nihilism

[iambiguous]

Come to think of it, we nondualists don't fear the state of death/nonexistence itself, because we know that it makes no sense to fear it. That would be a self-contradiction. But I totally forgot that most people don't know this / don't think like this, and really fear it. Hm that's another plus for nondualism I guess.

That someone can actually think themselves into believing something like this -- death and nondualism?! -- is merely a reminder of just how far the human brain can stretch in sustaining psychological defense mechanisms. In fact, some are able to sustain them all the way to the grave.

Well, unless, of course, this all really is just...tongue in cheek?

I don't believe in reincarnation, otherwise what's your point?

Actually, I am considerably less impressed with what others claim to believe about reincarnation and considerably more impressed with the extent to which they can actually demonstrate one way or another [even to themselves] that reincarnation [or any other narrative regarding life after death] is the real deal.

Click, of course.

Dualists like you are the ones with strange beliefs and in this case a quite detrimental one. My "belief" is pretty much fact.

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Wikipedia

Same thing. There's what anyone of us might believe about this and there's what anyone of us can demonstrate about it. In other words, such that all rational men and women would seem obligated to believe the same.

You won't experience an everlasting nothingness after death, just as you didn't experience an everlasting nothingness before birth. It's symmetrical. There was no you to experience it, there will be no you to experience it. That's not an experience, so nonexistence itself can't be feared. Only what comes before death can be feared.

A philosophical death? Death up in the intellectual clouds? And over and again, in my view, things like this are often asserted here as though because this is what someone believes that's what makes it true.

[Atla]

That someone can actually think themselves into believing something like this -- death and nondualism?! -- is merely a reminder of just how far the human brain can stretch in sustaining psychological defense mechanisms. In fact, some are able to sustain them all the way to the grave.

Well, unless, of course, this all really is just...tongue in cheek?

I don't believe in reincarnation, otherwise what's your point?

Actually, I am considerably less impressed with what others claim to believe about reincarnation and considerably more impressed with the extent to which they can actually demonstrate one way or another [even to themselves] that reincarnation [or any other narrative regarding life after death] is the real deal.

Click, of course.

Dualists like you are the ones with strange beliefs and in this case a quite detrimental one. My "belief" is pretty much fact.

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Wikipedia

Same thing. There's what anyone of us might believe about this and there's what anyone of us can demonstrate about it. In other words, such that all rational men and women would seem obligated to believe the same.

You won't experience an everlasting nothingness after death, just as you didn't experience an everlasting nothingness before birth. It's symmetrical. There was no you to experience it, there will be no you to experience it. That's not an experience, so nonexistence itself can't be feared. Only what comes before death can be feared.

A philosophical death? Death up in the intellectual clouds? And over and again, in my view, things like this are often asserted here as though because this is what someone believes that's what makes it true.

What philosophical death??

And you can't demonstrate any dualism, go ahead and try, duh. In the absence of dualism, what I wrote were facts, not beliefs.

[iambiguous]

I don't believe in reincarnation, otherwise what's your point?

Actually, I am considerably less impressed with what others claim to believe about reincarnation and considerably more impressed with the extent to which they can actually demonstrate one way or another [even to themselves] that reincarnation [or any other narrative regarding life after death] is the real deal.

Click, of course.

Dualists like you are the ones with strange beliefs and in this case a quite detrimental one. My "belief" is pretty much fact.

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Wikipedia

Same thing. There's what anyone of us might believe about this and there's what anyone of us can demonstrate about it. In other words, such that all rational men and women would seem obligated to believe the same.

You won't experience an everlasting nothingness after death, just as you didn't experience an everlasting nothingness before birth. It's symmetrical. There was no you to experience it, there will be no you to experience it. That's not an experience, so nonexistence itself can't be feared. Only what comes before death can be feared.

A philosophical death? Death up in the intellectual clouds? And over and again, in my view, things like this are often asserted here as though because this is what someone believes that's what makes it true.

What philosophical death??

And you can't demonstrate any dualism, go ahead and try, duh. In the absence of dualism, what I wrote were facts, not beliefs.

Okay, okay, I know when I'm beat.

[Atla]

Actually, I am considerably less impressed with what others claim to believe about reincarnation and considerably more impressed with the extent to which they can actually demonstrate one way or another [even to themselves] that reincarnation [or any other narrative regarding life after death] is the real deal.

Click, of course.



In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Wikipedia

Same thing. There's what anyone of us might believe about this and there's what anyone of us can demonstrate about it. In other words, such that all rational men and women would seem obligated to believe the same.



A philosophical death? Death up in the intellectual clouds? And over and again, in my view, things like this are often asserted here as though because this is what someone believes that's what makes it true.

What philosophical death??

And you can't demonstrate any dualism, go ahead and try, duh. In the absence of dualism, what I wrote were facts, not beliefs.

Okay, okay, I know when I'm beat.

Don't chicken out now, demonstrate your dualism "such that all rational men and women would seem obligated to believe the same".

[Atla]

Just as we normally use Occam's razor to believe that the Earth has 1 sun instead of 14.2 suns because that's what can be demonstrated, we can also use Occam's razor to get rid of dualism.

[Gary Childress]

Just as we normally use Occam's razor to believe that the Earth has 1 sun instead of 14.2 suns because that's what can be demonstrated, we can also use Occam's razor to get rid of dualism.

As I recall Occam's Razor essentially professes that we ought not embrace more complicated answers over simpler ones if the two are of equal adequacy explaining the same thing. Sort of like beauty is truth or the KISS principle (to put it in my own words). Does that disprove dualism if monism
doesn't explain phenomena as adequately as dualism? And what kind of dualism are you referring to? Is it Cartesian dualism between mind and body or is it some other "dualism"?

[Fairy]

Alan Watts vision is very similar to mine. I like listening to him.

We cannot experience nothing, and life is all we will ever know.

Every life experience is just one of an infinite life experiences. And that dying is just like going to sleep at night until you wake up with a new body.

Nothing can kill itself, because nothing was born. That's another realisation I've come to make peace with.

Come to think of it, we nondualists don't fear the state of death/nonexistence itself, because we know that it makes no sense to fear it. That would be a self-contradiction. But I totally forgot that most people don't know this / don't think like this, and really fear it. Hm that's another plus for nondualism I guess.

That someone can actually think themselves into believing something like this -- death and nondualism?! -- is merely a reminder of just how far the human brain can stretch in sustaining psychological defense mechanisms. In fact, some are able to sustain them all the way to the grave.

Well, unless, of course, this all really is just...tongue in cheek?

There isn't even any such thing as nihilism. Unless being conscious you are dead is it, or, being unconscious you are alive is it.

Beyond this trap of conceptual language; this trap that is a fictional overlay upon what is ultimately an unknown mystery is just more unknown mystery trying to solve itself.

Maybe we are not the universe trying to know itself. Maybe we are consciousness trying to piece together what we think the universe is like with an unbiased opinion.

So there is nothing to be known, including the idea of nihilism, which is just a self-unbiased opinion.

[iambiguous]

There isn't even any such thing as nihilism. Unless being conscious you are dead is it, or, being unconscious you are alive is it.

Beyond this trap of conceptual language; this trap that is a fictional overlay upon what is ultimately an unknown mystery is just more unknown mystery trying to solve itself.

Maybe we are not the universe trying to know itself. Maybe we are consciousness trying to piece together what we think the universe is like with an unbiased opinion.

So there is nothing to be known, including the idea of nihilism, which is just a self-unbiased opinion.

I'm trying to calculate the gap between a philosophical assessment of nihilism [such as the one above] and the manner in which I have come to understand it existentially...

A little help please.

The word nihilism exists much like any other word that mere mortals invented in order to communicate a shared understanding of the world around them. Or try to.

Me, I'm able myself to more or less reliably connect the dots between a shared understanding of what things mean in the either/or world. I'm a moral nihilist. I don't go so far as some nihilists will go in suggesting that all meaning is suspect. Rather than epistemological nihilism, I am more inclined myself "here and now" to hover in the general vicinity of epistemological fallibilism. Why? Because ultimately all of what we construe to be knowledge is embedded in The Gap and in Rummy's Rule. Then the part where human knowledge itself is explicable going all the way back to...God? The Big Bang? The Multiverse itself?

Hope that helped.

[iambiguous]

Epistemic Nihilism
Colin McGinn

When we speak of nihilism we are apt to think of moral nihilism, the kind of thing discussed in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or by Nietzsche or the existentialists. This is the idea that moral values are fictitious, spurious, and non-existent.

I try to make it plain that "here and now" I am not able to go much beyond morality in regard to how I understand nihilism. The either/or world may well be included, sure, but I have never come across either an experience or an argument that convinces me of that. In fact, epistemological nihilism seems more in sync with things like sim world or dream worlds.

But the term itself is broader than that, deriving from the Latin “nihil” meaning “nothing”. The OED gives us two definitions: “the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless”, and “Philosophy the belief that nothing has a real existence”. The latter is striking suggesting as it does the radical metaphysical position that nothing at all exists.

What else can we really come back to here but attempts to close the gap between what we believe about something like this "in our heads" and what, scientifically and philosophically, we are in fact able to demonstrate about it. Or is all of this here between us actually a manifestation of one or another Matrix. Or of solipsism?

We can broach, explore, assess and perhaps judge lots and lots of things pertaining to nihilism. But, beyond worlds of words, how much progress has been made in pinning down What It Really Is

Quite what the scope of the quantifier may be is left up to us, but we may suppose that ontological nihilism is intended, i.e. that no mind-independent entities exist. It would not be denied that thoughts exist.

Though here I suspect some flesh and blood human beings might be wondering: "What on Earth does any of that have to do with by own day to day experiences?"

Care to go there yourself?

Click, of course.

[Iwannaplato]

Epistemic Nihilism
Colin McGinn

When we speak of nihilism we are apt to think of moral nihilism, the kind of thing discussed in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or by Nietzsche or the existentialists. This is the idea that moral values are fictitious, spurious, and non-existent.

I try to make it plain that "here and now" I am not able to go much beyond morality in regard to how I understand nihilism. The either/or world may well be included, sure, but I have never come across either an experience or an argument that convinces me of that.

But you make precisely that kind of argument all the time using determinism, that people may be compelled to think something is true or false, and it is merely determined that they think that way. That's an all encompassing epistemological nihilism. Stunning that you haven't noticed this. You use it to dismiss points made by others with great regularity. Of course, for some reason, you don't use it as often to undermine your own POVs, but it's just as applicable to them.

[Belinda]

Come to think of it, we nondualists don't fear the state of death/nonexistence itself, because we know that it makes no sense to fear it. That would be a self-contradiction. But I totally forgot that most people don't know this / don't think like this, and really fear it. Hm that's another plus for nondualism I guess.

That someone can actually think themselves into believing something like this -- death and nondualism?! -- is merely a reminder of just how far the human brain can stretch in sustaining psychological defense mechanisms. In fact, some are able to sustain them all the way to the grave.

Well, unless, of course, this all really is just...tongue in cheek?

I don't believe in reincarnation, otherwise what's your point? Dualists like you are the ones with strange beliefs and in this case a quite detrimental one. My "belief" is pretty much fact.

You won't experience an everlasting nothingness after death, just as you didn't experience an everlasting nothingness before birth. It's symmetrical. There was no you to experience it, there will be no you to experience it. That's not an experience, so nonexistence itself can't be feared. Only what comes before death can be feared.

But there is a state of dream consciousness wherein a self is present, and also a state of dream consciousness wherein there is no ego -self.

[Atla]

That someone can actually think themselves into believing something like this -- death and nondualism?! -- is merely a reminder of just how far the human brain can stretch in sustaining psychological defense mechanisms. In fact, some are able to sustain them all the way to the grave.

Well, unless, of course, this all really is just...tongue in cheek?

I don't believe in reincarnation, otherwise what's your point? Dualists like you are the ones with strange beliefs and in this case a quite detrimental one. My "belief" is pretty much fact.

You won't experience an everlasting nothingness after death, just as you didn't experience an everlasting nothingness before birth. It's symmetrical. There was no you to experience it, there will be no you to experience it. That's not an experience, so nonexistence itself can't be feared. Only what comes before death can be feared.

But there is a state of dream consciousness wherein a self is present, and also a state of dream consciousness wherein there is no ego -self.

And?

[iambiguous]

Epistemic Nihilism
Colin McGinn

The position I want to consider here is both more and less modest than that: it is the thesis that knowledge does not exist. There is no such thing as knowing: all talk of knowledge is so much fiction, reification, and false objectification.

On the other hand, how does he know that?

One thing that few will deny is that the human species has come to know more about what it may or may not mean to know -- something, anything -- than any other species. On the other hand, there are things we claim to know are true simply because at any particular moment in time we believe they are true.

Knowledge is like the unicorn: a mythical entity. Epistemic nihilism is to be distinguished from skepticism, which concerns what is known not the alleged state of knowing itself. Maybe nothing is known, or very little, but the concept of knowledge is a concept in good standing—we know what knowledge would be.

More to the point [mine], we know any number of things about the either/or world in which few if any will challenge the objective truths that abound there. Only the metaphysical earthquakes embedded in sim worlds and dream worlds and matrixes call human knowledge here and now into play.

As for the concept of knowledge, you tell me. Then bring that theoretical assessment down out of the clouds and defend it...existentially?

There is such a state, but we are seldom if ever in it. By contrast, the epistemic nihilist holds that the state of knowing is a non-existent state—possibly an incoherent one. We should therefore eliminate the concept from our conceptual scheme, or keep it only under strict instructions about how it is to be understood.

Okay, let's focus the assessment above on, say, the recent presidential election here in America. What exactly would epistemic nihilists conclude about that. Especially the consequences over the next 4 years.

The epistemic nihilist is like the moral nihilist: both think that the things in question simply lack real existence. There is no such thing as right and wrong, and there is no such thing as knowledge. This is consistent with allowing for the existence of many other things (actions, beliefs); it is specifically moral values and states of knowledge that are declared to be nothing.

No, in my view, moral nihilists of my ilk are able to believe that what they know in and/or about the either/or world is no different from what those on all their countless One True Paths believe. The laws of nature, mathematics, the empirical world around us and the rules of logic seem applicable to all of us. How do we know that? How do we demonstrate that? Well, how far out on the metaphysical branch do you want to go?

[Belinda]

I don't believe in reincarnation, otherwise what's your point? Dualists like you are the ones with strange beliefs and in this case a quite detrimental one. My "belief" is pretty much fact.

You won't experience an everlasting nothingness after death, just as you didn't experience an everlasting nothingness before birth. It's symmetrical. There was no you to experience it, there will be no you to experience it. That's not an experience, so nonexistence itself can't be feared. Only what comes before death can be feared.

But there is a state of dream consciousness wherein a self is present, and also a state of dream consciousness wherein there is no ego -self.

And?

[Belinda]

I am having a problem with the website which does not allow me to quote , add my message, and post.