DNA doesn't encode
the big picture, it only encodes enough for us to make another link in the
chain.

I think it's ok to step back and admire the big picture, but I don't think we
are equipped to live in a way where we find agreement with the big picture.

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stas1987
In the world where nothing matters, would be no heroes.

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cschep
Agreed, so we might as well do something interesting. We inject meaning. Or we
don't and suffer. Totally up to us.

Wild.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
> I’d just like to take a second to point out how absurd all this is.

This passage from CS Lewis's Mere Christianity seems appropriate:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But
how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked
unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I com­paring this
universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless
from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show,
find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls
into water, because man is not a water animal: A fish would not feel wet.

Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing
but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God
collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really
unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus
in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that
the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one
part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense.

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no
meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: Just as, if
there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we
should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

~~~
leereeves
Why would a sense of justice need to come from God? Mere fear of death would
naturally lead to a prohibition against murder. Desire to keep things for
oneself would lead to private property and the prohibition of theft. Etc.

And if our sense of justice does come from God, why does it develop over time?
Modern people who read the whole Bible are usually struck by how unjust the
God therein is.

~~~
throw0101a
> _Why would a sense of justice need to come from God?_

Is justice absolute or (culturally) relative? The Nazis† thought they were
doing good: were they not? Were they "wrong" just because they lost WW2? If
they had won, would they have written down that they were "right" and have
history remember that 'fact'?

If they were morally wrong, regardless of winning or losing, where did that
'objective' moral fact come from?

You can certainly be an atheist and me moral and act justly. But where do you
pin your morality to? If someone is an atheist, and probably a materialism
(i.e., the only thing that exists is matter), where is justice in the
scientific realm? What does a molecule of morality look like?

† Let's just invoke Godwin's Law and go for the extreme case.

~~~
krapp
Here's the problem - God _doesn 't_ exist, and all morality _is_ relative. The
only absolute laws are the laws of physics.

And yes, there is a universe in which the Nazis won and it's taken for granted
that they were right all along.

So now what?

~~~
throw0101a
> _Here 's the problem - God doesn't exist_ ...

Aristotle would disagree:

* [https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgrou...](https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-background.html)

* [https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.h...](https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.html)

* [https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-l...](https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-lemmas-make-lemma.html)

* [https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-...](https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-kahuna.html)

> _The only absolute laws are the laws of physics._

Then you're left with explaining the laws of physics and why they exist. Those
laws are contingent after all. See Aquinas's "argument from contingency"
(though _not_ the general cosmological argument or Kalām variant, which are
not very good) as well as Leibniz:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument#Argument...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument#Argument_from_contingency)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason)

For a fuller treatment see Feser:

* [https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp/1621641333)

~~~
leereeves
Aristotle disagreed with inertia too. He was wrong about many things.

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cryptica
That's right, nothing matters. So you should give me all your money because
it's meaningless anyway.

