Sciborg

Maybe it's because I spent a long time as a crazy child believing in an indeterministic universe, and have a soft spot for  variations on the Argument from Reason, but I've yet to be totally convinced by anyone's arguments that free will isn't real and apparently John Lucas & the guy who runs Conscious Entities aren't either.

Interesting links. I'll make sure to read them after responding to the other posts here.

I've read some of Conscious Entities, and he seems to be pretty skeptical about most things. Not quite sure what his own views are, since he brings up other philosophers most of the time. His articles on Thomas Metzinger (another determinist philosopher who I mostly agree with) were interesting, I gotta reread them sometime.

I had a friend who was a depressed determinist who converted to spirituality because of ayahuasca. Now I'm not saying Mother Ayahuasca is a real goddess but the important thing is if you just commit suicide you will never know exactly what that experience was so make attending an ayahuasca church ceremony your goal.

 

Not everyone in philosophy is as convinced about how consciousness actually works. Heck, Chalmers even considers neutral monism and panpsychism as more likely than materialism, and McGinn wonders if mental causality is really the same as physical causality.

I've read some of Chalmers, but not enough to be able to comment (IIRC, Brassier's Nihil Unbound criticized him a lot). As for the other guy, Colin McGinn, he seems to believe in a semi-religious dogma of "we can't discover anything more about consciousness, this is it." It all sounds a bit too neat to me, IMO. And it's unsatisfying, especially in this age where we're learning more and more about how the brain actually works every year. Neuroscience has totally changed the way we look at human consciousness.

(If there were things we couldn't possibly discover or infer, we wouldn't be worried about them in the first place - what difference would they make to us? If the answers of consciousness are completely beyond us, then the questions should be beyond us too. Dogs can't understand nuclear physics, but that's because they don't get that there's anything there to understand in the first place.)

It relates to the whole experience thing Francis was talking about, but I guess I'm also saying take a gamble on philosophical conclusions being wrong. Remember until quantum mechanics few people were seriously considering the acausal events of indeterminism.

Don't know enough about quantum mechanics to comment on this, TBH.

There's just so much weird stuff out there that suggest we don't know as much as we think we do, whether it's Krippner's weird Grateful Dead telepathy results or just the placebo effect.

Never heard of those Krippner telepathy experiments, either. Since this is the first time I ever hear about them, they can't have been especially convincing, so excuse me if I'm still seriously doubting that telepathy exists.

Anyways, thanks for the reading tips. Whew, that's one huge pile of books on the "to read" list for this week...

On to next answer:

Royce

You don`t have to be so convinced that all these people you read actually are right in their assumptions.

As far as I can infer, they're completely right. Empirical science definitely suggests that human consciousness is an emergent system (an epiphenomenon caused by pre-programmed biology, if you will) and not some sort of supernatural core in the center of our minds. I obviously can't prove they're correct, in the same way I can't prove God doesn't exist, but they're convincing to me. There's something called "inference to the best explanation", you might want to look it up.

I'm far too level-headed and rational (you might call it Aspergery) to make some sort of great leap of faith and believe in things that aren't empirical reality. I don't have a religious bone in my body.

I know that it is pretty convincing though, since I (and probably everyone on this board) share your perspective

If we both agree on these things, why are you even arguing with me at all?

I am sad, because I have been there, and I know there is a way out(at least for me there was).

What was you way out, then? Eating shrooms and reading Buddhist platitudes?

I would also recommend that you give Alan Watts a chance. He may be the only guy who have gotten my out of a depression by using words. The book: On the taboo against knowing who you are, is pure brilliance IMO. Just do me(this guy you do not know:)) a favor and read that one.

I have it on PDF now, will check it out later. Thanks for the recommendation, though.

Here is a little quote: "When you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life." Psychedelics make you feel this, seriously. PM me if you want to talk more about this.

Ok, will do.

Interesting answers, I'll respond later today when I have the time.

I'll keep up my visits to the psychiatrist, even though I feel they're pointless. Need to buy more antidepressant pills as well. More exercise is probably a good idea, although running didn't help me at all.

I want to hear some input from the Bakker-reading crowd on this serious dilemma I've had.

Is there anything of value in the world? The answer, at least to me, seems to be "No". I've long had these ideas myself, and reading up on neuroscience basically confirmed them. Neuroscience definitely seems to prove that meanings and purposes (as we see them) don't actually exist and that "the self" is an illusion of bio-chemistry. We're not "real". Consciousness fools us all into believing that we're real instead of a puppet of our biology. The old-school pessimist philosophers like Schopenhauer have the same view - that every single thought, idea, concept, image, symbol, and representation are fundamentally distractions that prevent people from realizing that everything is meaningless.

Last week, I read Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against The Human Race, a book I really recommend to anyone who liked Neuropath: http://forums.philosophyforums.com/download.php?attachid=4970

Reading this book was sort of enlightening to me, although probably the most depressing kind of "enlightenment" imaginable. Most of these ideas were thoughts I'd already had myself, but Ligotti's book made things a lot clearer. He's basically a Schopenhauer-style pessimist who writes that life isn't worth living and explains the reasons why. Through the whole book, I couldn't find anything to disagree with.

I've been thinking about suicide on and off, over the last few weeks. On some level, I obviously have the instinct for self-preservation, which is probably the main thing keeping me from killing myself. I've tried going to a psychiatrist, but half the time he doesn't understand what the hell I'm talking about. I take antidepressant pills, but they're not helping much. I've stopped going to my uni lectures and basically don't give a shit about anything. I've stopped going to work. Since I now know that my life is meaningless, and that all "goals" are pointless distractions created by chemical reactions in my head, I don't do much at all.

To use Bakker's terms, going back to "Disney World" isn't really possible for me anymore. I want to, but it's impossible. I'm not good at compartmentalizing my thoughts and willfully ignoring stuff. There's some philosophy professors (Brassier, for example) who have wives and kids that they love, follow society's norms and rules in their daily lives, and then go to their universities (or wherever) and hold lectures about the meaningless and deterministic nature of reality without breaking a sweat. I'm not one of those. I can't live a lie. But neither can I really, fully be a nihilist/determinist and stay sane.

I tend to agree with Bakker (and Lovecraft, etc) that there are realities so hostile and alien that human minds can't handle them. But once you've stumbled onto these truths, what can you do?

(To be honest, I wish I'd never read Bakker, Schopenhauer, Brassier, Ligotti, Cioran or any of those authors. But what's done can't be undone.)

The basic premise of Nietzsche's theory is that the probability of an universe coming into existence exactly like our own is finite. Now, if either time or space are infinite (which Nietzsche clearly thinks), then math tells us that our existence will happen over and over again an infinite number of times. If A) the likelihood of this universe's existence is anything other than zero, and B) time/space is infinite, then infinity times anything other than zero is infinity.

You have to believe in both A and B to believe the conclusion, obviously. (B is the doubtful one, since we don't really know the nature of time/space). But if you accept the premise, then you also have to accept the logical conclusion.

Now, if we were to live this life over and over again, that could be a different story.  You would have an innumerable amount of chances to shape your existence into a "perfect life".

The whole argument of eternal recurrence isn't that a constant "you" will live forever and have infinite chances, but rather that "you" will exist infinite times and have the exact same chances forever.

That brings me to my current philosophy, you only live once with no rewards or punishments after.  Live however the fuck you want to.

That's definitely one of the reasons why Nietzsche embraced the idea of eternal recurrence - there won't be any rewards for altruistic people in an afterlife, but victims will be victims forever and winners will be winners forever. It's pretty much the opposite of Christian theology. The quoted bit in my OP is part of a chapter that basically makes the point "Choose to live a happy life, because what you do will be repeated forever."

(And, of course, my point was that almost nothing in our lives is actually chosen by us, and that "choice" itself might not really exist in any meaningful sense if we look at the neuroscientific evidence.)

What do you think of Nietzsche's ideas on "eternal recurrence"?

Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, - a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'

Do you agree with Nietzsche's view that time is infinite but all things are finite, so they'll eventually happen over and over again for all time?

I am totally with you on this. But what if what you are convinced of as true, also is a lie?

I have no way of knowing that, but it's the closest thing to empirical scientific truth we have.

Do you feel like a meatball of decaying chemicals floating around on a rock? Or is that what you are convinced of at this moment in your life? This can change, it certainly did for me. I can`t explain what happened, but it has nothing to do with religion.

I'm not a solipsist. What I feel doesn't change the truth one bit.

We may be deceived about everything, so I stopped taking my nihilistic thoughts seriously.

Possibly. All I know is that I don't know shit.

EVER ARE MEN DECEIVED