/lit/ - Literature

>>21812170
>>21806577
The worst part about this is that the mechanism is not entirely individual. Even if you were to eschew this modern way of life, you cannot escape it except in total isolation, which would defeat the purpose of the rebellion. The effects of these phenomena seep naturally into culture at large, and from there eke their way into the soul.

More connected information-wise than ever, but never before as lonely and cut off from the nourishing elements of life and humanity, finally subject to the previously-only-looming nihilism.

Of course, you aren't expressing pain over this self-obsessed information culture, you are pained over the more pure existential issues. The issue of death and meaning, the terror of being a subjective consciousness that will cease, the horror at being a consciousness generated by a biological entity that seems to be otherwise indistinguishable from the material world that surrounds it. I get it.

The nihilism-engendering quality of science, especially in its great victory over religion (nietzsche, the death of god, anyone?) has also never been so keen. The mystery of wonder at the material world is now easily dispelled by a google search, the reverent joy is somewhat dissipated. No effort is needed--we are ingrained then with the belief that science holds all of the answers. But if we look deep enough we find that the deepest questions seem to be unanswerable by scientific inquiry: the nature of consciousness, the mechanism of ontology, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the reason underlying natural constants, and probably some others that don't come to my mind immediately. Coupled with the modern faith that science can explain pretty much anything, there is an immediate terror: it fails us just at the most important and deep point of inquiry, it takes us to an edge promising it will explain everything, and shows us the abyss that is uncrossable.

And so, there is a twofold pain here. Not only do we perceive that humans, subject apparently to the laws of the material world, are forever damned to a state of epistemic pessimism and an almost lovecraftian island of ignorance, as a categorical rule and not merely a case of 'not having figured it out yet' (that scientific materialists so often love to espouse, stupidly), but the faith that has been cultivated in us by society is also shattered, much like the faith in religion was with the rise of modernism and industrialism, a century and some change ago.

There are other sources of this abject existential terror, too. Surely, talking about the profound and categorical underdetermination of our culture, it also lends itself to the terror of the inductive leap, which seems to be absolutely central to the whole human knowledge affair: induction is a fallacy, even if it seems to work well. There is no logical foundation to assert the fact that "things in the future will behave as they have in the past".
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help i remember seeing an image posted on this board about suicide a long time ago, it was basically an assertion that suicide was the worst crime imaginable, since it forsakes the entirety of the world itself, down to the smallest element, as a complete denial of life itself-- nothing is spared, when compared with murder, which the only thing forsaken is the life of the murdered. that was somewhat of the gist of the argument, i believe the guy who made the quote was a big old fat guy in black and white, maybe not fat idk please help i need the quote for an argument it was very lucid thanks