Just to offer a counterpoint:
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
The more I experience, the more I think maybe that's a pretty good point, too.
If you choose to fart around, whatever that means, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since there's no salvation, farts are also meaningless, and at the same time totally meaningful given the circumstances.
A nihilist would say fart or don't fart it's all pointless.
That's begging the question. I'd argue that all meaning is in how we fart around.
If you don’t know what it is and don’t know what you want, you either fart around or resign.
For what I know, my "existence" could be an infinitely short moment, or even an entirely static endless "moment", or any of an infinite variety of other options.
So even most of existence is only assumption. It's a set of assumptions that makes sense to just accept because we have no way of proving otherwise, but they are assumptions, not "universal truths".
To me psychedelic experiences break through the inputs, they become fuzzy and integrate in ways they aren't supposed to in normal functioning, it's why we feel a different sense of connection to anything else, filtering in different ways inputs from our senses and experiences, including the sense of one's self dissolving.
So why do you perceive yourself, and if you aren't you, then who are you? These sort of thoughts eliminated any notion of nihilism from me and gradually pushed me towards a simulation hypothesis. Of course that's just religion for an agnostic, because it doesn't even answer anything - if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started.
The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that. For instance what if you think the matter for a big bang was quantum mechanically poofed into existence then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics, the void of which emerged, or so on endlessly. You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist.
It may be absurd, but we nevertheless can not rule it out, and so it means that our ability to know anything about existence for certain is limited to almost nothing.
Note that I'm not saying I believe this to be the case. What I'm saying is that I see looking for "universal truths" to be entirely futile, because we can't possibly know much of substance with certainty.
Instead we have to accept that unless someone "pierces a veil" and shows us that there's a reality past the one we observe, we are limited to talking about what is observable and measurable within our observable reality, knowing that we are dealing with assumptions and probabilities, not universal truths.
> I find it no less absurd to imagine the same even if it happens to be 10^100 instructions.
This seems fundamentally at odds with saying you were gradually pushed towards a simulation hypothesis...
> if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started.
A simulation hypothesis does not need to imply that there's anything to wake up from for anyone. Indeed, even if you were to wake up, by confirming that simulation is possible, this would seem to strongly suggest that you should consider the probability that the world you wake up in is simulated to be extremely high.
> The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that.
It may feel unsatisfactory to you. It doesn't to me. I accept that whenever we push the horizon of knowledge, we're likely to discover more things that we don't know, and for the set of things we know we can't know to expand as well.
> You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist.
You don't have to do anything. You can accept that we don't know.
As for natural explanations - what I am saying is that the natural explanations for 'why' seem, currently, to be far weaker than other explanations. And in fact the natural explanations rely on various ad-hoc constructions (like inflation theory) that are completely unnatural. A simulation hypothesis is, to me, the only hypothesis that doesn't seem to have glaring holes in it and/or rely on defacto magic.
And obviously I understand that magic of one millennia is the mundane tech of another. But we do not live in that other era, and there's no guarantee that such an understanding will ever come to pass. Assuming otherwise requires having faith that such discoveries will come to pass in the future, and essentially assuming your own conclusion, instead of looking at the evidence as available. And that's why I referred to natural explanations as religion for an atheist.
They are not trying to explain "why", but to iterate toward an approximation of "how" that explains more and more, knowing it will always be incomplete. If someone looks to natural explanations as an answer to "why", then, sure, that is religion.
But to me, simulation or not is orthogonal to the "how". The "how", if we are within a simulation would still be down to identifying which "how" fits the available in-simulation information.
It's irrelevant that this wouldn't be "real" because within our reality, absent someone "piercing the veil" we can only relate to that reality, be it real or simulated.
Why as in "what set of circumstances led to your existence" or why as in "what purpose did a creator have to want to create you"? Two different people can hear why, and there are two different (though possibly overlapping) questions. Even if there were a creator, only the first question is interesting.
You're all overthinking it though. If you want more people like you to exist in the future, if the thought of our extinction disturbs you, then there are some basic rules to live by or you risk that ending. Some of these rules are as much about attitude as they are about behavior, and nihilism is extraordinarily maladaptive.
>then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics,
Even if we substitute in non-biased language (perhaps "manifestation" instead of "creation"), this question assumes very much.
For example, consider Cogito, ergo sum. As Latin has no continues verb time, that phrase may mean I exist because I think. Or I am existing because I am thinking . The latter implies that when one stops thinking the existence stops, the opposite of the former. Philosophers still debates what exactly Descartes meant.
Or consider the notion of time flow. In 1908 John MacTaggart published a paper arguing that the feeling of time flow is unreal. Again, there are heavy debates about the validly of his arguments without any conclusion with quite a lot of philosophers accepting the argument and even arguing that the time flow is an illusion.
All of these trite axioms nihilists use immediately refute themselves if they are true. Lol
> Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind."