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Old 02.24.2014, 05:31 PM   #17944
dead_battery
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Quote:
Originally Posted by !@#$%!
me neither, but in some critical situations it can give you powerful morale. i.e., useful even if untrue.



i've been reading your posts for quite a while and i still can't follow your idea of nihilism, etc. i wish you would define it in the most narrow way possible. i suspect that by this you mean that the universe is absurd and indifferent?

as for the need for belief, it's psychological. the mind can only handle so much. i think it's more or less like what aldous huxley said, that the mind needs to discard most perception and focus on what works in order to optimize survival. belief helps people keep their shit together. it has a function.

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science is founded on doubt. i love science for that very reason. it's the perfect antidote to dogma--even if people who don't really understand the scientific mindset try to turn scientific knowledge into dogma.

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ha ha, movie thread!

i think my idea is that if i can make it look like it makes sense to me then it will make sense to other people.

science is not founded on doubt, its founded on empirically verifiable knowledge. but it works because it does not deal with what we want to be true, and therefore unlocks a bounty of knowledge and technique precisely because it deals a right hook to our biases ability to interfere with our knowledge.

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belief - i think you are still playing ideological games here. noone has any need for belief whatsoever. you don't need belief to get out of bed and go get a sandwich. you need belief to socially report your glorious grasping to whatever folk psychological mythos of the self and its noble meaningful purpose you want to spout to look good to the other apes who will reward you with grains from the field and chants of your name.

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nihilism - yes the universe is indifferent to us and we have no good reason for existing at all and not killing ourselves. also perpetuating existence is a dubious prospect at best because all we are doing is pushing the date of our eventual extinction forward into time, which is also pointless.

i think that our culture has these subtle but all pervasive ideological manoeuvres. its like - commodity cool nihilism. its like the idea that by consuming and "participating" you are asserting your freedom FROM nihilism by denying it thus taking its potential threat away. but the trick is you are supposed to think that nihilism is a threat to your beliefs, but your beliefs can overcome it because everything is relative and therefore perspective trumps reality.

but the truth is that all human history - its all been nihilism. that's the fundamental field on which all human endeavour has been working in.
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