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Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

> Some people feel like being altruistic, but feelings are the products of ideas. Ideas can be examined and thrown out when irrational (as in this case).

At the end of the day we all are robot executing a program.Yet saying that serves little purpose. It's as stupid as saying "we're all made of atoms", it doesn't make someone who is pain feel better. There are reasonable solutions today to most problems of mankind. Making a difference is important because we are all on the same "boat". No man is an island, even nihilists like you aren't.

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I consider myself to be a nihilist and suspect you may misunderstand it. The full scope of nihilism subsumes the smug and misanthropic blackhole that people seem to relate to it. It's just, as you put it, another robot executing a program. The fundamental belief is in fact that you have agency over this mechanism. You get to choose what to believe. You alone are responsible for your semantic relationship to reality. You can toil in the adaptation of harmony between your desires and an apparently meaningless world. You can get a pre-optimized strategy from your local minister. It's just an expression of a new degree of freedom. It's more of a meta-philosophy than a philosophy. It's intended to describe a lack of meaning and not to prescribe it.

Nihilism often goes unidentified. Anyone who has ever changed beliefs has acted momentarily as a nihilist. A person who is open-minded is a partial nihilist. A complete nihilist being someone who has developed a core belief that none of their other beliefs are certainly true. They simply recognize each as subjectively and temporarily optimal. Notably this evaluation changes, for every existing belief, every time you change any single belief. At it's extreme nihilism can be anxiety inducing. There's always that sneaking suspicion that your core belief is no longer subjectively or temporarily optimal. That and no way to test your suspicion but to maintain your core belief. You can get sort've stuck in an anti-dogmatic loop frantically evaluating philosophies. This doesn't have to be your experience of nihilism. You can simply adapt beliefs to manage this problem.

Problem is, reality is knowable and there is meaning in life. So you are wrong.

You can choose to believe that there is meaning in life or that your relationship with it necessarily generalizes to all other human beings. It's just sort've annoying.

You can't "choose to believe" that there is meaning in life for the same reason that I can't "choose to believe" that God exists, or that the moon is made of cheese, or that Saturn has 28 moons, or that the world is 8.7 billion years old (I just made that number up).

If you "choose to believe" something, it's just a fantasy. If you "choose to believe" something, you don't really believe it. To really believe something, you have to have enough evidence to be certain about it.

Fortunately, pleasure is inherently valuable (this is given by biology), and moreover, our brains supply us with pleasure (in the form of brain chemistry). So now we have a basic value that we can erect other values around. Of course only if they are valid. I can value preserving my life (for instance), art, my loved ones, and so on, but I can't value something arbitrarily.

(The exact psychological mechanism of genuinely enjoying and thus valuing art and loved ones, and such things, is not straighforward, but it's there. Seeing how preserving one's own life is a value is more straightforward. I am a total egoist, by the way, because you can't out of that with the framework I am describing.)

I'm choosing to believe that our notions of "belief" differ.

Well, that's the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and saying "lallalalaa I can't hear you!"

edit: In other words: you should not just choose to "believe" one thing or another. You should look at reality and decide what the evidence favors.

Otherwise, you don't really know, and you know that you don't really know, and you are flying blind in life, and thereby engendering in yourself a sense of helplesness and anxiety (no coincidence that one of Sartre's works was called Nausea...).

I believe your notion of "belief" is false. Empirically in fact. As evidenced here. I would suggest that you ask yourself if your current idea of "belief" is actually serving you. If you did that you might see why you're failing to persuade me to adapt that belief.

First, I'm not a nihilist.

Second, if we want to make the world a better place, the best way to do it is to spread rationality and to counter forms of irrationality---in this case, altruism.

I'm not against human happiness. I'm for it. But I'm for doing it in a way that works, not a way that doesn't.

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