Comments on: The “authorities” are wrong

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:37:50 +0000

“ome personal meaning of life that’s entirely arbitrary, except for the part about our corporeal selves enjoying material comfort, which induces an “ethic of convenience” where we do what is comfortable and evade the rest. The resulting inability to form attachment to ideologies, peoples, families, etc. creates what Michel Houellebecq calls “atomized” individuals: entirely solipsistic, entirely isolated, and 100% free — but miserable, and spreading discontent and dysfunction through society, making it moribund.”

This is an empirical claim. Got any evidence for it?

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:37:09 +0000

“Your goal is to be a good organism and adapt to your environment.”

So “goal” is different from “meaning”? There’s not a meaning but there is a goal?

My understanding of “meaning” in the sense of “meaning of life” is basically purpose. Purpose and goal are basically synonymous, so it seems to me that “goal” and “meaning” are basically synonymous too.

In other words, your “solution” is not different from the “arbitrary personal meaning of life” idea after all. Just dressed up with slightly different language and a vague reference to evolutionary biology, as if that were some sort of support for the viability of certain goals over others.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:47:50 +0000

“Truths don’t exist, and divine insights into the universe are thus not “true” but representations from within ourselves.”

Classic paradox. In what sense is that sentence “true”, if there are no truths. (And if there is none, then why should we care that you wrote it?)

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:41:14 +0000

“Without some inherent part of the universe that denies value, like the hand of God (H.O.G.) or science discovering it writ into the stars, there is no proof of a lack of values. So it becomes a preference like anything else, a choice to have no values based on an assessment of the universe. That in turn makes it a value system about like any other.”

This clarifies your position a bit, but confuses epistemology with statement-type. It may be true that there is an epistemological difficulty with *knowing* the truth of a statement like “I have no values”, but that has nothing to do with the *status* of the statement as a factual, not a value-based, statement.

You may also be right that the statement “I have no values” expresses a preference. But that also does not make it a value statement. It is simply true or false that the person has the preference in question.

By: NihilCredo

NihilCredo — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:52:05 +0000

It is amusing that you’ve renovated the site on the very same day that I decided to give it a check after months, if not years. I approve of the new format, as the old one lacked any decent feeback process and was as such severely handicapped in the web 2.0. Also, it was very wise to avoid any explicit link to that one site with the most PR-unfriendly name in the universe.

One quibble: I would phrase the fourth sentence in the last paragraph a lot more carefully. “Your goal is…”, combined with the casual use of “good” – that most deceiving and dangerous of all words – sounds a lot like you’re just handing yet another Grand Purpose from above. Assuming I have correctly interpreted what you’re trying to convey, you should definitely make an effort to at least suggest how, in the lack of any metaphysical guideline, a particular approach to decision-making is the only one that is consistent with our available data and with our built-in bias and needs.