RE: Any Nihilists here?
August 13, 2023 at 9:06 am
(This post was last modified: August 13, 2023 at 10:11 am by Bucky Ball.)
(August 12, 2023 at 9:01 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:(August 12, 2023 at 4:53 pm)FrustratedFool Wrote: I see no way that freewill can exist. I see no way moral statements can be factual, right or wrong.
But it's interesting some see it differently.
The fact that free will can not exist means you don’t have a choice in whether or not believe in free wheel or see moral statements as factual or not.
Depends on the definitions, (which are sorely lacking in this thread).
"Degrees of" anything destroys (absolute) nihilism.
There are many things that are meaningful to me, and make me happy, and in fact, "being happy" or "content" or "not in pain" are values I prefer, thus not a nihilist.
The universe doesn't give a shit.
Free will does exist, in some sense. That above post got written, in the way it did.
There were many choices involved (and according to neuro-science, 95 % of those choices involved, were subconscious), including the decision that it was worthwhile
to post it. If even 5 % (or 1 %) is "free", that means one could "randomly see" something new or in a "new" light that one never did before, (or might be seen as valuable or worthwhile to try.) So you decide to go running every morning, and that becomes a habit. The habit becomes ingrained. Granted there were all kinds of personal "pre-requisites" in the process of valuing that "something new", or seeing the "old" in a new way, .. so you are "free" to lay down a long-term change, or even just go running once.
Moral statements are never "factual". The word "factual" was never once used in all the Ethics courses I took,
and has never once been used by anyone on the Ethics Committee I sit on, (except maybe that "it is a fact that *so and so* does not wish to be coded (resuscitated)
should their heart stop beating"). BTW, there are some interesting new "ethics", possibly ?? from "feminist ethics", ie "a duty to care" you can find if you're interested.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-ethics/
In the classical religious (Medieval) "moral" sense, there is no free will possible, because that requires that ALL the important elements of a choice be present
in consciousness *at the time the decision is made*. We know that is not the case, not possible, ... and in fact decisions are made before we are conscious of them, by a few seconds. There is a ton of recent research on that. (And if you were following what NX and I were arguing about, where he was making false claims about what the Roman Church says about "Mortal Sin", this (fully assent to the three elements of mortal sin in the Catechism) where no one can know whether they are fully met, this is why he was totally wrong on that and the church's position.
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. - Joseph Campbell
Militant Atheist Commie Evolutionist
Militant Atheist Commie Evolutionist