Would I be the only person here occasionally terrified by the idea that they might ‘wake up’ as a Boltzmann brain at some point, with a brain arranged in such a way as to subject them to terrible agony, for an indeterminate period of time? I would really appreciate a response on this...
Nick5
Karma: 2
I find this question kind of funny. I already feel that “that everything is permissible and nothing is forbidden”, and it isn’t DEVASTATING in the least; it’s liberating. I already commented in this under “Heading Towards Morality”. Morals are just opinions, and justification is irrelevant. I don’t need to justify that I enjoy pie or dislike country music any more than I need to justify disliking murder and enjoying sex. I think it can be jarring, certainly, to make the transition to such extreme relativism, but I would not call it devastating, necessarily.
There is no ought. I see only arbitrary, unjustified opinion based on circumstances that are organic, deterministic, and possibly irrelevant. I have a lot of difficulty ‘getting into’ the elaborate constructions of moral philosophy that I see; it all feels like looking at the same thing from different angles. I don’t see how any ‘authority’ can exist to settle any matter on morality; What authority exists to declare something as unethical, or ethical, or how ethics themselves operate? Who has the authority to declare that others have authority, or have authority to grant authority, or to deny it? This opinion itself is as “unjustified” as anything else, and I don’t particularly esteem it above a morality based around saving toddlers or collecting stamps. I don’t want my nihilistic tendencies to come off as pessimism or rejection of the world; I don’t see any external criteria that my morality must meet, and I feel completely justified in whatever I believe ONLY in the sense that I don’t see any actual ‘permission’ or ‘denial’ existing that could affect my ideas. To grotesquely simplify, ladies and gentlemen, we are all piles of screaming meat, and I feel ANY significance to be ‘merely’ in my own head. Maybe I’m rambling about the obvious, and coming off as obnoxious in the process, I’m not sure, but in any case I’m certain that what I’ve just said is held by an extreme minority.
It may be my personal ultra-pessimistic spin on what is otherwise topic full of diverse interpretation, but I’ve never had a positive view of living forever, and the idea of living for what could theoretically be millions of years with any number of unpleasant stimuli being simulated in this ad-hoc cognitive mechanism is, to say the least, disturbing.
I suppose hypothetically I could tolerate the mere existence of such a strange physical phenomena so long as it wasn’t me waking up in that situation, although if there’s a positive spin to be given to it, I suppose I could find myself in some sort of wonderful heaven. Either way, it’s more than a little unsettling to me...