Hacker News Reader

Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

For me it was Jack London's fiction The Sea-Wolf. I was/am interested in philosophical ideas/frameworks but the simple direct materialistic philosophy espoused by Wolf Larsen in the above book made me question everything i had read.

Here are the relevant excerpts : https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1jqpar/what_book_sin...

We are mere "Animals" with a far more complex social structure than any other species which is why we invent all sorts of "subjective meanings" to "objectively meaningless" life. How to reconcile both is the eternal "Human Condition" problem.

See also : Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality by James Tartaglia. Free pdf at - https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781...

View on HN

Nihilism strikes me as a very specific commitment. There is a difference between "there is no meaning", and "we don't know the meaning", or a myriad other recall/precision related questions such as "can we know the meaning", "is one of the following candidates potentially the meaning", and so on.

I can see why for practical reasons some may lean into it, but I don't see it being epistemologically well founded.

You have to give up your preconceptions and "think outside the box" as it were. Think of Nihilism as the canvas background against which you paint your chosen philosophy/religion/beliefs. Life "objectively" (i.e. from outside in) is meaningless (applying Occam's razor) but lived "experientially and subjectively" craves meaning. You have to keep both these distinct and separate viewpoints simultaneously in mind while treading your own path. Modern Science has so advanced our objective understanding of the world and ourselves that we can no longer cling to beliefs from the past unconditionally (eg. organized religion) without validating and re-interpreting them in the current context.

Here some of the Hindu schools of philosophy are of great help since many(eg. Carvaka/Samkhya/Yoga/Buddhism/etc.) don't subscribe to the idea of a omniscient "God" but merely construct a experiential worldview based on perception and inference. It is like a mathematical formal system with concepts/symbols/rules/etc.

I think that "life is objectively meaningless" is an unfounded statement. You should start by proving that to be true. I also think it preferentially loads words like "objective" and "existence". It also doesn't correspond to any common sense meaning of the word "meaning", since a servile dog's life is meaningful, a doctor's life is meaningful, and so on, in normal speech.

If you mean to say something like "all existence is objectively meaningless, and it is not objectively 'better' than nothingness", then it becomes another statement you need to usefully prove in order to go on with your argument.

There is nothing to "prove" here. I mentioned "Occam's Razor" to imply that among competing hypotheses the one with the fewest entities/assumptions is to be preferred. Here that is "life is objectively meaningless" over other competing hypotheses. There is also some inferential reasoning/evidence here since we know that from the pov of the objective Universe our existence on this planet makes not an iota of difference to its functioning i.e. our species could disappear and beyond some local disturbances the Universe will continue its course. That is why i also used the phrase "from the outside in". Note also that the word "Life" is used here in the sense of objective "Existence" since the pov is from external.

The usage (without quibbling too much) of the word "meaning/meaninglessness" is in the commonly understood sense of "purpose/calling/life-objective/etc.". All these are human-defined and therefore "subjective" as life is experienced and lived. There are numerous ways of doing this as is evidenced by the various schools of philosophies/religions/cults/groups etc.

The two viewpoints i.e. 1) Objective view of Life/Existence from the "outside in" vs. 2) Subjective Experiential "inside out" view of Life need to be carefully disambiguated in one's mind.

Occam's Razor isn't proof, though. It's a rule of thumb for how to create the most useful hypotheses.

A more complex hypothesis isn't useful until you come up with a method of testing that will distinguish it from the simpler hypothesis. That doesn't mean you have disproved the more complex hypothesis; just that you shouldn't use that hypothesis until you actually have a need for it.

I have already said that there is nothing to "prove" (i.e. no proof) but that it is a necessary corollary of applying the heuristic of Occam's Razor(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor).

> A more complex hypothesis isn't useful until you come up with a method of testing that will distinguish it from the simpler hypothesis.

No, the condition is even stronger; a more complex hypothesis should not even be considered until the simpler hypothesis fails for some data/evidence.

It is one from a set of heuristics called philosophical razors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor) and uses Abductive reasoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning).

Yes, this section of Wikipedia is spot on in my opinion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor#Controversial_as...

But we don't have an "outside-in" view? You have an inside + "guess the outside" view. Just because we can imagine an "outside-in" view, it doesn't mean we have it.

If there is an "objective" meaning to our lives which is without recourse to an inside-out view, then we have no access to it.

Occam's Razor, fewest entities/assumptions, etc is so problematic, because it is not invariant to being re-parameterised. I.e. under one description X is more complex than Y, and under another Y is more complex than X.

Here is Roger Penrose talking about the fine tuning of the Universe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDqny7UzyR4

Many use these observations to argue for design. Say it became a scientific consensus that design was the strongest hypothesis, because it just kept making good predictions. Design implies purpose. Would life still be meaningless?

Is this all just a regress to "nothing is just as good as something therefore all life is meaningless"? I think that's where you have to end up to defend Nihilism.

> But we don't have an "outside-in" view? You have an inside + "guess the outside" view.

This is not quite true. There is an Objective Reality consisting of physical laws (invariant in our Universe), Evolutionary evidence explaining the plethora of flora/fauna etc. We are but one species amongst the many that populate this planet. There is nothing "special" about Homo Sapiens (we simply occupy our own niche in the evolutionary tree) except for our different brains resulting in a greater degree of "self-awareness" and more complex social structures than other species.

> If there is an "objective" meaning to our lives which is without recourse to an inside-out view, then we have no access to it.

Not true at all. The whole of Modern Science is founded on trying to find out Objective Reality independent of us and has been quite successful at it.

You should then be able to show that objective reality exists without recourse to subjective experience.

I’m all ears :-)

Huh? It is almost as if you have not read/understood what i had implied w.r.t. Modern Science in my comments above. I had even specifically mentioned "Physical Laws", "Evolution" etc. Notwithstanding the fact that it is our "Consciousness" which "perceives Reality" through "Subjective Experiences" we have managed to remove a whole lot of subjectivity (biases, emotions etc.) through the application of rigorous Scientific Methods to understand a "Objective Reality". All of your Physical Sciences/Technology is proof of that.

Some readings;

1) Objectivity in Science - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivity_(science)

2) Subjectivity and Objectivity in Philosophy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivity_and_objectivity_(...

PS: In the Samkhya/Yoga school of Hindu philosophy there is a neat assertion which goes - Objective Reality exists because it is common to others besides oneself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com