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Comment by smokedetector1 | Hacker News Reader

It's really annoying and deadening, not to mention foolish, when people try to reduce every activity of the soul to a mechanical, comprehensible process.

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If you want to vindicate your distaste, check out the "Joke Examples" section of the argument:

> And here are a few jokes that were created using this method: (...)

> "I'm awful at jogging, I'm running slower than windows 95" (...)

> "You're such a great guy! - I'm not a great guy. Abraham Lincoln was a great guy. I'm a barely adequate guy." (...)

These are two out of 6 examples there - all are extremely plain and boring, except maybe for the last (which is just barely funny).

I like how they highlighted a commonality between two disparate things. When I recognized the pattern, my neurons lit up, eliciting a pleasurable response.

This. I've seen so much of this on Hacker News that it's almost like a game now to discover the variant of the archetype post in today's feed.

People with a "nerdy" mindset want to find the structure behind everything. That's not a bad thing, but it's so annoying to people who actually do comedy...or music...or art.

Not everything in life can be reduced and programmed. But they'll keep on trying.

How deadening would it be to imagine that our consciousness and agency is just an illusion created by firing synapses and hormones and that everything we think and do has been predetermined.

Couldn't agree more! I am trying to spread the word that materialism is not the only rational position! (in fact, I find it quite irrational indeed)

If the activities of the soul are so beyond mortal comprehension, then the futile attempt at understanding them should widen the soul in appreciation of the infinite depth of human creativity.

Failure at comprehension does not deaden, any more than only seeing a minute fraction of the cosmos deadens the soul. All that remains beyond our understanding should inspire awe.

Its not that the soul is completely beyond mortal comprehension - art, philosophy, etc do a good job of exploring it. But this (philosophically) materialist way of viewing the world, where everything is caused by evolution and so everything is mechanical to the point where you can almost feed it to a computer -- that doesnt inspire awe to me at all. That makes me feel that my actual existence is being denied, because I'm "really just" this simple process. It's blatantly false but for some reason as tech people we like to put ourselves into a box rather than admit some things are beyond mechanical formalization.

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