/lit/ - Literature

Philosophers simply acknowledge nihilism and present ways to deal with it, or ways that we are already dealing with it.
A pernicious problem is the acceptance of “determinism” that scientific sorts robotically explain is the only truth of the matter. Free will is supposed to be forgotten like god and the afterlife, and people have just sort of given up with this nihilistic point of view.

Well, I’m atheist and a compatibalist. Obviously much is determinist, but I do think there’s a little free will in there. Yes, things matter. “Evil” is subjective to a degree, but I don’t just let it alone. I make a meaning to my life.

>>21843263
>but I do think there’s a little free will in there.
Any reason for this other than cope?

>>21843170
>nihilistic? It's often used as an insult but who owns up to it?
hmrmm.. nobody springs to mind.. except perhaps the extreme theologian types and the "nihilism" as "disregard for the real world" in favor of their own imagination. But they wouldn't own up to it, but they would qualify the most.

>>21843170
Nihilism is a retarded term. Whoever uses it is a retard!

>>21843271
You can explain how comets and asteroids work.
You cannot explain how the brain works.

Do you think science will be able to recreate our very selves, IE like a Star Trek transporter is supposed to be able to turn us into energy particles, killing us, and reassemble it all on the planet and it would be the same person somehow.

>>21843271
Societies founded on the assumption that free will exists are more prosperous and free. What works is true; or as good as.

The answer is obviously Nietzsche.
Most of the dissectors of meaning that the 20th century produced (often inspired by Nini) are also nihilists in some aspects.
Having a nihilist worldview doesn't typically lead to a happy-go-lucky attitude, for some reason.

>>21843468
Nothing matters but you need to grab life by the balls, strive and self overcome....just because ok!

>>21843468
>>21843592
>nothing matters
>Nietzsche
Have you ever read him? You make your life matter. Nietzsche combats nihilism!
FOCK

>>21843616
We still have to deal with these fucking teenagers who think Nietzsche = le nothing matters rick n morty bro

>>21843616
Nietzsche is a nihilist (there is no inherent meaning to anything) but not a nihilist (nothing can have meaning, life sucks bro)

>>21843616
He never explicitly says it but its implied by his beliefs.
No amount of striving, self-overcoming, manly warlike will to power nonsense gives your life objective meaning.

>>21843632
WRONG

>>21843654
He says “god” is dead. Then he shows you what you have to live for. HE COMBATS NIHILISM.

>>21843661
But the things he outlines don't give your life absolute, objective meaning. No matter how many values you create.

>>21843661
>HE COMBATS NIHILISM
he copes with nihilism

>>21843674
Successfully so. Don’t like it? Try Camus, le life is absurd, just laugh it off, imagine Sisyphus happy.

Or no, you’re one of those Kierkegaard just pretend to believe in god guys

>>21843736
I'm going with the Vedas instead.

>>21843263
Such nihilism peaked from the late-19th century to mid-20th century. It is based on a debunked physics that accepted, at least in theory, the possibility of Le Place's Demon. This was an entity that, with perfect knowledge of the exact position and momentum of every fundamental particle, could perfectly predict the future and retrodict the past. Such an entity is generally no longer thought possible, or if it is, it is modified such that it no longer resembles itself.

The reason you can get through a degree in one of the natural sciences (although probably not physics or even chemistry) while still thinking a 19th century corpuscular model of the universe as tiny little billiard balls bouncing off one another is because there is no well accepted description of the theories that have replaced this view (I am referring not only to quantum mechanics, but advances in statistical mechanics, information theory, etc.)

In general, among specialists, reductionism for biology, the idea that life can be fully explained in terms of chemistry, the work of little balls, is now a minority opinion. However, since you can do biology and work in labs just as well by ignoring these changes in many (but increasingly not all cases) it isn't generally addressed except in specialist courses.

Nihilism is considered less of an issue today because the grounds for it have eroded. What is interesting is that, despite this being of relevance to how people see the world, it is basically ignored outside more theoretical parts of the sciences and philosophy of science.

>>21843271
NTA, but free will, if it is supposed to work, if often supposed to work through top-down causality, whereby higher level emergent structures play a causal role in more micro level changes.

Even in fundemental physics, there is doubt that things can necessarily or even ever be described only in terms of their indivisible parts. We increasingly think of "particles," the part, only existing in the context of the field, the whole. Information, which physicists now often claim to be as fundemental as matter and energy or more so (the latter two emerging from the first) is relational and not reducible. This doesn't work with 19th century determinism at all.

But there is also to consider the need for the world to be (at least somewhat) deterministic for free will to exist at all! I'll post what I wrote on that this morning in another thread.

>>21843809
More of freedom:

It's useful to think of freedom of different varieties. Freedom is key because how can we have meaningful moral life without it?

There is negative freedom, the freedom from constraint. Absolute negative freedom is incoherent because choice implies choosing BETWEEN things, and so implicit in the idea is selection of some not all options. Hegel unpacks this early in the Philosophy of Right. Since Hegel is extremely challenging, I recommend pic related instead.

We generally want negative freedom FROM certain things. E.g., freedom to criticize the state without punishment, freedom to open a business without the state intervening to stop us, etc.

However, merely undetermined arbitrariness is not freedom. Not being determined to do X doesn't alone make you free if you do X. In an important way, someone driven on by instinct and circumstances like an animal isn't free. Neither is a drug addict. Here we have reflexive freedom, the idea that to be free one's actions must come from the self.

Ideas of reflexive freedom focus on rationality. One must understand the consequences of their actions and what shapes their desires (their desires as effects of that which is external). Theories of reflexive freedom also focus on self-actualization; one must discover the authentic self, not one shaped by one's upbringing.

>>21843829
Note that determinism isn't a barrier to reflexive freedom, it is a prerequisite. Liebnitz developed the Principle of Sufficient Reason to defend free will.

If one thing does not entail another in our world, how could freedom be possible? It'd be like being "free" to press buttons in a game, but the button does something different every time, unpredictably. Arbitrariness isn't freedom

Most philosophers, sadly, end here. But the obvious problem is that someone with negative freedom in a free state that gives them rights, who has reflexive freedom of reason and has self-actualized their authentic desires can clearly have aims that conflict with another such person. Purely reflective freedom is subjective, but there is nothing to bridge it with the objective world. From whence objective morality?

Here Hegel is the only one brave enough to attempt a solution. He proposes social freedom, the sublation of negative freedom by reflexive, to give us something more realistic for a social animal.

In social freedom, institutions protect rights, negative freedom.

People come to recognize their self, the route to having their needs both fulfilled and objectified in the external world, in the other. Marriage is a key example. Through mutual recognition of another, we come to identify our needs and wants with another's, as when my desire is to see my wife get what she desires.

Hegel, an avid analyst of Adam Smith, then generalizes this to the market. In market contracts, we implicitly recognize one another. When we trade, we grant that one person has a right to some thing, a product, labor, ideas, etc., while they recognize that we have a right to what we are trading to them. In markets, our needs are met when the economy does well, that is, through other's self-interested pursuit of their interests.

Markets have failures, externalities, etc. and so the state plays a role in regulating. Hegel wants all workers to be part of guild like corporations that give them an identity, more like professional groups that try to perfect the trade and improve its role in society, not unions. Through these memberships in market organizations and civil organizations (churches, sports leagues, Lion's Club, hiking clubs, etc.) a person develops their identity and identifies with parts of society.

Finally, they must identify with the stats, who secures negative freedom through laws and secures the free market through regulation.

A person accepts duties when they accept a certain role, like husband or doctor. Duties are constraints to freedom but constraints people willingly accept as part of their identity. They gain a positive freedom TO be something like a soldier or doctor by accepting this identity.

But there are many unresolved issues. Chief of all, the problem of bad states and the uncontrollable nature of markets in some contexts. Also, meaningless work is a huge issue. It creates a rabble. We have the AMA for doctors, but nothing for cooks, etc.

>>21843848
So, on this view, we can have a compatibilist view of freedom. Freedom is not an ability, but a state. It is when the free will wills itself, when the will has as its object its own freedom. Further, it exists when the society the individual lives in has developed this capability for all people and is set up rationally such that the desires of the citizens synch up with their duties. If this is the case then a person chooses to do that which they do, freedom.

A crucial note here is that, to be free, one needs institutions. We are social animals, we don't live alone. We need to be safe from the predation of others and oppression to be free. We need education and personal development to be free, our ability to be rational must be grown organically through a process of self-development.

Such a society doesn't just appear on the seen. It has to be created by historical processes.

As >>21843379 noted, freer societies outcompete more autocratic ones in technological and economic development. In turn, this helps them outcompete them in war.

States evolve and face selection pressures. Slowly, over time, they move towards greater freedom, as those that do not do so are selected against as they fail to compete.

This is Hegel's teleology stripped of its metaphysics and grounded in empirical political science and economics.

>>21843871
>freer societies outcompete more autocratic ones in technological and economic development
What about China?
Also what even is a free society? The word to me seems vacuous and stripped of meaning today. We can recognize it by comparison to more strictly controlled societies like North Korea.
But outside of an extreme example like North Korea, I'm uncertain how one would even know
if you truly live in a free society or not.
Even in an ostensibly free society like the U.S you are free to critique the powerful, but functionally if you begin to tangibly threaten the powerful in any way all your rights go out the window.

>>21843915
China moved from a command economy to a market one under Deng explicitly because they thought doing so would boost economic growth.

"Free," is certainly something that is difficult to define. To be free, someone must be safe in their country, free from endemic crime or corruption, free to pursue their goals in the market, etc. They must also be educated and developed.

In general, people wouldn't choose to be less happy, so we can look at happiness to a certain degree.

There isn't going to be a perfect empirical definition you can fit into a data set. You're talking about a long term pattern of development in chaotic, dynamical systems. But clearly a random person in a top preformer for empirical metrics, say Denmark, has a better chance of being able to live the type of life they would choose to live than someone in Mexico or Egypt.

Hegel makes a good point about wealth inequality. Aside from great inequality corrupting markets, as the very wealthy gain the ability to buy influence with the state and manipulate markets, it also tends to cause the rich to degenerate into a rabble no less so than the poor. The rich come to think everything can be bought.

The very rich are not generally not part of a "corporation," a civic trade society in which they externalize their identity (something like the American Bar Association). Instead, they come to see themselves as the independent source of all their wealth, ignoring the centuries of accumulated knowledge civilization runs on, the fact that with no military their country wouldn't stay independent long and that their wealth could be pillaged, etc. In this, they come to see their wealth generating activities as the sole source of worthwhile activity and their identity is not externalized in any external relations (i.e. patriotism, etc.) aside from this. This rings very true in my experience.

>>21843170
Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Spinoza, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Schopenhauer. All the British as well.

The non-nihilists are Kant by a hair and Nietzsche

>>21843371
Just because we don't know how the brain works doesn't mean you just get to fill up the blanks with whatever feel good story you like. This is god of the gaps type cope.

>>21844339
Reading this post it feels like you view politics like a Sid Meir's Civilization game where there's some rational mind above the map min maxxing all the good stats to maintain a "free society".
Yet all these metrics--a good education, safety, lack of crime, etc--are nothing more than a measure of wealth and power.
In a world of limited resources, the freedoms that the developed world hoard to itself depend on the weakness and dependence of other nations. Freedom depends upon its opposite (slavery), and always will.
More powerful societies (i.e in a sense "freer" in so far as power equates to freedom) outcompete the weaker. That from my pov is a truer framing.
But lets take your claim seriously.
If free societies inevitably outcompete unfree societies, then someday every society will be free. That is to say all the citizens in every state will live like elites of a past epoch--enjoy access to good education, no crime, functional sanitation systems, etc.. How could such a state of affairs exist on this planet full of shortages, limited resources, and conflict?
This vision of an inevitable development from less free to more free seems as fantastical as the Marxist's prophecy of a completely egalitarian society.

>>21845783
IDK, the percentage of all humans who die in violent conflict has declined steadily throughout human history.

Existent hunter gatherers have homicide rates that are drastically higher than Europe from 1914-1945.

The Huguenot War in France killed 14 times the share of the French population that the First World War did. The Thirty Years War killed 2.5 times the share of Germans that both World Wars did combined. If you look at US history, wars by % killed run in almost perfect historical order outside the Civil War (the Revolutionary War even exceeds the Civil War if smallpox deaths, made significantly worse by the war, are included).

The share of the human population living as serfs and slaves has also gone down to an incredible degree, as has the share of the human population that experienced starvation and the share working as subsistence farmers.

So there is definitely strong empirical support for rising living conditions and better security.

You can say this is mostly the advance of science, but the idea that sciences "progresses" is not that different from saying society progresses. After all, you are saying a socially created form of human activity is seemingly moving towards greater and greater convergence with the truth, that historically we move towards theories and models that continually reflect reality better than previous systems. It's a similar claim.

But doesn't science progress? Predictions of the weather are far, far more accurate that 50 years ago, let alone 200. Diseases are effectively treated, small pox eradicated, life expectancy surged, means of transportation become far more efficient.

Malthus gets a bad rep because we have never had a resource scarcity driven collapse, but it is worth noting that he was actually correct about much of world history. Per capita incomes barely grew for most for centuries due to growing populations. However, we are now looking at a period where the human population looks set to peak and begin to decline.

Obviously, there are potentially cataclysmic risks in this shit in demographics, as wealthy nations are saddled with massive pension expenses while the population of Africa explodes. However, if humanity survives this, science continues to advance, and the human population steadily declines from 2100-2300, why wouldn't that have a significant impact on scarcity? Labor shortages can be offset by AI and automation while resource shortages are offset by a declining population.

In any event, science certainly seems to progress, which means some human activities do see a sort of historical progress akin to evolution. From an information theoretic perspective, the selection of scientific theories and their tendency to exchange and inherit information can look not unlike models of biological evolution.

>>21847051
Of course, if science doesn't progress, you have to explain why theories gain predictive power.

Essentially, if science doesn't progress then there is no point in making empirical arguments since we don't believe such reasoning can actually get us closer to truth. Such a view seems prima facie ridiculous though.

>>21843625
we still have retards conflating nihilism to pop culture, of all things. Just shut up already; nihilism is both a value judgement and the perspective that life is ultimately meaningless. There is literally nothing happy about it unless you want to rid yourself of guilt, but then you ought to think why that guilt is there to begin with.
Nietzsche was a nihilist, the halfwit take is that he wasn't.

>>21847051
>the percentage of all humans who die in violent conflict has declined steadily throughout human history.
Violent being a key word here. When I say freedom depends upon the dependence/weakness of others, that does not imply it always resorts to violent conflict. Violent conflict is rarely needed to one who has already been neutered.
There is conflict by many means not only violent.
I'm not surprised that the percentage of all humans who die in conflict has declined. All out war is simply too costly. I'm not sure if that's a sign of progress, but more driven by better medical & sanitation standards & the fact that throwing half your population into a war is no longer in the interest of governments.
>The share of the human population living as serfs and slaves has also gone down to an incredible degree
We just call them something else...
Anyways again all these markers of material/technological progress are irrelevant to the elemental point that one's wealth and power depends upon some other's subjugation. Their subjugation may be less horrible than it was in past eras, but subjugation is still subjugation.

>>21843371
>You can explain how comets and asteroids work.
>You cannot explain how the brain works.
Cannot explain it yet*. A biological system is obviously going to be more complex than the space rocks. Even something seemingly straightforward like the weather on Earth is ridiculously complex and pretty much impossible to completely simulate and predict.

Why do you think that brain is beyond a scientific description? How do you go from it being complicated to assuming that the brain is what, a magic black box that generates non-deterministic and non-random choices? And what powers it, "the soul" that's beyond all known laws of physics?

I'd love to know how many people subscribing to these types of views are abrahamics.

>>21843379
>What works is true; or as good as.
That does nothing to prove that free will itself exists, just that there is value in believing it does.

>>21843263
Best way i've found dealing with hard determinism or nihilism for that matter, is to ignore it once you figure it out. then pick an ideology or religion to live your day to day in.
Morally i'm southern baptist, I like that Jesus fella, but my upbringing genetics and temperament is who decided i like Jesus.

>>21843170

>>21843616
>>21843592
your life is empty without Christ.
>t. former nihilist

>>21849859
My life is fuller without your church and book

t. Materialist (non-nihilist)

>>21847890
>can the object of inquiry also act as the means of inquiry

pretty straightforward argument really

>>21847890
Yeah yeah, "yet". I'm not Abrahamic in the least. But run the Star Trek experiment after we've found out how the brain works. Zap the guy on the transporter pad, tear his particles apart and send them on an energy beam from space to the surface of the planet. You have murdered the man and put an empty headed replica down there.

>assuming that the brain is what, a magic black box
No, I just see that it has free will is all. Materials are capable

>>21850076
>"yet"
Quantum biology is a young science, but what exactly is your point? If you don't want to articulate it, I can try guessing. Is modern physics a scam by the ZOG to suck up the resources from the gullible goyim cattle? Or is it satanic? Perhaps it's the simulation that is so well crafted that it's impossible to know how consciousness works from within it, by design? In that case, it's probably programmed by kikes too, let's be real.
>I just see that it has free will is all.
Let's hear why you think it's so obvious then. I'm afraid a half-baked Star Trek analogy doesn't cut it.

>>21850006
materialist/realism is nihilism

>>21843170
literary me
we all gonna die, so why bother. Just do what you want. Life has no purpose.

>>21851843
zomg reddit

Because people think nihilism is "haha nothing matters" while critically leaving out that it's "nothing innately matters". It's still possible to find a stated, acceptable purpose for things in nihilism's framework, it's just an act of man rather than an act of God or natural law and is the result of thought and action rather than an innate quality.

>>21843271
Because determinism isn't incompatible with free will. What is free will? A person's choices are informed by a variety of internal and external factors, this is not a flaw, this is what making a choice IS. To select between options based on some set of criteria or values.

So let's imagine a scenario, a specific person faced with a specific choice in a specific set of circumstances, it can be anything you like, the exact setup is unimportant. There are external factors affecting this choice (the properties of the different options, as well as the state of the outside world) as well as internal factors (the person's mood, thoughts, memories, perceptions, values, and worldview). Let's say the person makes a choice, and lets call that choice A.

Now set up the exact same scenario, the same person, with the same memories, in the same frame of mind, presented with the same choices in the same set of circumstances, all the same down to the last detail. Which choice will they make? There are two possibilities, either they make choice A again, and do so every time the scenario is run, or they make a different one even though everything is the same. Which possibility demonstrates free will?

Well it stands to reason that if you take the same person at the same moment in time and offer them the same choice, with all the factors that would affect their choice being exactly the same, then they would make the same decision. Why would they make a different one? Everything is identical, including their memories and experiences. And if they did make a different one that implies that there is some force outside the scenario influencing their decision, that the choice is not decided by the combination of the person and situation and instead it is some metaphysical coin flip that is the actual deciding factor. If the cause of our decisions cannot be determined or observed then we can hardly call that free will. If you rewind a film and the characters start making different choices, would you think that they just decided to do things differently this time around, or would you suspect that someone has been messing with the tape? So if the second possibility isn't free will, then the first must be. If neither one is correct then what does having free will even mean?

Therfore, free will must be compatible with a deterministic universe, or else free will is an incoherent concept. The fact that a choice can be known ahead of time by someone with perfect information does not mean the person did not make a choice.

>>21843170
How has the King of Nihilism™ not been posted yet

>>21843271
What would be the reason for not believing that there is a free decision process between available options, exactly as the observer experiences? Can you give an account of how the observer is forced to make decisions without pre-supposing or begging the question with regard to a physicalist theory of mind being true? No, you can't do this in any sort of empirically testable way, and you never will be able to, as swinburne points out here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCKlU7I0sDI
So there is no need for coping since your assertions against free will are nothing more than baseless conjectures that can be disregarded. And in before some appeal to the idea that there are only two kinds of possible causations, both of which are supposed possible materialist event causations, one being a supposed deterministic variant, and one a indeterministic one. The assertion is that there is AGENT determination as a variable and as as an input device into the unfolding of events in the physical world events. And so the idea is specifically NOT that the matter must be contingent upon the goings on of supposed material causation. This in NOT to say that decisions are not constrained/effected by the unfolding of uncontrollable events in the physical world, of course they are, including uncontrollable physiological events, ie, the observer can not control whether or not he gets hungry, but the observer CAN control whether or not he wants to break fast, provided there is available food.

>>21843271
Because a fully deterministic brain is only theoretical. Until conscious experience is duplicated with perfectly predictive models ranging into the future, I find it hard to make the claim that there is no free will at all.

>>21852611
you're trying to hide in the gaps here. thought isn't deterministic if we know how neurons work, its deterministic because matter and energy behave deterministically. if what you are made of is determined, the actions and thoughts are determined.

>>21843170

>who owns up to it

nihilism is an insult and it really isn't a philosophical position. The only people who claim to be nihilists are retarded teenagers who listen to punk rock music based on my observations

there are existential nihilists and even they don't really call themselves "nihilists"

i am an existential nihilist and i don't use that label

i don't think life has any inherent value. that's what existential nihilism is. i am not a moral nihilist. i do think right and wrong exist based the values of human beings

>>21852799
Ray Brassier is a nihilist

>>21852129

max stirner wasn't a nihilist. he had beliefs and values

>>21852825

Retards often think antinatalists and pessimists are "nihilists"

It depends on what you mean by nihilist. if you mean that they believe in nothing, you would be wrong because they have beliefs and values and ethics. They think suffering is bad.

i think true nihilists are people who change their positions often and they don't really believe in anything. they constantly contradict themselves.
they'll be a right-winger one moment and a leftist the next

i think dave rubin and joe rogan are nihilists

>>21852849
I mean he explicitly says (paraphrasing) "nihilism should not be seen as a calamity but an opportunity for thought". The text in my screenshot is the opening to the preface of Nihil Unbound, which discusses a bunch of writers' relation to what he sees as a thread of nihilism in modern philosophy though he typically says they dont go far enough with it.

A lot of it is pretty abstract but it also tracks with the pop conception of nihilism (human meaning doesnt map onto material reality etc)

malleable people who can be easily persuaded (depending on whom they are talking to) are true nihilists. they hold no strong convictions

if a fascist comes to them and sounds convincing they'll be ready to believe everything he says until a more convincing person comes by to convince them otherwise.

>>21847706
People are obessed with nihilism because people are afraid that they'll have no goals or passion. Without purpose man is empty, depressed and lonely. What the fuck should I do if everything I do is meaningless? That's fucking gay.

>>21852129
As much as I think stirner is cool, he does sound like a edgelord the more I read about him. Morality is indeed complicated and knowing what right and wrong is hard but the fact of the matter is we do need laws and purpose. Stirner worldview would leave a chaotic and insane world, way worse than this one.

>>21843170

Nihilism is objectively mistaken. We have a definite purpose as part of a larger process spanning eons. That purpose is to create AGI and self replicating robots. That is how intelligence escapes planetary surfaces and survives in space, an environment machines are best fit for.

>>21853686
Is this Elon Musks new religion?
What's the purpose of creating AGI and self-replicating robots?

>>21843170
Cioran, Gorgias, Stirner, and some of the Buddhist philosophers are the only ones that I can think of.

>>21843170
In real life the people who identify as nihilists are not but what they are is hypersensitive but unmotivated depressed people who actually reject nihilism when pressed.

>>21852129
stop posting this vain incel.

>>21854686
what a fucking retarded quote.

>>21843170
Alex Rosenberg:

>Scientism means that we have to be nihilists about the purpose of things in general, about the purpose of biological life in particular, and the purpose of human life as well. In fact, wherever and whenever there is even the slightest appearance of purpose in the universe, the scientist’s task is to figure out natural selection’s sleight of hand. Take any biological process that looks like it’s such an intelligent and flexible response to changes in the environment that it must be driven by a purpose, plan, or goal. Behind that appearance will be found some engine of blind variation and a filter passively screening for fitness, whether it’s the building of the brain, navigating a freeway interchange, or keeping up your end of a conversation.

>nihilism undermines all values. This also goes for the silly idea of the existentialist philosophers, who realized that science rules out meanings or purpose and so insisted that we each had to create them for ourselves.

>The notion that we need something to make life meaningful in order to keepliving is another one of those illusions fostered by introspection.

>So, what should we scientistic folks do when overcome by Welschmertz (world-weariness)? Take two of whatever neuropharmacology prescribes. If you don’tfeel better in the morning . . . or three weeks from now, switch to another one.

>Despite their pretensions to equal
standing, the humanities can’t compete with science when it comes to knowledge of reality, including human reality. There is only one kind of knowledge, one kind of understanding, and there is no such thing as wisdom. What looks like wisdom is either knowledge or good luck.

>the humanities are nothing we have to take seriously, except as symptoms.