Any Nihilists here?

[FrustratedFool]

Well, at least we can all draw comfort from the fact that none of this is under anyone's control as freewill doesn't exist.

How do you know free will doesn’t exist?

Boru

I don't. It's just that I think it highly unlikely to exist. First, because freewill cannot, as far as I and many others can see, exist within a physicalist universe. Seco d, beacsue I have encountered no convincing evidence or argument for its existence.

[HappySkeptic]

Free-will is an inconsistent concept.

What people think of as "free-will" is really just agency. We have agency. We make choices for our own interests. Making choices is a computation. A computation requires a causal framework underlying it. Causality isn't free.

Now, our conscious choices are not "simple" computation. The brain works in a different mode of operation from a normal computer. The mode of operation gives us both agency and an internal narrative of self.

Now, if the mind is not fully dependent on the brain, and it possesses a supernatural soul that possesses "free will", how does that operate? Are choices uncaused? If not, then one must posit a causal supernatural framework on which the soul operates. Occam's razor requires us to throw away the whole idea.

[Angrboda]

Wittgenstein said something to the effect that many problems of philosophy are actually problems of language. I suspect free will is one of those. I think the prudent course of action with nebulous questions like the origin of the universe, the nature of free will, morals, and so on is to embrace a pluralism rooted in steadfast agnosticism about the question.

[Belacqua]

What is the natural end / teleology of being human?  Reproduction?

Naturally there was a lot of debate about this. For Aristotle, it was contemplation of the true. For Christians, contemplation of the True enlarges to heaven. 

For less ambitious thinkers, it's just a healthy life in which you use your talents as best you can.

And why not make it more specific, like the telos of me specifically?

For those who see all humans as having the same telos, your goal would be the same as everyone else's -- though it might express itself differently due to differences in circumstances. But yes, the actual life you lead, while fulfilling your telos, might look very different from that of someone in a completely different time and place.

And why base it around humans, rather than base our morality around the telos of spiders or rocks?

Well, this is just talking about people. Spiders have their own telos. 

That said, I personally prefer a society aimed at making things better (in terms of a rough negative preference utilitarianism) for all.  Sounds good.  I subjectively value that.

Yes, this is why I think it's compatible with nihilism. I'm perfectly happy conceding that "this is just the way I prefer it." There is no proof that a peaceful healthy society where people can live long and prosper is best. But I'll bet you we could get a good bit of consensus on the general goals.

[FrustratedFool]

I see no reason to believe anything has a natural telos, or if it does it can be known, or if known I should value it, or that I should care about human telos more than anything else.

But I do care, for reasons that are effectively self interest, in building a wonderful society where all can prosper.

I am a socially conscious, empathic, and political nihilist.

[Belacqua]

I see no reason to believe anything has a natural telos, or if it does it can be known, or if known I should value it, or that I should care about human telos more than anything else.

But I do care, for reasons that are effectively self interest, in building a wonderful society where all can prosper.

I am a socially conscious, empathic, and political nihilist.

Yes, I think this is part of what makes us modern. 

The post-Kantian recalibrations are largely about what a wonderful society would look like, in the absence of a knowable telos. Existentialism, nihilism, absurdism, surrealism, dadaism.

[The Grand Nudger]

As expected, you're a nihilist in the same way that I'm nubian.  It's not that you think things x and y are meaningless, it's not that you fundamentally reject value judgements, even.  You simply think that common understandings of meaning and common expressions of value are wrong.  You're an error theorist - and in that very much a realist about error.....  Welcome to the club, we're all error theorists at some point.

You are, ofc...and as we all are, very much enamored with what value and meaning you do accept..which, somehow, overcomes those objections you have to the accuracy of the ones you don't.

I could make some other predictions I'd bank on. Like when you say "I'm a nihilist" about politics what you really mean is not that government doesn't exist, that there is no meaning to government, or that the values a government prioritizes are illusory. It probably just means you don't give a bunch of shits about politics. That even though you do think there's meaning and value in politics, that you do have an idea of a better world that we ought to strive for...you're not going to bust your own balls to realize any political outcome. Me neither.

[FrustratedFool]

So, it seems I may be the only nihilist here... somewhat unexpected on an atheist site, tbh.

[Belacqua]

So, it seems I may be the only nihilist here... somewhat unexpected on an atheist site, tbh.

You got me thinking about it, for sure.

I think in the end I am happy to admit that any meaning in the world is made by people. It is not something that physics or chemistry can detect, and if all the people went away there would be no meaning. 

But I do think that what people make is real. The meanings that people have made have real existence independent of me. They can be studied, debated, held objectively at arm's length and pondered. 

While some things are assigned meaning only by individuals, others are such enormous group projects that the disappearance of any given person would scarcely affect anything. 

The biggest messiest cases are probably the world's major religions. These are huge ziggurats of interconnected meanings -- evolving, sometimes self-contradictory, sometimes based on lies -- but nonetheless having existence in some more-than-personal way. 

I'm thinking of the things that Levi-Strauss or Roland Barthes studied. Those guys could pick out and analyze the various ways in which the things we tell each other build meaning in the world. Our myths and our assumptions can be detected as tacitly conveyed in ways that even the speakers didn't knowingly intend. 

Or think of something like the Louvre Museum. Everything there is man-made, and everything there (from the entrance gates to the Mona Lisa) is so replete with cultural meaning that you could never articulate all of it. All cultural productions form a world of interconnected meanings that we are thrown into at birth, and, for the individual, has an inescapable given-ness nearly as strong as the laws of physics.

Even if none of this meaning exists for the snails in my garden, it nonetheless exists for people, really truly.

(Though I may have simply missed the point of what you mean when you say "nihilist.")

[FrustratedFool]

I think we agree that things like religion, gender, currency, nations etc esit and are real, it's just that such personally inter-subjective socially created things (like meanings of words within a language system) would not qualify, I think, to be classed as objectively existing objects in the same way that rocks are. They are wholly dependent upon consciousness in a way that gravity isn't.

I think many nihilists (such a broad term) can agree that national borders exist independent of any single human mind, whilst also holding to the idea that they don't have objective existence in the sense of existing as concrete physicalist objects with no subjectivity involved at any point. And, far more importantly, that they have any objective value or meaning outside of that which agents give them (consciously or unconsciously).

When a nihilist of my stripe says, then, that no act or social system has objective value or the universe as a whole has no objective meaning or purpose, this is what I think they're referring to.

I think this a somewhat obvious and unavoidable outworking of materialism, and in many ways is a trivial and banal claim for the modern. It seems obvious that if materialist atheism is true then there cannot be objective moral facts, objective values, freewill, a purpose to the universe, or God.