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Comment by peebeebee | Hacker News Reader

Once I had this vision in a strong ayahuasca trip... I met "Mother Nature", but it wasn't the feminine caring image you'd think of. It was an unstoppable force of life that did not had any caring of right or wrong. It only wanted to create more life. It had more a feeling of millions of beings crawling over each other, like a beehive or ants nests. Just devouring everything with "life".

Like a "Squiggle Maximizer" with a vengeance and attitude. It was awesome, but made me seriously reconsider the "sacredness" of life.

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> but made me seriously reconsider the "sacredness" of life

When I think of life mattering, I think of the individual, not life in general.

I think nature is quite cruel and there's very little about nature to suggest that the life of an individual matters at all, but to that individual, their life is the most important thing they have.

It's like the argument people make to vegans: if we stop eating cows, they'll go extinct and that's bad.

It initially sounds bad to think of a species going extinct, but the species doesnt matter in this case. What really matters are the individuals who make up the species, and they're living a short existing with a cruel death. No cow would suffer if we stopped breeding them and let the species go extinct, but people think of the species as a being that woukd somehow be hurt by not existing.

I agree. I did not mean to say: “all life is meaningless “, but more that the green/ecological imagery of ‘mother nature’ that cares for you and needs caring was changed for me. Life itself can be a terrifying force. That the individual feels suffering is an effective but brutal feature of Life trying to maximise itself. We are all born in this system, and we should obviously try to minimise this suffering.

Abject nihilism is fucking lame, and I don't care whatever chemically-induced experiences you or anyone else has had or whatever value you think you found within them or whatever the fuck, but I'm frankly tired of pretending otherwise.

That’s a nihilist statement though. :p I was just outing my experience, no need to get that riled up.

These ideas are inherently harmful to spread to other people so flippantly—think of the possible nth-order effects for five fucking seconds, and you'll see what I mean.

(Or, don't because nothing fucking matters anyway, right, mannnn?)

We need to learn to respond to such nonsense swiftly, or we're completely and totally fucked as a civilization, as a species, in this information age of instantaneous transmission of thoughts and ideas.

Your ideas with regards to this matter are horrible, and you should feel horrible for proselytizing them.

(But, of course, you won't, because nothing fucking matters anyway, right, mannnn?)

„This is what I experienced“ is not the same as „this is what I believe in“.

Me telling you „I once was told by a nazi that all Jews need to be punished for their sins“ does not make me a nazi.

>> think of the possible nth-order effects for five fucking seconds, and you'll see what I mean.

In five seconds I can hardly even get into 2nd order thinking.

How many Ns deep can you go in 5 seconds?

Do you have a halting routine built in so that you can attend to other tasks?

What you think is nihilism is not nihilism. Please change your semantic understanding of this word to be more in line with reality.

Yawn

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