tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post5389996262259100356..comments2024-02-13T12:50:30.457-05:00Comments on Rants Within the Undead God: Atheistic Morality Despite Life’s AbsurdityBenjamin Cainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-61673845016831036582013-07-28T19:45:46.898-04:002013-07-28T19:45:46.898-04:00Ciron wrote, "Is it possible that existence i...Ciron wrote, "Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?" <br /><br />One must also mention the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, who until fairly recently had never been translated into English. His darkly lyrical essay The Last Messiah advocates human self-extinction, and is echoed today by anti-natalists. Not sure how to imbed active links here, but you can cut and paste the link to The Last Messiah: http://www.scribd.com/doc/55546861/The-Zapffe-Essay-the-Last-Messiah<br />davidmnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-87171155335819333652013-07-28T11:32:04.989-04:002013-07-28T11:32:04.989-04:00You're welcome, I only recently found out abou...You're welcome, I only recently found out about him. His Wiki page was deleted, no surprise really. He seemed genuinely interested in pushing the boundaries of nihilism. I'm going to do my best, to make sure all of the sites I visit become aware of him. I love Cioran, but agree about his writing style. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-60449984263581736712013-07-28T10:12:49.090-04:002013-07-28T10:12:49.090-04:00I'd heard of him, but I hadn't before seen...I'd heard of him, but I hadn't before seen his 2000 page philosophical suicide note published in such a convenient form. Thanks very much for the link. I've been meaning to write something on nihilism. Specifically, I've been reading some Emile Cioran, but his writing style is a little too postmodern (needlessly cryptic) for me. I think I'll focus on Heisman. He was certainly full of ideas and some of them seem similar to mine. Of course, he appreciated all too much the curse of reason: <br /><br />"My hypothesis, based on my own life experience, is that objectivity taken to its extreme selects against the subjectivity of the observer, and in its most advanced form,<br />is rational self-destruction."Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-4835449759586496612013-07-27T18:29:19.687-04:002013-07-27T18:29:19.687-04:00Have you heard of Mitchell Heisman?
http://www.s...Have you heard of Mitchell Heisman? <br /><br />http://www.suicidenote.info/<br /><br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-65181872740564303942013-07-26T17:00:19.333-04:002013-07-26T17:00:19.333-04:00I've had a look at his website and some relate...I've had a look at his website and some related articles. Tegmark seems to rely on probability theory to explain why an infinite space would have to be populated by everything that's possible, including duplicates of everything. As he says in his Scientific American article, "In infinite space, even the most<br />unlikely events must take place somewhere."<br /><br />But Leibniz's Law says such duplicates are impossible. Either way, this is at best popular science, which is to say pretty much philosophy rather than science. There's no empirical evidence for this sort of multiverse. There's the math and the interpretations of its implications, including the analysis of the relevant concepts, which is a philosophical task. <br /><br />Anyway, it's certainly interesting to think about parallel worlds. I like Bostrom's simulation arguments.Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-62700828018278319162013-07-26T12:38:57.338-04:002013-07-26T12:38:57.338-04:00I haven't read Smolin's book yet. The dupl...I haven't read Smolin's book yet. The duplicate earth idea is a consequence of the spatial infinity of space, and is Level 1 of the physicist Max Tegmark's Four-Level Multiverse. The basic idea is that if the universe is spatially infinite, every possible configuration of matter and energy must necessarily be duplicated an infinite number of times. Tegmark estimated that to visit our nearest duplicate earth neighbor would require that we traverse a distance of space equivalent to the diameter of the observable universe (the so-called Hubble Volume) multiplied by four. HIs four-level multiverse article is online. For Tegmark, the four-level multiverse is: spatially infinite universe instantiates every possible outcome infinitely many times; the quantum multiverse; the inflationary multiverse and the mathematical Platonist multiverse, in which every mathematical structure is isomorphic with a physical universe. Also see Bradley Monton's work on design inferences in an infinite universe.davidmnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-63207360611047329722013-07-26T09:53:10.144-04:002013-07-26T09:53:10.144-04:00Amen to the Schopenhauer reference! He's speak...Amen to the Schopenhauer reference! He's speaking here for the non-egoistic, Eastern view of morality.<br /><br />I talk about the multiverse in my myth of the undead god. God's being would be infinite, so the translation process would likewise be infinite (the quantum fluctuations). Funneling God into a form that could be annihilated would be timeless, but from the perspective of creatures inhabiting part of God's sprawling undead body (a universe in the multiverse), God is effectively dead since he's eternally killing himself by creating worlds, as opposed to intervening and making things better, and those worlds each tend to fate out in some horrible way for living things. As in certain transhuman science fiction stories, species may find eternal homes somewhere, but the vast majority of universes end badly for life, because their purpose isn't to put divine benevolence into practice; instead, it's to transduce a personal form of transcendent creativity into domains of natural creations so those iterations can be eliminated.<br /><br />I think you're asking, though, whether the eternal recurrence idea is consistent with the idea of crossing a creation off the list, since that very creation would be repeated infinitely many times. But it sounds redundant to talk about an infinite universe on top of a multiverse. When you say there are duplicates of us in our universe, is that in addition to the near-duplicates in the multiverse, made by quantum fluctuations? I think you must be making a leap here somewhere, because as far as I know, how we should answer Fermi's Paradox is still an open matter.<br /><br />Have you read Lee Smolin's book Time Reborn? There may be something fishy about modern cosmology. He brings in Leibniz's Identity of Indiscernibles Principle, which would count against eternal recurrence. The undead god myth seems more consistent with infinite universes if each of them is slightly different. If two are identical in every respect, it's hard to see an elimination process at work. I think we could distinguish those intrinsically identical universes by looking at their different relations to other universes.Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-27493873249465702172013-07-25T23:04:27.811-04:002013-07-25T23:04:27.811-04:00I don’t know if this makes any difference to your ...I don’t know if this makes any difference to your thesis, but modern cosmology and physics point to a vastly more capacious realm of reality than our poor “Hubble Volume,” which is the observable universe that presents itself to us because of the limit on the speed of light.<br /><br />Sky map surveys in the last decade have settled, to a high degree of probability, the topology of the universe. It’s not finite but unbounded, but spatially infinite. As Bradley Monton pointed out in a short but wonderful paper, this means we should expect that there are an infinite number of inhabited planets scattered throughout the infinite universe, no matter how rare life is; even more, there are an infinite number of planets inhabited by intelligent beings similar to us, and even an infinite number of duplicates or near duplicates of earth with each and every one of us duplicated infinitely.<br /><br />Moreover, when we speak of the path from Big Bang to heat death, we’re talking about our cosmos only; but inflationary cosmology suggests that our universe pinched off from a larger meta-universe that has always existed and always will exist, and that these “bubbles” are always happening, constantly bringing new universes with the prospect for life into existence. Nature has no beginning or end under these ideas, and indeed given these facts it seems we ought to look forward to some reasonable facsimile of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, which he meant as a metaphor but may be real.<br /><br />I don’t know, maybe these facts make things even more horrible!<br /><br />Finally, your advice on the most logical or efficacious philosophical stance reminds me of Schopenhauer’s advice that we should treat all with compassion because they are fellow suffering travelers on a meaningless journey. <br />davidmnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-772695303624773492013-07-24T16:14:32.446-04:002013-07-24T16:14:32.446-04:00When you say that the universe's indifference ...When you say that the universe's indifference to us just IS, I agree but that's part of nature's tendency to horrify us. Likewise, in the fiction, zombies just ARE and that's what's so horrible about them. How do they move with no soul? I agree that it's possible to be a naturalist but not to feel that horror. Whether we're horrified by the world depends in part on our character. But the more we think about the effects of nature's impersonality, such as the suffering caused by accidents, diseases, and so on, the more we'll have in common with existentialists. <br /><br />There are two main ways of avoiding the horror which is then a natural reaction as opposed to what you call a choice: there are the delusions of mass culture and there's the Eastern religious tradition of detachment. When you speak of equanimity and so forth, I think you're talking about the latter rather than the former, and indeed detachment and depersonalization seem to me more respectable than sticking your head in the sand. The reason we'd have to depersonalize ourselves is to avoid feeling empathy and pity for those who suffer all around us. I know Buddhists are supposed to be compassionate, but I think Buddhism is inconsistent on this point.Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-38786091421885133942013-07-24T12:52:15.487-04:002013-07-24T12:52:15.487-04:00But your "indifference to life" thesis i...But your "indifference to life" thesis is not a moral state at all. It just IS. <br /><br />You CHOOSE to feel HORROR about this nature of reality, but that choice and that emotion has no objective reality...it is your choice to respond to ultimate reality in this way. <br /><br />Other choices might include equanimity, acceptance, passivity. These choices are no less moral and no less accepting of reality. <br /><br />Your choice to feel horror is based on an underlying decision that there SHOULD be purpose, that the universe SHOULD be "nice" and have a "positive" purpose. is this not somewhat presumptuous in an almost hubristic way? Brian Mnoreply@blogger.com