And I’ve already seen twoLWers who have discovered such compassion for the suffering of animals that they want to exterminate them all except for a few coddled pets, one of whom isn’t sure that humans should exist at all.
Less dramatically, any number of Buddhists have persuaded themselves that they don’t exist, although I’m not sure how many just believe that they believe that.
“If nothing really exists and it’s all just emptiness and even the emptiness is empty of existence, then how could I have killed all those nonexistent people with my nonexistent hands?
I went through my nihilism crisis a little over two years ago. I was depressed and sad, and didn’t see any point in existing. After about two weeks, I realized what was going on—that I had kicked that last pillar of “the universe has meaning” out from under my model of the world. It was odd, having something that seemed so trivial have so much of an impact on my well being. Prior to that experience, I would not have expected it.
But once I realized that was the problem, once I realized that life had no point, things changed. The problem at that point simply became, “why do I exist, and why do I care?” The answer I came up with is that I exist because the universe happens to be set up this way. And I care (about any/everything) simply because my genetics, atoms, molecules, and processing architecture are set up in a way that happens to care.
This was good enough. In fact, it’s turned out to be better than what I had before. I love life, I want to experience things, I want to contribute, I want to maximize the utility function that is partially of my own making and partially not.
Getting through to true nihilism can be difficult, and I can see many people not having the ability to do so. But in my case, it has served me well, as my model of the world is now more accurate.
I came by anti idealism through Stirner, who framed it as “Whose cause?” Maybe that’s why I never hit the “it’s all pointless” stage, and progressed directly to my cause—acting according to my values. Free to love what I love, and hate what I hate. And similar to you, I find it better than before. To own your values is more satisfying than feeling they’re dictates from a higher power.
Buddhism merely states that there’s a psychological continuum in which there is nothing unchanging. The “self” that’s precluded is just an unchanging one. (That said, in the Abhidharma there are unchanging elements from which this psychological continuum is constituted.) The Mahayana doctrine of emptiness (which isn’t common to all Buddhism, just the schools that are now found in the Himalayas and East Asia) essentially states that everything is without inherent existence; things only exist as conditioned phenomena in relation to other things, nothing can exist in or of itself because this would preclude change. It’s essentially a restatement of impermanence (everything is subject to change) with the addition of interdependence. So I’d imagine few Buddhists have convinced themselves they don’t exist.
I can’t speak for most Buddhists, but my interpretation (formed after about a week of meditation) is that they are basically saying that belief in the self as a unified whole is a delusion that causes a lot of unhappiness, not that they don’t exist.
If you pay close attention to your mind, you start to notice that it’s just a series of ever-changing recombinations of sights, sounds and feelings; always flickering on and off and moving slightly. It’s the absurdly chaotic nature of the flux of stimuli that people misinterpret into the feeling that they are a single thing.
When they do that, they feel upset about what “they” are, and what “they” could be, because it never lives up to expectations. But really, “they” are not the same thing “they” were even a few seconds ago. A slight change in the balance of electrochemical signals (such as is happening at all times) causes you to view reality from a whole new angle. In this way, the “me” that I remember from earlier today is not the “me” that is typing right now, even though we are linked by causality. In the end, the mind is made up of so many different, changing pieces, that grouping it as one thing can only cause pain.
Incidentally, trying to force yourself into one ego also grants people some of their most compelling reasons to live, so you could make the case that rejecting the concept of self is as much a rejection of life as it is death, but that’s an issue for another time.
I can’t speak for most Buddhists, but my interpretation (formed after about a week of meditation) is that they are basically saying that belief in the self as a unified whole is a delusion that causes a lot of unhappiness, not that they don’t exist.
I’m not saying that most do, but some certainly do. Here’s the first Google hit for “you do not exist”, and there are a lot more hits to the same sort of thing: people who have had the tiny ontological shock of noticing that their mind is not an atomic, unanalysable entity, and go mildly insane, if only to the point of ranting about their discovery on the internet and talking about red pills and blue pills.
If you pay close attention to your mind, you start to notice that it’s just a series of ever-changing recombinations of sights, sounds and feelings; always flickering on and off and moving slightly. It’s the absurdly chaotic nature of the flux of stimuli that people misinterpret into the feeling that they are a single thing.
One might as well say that this rock does not exist (and I think that is a straightforward reading of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras). The rock is just a set of atoms that happens to be temporarily assembled together creating the illusion of a single thing. But having read Korzybski before the Buddhist scriptures, I just shrug “oh, yes, consciousness of abstraction”, and dismiss the emptiness doctrine as a deepity. You wouldn’t catch HPMoR!Harry reciting the Heart Sutra. Instead, he uses what is true in that idea to invent Partial Transfiguration.
One might as well say that this rock does not exist (and I think that is a straightforward reading of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras). The rock is just a set of atoms that happens to be temporarily assembled together creating the illusion of a single thing. But having read Korzybski before the Buddhist scriptures, I just shrug “oh, yes, consciousness of abstraction”, and dismiss the emptiness doctrine as a deepity. You wouldn’t catch HPMoR!Harry reciting the Heart Sutra. Instead, he uses what is true in that idea to invent Partial Transfiguration.
I probably would have agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I think there’s a bit more to it.
There’s a pretty drastic difference between a rock and a human mind. Rocks don’t appear to change just by looking at them. Thoughts do. For most purposes, your model of a rock can get away with focusing only on its contrast to its surroundings; of the concept of rockiness; like human intellects are predisposed to do.
Whether the rock is a consistent whole or not, as long as it differs from non-rocks in your perception, it’s still a rock. You, however, are inside your consciousness. You can’t really contrast anything from the workings of your mind, because it’s all you ever see. You can only contrast one aspect of your mind from another, which means that the model you have of yourself inside your mind as being more inside your mind than your model of other things inside your mind, is severely flawed.
I believe that this particular flaw is chiefly responsible for a good deal, if not all, of human suffering, as well as ambition. I don’t know if that belief can be used towards anything as categorically practical as transfiguration, but it certainly is useful for solving ontological and existential crises and improving happiness and peace of mind.
Also, really, the rock doesn’t exist, just the concept of one. Anyone who says that the image of a rock in your mind doesn’t describe the counterintuitive patters that correlate to it accurately enough for them to feel comfortable with is technically right. And it’s probably best not look expressly for flaws in ancient wisdom so as to discount the message. it’s outdated, it’s going to be wrong. What you should do instead is take the arguments presented, try to see the speakers point of view, and interpret the words in the most plausible way possible and look for serious challenges to your beliefs so that you actually get more out of it then just feeling superior to a bunch of dead guys.
There’s a pretty drastic difference between a rock and a human mind. Rocks don’t appear to change just by looking at them. Thoughts do.
Timescale and proximity.
You can’t really contrast anything from the workings of your mind, because it’s all you ever see.
I don’t see the difficulty. I contrast how I feel when I first wake up in the morning (half dead) and how I feel half an hour later (alive). I contrast myself before and after a glass of beer. When I drive a car, I notice if I am making errors of judgement. While I am sure I am not perfect at seeing my own flaws, to the extent that I do, it’s a routine sort of thing, not a revelation.
I believe that this particular flaw is chiefly responsible for a good deal, if not all, of human suffering, as well as ambition. I don’t know if that belief can be used towards anything as categorically practical as transfiguration, but it certainly is useful for solving ontological and existential crises and improving happiness and peace of mind.
So the Buddhists say, but I’ve done a fair amount of meditation and never noticed any connection between contemplating my interior life and the presence or absence of suffering. Neither has the experience thrown up so much as a speedbump, never mind a serious challenge to anything. Wow, maybe I’m naturally enlightened already! Except I wouldn’t say my life manifested any evidence of that.
No. People do go out of their minds on nihilism now and then.
And I’ve already seen two LWers who have discovered such compassion for the suffering of animals that they want to exterminate them all except for a few coddled pets, one of whom isn’t sure that humans should exist at all.
Less dramatically, any number of Buddhists have persuaded themselves that they don’t exist, although I’m not sure how many just believe that they believe that.
“If nothing really exists and it’s all just emptiness and even the emptiness is empty of existence, then how could I have killed all those nonexistent people with my nonexistent hands?
“Tell it to the nonexistent prison walls, buddy.”
I went through my nihilism crisis a little over two years ago. I was depressed and sad, and didn’t see any point in existing. After about two weeks, I realized what was going on—that I had kicked that last pillar of “the universe has meaning” out from under my model of the world. It was odd, having something that seemed so trivial have so much of an impact on my well being. Prior to that experience, I would not have expected it.
But once I realized that was the problem, once I realized that life had no point, things changed. The problem at that point simply became, “why do I exist, and why do I care?” The answer I came up with is that I exist because the universe happens to be set up this way. And I care (about any/everything) simply because my genetics, atoms, molecules, and processing architecture are set up in a way that happens to care.
This was good enough. In fact, it’s turned out to be better than what I had before. I love life, I want to experience things, I want to contribute, I want to maximize the utility function that is partially of my own making and partially not.
Getting through to true nihilism can be difficult, and I can see many people not having the ability to do so. But in my case, it has served me well, as my model of the world is now more accurate.
I came by anti idealism through Stirner, who framed it as “Whose cause?” Maybe that’s why I never hit the “it’s all pointless” stage, and progressed directly to my cause—acting according to my values. Free to love what I love, and hate what I hate. And similar to you, I find it better than before. To own your values is more satisfying than feeling they’re dictates from a higher power.
Buddhism merely states that there’s a psychological continuum in which there is nothing unchanging. The “self” that’s precluded is just an unchanging one. (That said, in the Abhidharma there are unchanging elements from which this psychological continuum is constituted.) The Mahayana doctrine of emptiness (which isn’t common to all Buddhism, just the schools that are now found in the Himalayas and East Asia) essentially states that everything is without inherent existence; things only exist as conditioned phenomena in relation to other things, nothing can exist in or of itself because this would preclude change. It’s essentially a restatement of impermanence (everything is subject to change) with the addition of interdependence. So I’d imagine few Buddhists have convinced themselves they don’t exist.
I can’t speak for most Buddhists, but my interpretation (formed after about a week of meditation) is that they are basically saying that belief in the self as a unified whole is a delusion that causes a lot of unhappiness, not that they don’t exist.
If you pay close attention to your mind, you start to notice that it’s just a series of ever-changing recombinations of sights, sounds and feelings; always flickering on and off and moving slightly. It’s the absurdly chaotic nature of the flux of stimuli that people misinterpret into the feeling that they are a single thing.
When they do that, they feel upset about what “they” are, and what “they” could be, because it never lives up to expectations. But really, “they” are not the same thing “they” were even a few seconds ago. A slight change in the balance of electrochemical signals (such as is happening at all times) causes you to view reality from a whole new angle. In this way, the “me” that I remember from earlier today is not the “me” that is typing right now, even though we are linked by causality. In the end, the mind is made up of so many different, changing pieces, that grouping it as one thing can only cause pain.
Incidentally, trying to force yourself into one ego also grants people some of their most compelling reasons to live, so you could make the case that rejecting the concept of self is as much a rejection of life as it is death, but that’s an issue for another time.
I’m not saying that most do, but some certainly do. Here’s the first Google hit for “you do not exist”, and there are a lot more hits to the same sort of thing: people who have had the tiny ontological shock of noticing that their mind is not an atomic, unanalysable entity, and go mildly insane, if only to the point of ranting about their discovery on the internet and talking about red pills and blue pills.
One might as well say that this rock does not exist (and I think that is a straightforward reading of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras). The rock is just a set of atoms that happens to be temporarily assembled together creating the illusion of a single thing. But having read Korzybski before the Buddhist scriptures, I just shrug “oh, yes, consciousness of abstraction”, and dismiss the emptiness doctrine as a deepity. You wouldn’t catch HPMoR!Harry reciting the Heart Sutra. Instead, he uses what is true in that idea to invent Partial Transfiguration.
I probably would have agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I think there’s a bit more to it.
There’s a pretty drastic difference between a rock and a human mind. Rocks don’t appear to change just by looking at them. Thoughts do. For most purposes, your model of a rock can get away with focusing only on its contrast to its surroundings; of the concept of rockiness; like human intellects are predisposed to do.
Whether the rock is a consistent whole or not, as long as it differs from non-rocks in your perception, it’s still a rock. You, however, are inside your consciousness. You can’t really contrast anything from the workings of your mind, because it’s all you ever see. You can only contrast one aspect of your mind from another, which means that the model you have of yourself inside your mind as being more inside your mind than your model of other things inside your mind, is severely flawed.
I believe that this particular flaw is chiefly responsible for a good deal, if not all, of human suffering, as well as ambition. I don’t know if that belief can be used towards anything as categorically practical as transfiguration, but it certainly is useful for solving ontological and existential crises and improving happiness and peace of mind.
Also, really, the rock doesn’t exist, just the concept of one. Anyone who says that the image of a rock in your mind doesn’t describe the counterintuitive patters that correlate to it accurately enough for them to feel comfortable with is technically right. And it’s probably best not look expressly for flaws in ancient wisdom so as to discount the message. it’s outdated, it’s going to be wrong. What you should do instead is take the arguments presented, try to see the speakers point of view, and interpret the words in the most plausible way possible and look for serious challenges to your beliefs so that you actually get more out of it then just feeling superior to a bunch of dead guys.
Timescale and proximity.
I don’t see the difficulty. I contrast how I feel when I first wake up in the morning (half dead) and how I feel half an hour later (alive). I contrast myself before and after a glass of beer. When I drive a car, I notice if I am making errors of judgement. While I am sure I am not perfect at seeing my own flaws, to the extent that I do, it’s a routine sort of thing, not a revelation.
So the Buddhists say, but I’ve done a fair amount of meditation and never noticed any connection between contemplating my interior life and the presence or absence of suffering. Neither has the experience thrown up so much as a speedbump, never mind a serious challenge to anything. Wow, maybe I’m naturally enlightened already! Except I wouldn’t say my life manifested any evidence of that.