Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewfromx | Hacker News Reader

alan watts said this best. You can walk into a eastern temple and enjoy it. laugh. do all the "silly" little rituals. Religion is _supposed_ to be fun and NOT serious. The min you make it deadly seriously and tell children THIS IS REAL you defeat the point. i.e. life is one big ride and silly. Life is very very silly and not even a little bit serious. Even when people die. Espeically when people die. Live your life this way and you won't fear death. You'll enjoy your silly number of X years you get on earth and want to live a good life cuz that's the most silly fun you can have. And _that's_ how you get people to be "reglious". NOT BY PREACHING or saying do this "moral" behavior. No no no. Live it up. Go to Burning Man. Enjoy the ride is what religion was trying to tell us but the message is all mixed up now.

View on HN

Life is very silly when you're the kind of person who tends to read HN. For others, in this age and throughout history, life is not so silly, but quite serious and scary. Through common cultural themes like shared religions, communities can band together and survive. If I stop practicing my Judaism tomorrow, there will still be those who want to kill me for being a Jew - my life will not get more "silly" by losing my religion.

I think this is completely culturally and moronically ignorant to such an extreme degree. You wish this were true. I wish it were true. But it's complete, utter, bollocks. Life is one big ride and silly? Are you fucking high? You've traveled no where. You've read no history at all whatsoever. Yeah, what's going on in Syria is silly. Being drawn and quartered is one big ride. What the fuck ever. Idiot. You clearly got Alan Watts wrong.

I don't understand people who call themselves clowns and calls everyone else clowns as well, then expects to be taken seriously.

oh I get your position. I felt that was true for years. The real question is, is a human death tragic? Even your own? And the answer has to be no. It's not. It's a goof this life. Dying is not the worse thing that can happen. Not living is. How do I think terrible things like torture and kids dying in Syria is silly? Because each human is NOT really a seperate thing that has to survive at all costs. Think of humans like pids or threads. They come and go. When a linux process dies is that tragic?

> The real question is, is a human death tragic? ... Dying is not the worse thing that can happen.

It's very easy to say this on HN.

I'd like to see you say that with a straight face to a war widow or a mother who just lost her child though.

what if life is 1 big computer simulation? Then the mother and child are pids. Do you feel pain when you kill -9 a process on a linux box?

You're having a hard time keeping a coherent train of thought. In your computer simulation of people, if you're modeling individuals as processes, then another process feels pain when a process it cares about is killed. If you're deliberately killing people in a computer simulation where you know the simulated people are sentient, you are an asshole. Your computer analogy only holds when simulating sentient people; the whole point of computers is that they are capable of arbitrary computation. Since we cannot currently use that arbitrary computation to simulate a person, kill -9 in 2016 isn't analogous.

e: 2016

If I start a program that creates pids, and each pid is programmed to feel like a little simple human that does stuff, and I slowly slowly make that program more and more complex until it's the level of the AI girl in a movie like ex-Machina at what point is ctrl-c and killing the whole program being a cruel god that wipes out millions of pids/humans without caring?

Don't move the goalposts; removing reality is entirely different than causing pain within the reality.

A simpler scenario; I meet you and decide, for whatever reason, to kick you in the dick. In this moment, you are no longer an absurdist: your whole world is pain; pain is literally the only thing you can perceive. Now, post dick-kicking, when you eventually convince yourself again that nothing really matters, does your perception of me change? If so, why? If not, why? And why do you value your pain over the war widow's?

absolutely I'll feel the pain. And it's a challenge to realize my indivual pain is no big deal to the master program. I'm just a pid. By my pid is programmed to feel pain. So yes, I'll feel the pain. Ouch. But i'm a very smart pid that can see I'm like 1 liver cell. If you fry and kill 1 liver cell, but the rest of the liver keeps working perfect. Does that 1 liver cell's pain matter? To that one cell sure, but humans make up 1 "thing" like a liver too. One big organ. 7 billion humans all working together and are part of something but don't even know what it is. All we pids can do is follow our programming.

You ignored the questions about how and why you'd revaluate someone who deliberately hurt you.

But yes, we can only follow our programming. Part of that programming is creating narratives and assigning value judgements to elements of those narratives and our sensory experience. Your narrative overvalues your understanding of basic structures you have a naive understanding of, while suppressing creation of those of a social level. If you find life absurd, its because your outlook leads to internal schisms.

You asked why we dance, and then referenced Ex Machina. Kyoko has no free will and is programmed to dance on command, and yet dancing seems like the one thing she actually enjoys. Is there meaning in her dancing?

In the moment of sheer misery you will not be a smart pid that will give two shits about the grand scheme. You'll only care about yourself, you'll only recognize that reality, that is your fundamental programming. You will not be thinking life is just all fun and games and that your personal pain doesn't matter. That it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things will not give you comfort.

> what if

And what if it isn't?

but it seem inevitable that we will be able to create simulated worlds like our own soon. So fast forward 2000 years or however long that will take to have tech like The Matrix and humans inside don't even know the world is simulated. And if that's obviously going to happen at some point, isn't it silly to think that it didn't already happen 2000 years AGO and I'm in the simulation?

Even if you're 99% sure that we're in a simulation, treating the lives of others as if it were already a foregone conclusion and ignoring that 1% possibility is IMO immoral.

And if you choose to cause suffering for others in the belief that somehow it doesn't matter, then aren't you just shoving your beliefs down other people's throats?

You're even dumber than I thought. No fool, it's not death that's tragic, it's human suffering. Torture for years before dying. Oh yeah, that's just a goof. Asswipe.

Well think about who taught you that life was serious. What was their agenda? Well they want to rule the world of course. What's the best way to rule over someone. Tell him to fear death and that their only choice is to do what you say and they will avoid a horrible fate. How can you be "saved"? just stop caring about your fate. Bring it on whatever is is. Torture, hard work situation, any adversity in your life. Laugh at it and you can't be ruled. That makes people very dangerous of course.

what's going on in Syria is a function of too many of the wrong people taking life too seriously.

your shitty attitude stems from the same function.

Believe what you want about the meaning of life, but you're misrepresenting the messages of almost all religions. The one I'm most familiar with, Christianity, says this life is your one chance to prove your virtues before being judged forever, which is why they are expected to do some pretty serious things instead of whatever amuses them.

1+ for Alan Watts. He was surprisingly well-grounded not only in Eastern traditions but also in Christianity.

he spent YEARS in Christianity school as a kid.

Why do you value the emotion of silliness to the exclusion of all the others?

edit: Maybe a better question is, what is the objective measure of silliness?

what do humans like to do when the work is all done? Sing and dance. Why? What is this all about? It's all about nothing. Its all about ba ba ba do do do, one big dance the universe over, Look at the atomic level, nothing but one big rave. Atoms dancing like crazy in all sorts of weird patterns just because.

People create more tasks to do when the current tasks are done. Singing and dancing is communication. Your answer wasn't objective, and neither was mine.

If I understood you correctly, your answer to "what is the objective measure of silliness" is essentially to say our best model of nature is of particles in spacetime adhering to certain rules. My, and what I assume is the common definition of silly, is inconsequential incoherence. Perhaps your definition is different? Nature is not silly, since the consequences of its rules are both measurable and consistent. If you're saying its absurd to think of human society in terms of physics, well sure. Don't do that, its the wrong layer of abstraction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com