[idiocache]

It's a wonderful article but I can't accept the core argument.

Life is rare = life is precious is just a version of the naturalistic fallacy. You are entitled to believe that life is beautiful; you are equally entitled to believe it is a terrible cosmic mistake - acknowledging the rarity of life doesn't obligate you to change your belief.

[blamestross]

The nifty feature of intelligence is that you get to examine what you value. Critical peer comments (so far) don't seem to address the "naturalistic fallacy" part, or even lean into it.

As far as I am tell, life can be maximally ambiguously defined as "entropy deferral". Nothing can stop entropy, but life crams as much organization into that lifetime as possible. I think that is kinda cool and I want to help, so I think we should make as much matter alive as possible before the universe fizzles out.

Rationalizing value judgments is always a challenge. We can argue over facts and implication of facts all we want, but the "predicate values" are arbitrary and you can't change them in others. I generally don't bother unless I have a strong idea of my audience's "predicate values". If they don't match mine, or I can't manipulate others into agreeing we share instrumental values, I am just out of luck.

[bko]

> you are equally entitled to believe it is a terrible cosmic mistake - acknowledging the rarity of life doesn't obligate you to change your belief.

I don't know, thinking life and humanity is a "cosmic mistake" seems to be a destructive nihilistic take. Easy to justify horrible things, because why not?

Shouldn't we all seek to be pro-human? All of the things I care about most in this life are human.

[cwmoore]

Destructive and horrible events are often very hard to justify without resort to nihilism, which indicates that it may secretly be the truer core belief, and therefore the better foundation for understanding how humanity can become over the arc of time, less often mistaken.

[braingravy]

Justifying the existence of horror and evil is not necessary.

It is possible to accept that things happen that you don’t endorse or control, horrible things, without providing a justifying reason for those events.

Unless, of course, you are the one knowingly carrying out those acts. In that case, a level of nihilistic justification is necessary from both leadership and those doing the dirty work.

Death, vile and evil behavior are a part of life. This doesn’t justify their existence.

Nihilism promotes the idea that life is meaningless. Perhaps an attractive idea in a complicated world with countless examples of suffering, horror, and death. I would urge you to consider an alternative conclusion when faced with these realities: The presence of death is necessary for life itself to have any distinct meaning. Once you accept that death is a necessary element for any “life” framework ever evidenced or argued for, vile behavior like systematic genocide can be understood as an outgrowth of the intertwined nature of life and death.

This still doesn’t justify a nihilistic conclusion. For example, if I dropped my cup and it broke, I might be tempted to provide a reason for the destruction of that cup (I was distracted, the coffee was hot, etc.). These explanations might be appropriate, or they might not. Since we are examining the event after it happened, we won’t ever know the exact causal reason (though we might get really close!).

The post-hoc rationalization of past events can only go so far. The causal reasons cannot be fully sussed after an event. (You can get pretty darn close! So it’s worth rationalizing explanations for the possibility of prevention of something like that.)

Regardless, these explanations are not necessary to accept the reality of my broken cup. I may dearly want to know why my cup broke. Perhaps because I liked that cup, or because I simply don’t want to break another cup in the same way, but knowing the reason my cup broke is not a necessary or sufficient element for me to know that I miss my cup and, all things considered, would have rather not had it break.

In the same way, the suffering you see in the world does not need to be justified for it to be condemned.

So, because nihilistic beliefs are (a) unnecessary for condemnation of suffering and evil (bad things are bad, A = A), (b) highly useful for justifying suffering and evil (as you noted), and (c) naturally lead to (at best) inaction in the face of suffering and (at worst) acceptance or even endorsement of suffering (“Well, life has no meaning, so I may as well accept the suffering, and maybe even go so far as to fuel a bit of it for my own benefit. After all, there isn’t a meaningful moral difference between those two options.”)

With those three outcomes as just a few of the natural consequences of practicing nihilism, I fail to see either the logic or utility of nihilism in anything other than providing a very shallow justification for the suffering in the world. It’s an easy puddle to splash around in, but I would encourage you to keep thinking through it: You don’t need to reject morality and ethics simply because immorality, unethical behavior, and unethical people exist.

As a final note: If you want to keep your nihilistic beliefs, you must reject the stated premise above that bad things are bad (A = A in symbolic logic). However, I’d suggest you be very careful about rejecting what you feel to be true (i.e., that destructive and horrible events are indeed destructive and horrible).

Hope this helps. Try not to get trapped by nihilism. It doesn’t lead to anything meaningful, as it’s logically impossible to do so under that framework.

[cwmoore]

Thoughtful. But nihilism is never the professed belief of the peoples who have practiced such atrocities across thousands of years.

[90s_dev]

That was such a long comment though

[idiocache]

Can't we believe that life is a terrible cosmic mistake and still be pro-human?

[kurthr]

Create whatever joyful apocalypse your putrid hateful heart desires.

I think the key here is "mistake". I don't really like that word here, any more than I like "precious" as opposed to interesting. Many rare things are just dangerously destructive.

[fellowniusmonk]

Can the cosmos make a mistake? Can a highly energetic RNG generator make mistakes? Random perhapse, mistake is just a very anthropocentic way of phrasing it

State change is all you need to create humans and state change is impossible to deny. Maybe other basic stuff exists too but that isn't important.

We are structural semantic meaning generators, we turn energy into semantic meaning.

Nothing and meaninglessness don't actually exist.

You can assert otherwise but that assertion relies on the very structures that make you able to assert, so assert that everything is meaningless but your ability to do so undercuts your own assertion. Even if you remain silent your brain keeps making meaning.

Does meaning lead anywhere? It might, idk, seems too early to call it.

Based on our current understanding and empirical observation, there are a very small number of entities and their progeny that can try and figure it out until the heat death of the universe.

If you feel meaningless it's just evolutionary pressure to not get stuck in a local maximum.

[croes]

Not a mistake just a happy little accident.

[jagged-chisel]

“Mistake” imparts intentionality. Perhaps life is an accident, but it can only be a mistake if intelligence is behind the cosmos. Observation, not argument.

[deadbabe]

Thinking this way is a necessary prerequisite before pushing humans into an oven.

[cwmoore]

How about after?

[braingravy]

Only necessary for those who carried out those actions and want to live afterward without remorse.

[cwmoore]

I disagree that rarity is a decider for remorse. We are all related and our actions influenced in many ways by the experiences of others. The very commonness of modest stars on uninteresting arms of a minor galaxy in a narrow window of time leads me to expect that indeed, an essential humility about our expression of certain moral virtue might be in order.

[falcor84]

I agree that "precious" might be too much of a leap, but nevertheless think that there's a legitimate argument here for life being "interesting". I'm particularly reminded of Schrödinger's "What Is Life?", which (amongst other great arguments) posits that life is what actively rejects within itself the increase in entropy (via homeostasis). I'm not aware of any mechanisms doing so that aren't either alive or were assembled by living beings.

This function comes hand in hand with the creation and maintenance of information, and in my opinion makes life particularly "interesting", especially if it is rare in the universe. In other words, if our universe is to be analyzed by a hypothetical external entity, it is likely that a significant fraction of the analysis effort would go towards our small corner of the universe (and any others) with living organisms.

[api]

Without life nothing is precious or a mistake. There is nothing to make a value judgement.

[aacid]

Life on Earth would be perfect ecosystem without human. Sure lion eats zebra but there are no animal species capable of eradicating other species. my (very amateurish) opinion is that "high inteligence" is very effective and successful short term genetic strategy (it allowed very average mammal species to become absolute apex predator) but long term it is very unsustainable and self destructive. Look at the lion, apex predator in his environment and it is completely content. People are never content, always need more and more. We are intelligent but so bored that we spend most of our time finding out new ways to kill or at least hate each other.

yea, I'm not a big fan of Humanity...

[api]

Perfect by whose measure? How do you know lions are content? Do you speak lion? Are all humans permanently discontented or just the noisiest ones? Contented people don’t scream as much.

I’ve thought like this, or versions of it, before in my life. Eventually figured out it was just globalized philosophized depression. I’ve come to call it “low serotonin philosophy.” (Yes, the serotonin hypothesis for depression is a huge oversimplification, but it’s a catchy name.)

[oh_my_goodness]

Are you personally alive?