A post more to myself, but also to release the thoughts and to see if any interesting reactions pop up.
My angle of nihilism, developed after over reading a variety of perspectives within religion (West/East, mostly Buddhism/Christianity), philosophy (from the Taoists to the Post Modernists), and science (largely neuroscience and psychology), has fallen largely in line with those of Thomas Ligotti, aka puppet determinism.
Looking over, I think I can summarize and breakdown my belief system into fundamentally 4 pillars, 3 objective views (views on the nature of reality, not objective as in factual), 1 subjective (a self acknowledgement of emotional bias):
Determinism: Be it in the randomness of the Quantum (which, in my opinion, is more an instrumental problem than true randomness) or the mechanical, multifaceted but still linear progress of Newtonian events, be it genetics or environmental influences, the human phenomena seems impossible to have any room for "Free" Will. Even zooming in on the most basic of decisions in clinical psych trials reveals the very likely presence of unconscious activity largely determining actions before consciousness is aware of a thought or a feeling of decision making. A series of bowl movements we seem to be, with a mask painted on the worm.
But even if one could dispel the sense of agency we have, the ghost of "Will" remains, which would give rise to delusions such as solipsism, be it in the small self or a greater Self, or Epiphenomenalism, aka fatalism, or other such delusions that just border on (what I believe to be anyway, for whatever that insignificant belief is worth) the truth.
Non-selfism: Regardless of whether you find the ramblings of rationalists or mystics such as Buddha, Hume, or Nietzsche to be compelling arguments for the lack of an essential, fundamental self that persists in some manner, neuroscience, be it in the observation of the breakdown of the self in mental disorders, or the observation of average delusions and tricks of the brain, seems to largely agree with this ancient view that what we call the self is largely an amalgamation of various mental processes, and that it would be far more true to view ourselves, not as our thoughts, emotions, or actions, but as our awareness at best, and even then our awareness comes and goes.
Not even, one does not simply die and come again in sleep and awakening, but on a second to second basis one's 'self' only really lasts as long as the object of awareness. A series of conscious events, no people here, just mirrors reflecting a distorted expanse of the quantum energy field, the sea of chaos, formless shades of divinity in stale infinity, puppets, waves, etc. Whatever nonsense you want to call this.
Hence, Life, Sentient Life, is a Show
Eternalism: The final nail in the absurd nightmare of reality that makes it a horror, and not simply a tragedy for the existentialists, or a comedia for the salvationists and progressivisits, is the inescapbility of it. Regardless of how you believe the universe came about, be it in God's act, expansion, or suicide, be it a quantum fluctuation, a multiverse, a cycle of Crunch and Bang, the universe came to be. And if it can come about once, it can come about again. We have observed since time immoral the cyclical, frequently pattern esque nature of so many aspects of reality, but time is not a flat circle, sorry Nietzsche and Cohle. It is imperfect, and chaotic.
Even mathematically, if one were to have three wheels with marked points running at different speeds, it would take a great deal of time before those three points were arranged in the same, starting pattern. Hence, time is a spiral. Iterations, be it in linear succession or parallel or simultaneous all at once happenstance, are inevitable.
You exist in this timeline/iteration and not another because consciousness cannot see from the 4th perspective. You may claim kineship with other variations of yourself that you will never experience but can subtly incline, perhaps hope, or despair, that they exist, but regardless of whether you feel you are many or solely, uniquely one, you will always be here.
The last refugee of existentialists, athiests, and, yes, most nihilists, death, is not real.
Meaning is not real, because there is no freedom to create it nor a will to be it's origin or recipient. The Self is not real, fragmented illusions at best. Yet even the illusion is a physical event. Bound in time and space.
Death is not real, you will always be here. Suicide is but another blindness, you cannot cut that which cannot be created nor destroyed, that which has no beginning or end.
Pessimism: Of course, the view of man as a but adrift in a sea of chaos at the whims of powers beyond his or her comprehension is not lovecraftian view. In fact humans have largely existed in mythical frameworks that post such a scenario, just see the Greeks and all their horror and comedies and tragedies.
And yet even in these horrible vistas man finds meaning and confidence, because of course, humanity wouldn't have stayed alive this long otherwise.
One can then easily look upon this puppet determinism with a hint of romanticism. Sure, we may have no freedom and no self, but that means we are one with the cosmos and everyone, pantheism, hinduism, etc.
Sure, death may not be real and we may be here eternally in infinite variations, but that means, though there are yous who suffer worse than you do now, there are also yous who live far better. Every dream you've ever had, every love, frozen in time, and eternally acomplished, somewhere, out there, in infinity. The conscious event of your triumph is happening now, even as the conscious event of your suffering does too.
And yet, in my subjective opinion, I cannot help but be swayed by the asymmetry between pain and pleasure proposed by Buddhism, and Nietzche, and Schopenhauer and Benatar and his fellow anti-natalists.
Happiness is not guaranteed. Suffering is.
There are greater more variety of suffering than happiness.
Happiness is banal, a distraction at best, and can hardly ever justify hard suffering.
If Heaven lies, in classic cosmology, atop the purgatory earth and the burning hell, then it stands not as a justification or redemption of unfair suffering and the triumph of justice, but as another accomplice to that hell, for hell is it's foundation and roots.
I find the whines of optimistic nihilists in the same manner. Do not tell me to create meaning, meaning is bestowed like a dusty heirloom, not created. Do not tell me to simply live, what else can I do as an animal puppet, there is no dignity in this. Any enjoyment, personal or aesthetic I may find in life, is hardly a justification for being born. A balm, but not an answer. If life had an answer, even an dignity in absurd resistance and subjective meaning, it would be a tragedy.
It is not, it is a horror, for horror offers no escape or true ending.
If I have been poorly worded in my summary, then perhaps the best comparison I can give to the themes of my view, is that I am a Buddhist who does not believe in Nirvana.
Of course, all of this is pretentious theory crafting, no rationality comes without some basis in physical disposition or experience, both Nietzsche and Hume knew reason was but the tool of the passions at the core.
There must be some physical grounding for my disposition to nihilistic pessimism.
Other than personal troubles, which of course everyone has, and the observed absurdities of daily life, I find two sufferings that convince me to hold confidence in such a pessimistic view, despite the desire to ask 'why' unending: Animal Factories, and Climate Change.
Factory farming is a modern holocaust, and not simply for the acts of cruelty performed upon animals, but for, at least as I believe from my research, their sentience in these environments.
My rule of thumb: If it can dream, it has an inner world, it has a consciousness.
Self awareness and intelligence and agency is not necessary.
Can we say children possess these traits at, say, 2? And yet we would still grant that even the youngest amongst us has some kind of consciousness in it's fragile egg skull. The animals we farm, from chickens to cows to pigs, display a similar range of emotional and intelligent reactions as those of children, let's say the age of 5 or 6 at best in terms of complexity of sentience.
Now, take into account that there are, ah, according to google research performed right now, 19 billion chickens, 1.4 billion cows, and around 1 billion combined pig and sheep.
Wikipedia, which needs to be updated, says that 40% of the world's farm animals were produced and treated in factories.
That's 8.56 billion, on the conservative estimate, child like consciousness events experiencing literal hell conditions (cramped quarters for the rest of a short life, unsanitary conditions, forced breeding, stress and noise, painful treatment, branding, and deaths usually), all so a fat bastard at McDonald's can order his cheap burger, complain about a minor technicality, have said burger taken back, and thrown away so a new slice of harvested flesh of a child like being can be composed into a brief hit of dopamine.
That mountain of suffering alone, not to take into account human suffering, casts existence into an absurd horror.
And then there's Climate Change. I won't bore you with the details of arguments, go to r/collapse if you truly are willing to see how far the rabbit hole goes, but suffice to say, as most news reports go, 'things are happening faster than we anticipated', and it is very likely that humanity will experience an economical collapse in light of environmental devastation sometime around, or likely before, the century is over. We, many whom still firmly believe that we will ascend, in rapture or scientific marvel, to greater heights, as if our birth right. When instead all that awaits our art and prayers is drowning in our own shit.
And this collapse drama has played itself out numerous times, cyclical, in all dimensions and perspectives. Historically, and literally.
There is no escape.
Life is a horror show.
Submitted April 04, 2019 at 10:58AM by NihilBlue https://ift.tt/2WPZkzf
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