Comment by benjaminjosephw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benjaminjosephw | Hacker News Reader

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benjaminjosephw

Individualism is a closed system. Any attempt to find meaning in isolation as a lone consciousness is subject to the same kind of force as the entropy of closed physical systems. It becomes almost impossible to pattern match on significance because the dataset is too small and the variance in factors that might influence our thinking is too great. All Nihilists are focused only on their own existence because they fail to see reality as having meaning beyond the meaning they can individually make sense of.

I think we can only ever really understand ourselves as humans in relation to other humans. Our individual ideas about who we are can only form in context of our ideas about who other people are and in relationship with them. This is an open system where meaning is an emergent property. Life create meaning, order and structure in the context of complex systems. This is a force as powerful and pervasive as entropy but much less understood.

Meaning exists outside of ourselves.

And yet, as Sartre shows us in No Exit, it is the very presence of other humans and our being forced to view ourselves from the perspective of others that causes us so much existential dread and pain. The mere presence of other sentient beings which perceive, judge, interpret, and conceive of us in some abstract mental model of our being, as opposed to the actual and/or self-perception of our being, causes untold psychic suffering.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but attempting to create meaning strictly in relation to others is no panacea for existential dread and the fundamental nihilism of what I, and the OP, believe to be reality - that is, a strictly physicalist universe devoid of metaphysical or supernatural forces or beings.

And this suffering is the key to unlocking your freedom IMHO. The best thing i read red about it so far is from Khalil Gibrans' The Prophet:

And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain. And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

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> And yet, as Sartre shows us in No Exit, it is the very presence of other humans and our being forced to view ourselves from the perspective of others that causes us so much existential dread and pain.

I've never been entirely clear on whether Sartre intended this or not, but it always seemed glaringly obvious to me that the problem in Huis Clos was not that they were trapped for eternity with other people: it was the specific other people they were trapped with. People who magnified all their own flaws and threw them back in their faces.

If, instead, you were bound for eternity to people with whom you shared mutual respect, understanding, and commitment to each other's happiness, that would be heaven.

It is not truly that "hell is other people", whatever Sartre might say. Isolation is the worst punishment we have in this lifetime. Being condemned to an eternity of isolation would truly be hell.

Even if you started out with people you couldn't stand, and spent aeons torturing each other, what's to say you couldn't then come to some form of co-commitment to happiness with them?

Heaven and hell are defined by how we interact with the people around us.

The realities of dread and pain are part of reality - no doubt about that. So are joy and love. A pure materialist view would have to accept these realities without judgement.

We _want_ to be able to say that suffering and pain imply meaningless, but I don't think that is consistent with a purely materialistic understanding of reality. It is what it is - that's all that can be said.

The materialistic view takes an epistemological stance that precluded the possibility of the metaphysical. That's not the same thing as the actual non-existence of the metaphysical. Fiat money, power and the nation state are all concepts that don't have material existence yet these are realities non-the less. The material world doesn't set the limits to reality, just the context.

Even if you see humans/society as just really complex versions of a cellular automata (or composed of nested automata) you can't deny that the emergent properties are more meaningful/significant than the material realities that compose them. The material world isn't a panacea of meaning either.

Well said!

"All Nihilists are focused only on their own existence because they fail to see reality"

That's the most dumb thing I ever heard since the last conversation I had few days ago about asexuality. It's equivalent to the same argument I heard which was "people are asexuals because they don't have sex more often" or "you're straight because you didn't tried anything else besides that".

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