Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

You could say that about any religion given only a one sentence high level summary. “A guy in the sky made us in seven days.” has no serious, philosophical grounding.

View on HN

Your comment's first half was a kind of freshman nihilism backed up by vague gesturing at science (despite the fact that science can't really answer normative claims or value judgements). You then follow it up with a totally unsupported teleological claim which completely contradicts the paragraph that came before.

It was a Hacker News comment, not a doctoral thesis. People like you are why this site so desperately needs a block feature.

I just don't like this kind of poorly thought out misanthropy.

Things aren’t poorly thought out just because they’re a short internet comment. I could easily have delved into the background belief that’s deeply-rooted in Buddhist philosophy. Thinking humans aren’t special isn’t necessarily nihilism, it can be because you believe you’re only a tiny part of the vast universe, and that what we experience as “self” is just an illusion caused by limited processing power, and that since we are all part of the universe, not a separate thing from it, the universe itself has a level of consciousness that we don’t understand and might, for instance, want to develop an intelligent species that could develop artificial life for it for some purpose we don’t understand.

It is neither nihilist nor misanthropic, it’s just an internet comment that has no reason to get that deep and therefore you assumed it had no depth.

Feel better?

>the universe itself has a level of consciousness that we don’t understand and might, for instance, want to

This is insane I'm sorry. Panpsychism is one thing, saying that the universe itself wants us to make AI is deluded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com