Resisting Existential Nihilism

No, the very nature of our reality is that there is always something further. It's a fractal universe in every sense. And since it's also holographic in nature, no information is ever truly lost, meaning that everything we do and think and say leaves an indelible trace on the surface of reality.


Everything I have seen and stumbled across has lead me to this point.


And since I feel like raging against the dark, I feel this is particularly apropos, especially the refrain:

Well, it’s not that we cope with nothingness whilst living, exactly, is it?

We come from nothingness and nothingness is simply our ‘fate’ (no, I don’t mean it like that!).

Nothingness is incomprehensible, I know, you know. Beyond our ken — yet, yeah, we fear that which we cannot imagine, don’t we?

I think that we accept nihilism, accept that we’ve no destiny or meaning, and accept finality. We’re just as unable to understand nothingness as we’re unable to, say, stop the Earth from rotating around the Sun; doesn’t make sense, does it? Why worry about that which we cannot do?

To me, the point is that legacy doesn't matter - it's what you choose to do next that does.


As for point, understanding & answers? Life & the interrelationship between mathematics, science & the apparent structure of nature & the universe (as currently understood) is just too perfect an example of randomness working out, for me to consider it an accident without purpose. There's design there, not least in the way that humans seem programmed to inquire & seek purpose/meaning in things. Even if our purpose is to discover there is no purpose & that 42 just means that you're gonna need a bigger computer...

I don’t buy any sci-fi/paranormal/afterlife claptrap and I think that the inability that you write of is a very good thing.

I cannot empathize enough my wonder and awe in contemplating exactly how individually unique we are! What right bastards we can be; all of us! How smart we can be; some of us! How very benevolent others can be! How horribly bacchant I was!

I shudder at the thought (pun) of another invading my twisted mind. I believe that I would be ill discovering the nasty-little-secrets in the minds of others.

Let’s be content in our own dusty attics.

No, no, no!

This is not some perverse holographic universe! This is no dream; we are as real as the smallest grain of sand on a snow-white beach and as real as the largest discernible black hole.

What endures? Very little. Ashes, in my case, will be my carbon footprint. I have a son and maybe he will reproduce, as well, but I will be forgotten, as will he and his potential progeny.

There is no universal storage system and what we think has no effect on any galactic reality. Stars die, stars are born. So are we.

That’s reality.

As for legacies: That’s the reason that we reproduce, isn’t it? Like the dog whizzing on the fire hydrant, we have that innate need to make our mark (pun — my son’s name; my confirmation name).

I love higher mathematics, but I do not understand them — I’m a child who can grasp only the very basics. As with all hard sciences.

No, if we know anything of nature it’s that it is always changing. That it is evolving and that the evolution is only conditioned by environment. There’s no design, no designer, no programming, no ticket-no laundry. No purpose outside of our needs, our basic and higher needs and desires.

I’ll repeat it again: We only need think of Kinsey and his millions of gall wasps to appreciate our random novelty. We are prone to see patterns; we’re dim-witted in that. But — in higher mathematics (eleven dimensions?) — we theorise the wholly random nature of existence.

We aren’t Punch and Judy on strings (theory — I adore puns). There’s no puppeteer. I think that we have to embrace the comedy, the absurdity, of our existence rather than expecting an Ibsen drama (no matter how realistic — major domo pun).

That’s life.

I don't think we need to create bizarre myths to live. But your idea of nihilism seems to be predicated on a certitude and a "knowingness" about reality. That is, that life beyond our own experiences is without meaning. I don't prescribe to this anthropocentric view at all and I do not necessarily believe that we are the superior of all lifeforms because we can think and put forth hypotheses. Nihilism "seems" to negate the ephemeral, the ineffable...and the unseen.


Well, I am surprising myself by being so "pro" animated lifeforce as I continue to have it pretty rough in my life and I am plodding forward like a soldier. I have so many important issues on my plate I am having a difficult time getting organized. My sole personal "pleasure goal" is to get to the Recreation Center before it closes today for a swim as my stress levels are through the roof.


I long to once again live life for the sheer pleasure of living. That feeling is not with me today, and has not been with me for quite a long time, but still, I have a schedule and so many things to do, and a swim and a sauna, though more a chore now than a joy is on the agenda. Nihilism is, to me, saying "No," and I want to say "Yes!"....one day, hour, or even minute at a time.

Glad that we can agree on mythologies (which I may bring up again). I’m having a bit of trouble digesting the meat of your message (my fault, not yours) so if you find that I’m cherrypicking words instead of diagraming sentences, well, yes, I am.

Yes, a generic pattern of reality that we tailor to fit our perceptions, though the tailoring is probably 80% accomplished by our unique genetic configuration. No, I believe that shared experiences (whether shared or shared) contribute to our understanding of real-life.

And, yes, I’m an anthropocentricist in my observations, though no radical proponent of the man über Earthly concerns (environmentalism, etc.). Dogs are decidedly kinder than man, elephants larger, but humans (it seems to me) stand atop the food chain by way of Darwinian evolutionary functions. I’ll not argue that we’re #1 in the Universe (heavens!) but I believe that we’ve fairly established ourselves, for better and worse, as the prime fulcrum on this planet.

[SIDEBAR] There are words and concepts that I overuse, I know. Only, though, because I believe that they’re so damned important. But I want to make clear that when I write of the unique individual that I am not an advocate of any — any at all! — Randian philosophies. Pew! Puke! No! [END SIDEBAR]

Yes! I agree! Nihilism completely negates the unseen, the unobservable, the spiritual, etc.! Any philosophies/theologies that posit any higher power than man. Not certain that ‘ephemeral’ is what you mean to imply? And the beauty of ineffable is that it is so very ineffably ineffable (those things of which we dare not speak).

I hope that I’ll not have to eat unseen and unobservable… let me say, maybe, that nihilism negates, sometimes temporarily, those things that lack a logical hypothesis. Reasonably theoretical. Culture and science and knowledge evolves, too, and we cannot predict what we will know one-hundred years from now. Just as the speeds of microprocessors were predicted to increase exponentially (until the brick wall) humankind’s knowledge seems to have increased exponentially during the past 120-years. Old men (like me) are in awe of touchscreen-telephones because we were so very pleased with ourselves when we mastered the rotary dial. My new iPhone is so laughably thin because my iPhone 3 is so comically thick in comparison.

We’re in a remarkable time.



We need — we physically and emotionally need — to say yes.

I’m ever thinking of Molly Bloom with her ecstasy punctuated with yes and yes and yes and it is likely that I’ve re-read her soliloquy twentyfold these past six months.

I don’t agree that nihilism negates life. It only says ‘no’ to moral or religious or humanistic principles that attempt to narrowly define ‘meaning.’ In that sense (or even broader senses) there is only one plausible reaction and that’s to reject meaning while holding living dear, if only for pleasure’s sake. Sensual/intellectual pleasure. Pleasure doesn’t figure into any equation of meaning — assuredly not for the puritanical! — but I suppose that it might be said to be an evolutionary technique for survival.

Finally.

I’ve been as Roman Catholic as the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and as rabid as any Rottweiler) but nihilism has always been nipping at my heels and I have vacillated from absolute meaning to none-at-all until settling on the latter.

Let me suggest that imparting meaning for human life may be the ultimate anthropocentric farce unless meaning is also ascribed to the smallest asexually reproduced microbe that scientists describe as ‘doing nothing.’ Eking meaning from nothing for the smallest form of life is exactly the same as prescribing meaning to the most complex. A great comedy.

We enjoy a good laugh. We don’t enjoy being the butt of laughter. As perplexed as I can be by some of the more naïve life-principles, I really have to laugh at the failed comedies and comics. No, I don’t mean to be mean; I simply see no need for overarching meanings.

“Life is sad, life is a bust; all we can do is do what we must — we do what we must do, and we do it well. I’d do it for you, honey-baby, can’t you tell?” — (Mr. Bob Dylan, Buckets of Rain, from the critically acclaimed vinyl album Blood On The Tracks, 1974)

I abso-freaking-lutely LOVE this thread. I've been reading up on philosophy a bit lately so

I am, however, a tad nervous about my responses since I don't want to piss anyone off by disagreeing with their religious beliefs. I have a very scientific view of the world and -- no offense to those who believe differently than me -- I don't give a lot of credence to religion (sans the fact that it's purposeful to most people).

My answers, all long and drawn out:
1. What is reality? That's something we've yet to figure out the answer to. Maybe it's all a deception and nothing is real -- a la the episode of 'American Dad' where the family was put into stasis gel and they were made to think they were experiencing an integrated family vacation; I don't mean "nothing is real" in the sense of a delusion. We use and know of a fraction of the brain's abilities so anything is possible. In a less sci-fi explanation, I think everything people perceive is real but the reality behind it is in the eye of the beholder or yet to be explained. Ex: A mirage. We see what looks like water waves but water isn't really there... Yet it's not a fictious hallucination, it's caused by a confluence of environmental factors. So even though it's an optical illusion, it really is there. A psych example: psychosomatic symptoms. In what reality does stress cause blanks in your field of vision? It does (or at least it can) in my reality, thanks to my migraines with auras.

2. Does God exist, and if so, what is His absolute nature? My highly unpopular belief is that religion is a man-made construct to explain things that couldn't/can't be explained by science at the time. It also serves to give people a purpose and/or direction and it helps alleviate the fear of death in that there's something more to come once their current life is done.

3. Why has consciousness evolved? Change is inevitable (a fact I hate very much) so for pretty much everything it's 'evolve or die.' However, in the case of consciousness, I don't know that it's evolved so much as it's a case of us not fully understanding it in the past. Ex: There's been a bunch of research done that shows that there's a lot of overlap (and thus misdiagnosing) between the autism spectrum and personality disorders, so much so that some articles I've read suggest that in the future they could be combined somehow. Anyway, how do we know that it's consciousness (as opposed to our understanding of consciousness) that has evolved?

4. What is the ultimate fate of ourselves, and this universe? Two part question....
a) I can understand this question in itself in two ways: A person's fate and the fate of humanity. As far as personal fate, I don't believe in fate or destiny. What happens happens and there isn't always a reason. (The only possible reason I can think of for, say, the Holocaust is 'to serve as a warning lesson to future generations' and that's complete and total BS with more BS heaped on top of the BS.) The inevitable fate of humanity, though, is exactly the same as it was with the dinosaurs -- something will happen that wipes us out and a whole new species will eventually populate the planet, (unless, of course, the planet becomes uninhabitable, but even then humanity will be wiped out).
b) I think the ultimate fate of the universe is, to a certain extent, dependent upon its original purpose/why it exists. Scientifically speaking, though, the universe will go through the usual life cycle of a star and eventually become a black hole.

However, I think your point in asking this was like mine, to figure out the purpose of life. The best I could figure out was to procreate but I don't understand: Procreating to what end? And what about those of us who can't and/or don't want kids? Does that mean my life is destined (so to speak) to be without purpose? I don't accept that.

"To know the self is to forget the self." Master Dogen

"Rock me baby, all night long." Muddy Waters

"Imagine..." John Lennon

"Just do it." Nike Spirit Guide

"I was happy for one or two seconds today. I'm making progress." Dechan Dawa (DD)

I'm loving this thread.

I have tried to return to the Roman Catholic Church - religion of my birth. All was going well until I woke up to the fact that....how, how, how can I be a part of that broken system? I already did this for over 20 years with Buddhism until I could no longer ignore the "issues" around sexual abuse within the community --- Why oh why can't I accept that patriarchy must END? And that means the systems need to be destroyed because no one from within is looking at huge revamping. I do like communal ritual but what now? A Wiccan CIrcle? I cannot see myself dancing naked in the moonlight with a bunch of female drummers. No disrespect intended. (I have done solo Wiccan Rituals.)

Presently I don't have a response but I just wanted to say I really appreciate the beauty of how you arranged your comments.

First of all, "nature" does nothing without a purpose, even if we don't understand that purpose or consider that purpose insignificant. Second, ELEs (Extinction-Level Events) are extraordinarily common throughout the universe, which is probably why we haven't been contacted by aliens--they went extinct long before they could develop the technology to cross unimaginable distances between stars.


That makes humanity special in that we're still here and not yet extinct.


As for that purpose of nature, everything through out all of creation utilizes fractal mathematics. Over and over at smaller and smaller, and larger and larger scales. This repeating correlation seems to end at about 350 million light years out--doesn't mean that Pattern ends, it just becomes too large for us to comprehend with our current level of technology.


Not only that, but it's been proven recently that large swarms of lesser intelligence animalia will generate spontaneously a higher order of intelligence when in swarms--fish, birds, etc., all do this. This is in violation of the second law of thermodynamics, and is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. Order does not proceed from chaos. And yet, there it is. It is my belief that humans are undergoing the same process over a geological time period (i.e., a long time). There are seven billion people on earth, and it's as though humanity is beginning to become "self-aware" as a single organism. I believe this same can apply to even galaxies themselves--what's to say that such a huge collection of energy (made of smaller constituent parts) is not in the process of becoming self-aware? Perhaps this energy field is of creation is competing against the energy fields of entropy? There's your good and evil.


The Simpsons even referenced this in their universe couch gag:



That reality is holographic in nature is incontrovertible; that our brains store memories holographically is also incontrovertible, thanks to the work of Karl Pribram in the 80s and the work of David Bohm in the 60s. Even Karl Lashley from the 1920s found this to be true, though he couldn't say why.


That we live in a binary universe is also near-incontrovertible. There are two poles in the universe: negative and positive. Not three, not five. Two. That fractals are utilized by nature is also incontrovertible.

All of these facts point to the fact that there is more than meets the eye to our reality. Even Plato, long before theoretical physicists came along, suggested that the reality we see is not the reality that exists by using the cave analogy. We live in a cave, looking at shadows being cast on the wall from the light behind us. The shadows we think make up reality are nothing but a fuzzy outline reflected from something outside of our perception.

Nature made us evolve to recognize patterns for a purpose; we have only to live long enough as a species to figure out why, and that means we have to ensure that we don't wipe ourselves out the way other alien civilizations (if they ever existed) undoubtedly have because of how common ELEs are. And if you think they're not, you may want to give this video a watch:

Haha, thanks. If there's one thing Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder is helpful with, it's organization.

It's like how black isn't really a color, it's the absence of color.

I never thought of emptiness this way but that makes so much more sense. (That, and also the concept of a void doesn't make sense to me. It's me being uber literal with the meaning of the word: A void is nothingness but if it was actually nothing then it wouldn't even have a word to explain it.)

lol Don't mind me. I've been raving about this Pattern thing for years. I still remember the precise moment I cracked, in fact. It was like perceiving in the theater of the mind's eye something I perhaps wasn't meant to, and now it's stuck. And so it festers and comes out dysfunctionally. To quote Pink Floyd...

"I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us... very hard to explain why you're mad, even if you're not mad..."


How can one not be after staring too far into the future for too long?

Something tells me your "What now?" was a bit rhetorical but since there's so much math and science in this thread, I figured I'd throw in some history.

Because people tend to hold so strongly onto their beliefs, I don't think you can ever truly 'destroy' a religion until every believer of that religion has died.... But even that isn't right anymore thanks to written records -- now the digital age -- because there will always be a record of it and it's inevitable that someone will eventually try to restore it.

{RANT} History is just as important as math and science. As George Santayana said, "Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it." If -- culturally speaking -- something died out, there was a reason for it doing so and before resurrecting it, it would behoove you to figure out why it died out in the first place to avoid making the same mistakes and thus ending in the same result. {/RANT}

I'm a bit of an outsider on religion since I never ascribed to one (even when my parents pushed it when I was a child) and maybe it's partially that I still don't fully understand them but the one thing I've found that religions seem to have in common is that they tie back to a creation myth (no offense). It doesn't matter if it's monotheistic (e.g., God) or polytheistic (e.g., Isis/Osiris/Horus/Ra of Ancient Egypt, Odin/Thor of Norse mythology, Zeus/Athena/Poseidon of Ancient Greece, etc), it always seems to go back to at least a bit of a creation myth. Heck, even Pastafarianism with its Flying Spaghetti Monster had a creation myth!

Circling back around.... I can't fathom how people would be willing to revamp a religion thus the only possibility would be to scrap it and start anew, but that's unlikely to happen without a new myth as a basis.

However, I will concede that things in history tend to cycle back around and polytheism -- in the form of neopaganism -- is becoming more and more popular around the world. So maybe it won't be too long before there's a new option out there that doesn't involve naked Wiccan dancing.

I sometimes feel the same way, that if I were to stop obsessing about things I can't control that I would be sticking my head in the sand like an ostrich.

BUT!

Distracting yourself by focusing on the needs of others isn't always the best answer. I have a tendency to do that to a destructive level, forsaking everything for others. Even though I realize how bad I'd gotten with it (after a few too many instances of forgoing meals and bathroom breaks because my PTSD-suffering cat was so comfortably laying against me and I put her comfort over my needs) it's become so ingrained that I barely understand psychology's concept of "self-care." So just be careful.

THIS. IS. ME. Well, my exact train of thought. I wonder if it's just a coincidence or it's all of us with OCPD? (Albeit I mean to varying extents, I'm aware of how dumb that sounds. But I never discussed anything of depth with anyone else who also had OCPD before.)

Fair warning: I've been trying to compose this post for wayyyy too long so I probably missed my original target. If it doesn't make a lot of sense, you can blame me being punch-drunk tired, forgetting to eat lunch and dinner, and/or my migraine.


I was re-reading this thread and marvin_pa made me think of perception when he mentioned the meaning of the number 42.

We think of the number four when we see the symbol 4 and the number two when we see the symbol 2 but who is to say that our perception, our REALITY, is right? We use a base 10 number system in the US so we understand the concept of four and two but what about using a different base system? Specifically, I'm thinking of the ancient Mayans, who used either a base 20 or a base 5 system. (The answer depends on how you see the numbers... Since it works similar to tally marks, changing every 5 numbers, I'm going with Mayans using base 5.) So what we know as a four isn't as big (or small, in base 20) as a four to the ancient Mayans. Whose perception is right, ours or theres? Both are real, though, which I can attest to since I was made to do trigonometry using Mayan numbers back in college. (Side note: Math and I never got along but I never truly hated math until I had to use Mayan numbers to do it.)

Along similar lines, I've often wondered about the perception behind letters and words. History shows that the first recorded alphabet (as opposed to pictograms) was that of the Phoenicians, Mediterranean seafarers who most notably traded with the Minoans on the Greek island of Crete. I wonder what made the Phoenicians think of changing the status quo of writing from pictograms to letters. Can you even imagine how much different the world would be if the concept of the alphabet hadn't been developed? (... And now my mind is running off with the possibility of the world being a more peaceful/less war-torn place had the alphabet never been developed and every written language used pictograms. Oh wishful thinking.)

In the really weird way my mind works, I can see the Phoenician alphabet as a sort of Big Bang event. I look at a single letter on my computer screen... A single letter within a word within a sentence within a paragraph within a post within a webpage... That tiny insignificant letter has more than 3000 years of history behind it. Although 3000 years isn't even a fraction of a fraction of a microsecond in the history of the universe, my mind can equate that single letter and it's history of writing with the life of a single person in the time since the Big Bang.

What makes to someone, their reality, really is in the eye of the beholder.

Reproduction is programmed behavior, designed to continue a species - it's not really a conscious decision to leave some kind of personal legacy. Yes, I know that a desire to extend the family line is a conscious thing, but there is also plenty of procreative activity that takes place, simply because the activity is pleasurable, something that's hardwired into our brains.

See above. Reproduction is programmed. Genetics is programming... with random corruption thrown in to add variety - thait last part is important, it's the element that prevents the initial code from going stale & being prone to destruction via unforeseen events. If this is a totally random, accidental state of affairs, then it's a massively fortuitous one for life as we know it.

I see no reason why life, the universe and everything cannot be equally represented by the creative works of Monty Python, Douglas Adams, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, or our own individual perceptions of what reality is - for they are all products of that same system. All deserve equal embrace...

I think the problem is that I want to step outside of that system to perceive the whole, while still carrying within myself the products of that system (my consciousness and what makes me me).


It is a cruel irony of life that in order to finally perceive the system from outside, one must first face the forced removal from that system via death...

That's if we do indeed get that revelation when we die - we may just suddenly find ourselves reborn, back in the great game (and if memory survives for a moment, find ourselves like Hitchhikers sentient flower pots, thinking to ourselves 'oh no, not again? ).

I think that desire to understand the system is an inevitable function of being apparently conscious of its possible existence - it's something you either ponder, or just push to a quiet neighborhood of your own subconscious, so you can on with the vital matters of existence, like eating/procreation, thinking about the above, getting annoyed with not getting enough of the above & wondering why anyone gives a monkeys about the Kardashians...

First of all, no one cares about the Kardashians. lol

Also, I find that such questions invariably lead me to wondering what will happen at the end of the universe when everything becomes a single, infinitely large black hole? Does the big bang re-occur at that point and start everything over? I ask because if we're dead, and unconscious of the passage of time, then the end of the universe is coming very quickly and suddenly for the majority of us.

Of course, I also have wondered at times if the DNA of offspring don't carry some piece of our conscious awareness forward, similar to the stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine where all of humanity has a collective subconsciousness that reality forms from where we live on past the destruction of the mere physical aspects of ourselves.

Then, there's David Wilcock's book, The Sourcefield Investigations. What do you do after reading something like that?


But seriously, I find Plato's The Cave analogy, while predating astrophysics by several millennia, seems to describe our reality with uncanny accuracy. I can see a convergence in the future where science becomes indistinguishable from metaphysics--if we as a species survive that long.

Regardless of whether or not the future will ever happen, I'm beginning to feel that the only thing that matters in the universe is now. This moment, right now. That is all that can be definitively said to exist, and if we are not doing everything we can to lift our species out of the darkness of ignorance, then we are failing as a human being. A human being is called a human being because it requires action--you're a human being, not a human already became. It requires sober responsibility from within.


The things that worry me the most, now that I think about it, are the removal of moral absolutes from our society because that is the underpinning of culture and civilization. If someone is allowed to "move" the goal posts of right and wrong based on whim, then we as a species are doomed. Yes, you may be able to legally display a Satanic Statue publicly, but that doesn't remove the necessity of humans needing a symbol of pure evil to be able to look towards the symbol of pure goodness. You can't have light without darkness; otherwise, how do you know it's light? Diminishing such fundamental poles by watering down and making light of their absolute domains waters down our responsibility as a species to move away from darkness and into the light, regardless of religious background, or not.


That is why I say, perhaps at the ultimate level, good and evil are nothing more than the two poles of creation and entropy? But we as a species need these poles whether we know it or not because they define the boundaries of civility and humanity.


Sorry, didn't mean to go off on a tangent--what takes me but a second to conceive in the blink of an eye takes me paragraphs to describe because words fail me. This is constantly circling my thoughts--this and many variations and permutations thereof.


Fear is exhausting.