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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

>Is there someone among you HNers who has retained a positive outlook by believing that the universe is a bleak, chaotic place with no intrinsic meaning to the things happening in it?

Yep. Though I'd suggest you take a closer look at that sentence of yours. Specifically the "bleak, chaotic" part. That's already a very negative judgement and in contradiction with the neutral "no intrinsic meaning" part.

>I have found it difficult to really, deeply, accept things as out of my control without resorting to some concept of god or "the universe as a well-meaning entity".

Well it does by necessity lead to a conclusion along the lines of "the world is a cruel place". It's a bit like a lion eating a zebra though - brutal but not inherently evil. It just is what it is.

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This is exactly what I believe the universe is. When people say the universe is uncaring, they equate that as bad; I reckon this is because we want control over our lives. True our agency over our lives is increasing as we progress as a society but it's unlikely that we will reach a point that our cumulative progress would give us control over everything.

The universe doesn't care who you are the same way a benevolent god cares about his subject; the universe cares about you in an impersonal kind of way, that is if you do things according to the reality that is already established, then it'll 'care' about you and give what you want. The giving is likely probabilistic.

The "bleak, chaotic place with no intrinsic meaning" conflates two things unfairly. Consider a beautiful sunrise on a tropical beach. It's part of the universe and not bleak and chaotic yet you don't have to believe it has a meaning enjoy it. As an atheist, the survival of us and our ancestors for ~4bn years suggests the universe is not so bleak in parts.

I dunno, I see the continued survival of our species as a cruel joke - certainly bleak - given the amount of harm we do to each other and everything around us.

Harm is again an unnecessarily negative judgement. We are the same matter and energy (nature) as the Earth, the Moon, the Sun. What we do when our matter and energy moves around is not any more purposeful or harmful than what the Sun does.

It's kind of like asking if the Universe was harmed by the big bang.

Well, I take away just the opposite though.

Suppose there really was a loving creator that put this all in place just for us. Then, yeah, we've made quite a mess of it, and it really all rather sucks.

However, if it's just a bleak, uncaring universe, then the fact that we're around is amazing in the first place, and the fact that we've managed to carve out a niche where we can, by and large, thrive in ever larger numbers [1] is outright awesome and amazing.

It also then enjoins us to "keep on fighting the good fight". For example, I don't think there is "automatic karma" imposed somehow - it is incumbent on us humans to impose justice as well as we can.

[1] The notion that things are terrible and getting worse is wrong, I think. See for example

- Julian Simon, "The State of Humanity"

- Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of our Nature"

- Max Roser, "Our World in Data", https://ourworldindata.org

etc.

Then again we also do a lot of great thing and create and experience love and beauty. I have no idea how to quantify and weigh the good against the bad, so perhaps it comes down to temperament if you consider the human existence an overall negative or positive experience.

I find that people's outlook on humanity comes down to where they focus their attention. We're definitely a mixed bag of wonderful and terrible. But, the vast majority of people, the vast majority of time are boringly nice to everyone and everything. That boring niceness is as common, as important and as easy to forget as air.

Also, the world has many very bad aspects and some of them are getting worse. But, on average the world is getting to be a better place rapidly. Today is the most peaceful, most healthy, most just, most educated, most comfortable time ever. As people who were born and grew up knowing only such good times, we easily forget how so much of what we would consider atrocities today was common a mere few hundred years ago.

We have adjusted to be tremendously more sensitive than our ancestors. And, we are infinitely more informed about every bad thing everywhere in the world. That doesn't make everything OK. But, it is a great sign that more attention and effort is being focused on the remaining problems than ever before. If you are deciding to focus your attention on the problems we still have, then you are a sign of how the world is getting better.

With that attention, you can find problems that remain. With some historical perspective, you can figure out which ones you can best help reduce. With some effort, you can be part of making the remaining problems in the world even smaller.

Great points. Despite my cynicism and strong bias towards the self-destruction of mankind, there would be always be moments when I thought "hey, I'm glad this guy/gal existed because the world is a better place because of them." Things do get better when you look at the world around you.

Thought it might be bleak for those who are ill-equipped to deal with the modern types of chaos (eg anxiety and depression). Like someone else said, this could all be a matter of labeling the world as "good" or "bad"; the problem with these labels is that they are rarely self-examined partly because it takes a lot of epistemological thinking and self-awareness to reach that level of meta-cognition.

From your points on conflation, just to clarify, are you saying that meaning does not determine our feelings about the degree of bleakness? Maybe meaning is a multiplier of feelings depending on the direction you are interested in. For non-bleakness, meaningfulness would multiply the amount of enjoyment, and for bleakness, non-meaningfulness would multiply the amount of hatred. Those two assume that state of bleakness is naturally attached with intrinsic feelings.

I wish I've read more about this topic; it is ultra interesting.

>This is exactly what I believe the universe is.

Yup - I've found the lion/zebra thing to be very useful in explaining something that isn't easy for most people to see. Especially those that grew up with religious notions of good vs evil.

>the universe cares about you in an impersonal kind of way

Personally I'd be very wary of using the word caring at all. It's just atoms & stuff flying about the place to me. I choose to overlay the whole "I want to be a good person etc" on top of that though as a personal choice despite considering it a very artificial & fake construct. Bit of a cognitive dissonance I suppose but much like people choose to believe in god I choose this.

I agree on wariness regarding the usage of the word "caring".

My usage of "care" here is equal to "notice". To make it easier for myself, I imagine an anthropomorphic universe gallivanting around and notice one of its agents doing something that could possibly exert an effect (either null and non-null) and bless it with that effect after spinning the wheel of probability.

I'd suggest what keeps man from eating man, on the scale that lions eat zebras, is a general belief in a authority higher than man.

You should ask, "what keeps lions from eating lions" if you want to go that route and then see what happens to your higher authority argument.

No argument was made. Just a statement of belief in a general belief.

Not true. An argument was clearly made.

Fair enough, your using definition number 1 of the word argument here. I'm using definition number 2.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/argument

My statement was not meant to be an argument or statement of fact but rather a suggestion or hypothesis, which is why I used the word suggest.

Interestingly enough, this has been scientifically investigated - I posted about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13724476

Interesting article. Note that it only talks about improving cooperation "within" the circle, i.e. among "co-religionists", as the article puts it.

I think you'd find increased cooperation within many other types of groups. What we should aim for, of course, is to expand this circle of concern ever further, beyond religion.

So, just want to clarify that this might have been an benefit of religion in earlier days, but is by no means an argument for them today.

Yeah, the sticky point I've always found in the man is just a higher evolved animal position is the arbitrariness of cooperation. That is to say, any expectation one human has of another seems arbitrary to me without a base set of rules set forth by a higher authority.

The writings of C.S. Lewis crystallized a lot of this in my mind.

I'm really disturbed by that mindset. Surely, you are not saying that without belief in some sort of God, you personally would cease cooperation and rape and murder and steal?

I'm an atheist, but I certainly have no desire or intention or plan to cease cooperation. Just the opposite, I think it's extremely important, and it is also extremely important that we cherish and enforce and cultivate it.

As just a little example, for me some sort of communal health insurance covering everyone is a matter of course, as for most citizens of developed nations. (I'm aghast at the fact that many people oppose it in the USA, and I note in passing that it appears to be mostly religious people.)

Next, I have the same expectation of basically everyone I encounter (except some sociopaths, against one has to guard appropriately).

Finally, I think there are many good reasons for it, and the position that man is ("just") a higher evolved animal is not at all incompatible with it.

> I'm really disturbed by that mindset. Surely, you are not saying that without belief in some sort of God, you personally would cease cooperation and rape and murder and steal?

No I'm not saying a belief in God is necessary for what we would agree upon as moral behavior. However, I could easily see the case being made by individuals who might think that what we agree on as morally correct behavior being nothing more than our arbitrary beliefs. And that, from their perspective, rape or pedophilia makes them feel good in the way eating red meat makes them feel good.

So on a spectrum with complete moral bliss on the far left and complete degeneracy on the far right, I think we live somewhere on the left side. Furthermore I think a big reason we live there and not right of center is the wide spread belief in a higher authority/authorities.

> Next, I have the same expectation of basically everyone I encounter (except some sociopaths, against one has to guard appropriately).

Why? From where is your sense of "Fair Play" derived? Does it all boil down to the non-aggression principle and if so, from where is that derived?

> what we agree on as morally correct behavior being nothing more than our arbitrary beliefs

Interesting. I am also concerned by moral arbitrariness and relativism, but fear it comes from somewhere else:

I fear that religion opens up the door to moral relativism, because you can go and say "don't eat shrimp" (Leviticus 11:10), or "don't eat pork", or "don't eat cows", or what have you, claiming "it says so right here, in this holy book full of true revelations".

That's a trivial example, but the same applies for more serious issues: morality based on (religious) revelation is hard to verify and discuss, and somewhat arbitrary.

But if we empirically agree on one real world, empiricism and evidence, we have at least a common basis and need very few, very basic moral principles (it really boils down to the golden rule, or somewhat more sophisticated versions of that, like the "veil of ignorance" in John Rawl's Theory of Justice.)

So, in purely practical terms, I think this notion of some psychopath running around claiming "there's no God, thus I can do what I want" is a non-issue.

If you furthermore seek a philosophical "Letztbegründung" (i.e. ultimate reason, where "the buck stops"), there are attempts e.g. in discourse ethics ("if we are talking, we are already implicitly subscribing to certain axioms, otherwise we would not need to talk"). But I don't think it'a a big problem.

The problem lies less in the foundation and more in certain topics, I think (think of abortion, contraception, war).

You can explain a lot without a higher authority. For instance humans gossip so if you screw someone over, word spreads and can have adverse consequences. That can help do gooders and help pro do good genes to spread in the gene pool for example.

I'd suggest that isn't the case. I don't need a parent figure for me to fear or appease in order to act kindly to others, nor do I expect them to need one to act kindly to me.

Wouldn't we then expect homicide rates in religious USA and Pakistan to be much lower than in secular Sweden?

I don't think your claim withstands any scrutiny.

> Wouldn't we then expect homicide rates in religious USA and Pakistan to be much lower than in secular Sweden?

If you were able to control for all other conditions, possibly but not necessarily. Thus I don't think comparing homicide rates in the USA, Pakistan and Sweden proves or disproves anything.

First, you grant that other conditions have influence too, and not only as much, but more influence, than religious beliefs.

So, comparing homicide rates across countries disproves that more religion is necessary or sufficient for an ethical life.

(Let me note in passing that fairly secular northern Europe also has much lower rates of abortions, STDs, teenage pregnancies, and other societal ills, than other, more religious societies.)

Second, if we look at long term trends, violence has come down over the millennia, as religiosity has decreased (see Pinker's Better Angels).

Third, I concede that under certain circumstances in primitive societies you might achieve a reduction in crime by introducing certain religious beliefs (whether they're falsehoods or not). However, we should not strive for that, but for enlightened societies where that is not necessary anymore.

>I'd suggest what keeps man from eating man

Not really the point I was making with the lion/zebra thing, but regardless:

>is a general belief in a authority higher than man.

For some, certainly. I'd venture that it's only one route available. I certainly don't believe in any higher authority whatsoever nor do I even believe that good & evil are particularly sound concepts (Moral Relativism), yet most people that know me will probably judge me a good person.

Animals typically don't kill and eat their own species, so in these matters humans fare a lot worse than most animals. Given that a belief in a higher authority is one of the things causing humans to kill each other, it seems this theory is wrong.

> Animals typically don't kill and eat their own species

I think you'll be surprised by the amount of cannibalism in the animal kingdom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_(zoology)

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