• They/Them

Nothing interesting


folly
@folly

don't you know words aren't real. your thoughts and feelings aren't real. you're just a bunch of matter, no difference from dirt or a leaf or the trail of a comet. when you try to read or speak you're just moving neurons and neutrons in the illusion of a pattern. even patterns aren't real; there is no person to perceive them. don't you feel so much better knowing how worthless the world is?

like i'm all for atheism but i don't get where you stop, when you try to unravel the thread of unreality. why should you believe pain is real? it's just as arbitrary as anything else. it just makes me sad


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @folly's post:

It is something I think a lot about.
I am not a nihilist. There are rational reasons to believe in... values. A certain definition of personhood. Worth.
But I am not completely convinced. Our own faculty of reasoning fools us so much, I can't trust it completely. It is possible that none of that matter. It is possible that none of it is real.
One strategy, something I do a lot, is to live with that sadness. The Nitzchean strategy is to create a system of value that is compatible with so many sad truth. I haven't figured out how to do that.
I guess the strategy I use the most is to force myself to contemplate the void. It is a somewhat masochistic tactic, but the hope is that the impact of it diminish it the more I do that. It hasn't gone away though.

assuming this is apropos to the post directly preceding it: i haven't listened to this podcast episode but this is not the first time i've seen it come up, and i'm hearing different perspectives on it, and... it sounds provocative and i am now curious about how it might provoke me.

once upon a time i believed these facts and i very much didn't understand where to stop, and i also really thought it made me feel "better" but "better" was actually "dissociated" — from pain and sadness and joy and wonder. embodiment was the remedy and my dream for anyone who prescribes to the beliefs you lay out here is that maybe they can find that remedy as well. to start from the presumption of... if i am merely a "bunch of matter", but i also honor my experience of being matter as real... then what?

my (ha ha) little trick has also been to presuppose relation before relata, and thus what "i" is can only emerge in the presence of "other" (and, aside: what reason do i have to believe "other" doesn't possess its own "i"?), and determining the boundaries/limits between "i" and "other" is a co-creative process... is this perhaps some sort of syzygy? to echo the other comments here... maybe

not sure if this unsmart answer to very smart quandary helps at all. but (a) I have personally decided that if I get bent out of shape over a metaphysical question, I am well within my rights to just pick the answer that lets me sleep at night.

maybe also (a.1) imo reality is as real as you want it to be. I grew up experiencing a fragmented, dissociative sense of reality, and for my own sanity I had to learn to just decide (maybe you'd call that faith) that this was all really happening, and mattered, and I was real.

and (b) as far as being no different from dirt - to me it is the absolute greatest most holy miracle that we are dirt that wakes up. we're stuff just like all the other stuff but we know we're stuff! like I'm shocked to see my own most profound belief framed as a downside, but I do see how you get there when you discard the idea of an observer. there's only miracles if you're there to see them. which I guess is your point. so from one atheist (?) to you, "where I stopped" was a place that lets me see and understand myself as a part of the world, with gratitude and reverence.

sorry this is so long. the bottomless absurdity you've described is something that haunted me for about a decade, as I tried to figure out how to live without a god. it's nontrivial!

I think other people have already said things more eloquently than I can, but 1) I just want to say that I really relate to this sort of grief, and 2) part of the beauty of humans is that we're meaning-makers. We create narratives to make sense of our experiences, we tend to interpret coincidence as significant in some way, we tell stories to each other and also to ourselves---stories of ourselves and others and the world. And I don't know how to articulate the way that intersects with what you wrote (there's a point at which it all gets very blurry and I just sort of shrug and shift my focus elsewhere), but I think our attachment to narrative is beautiful and I try to celebrate that.

I guess a piece of all this is that I think we're collections of matter who see ourselves as people and therefore we are, and therefore there are patterns because we're observing them. (Perhaps this is entirely faulty logic, but I still think it contains a truth.)

yes, absolutely.

oh also, have you read any Catherine Z. Elgin? I've only ever read one paper by her but I really liked it. I'm not sure how much she gets at the exact thing you're talking about, but I think she at least explores some adjacent issues of epistemology. She has a book called Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary that's on my to-read list.