To flip this around as ālol no one and nothing mattersā is an abomination, a total perversion of the pale blue dot.
These people are not well.
I mean, sure. Art is open to interpretation and all, but I think ālol no one and nothing mattersā would be an odd takeaway from pale blue dot. Do you genuinely believe that thatās the message that a generic astronomy account is intentionally trying to communicate? If so, why? Iām not aware of any global political groups with power that are motivated by an adolescent misunderstanding of nihilism.
Thatās very clearly the message: you donāt matter on the scale of the Earth, everyone disappears when you zoom out far enough.
And thatās exactly the ethos of so-called effective altruism, longtermism, extropianism, etc. The idea is that you should zoom out and ignore all the individual people because they donāt matter on a large scale, instead we should focus on growing the economy for a technological-utopian future where the number of humans can grow exponentially by living in space and trying to colonize all parts of the universe.
This dominates Silicon Valley and has become a driving force in the tech industry.
Thatās very clearly the message: you donāt matter on the scale of the Earth, everyone disappears when you zoom out far enough.
Yes. I agree this is what itās communicating. This seems straightforward, empirically correct, and philosophically basic. Things look different when you look at them from a different perspective. Isnāt it interesting to look outside ourselves for a moment and consider things from a different point of view.
the ethos of so-called effective altruism, longtermism, extropianism, etc. ā¦we should focus on growing the economy for a technological-utopian future where the number of humans can grow exponentially by living in space and trying to colonize all parts of the universe
Iām sure you can find people in real-life who believe those things, and maybe even some who will admit to knowing what the fuck those specific terms mean. Iām sure some of those people even like looking at pictures of space. Iām sure some of those people look at pictures of space and think to themselves āall that will be mine some day! I shall rise above the puny mortals and claim my rightful place among the stars! galaxies will tremble at my unrivaled splendor!ā
I just donāt believe that the Venn diagram of people who like looking at space pics and people who are seriously committed to leading a post-human space empire is a circle. I know a lot of people who like looking at pictures of space and considering how small we are on a cosmic scale, and I can think of maybe a few people in real life that are making serious financial decisions about fucking the planet to colonize Mars. For that Venn diagram to be a circle, it would require most of the people Iāve ever interacted with during my life to all secretly hold the same specific and detailed political philosophy that theyāve deliberately kept hidden from me. When I find myself seriously considering things like that, I remind myself to go outside and touch grass. Or look at pictures of space.
Isnāt it interesting to look outside ourselves for a moment and consider things from a different point of view.
When I find myself seriously considering things like that, I remind myself to go outside and touch grass.
Why are you talking to me like that?
I just donāt believe that the Venn diagram of people who like looking at space pics and people who are seriously committed to leading a post-human space empire is a circle.
This isnāt just a space pic. This is, specifically, a nihilist space meme. I think the venn diagram in this case has a lot of overlap.
you donāt matter on the scale of the Earth, everyone disappears when you zoom out far enough.
Yes. I agree this is what itās communicating. This seems straightforward, empirically correct, and philosophically basic.
I reject that!
Everyone matters. When you zoom out, weāre all the same. Weāre all connected. An injury to one is an injury to all.
What this meme does and what you are doing is flipping that around to then say āWhen you zoom out, weāre all irrelevant. Weāre all nothing. No one matters at scale.ā I refuse! Every single person matters to all of us, because weāre all the same. When you zoom out you canāt tell us apart, all you can see is a pale blue dot. Thatās us. That doesnāt mean that no one matters at scale, that means everyone matters as much as everyone else. No one is more important or more valuable or more human, we are all the same, we all matter equally. We are our home.
I refuse to accept that no one matters, no matter what scale we are talking about. Every single person matters as part of that pale blue dot.
I apologize. I was going for levity, not insult. Itās easy, in niche internet subcultures like this, to fall into the idea that everyone outside the subculture all uniformly believes the same specific thing. Iām not immune. Many internet subcultures devote a lot of energy into collectively creating a hypothetical amalgamation of everything they personally dislike, then posting about how everyone else is just like the bad thing chimera. Itās the most reliable way to drive engagement. Look how popular /r/ShitDumpPeopleSay style communities are in every online medium. I find that most normal people tend to have diverse, inconsistent, and largely unexamined beliefs about most things.
No one is more important or more valuable or more human, we are all the same, we all matter equally. We are our home.
I agree in spirit with all of this. āWe all matter equallyā doesnāt mean āno one mattersā. I donāt believe not individually āmatteringā on a planetary scale means that humans donāt āmatterā at all: I see it as a rejection of anthropocentrim. Iām not the most important thing in the world. It came before me. It will be here after Iām gone. It wasnāt created to service my personal desires. Itās the only home of uncountable living creatures, older and more numerous than me, and they all have value too. I am not so much more important than every other living thing on this planet that destroying our shared home is acceptable just because I got what I needed out of it. Other things live here too, and because I donāt have any more inherent value than any of them, I have a responsibility to be a good neighbor and steward of the only home any of us have.
Iām pretty far removed from taking Philosophy 101 so forgive my ignorance, but I wanted to speak on nihilism. I also havenāt read a ton of any specific nihilist philosopherās work, so Iām going off the broad strokes as I understand them. Most people use ānihilismā in the way that most people use āanarchyā: as an epithet that broadly means chaotic, disordered, or without purpose. Nihilism, like Anarchy, means a lot of specific and conflicting things depending on which particular author youāre reading. My reductive understanding of the broad umbrella of nihilist philosophy boils down to two points. Point 1: Life has no intrinsic meaning. Thatās about as far as most people get. They hear that and go, āSee, that sounds bad! [insert supernatural thing here] gives life meaning and tells us the one correct way all must live!ā The ignored second part as I understand it is Point 2: Because life has no intrinsic meaning, we must create our own meaning. Some people hear that second part too and decide that, on the whole, itās not for them. They prefer to believe that something outside themselves gives their life meaning and defines how they should live. Fine by me! Iām not the philosophy police! Iāve just genuinely never heard of a self-described nihilist (outside of literal children) who claimed their own understanding of nihilism to be the first point, but not the second. The only adults I have ever seen use ānihilismā that way are using it as an epithet to explain what people they donāt like must believe in order to be so evil.
Itās the same way most people use Anarchist. āThat person doesnāt care about anything, and they just want the world to burn because theyāre an anarchist!ā Iām a Marxist-Leninist, so have some significant disagreements with Anarchist political philosophy as I understand it. That said, I donāt believe any self-described anarchists would characterize their belief system as ābasically just, like, the Joker, manā, even if thatās what most people probably think. When someone says āthe problem with society is thereās all these anarchists that donāt care about anything and just wanna fuck shit upā, I donāt think thatās a very accurate way to explain the world, both because there arenāt that many Anarchists shaping world politics, and the ones that exist wouldnāt describe their own beliefs as āfuck everything! nothing matters!ā
Coming back to nihilism, I think plenty of people can find the idea that life has no intrinsic meaning beyond what we make for ourselves to be freeing. They can know being their authentic self and doing what makes them happy is just as valid as anything else, and that theyāre not āfailingā at life by not conforming to the mold that their family, or god, or society sets for them. A woman isnāt āfailingā at her āintrinsic purposeā as a wife and mother if she doesnāt want to do any of that shit, for example. Any way she chooses to live is an equally valid way of being a woman. I can see why that might not resonate with some people, or that some might be frightened rather than hopeful at the idea of defining your own purpose, and I think thatās fine. A philosophy is only useful if it helps you navigate your own life. People have different perspectives, and I generally think we should try to understand one anotherās differences rather than imposing our own on others.
joke: please do not yell at me
ā¦except when it comes to the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism, the one true path to proletarian liberation! All revisionists get the wall!
It sure has been a long time since Philosophy 101 huh? Iām pretty sure you are confusing existentialism with existential nihilism.
Existentialism is the belief that we construct the meaning of our lives through our own awareness, will, and reason. Nihilism, on the other hand, is the assertion that there is no meaning to life including whatever meaning we try to make for ourselves and that it is pointless to try to give life meaning. The man climbs the tree because he wants to, thereās no deeper meaning behind it because meaning doesnāt exist. Heās not making a new meaning for himself, heās just doing what he wants because thereās no reason not to and nothing is stopping him.
Iām sympathetic to the nihilist view, but rather than reject giving life meaning as pointless I just recognize that it is absurd and then do it anyway.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy, yeah?
And now we return to that pale blue dot. Thatās home. Thatās us. I choose to give that meaning and acknowledge that I am choosing to do so, despite the meaningless universe in which we find ourselves. I am part of something bigger than myself, and so are you, and together we give the world meaning. Nihilism rejects meaning, and I donāt think youāre actually a nihilist.
Iāll confess, youāre probably right that Iām conflating some stuff from nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism. Itās been a while, and my understanding is that they were always very overlapping and informed by one another. Iāve just never met or even heard of a real person explaining their own beliefs in literal āWe believe in nothing, Lebowski!ā terms outside of memes or epithets, so itās difficult for me to jump to the conclusion that it must be what someone intends from one instance with plausible ambiguity. Accepting the premise that someone does strictly believe ānothing means anything; full stopā, I donāt see how that would be an action motivating belief. If ānothing means anythingā is the full scope of how you relate to the world, then whereās the benefit in persuading anyone else? If nihilism definitionally prohibits a āthereforeā after the proposition that ānothing mattersā, then I donāt see how itās not self-excluding. Nobody can exist in the world in a perfect state of inaction, and if ānothing matters so make your own meaningā leaves the definitionally pure confines of nihilism, then I donāt see how āonly I matterā or āonly I and [subgroup]ā matter isnāt just as much a departure from that definition.
Iāve never called myself a nihilist because to me the ānothing mattersā or ānothing has intrinsic meaningā part of the equation always seemed like an immaterial meta-issue. If you canāt objectively test for whether or not something matters, or quantify the degree to which one thing matters over another, then ānothing mattersā and āeverything matters an infinite amountā are functionally indistinguishable to me. Itās what you materially do with the motivation that Iām interested in. I donāt think ābully more people on the internetā is a particularly worthwhile thing to do or encourage generally, no matter the thought process behind it. To the extent that oneās āpolitical actionā is limited to online bullying, I feel like āpeople that talk about scienceā, āpeople that talk about philosophyā, and āpeople that donāt believe a godā are pretty poor proxy groups for the people in real life that actually have the political power to make the world worse, unless youāre identifying āintellectualsā rather than ācapitalistsā as the final boss of class struggle. It just feels like, if you want to make a reasonably safe materially insignificant net positive contribution to the class struggle without working too hard or thinking too much, youād be better off shoplifting a pack of gum from a business, or throwing a rock at the most expensive house in your neighborhood or something.
Youāre right, āonly I matterā and āonly I and [subgroup] matterā are not nihilistic either, but thatās thatās not what this meme is implying or what Iām rejecting. A truly nihilistic stance is āI donāt matter, no one matters, nothing matters, and thereās no reason to create meaning because that doesnāt matter either.ā If I ask āshould I kill myselfā then nihilism can not provide me a reason to survive. Earth before, Earth after, nothing changes. Thatās why Camus considered suicide to be the only really serious philosophical problem.
Now of course, nihilists arenāt necessarily suicidal (although itās not uncommon). The nihilist philosophy tells us to reject meaning and to pursue personal pleasure and satisfaction and self actualization i.e. the Will to Power, not because that is the meaning of life, but because in a meaningless universe thereās no reason to do anything else. The person who can achieve this becomes the Ćbermensch, able to overcome the limits of religion and reason to pursue ambition and no longer burdened by the sorrows of ordinary people.
And again, this isnāt something that gives life meaning. Itās a supposedly rational solution to the question āshould I kill myselfā i.e. the Ćbermensch wants to live for life itself and does not need a reason to do so or to find meaning for life to be worth living.
All of this is to say that, yes, real people believe this stuff and they should be discouraged from doing so whenever possible.
I mean, sure. Art is open to interpretation and all, but I think ālol no one and nothing mattersā would be an odd takeaway from pale blue dot. Do you genuinely believe that thatās the message that a generic astronomy account is intentionally trying to communicate? If so, why? Iām not aware of any global political groups with power that are motivated by an adolescent misunderstanding of nihilism.
Thatās very clearly the message: you donāt matter on the scale of the Earth, everyone disappears when you zoom out far enough.
And thatās exactly the ethos of so-called effective altruism, longtermism, extropianism, etc. The idea is that you should zoom out and ignore all the individual people because they donāt matter on a large scale, instead we should focus on growing the economy for a technological-utopian future where the number of humans can grow exponentially by living in space and trying to colonize all parts of the universe.
This dominates Silicon Valley and has become a driving force in the tech industry.
Yes. I agree this is what itās communicating. This seems straightforward, empirically correct, and philosophically basic. Things look different when you look at them from a different perspective. Isnāt it interesting to look outside ourselves for a moment and consider things from a different point of view.
Iām sure you can find people in real-life who believe those things, and maybe even some who will admit to knowing what the fuck those specific terms mean. Iām sure some of those people even like looking at pictures of space. Iām sure some of those people look at pictures of space and think to themselves āall that will be mine some day! I shall rise above the puny mortals and claim my rightful place among the stars! galaxies will tremble at my unrivaled splendor!ā
I just donāt believe that the Venn diagram of people who like looking at space pics and people who are seriously committed to leading a post-human space empire is a circle. I know a lot of people who like looking at pictures of space and considering how small we are on a cosmic scale, and I can think of maybe a few people in real life that are making serious financial decisions about fucking the planet to colonize Mars. For that Venn diagram to be a circle, it would require most of the people Iāve ever interacted with during my life to all secretly hold the same specific and detailed political philosophy that theyāve deliberately kept hidden from me. When I find myself seriously considering things like that, I remind myself to go outside and touch grass. Or look at pictures of space.
Why are you talking to me like that?
This isnāt just a space pic. This is, specifically, a nihilist space meme. I think the venn diagram in this case has a lot of overlap.
I reject that!
Everyone matters. When you zoom out, weāre all the same. Weāre all connected. An injury to one is an injury to all.
What this meme does and what you are doing is flipping that around to then say āWhen you zoom out, weāre all irrelevant. Weāre all nothing. No one matters at scale.ā I refuse! Every single person matters to all of us, because weāre all the same. When you zoom out you canāt tell us apart, all you can see is a pale blue dot. Thatās us. That doesnāt mean that no one matters at scale, that means everyone matters as much as everyone else. No one is more important or more valuable or more human, we are all the same, we all matter equally. We are our home.
I refuse to accept that no one matters, no matter what scale we are talking about. Every single person matters as part of that pale blue dot.
I apologize. I was going for levity, not insult. Itās easy, in niche internet subcultures like this, to fall into the idea that everyone outside the subculture all uniformly believes the same specific thing. Iām not immune. Many internet subcultures devote a lot of energy into collectively creating a hypothetical amalgamation of everything they personally dislike, then posting about how everyone else is just like the bad thing chimera. Itās the most reliable way to drive engagement. Look how popular /r/ShitDumpPeopleSay style communities are in every online medium. I find that most normal people tend to have diverse, inconsistent, and largely unexamined beliefs about most things.
I agree in spirit with all of this. āWe all matter equallyā doesnāt mean āno one mattersā. I donāt believe not individually āmatteringā on a planetary scale means that humans donāt āmatterā at all: I see it as a rejection of anthropocentrim. Iām not the most important thing in the world. It came before me. It will be here after Iām gone. It wasnāt created to service my personal desires. Itās the only home of uncountable living creatures, older and more numerous than me, and they all have value too. I am not so much more important than every other living thing on this planet that destroying our shared home is acceptable just because I got what I needed out of it. Other things live here too, and because I donāt have any more inherent value than any of them, I have a responsibility to be a good neighbor and steward of the only home any of us have.
Iām pretty far removed from taking Philosophy 101 so forgive my ignorance, but I wanted to speak on nihilism. I also havenāt read a ton of any specific nihilist philosopherās work, so Iām going off the broad strokes as I understand them. Most people use ānihilismā in the way that most people use āanarchyā: as an epithet that broadly means chaotic, disordered, or without purpose. Nihilism, like Anarchy, means a lot of specific and conflicting things depending on which particular author youāre reading. My reductive understanding of the broad umbrella of nihilist philosophy boils down to two points. Point 1: Life has no intrinsic meaning. Thatās about as far as most people get. They hear that and go, āSee, that sounds bad! [insert supernatural thing here] gives life meaning and tells us the one correct way all must live!ā The ignored second part as I understand it is Point 2: Because life has no intrinsic meaning, we must create our own meaning. Some people hear that second part too and decide that, on the whole, itās not for them. They prefer to believe that something outside themselves gives their life meaning and defines how they should live. Fine by me! Iām not the philosophy police! Iāve just genuinely never heard of a self-described nihilist (outside of literal children) who claimed their own understanding of nihilism to be the first point, but not the second. The only adults I have ever seen use ānihilismā that way are using it as an epithet to explain what people they donāt like must believe in order to be so evil.
Itās the same way most people use Anarchist. āThat person doesnāt care about anything, and they just want the world to burn because theyāre an anarchist!ā Iām a Marxist-Leninist, so have some significant disagreements with Anarchist political philosophy as I understand it. That said, I donāt believe any self-described anarchists would characterize their belief system as ābasically just, like, the Joker, manā, even if thatās what most people probably think. When someone says āthe problem with society is thereās all these anarchists that donāt care about anything and just wanna fuck shit upā, I donāt think thatās a very accurate way to explain the world, both because there arenāt that many Anarchists shaping world politics, and the ones that exist wouldnāt describe their own beliefs as āfuck everything! nothing matters!ā
Coming back to nihilism, I think plenty of people can find the idea that life has no intrinsic meaning beyond what we make for ourselves to be freeing. They can know being their authentic self and doing what makes them happy is just as valid as anything else, and that theyāre not āfailingā at life by not conforming to the mold that their family, or god, or society sets for them. A woman isnāt āfailingā at her āintrinsic purposeā as a wife and mother if she doesnāt want to do any of that shit, for example. Any way she chooses to live is an equally valid way of being a woman. I can see why that might not resonate with some people, or that some might be frightened rather than hopeful at the idea of defining your own purpose, and I think thatās fine. A philosophy is only useful if it helps you navigate your own life. People have different perspectives, and I generally think we should try to understand one anotherās differences rather than imposing our own on others.
joke: please do not yell at me
ā¦except when it comes to the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism, the one true path to proletarian liberation! All revisionists get the wall!
tl;dr Nihilism: itās about perspective
It sure has been a long time since Philosophy 101 huh? Iām pretty sure you are confusing existentialism with existential nihilism.
Existentialism is the belief that we construct the meaning of our lives through our own awareness, will, and reason. Nihilism, on the other hand, is the assertion that there is no meaning to life including whatever meaning we try to make for ourselves and that it is pointless to try to give life meaning. The man climbs the tree because he wants to, thereās no deeper meaning behind it because meaning doesnāt exist. Heās not making a new meaning for himself, heās just doing what he wants because thereās no reason not to and nothing is stopping him.
Iām sympathetic to the nihilist view, but rather than reject giving life meaning as pointless I just recognize that it is absurd and then do it anyway.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy, yeah?
And now we return to that pale blue dot. Thatās home. Thatās us. I choose to give that meaning and acknowledge that I am choosing to do so, despite the meaningless universe in which we find ourselves. I am part of something bigger than myself, and so are you, and together we give the world meaning. Nihilism rejects meaning, and I donāt think youāre actually a nihilist.
Iāll confess, youāre probably right that Iām conflating some stuff from nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism. Itās been a while, and my understanding is that they were always very overlapping and informed by one another. Iāve just never met or even heard of a real person explaining their own beliefs in literal āWe believe in nothing, Lebowski!ā terms outside of memes or epithets, so itās difficult for me to jump to the conclusion that it must be what someone intends from one instance with plausible ambiguity. Accepting the premise that someone does strictly believe ānothing means anything; full stopā, I donāt see how that would be an action motivating belief. If ānothing means anythingā is the full scope of how you relate to the world, then whereās the benefit in persuading anyone else? If nihilism definitionally prohibits a āthereforeā after the proposition that ānothing mattersā, then I donāt see how itās not self-excluding. Nobody can exist in the world in a perfect state of inaction, and if ānothing matters so make your own meaningā leaves the definitionally pure confines of nihilism, then I donāt see how āonly I matterā or āonly I and [subgroup]ā matter isnāt just as much a departure from that definition.
Iāve never called myself a nihilist because to me the ānothing mattersā or ānothing has intrinsic meaningā part of the equation always seemed like an immaterial meta-issue. If you canāt objectively test for whether or not something matters, or quantify the degree to which one thing matters over another, then ānothing mattersā and āeverything matters an infinite amountā are functionally indistinguishable to me. Itās what you materially do with the motivation that Iām interested in. I donāt think ābully more people on the internetā is a particularly worthwhile thing to do or encourage generally, no matter the thought process behind it. To the extent that oneās āpolitical actionā is limited to online bullying, I feel like āpeople that talk about scienceā, āpeople that talk about philosophyā, and āpeople that donāt believe a godā are pretty poor proxy groups for the people in real life that actually have the political power to make the world worse, unless youāre identifying āintellectualsā rather than ācapitalistsā as the final boss of class struggle. It just feels like, if you want to make a reasonably safe materially insignificant net positive contribution to the class struggle without working too hard or thinking too much, youād be better off shoplifting a pack of gum from a business, or throwing a rock at the most expensive house in your neighborhood or something.
Youāre right, āonly I matterā and āonly I and [subgroup] matterā are not nihilistic either, but thatās thatās not what this meme is implying or what Iām rejecting. A truly nihilistic stance is āI donāt matter, no one matters, nothing matters, and thereās no reason to create meaning because that doesnāt matter either.ā If I ask āshould I kill myselfā then nihilism can not provide me a reason to survive. Earth before, Earth after, nothing changes. Thatās why Camus considered suicide to be the only really serious philosophical problem.
Now of course, nihilists arenāt necessarily suicidal (although itās not uncommon). The nihilist philosophy tells us to reject meaning and to pursue personal pleasure and satisfaction and self actualization i.e. the Will to Power, not because that is the meaning of life, but because in a meaningless universe thereās no reason to do anything else. The person who can achieve this becomes the Ćbermensch, able to overcome the limits of religion and reason to pursue ambition and no longer burdened by the sorrows of ordinary people.
And again, this isnāt something that gives life meaning. Itās a supposedly rational solution to the question āshould I kill myselfā i.e. the Ćbermensch wants to live for life itself and does not need a reason to do so or to find meaning for life to be worth living.
All of this is to say that, yes, real people believe this stuff and they should be discouraged from doing so whenever possible.