This Nihilism business - You're all just mucking about...

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Personally…

  • I deny Tab’s existance.
  • I accept Tab’s existance.
  • I wish I didn’t have to accept Tab’s existance.
0 voters

A quick pre-emptive apology (if such a thing exists) - “sorry if a variation of the following has been posited and blown out of the water already somewhere else - if so - my only claim to originality is that it hasn’t been done previously by me…”

And a quick dedication: to my baby boy - if he hadn’t thrown up on me about an hour ago, this post would never have come into existance… Any muse is good muse as far as I’m concerned - even babysick. :astonished:

[size=125]Imagine a slow dismemberment of the senses…[/size]

…let me put your eyes out first - now light does not exist save in the heat that blossoms in your skin at noon. Let me destroy your awareness of hot and cold, now light only exists in the pain of sunburn. Now let me take away your pain, and leave you comfortably numb… Light is gone.

Let me take away touch, no longer will you feel the roughness of your stubble, or the silk of your lover’s skin. Take away the texture and taste of food in your mouth, the liquid squelch of it sliding down your gullet, and the gastric gurgles in your stomach. No more will you feel the fullness of your bowels and the football of your bladder after too many beers, nor the relief of expulsion. No more smells, not even the sensation of air in your nostrils. No more sounds - The thudding of your heart and the swelling of your chest will go unheeded…

Now I disengage your awareness of body position - you will move your arm and no longer know where it is. Fall, and you will never know if you’ve clambered back onto your feet… The meat is forgotten and
the outside world of physical objects is gone.

What’s left - Your little thinker, alone in the void. An Uroboros- the snake of your mind clasping the tail of its memories…

So far - so Descartes. Everything external is unprovable. Time has lost its meaning without an updating source of light.

My first question to the nihilists out there…

You accept nothing but the thinker… (please God let them say “yes”)

So if I have brought you to a state where there is nothing but your thinker remaining, and I inject you with a series of psychoactive drugs, giving you some time between each dose, to recover your ‘normal’ brain chemistry… Your brain state prior to the drugs is remembered… You find you cannot actively/simply ‘re-think’ yourself into the altered state you remember as being suddenly different to the previous ‘normal’ state. Are you not forced to accept the presence of some external factor operating on your thinker…? And if you accept this one external force - do you have any reason left to doubt the wielder of the syringe…?

Anyway - if you’re just sitting there thinking - ah Tabula’s just talking out of his arse again - doesn’t he know about that fallacy thingy that says - “What comes does not necessarily have to resemble what came before… Just because we’ve already observed it happen that way a quadrillion times” (Okay-okay so I’ve forgotten the fancy pants name for it - shoot me - probably ‘Ad-hoc-blip-blop-Rip-Van-winkle’ in layman’s latin)

Let’s take it further:

The foetus in the womb - as soon as it begins to be aware, it is overcome with sensation: The crash of its mothers heart, the tides of her breathing, the joyful song of her voice, the ripple of fluid between its vestigal toes, the wiggling of its tiny fingers, the muffled roar of the world outside the red walls of its residence.

A nasty scientist comes along (not me - I’ve done enough nasty things in the lab to last a lifetime) and does the same to the foetus- before that awakening - removes all possibility of sensation. Severs all avenues of stimulus. Casting its thinker into the void before it even feels the warmth of its mother’s blood.

The baby comes to term, is born, lives. The nasty scientist hooks it up to a wonderful new machine that monitors thought.

I’ll bet you a million pounds that the poor little mite would just register white noise.

Why…? Because your thinker is those stimuli, is those sensations, touches, hearings, seeings. Without external stimuli, to build an internal language of mind on top of, there can be no thinker, no thoughts to think…

My second question to the nihilists out there…

How can you develop ‘thought-concepts’ to think with without having an external frame of reference to build them on…? I accept it’s possible to think without words, but without even learned and remembered sensual data…? I don’t (ahem) think so…

And please don’t tell me that we’re each born with a whole universe of latent knowledge (for your given definition of knowledge) already sequestered in our heads… And generate/regurgetate it as is required. My baby’s already regurgetated on me enough for one evening…

So anyway - if our thinkers are even in part the sum of our sensual experience, that must mean that things external to our thinkers exist separate from it. ie: denying the existance of the external is bollocks - not to put too finer a point on it.

Anyway - fully expect İmp or another of his gloomy ilk ( :wink: ) to come along and sink my pretty ship with a few well-placed words… Try not to be too brief, as I’d like to really understand why I’m wrong rather than just be wrong… If you get my drift…

Oh yes, and a bit of swearing would be nice too, I haven’t ad-hommed anyone in ages, and I’m feeling I’ve become far too polite recently.

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the answer to question one would be that nothing can be proven outside the self and even the existence of the self is questionable… logically, there is no self, only a momentary perception but that’s a different argument… (you accept nothing but the thinker would be better claimed by an existentialist, because a nihilist might even deny himself)…

the answer to two would be yes, there is nothing but the “thinker”…
the thinker thinks thoughts about what it believes is external but actually, the only thing the thinker has is his thoughts, not anything outside of the thinker… the thoughts of the thinker do not ensure the existence of an external world, the thoughts of the thinker only (tentatively) ensure the thoughts of the thinker… it could be the case that the thinker is nothing but a brain in a vat and the brain is being prodded to think thoughts in accordance with an external experience but in actuality the experience is nothing but a sequence of neurons firing… or as per your request, a sequence of fucking neurons firing… now when one asks why one responds as one respons, it is because of training and conditioning… humean habit…

I’ve got your gloomy ilk… :wink:

-Imp

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In real life we’re usually flaming self-dogmatists. Why have your philosophy differ from the way you live your life? Unless you’re buddhist going for non-existence of the self… I’d like to try non-existence for a little while, but would I ever get to find out for how long I didn’t exist?

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Thanks for the reply İmpenitent…

I agree - but that was not what I wanted to ask… I meant that if the thinker is able to think in any coherrent way, using an internal language of thought to do so, it must have had sensual experience with/on which to base the thought processes/thought language it uses. This sensual experience has to be based on things external to the thinker - ergo - the external exists, because the thinker can think.

Do you think the sensually deprived baby would register on the ‘thought visualizer’ with any comparison to a normally developed baby…? Would it ever develop a normal thought process…? I mean - sit down somewhere quiet, and try to think without using words, then try to think without using shapes sounds memories, anything with any connection to the external sense-data you’ve recieved…

Surely if your thinker can even frame the statement: “Nothing can be proved to exist” it becomes an instant oxymoron…

What’s your definition of self…?

Hi Aporia, take a newspaper with you into non-existance, come back and compare dates…? :astonished:

PS: Just love the way the polls going at the moment… :cry:

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-Imp

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Dear İmp -

That again is not my point, the blind and deaf - though more limited than normal - still have many avenues of sensation open to them - it is not, as you say that bigger deal. They can use the avenues still open to them as resources of experience on which to form a basis for coherent thought. My example is of a poor creature that has no avenues open. Nor has ever had them available. Can it form an internal language of the mind from scratch…?

Very well, dreams, the imagination - the conjuration of the apparantly real. Invention…

Dunamis on another thread observed: (paraphrase)

“There is no such thing as true invention (ie: the spontaneous creation of an absolutely original form) only the re-shuffling/realignment of relationships between previously percieved forms”

This struck me as true.

Now - very well, the drunkard can dream/hallucinate the proverbial pink elephant - but only if he’s previously perceived the colour pink, and percieved an elephant. Otherwise it would literally not cross his mind…

This is my point - in a thinker that has had absolutely no sensual input, is absolutely Tabula Rasa :smiley: , how could it extrapolate/realign new forms, with absolutely nothing to work on. Worse than the Eskimos and snow - it would only have a vocabulary of only one word - void.

That does not matter - as long as said sensation cannot have been produced from scratch internal to the thinker - it must follow that it came from outside the thinker - ie: that there is some form of external in existance

Good - I was hoping it was something like that, any experience apart from that of ‘non-experience’ (if that’s not just silly phrasing) must have come from something external to the thinker. (for the above reason)

PS: You forgot to swear in your last post… :wink:

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it was mumbled under my breath… :slight_smile:

-Imp

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T.R.,

Why…? Because your thinker is those stimuli, is those sensations, touches, hearings, seeings. Without external stimuli, to build an internal language of mind on top of, there can be no thinker, no thoughts to think…

Consider Spinoza’s analogy of the construction of hammer, a which it would seem would require another hammer to make it. Much as you suggest, it would seem rather that by analogy, Spinoza’s “instruments supplied by nature” would be those elemental bodily sensations, and their organization, from which we are constituted in the first place…

“For, in order to work iron, a hammer is needed, and the hammer cannot be forthcoming unless it has been made; but, in order to make it, there was need of another hammer and other tools, and so on into infinity. We might thus vainly endeavor to prove that men have no power of working iron. But as men at first made use of the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other things more difficult with less labor and greater perfection; and so gradually mounted from the simplest operations to the making of tools, and from the making of tools to the making of more complex tools, and fresh feats of workmanship, till they arrived at making, with small expenditure of labor, the vast number of complicated mechanisms which they now possess. So, in like manner, the intellect, by its native strength, makes for itself intellectual instruments, whereby it acquires strength for performing other intellectual operations, and from these operations gets fresh instruments, or the power of pushing its investigations further, and thus gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit of wisdom.”

-On the Emendation of the Intellect

Yet what must be kept in mind is that everything thought to be “out there”, in the world, is only a perturbation in the body, which the body-as-mind treats as-if it were a mapping of an imagined exterior state. At no time is the body-as-mind relating to anything other than its own internal states, but only dealing with –homeostatically- the perturbational effects of those “as if” hypothesises. As Spinoza would suggest, the experienced increasing efficacy, the power of those hypotheses would appear to be the climb of a summit of knowledge. Only, the values that are the measure that efficacy would still be relative to the project. Hammers are experienced as efficacious because we attempt to go around hammering things. One can always question whether it is meaningful to hammer. A meaningless question perhaps for those who make hammers.

Dunamis

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It’s meaningless to ask “what’s the point of hammering” for hammer makers indeed, but for the same reason, I say that it’s also meaningless to ask the same question for the hammerers. Asking about, is like an intellectual rejuvenation. If nihilists keep living their lives out by asking “what’s the point”, then it’d make everyone else busy living their lives look more like nihilists.

“Hume remains unrefuted”, there goes some nihilist… Who cares? What does it matter? What good does it do? What is the point? Nihilists fail to realise that their philosophy is based upon this one grand irony: there is no point being a person who thinks that there is no point. The happy nihilists are under the illusion that they stand above the heads of all; the sad nihilists are under the illusion that they live to complain and cry. To the happy nihilists I say: suit yourselves; the the sad nihilists I say: lighten up.

I tell you nihilists what the point is right here right now: being happy. Don’t say “it’s not a point at all”, because either way both you and me live for that purpose, and for that purpose alone. The fact that you have to eat food and drink water everyday should tell you that the point lies in the actions themselves. If those points are not “good” enough for you, then feel free to manifest some “higher” purposes for your amusement, like Christians. But never forget about this: whatever you’re thinking right now, is aimed at your own satisfaction.

Who is the one that stands above everybody else, in terms of the higest philosophy that is the scientific enquiry into absolute humanity? Nietzsche. So if somehow you believe that you’ve already surpassed him, do start to worry about life. By standing on the man’s shoulders, you see clearly so that you wouldn’t fall into the abyss of disillusion as so many other thinkers did, those who actually had the equiptment to lead a much happier life than the hero himself.

Nihilists, I know the attraction of the juvenile youth, but it’s time to be ripe adults again.

“A man is who has found the seriousness at play when was a boy.”- Nietzsche

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I thoroughly enjoyed your post, I do however have a few objections/clarifications/points of discussion if you’ll endure them.

This fallacy as I understand it is twofold, and a bit more complex than you have presented it. The first part goes as you have described above, but there is a implication that I find is often missed. If I argue that we have no reason to believe that the future will resemble the past, and you respond by saying that the future always resembles the past, you are not refuting my point. As your understanding of the future resembling the past occured in the past, and so you would simply be assuming that in the future the future will resemble the past, based on the fact that in the past the future has resembled the past. Thus using the “future/past” facet of “knowledge” to justify the “future/past” claim, and passing into circularity.

It sounded better in my head, and although I don’t want to be condescending many people I have conversed with on this subject have missed this implication, so I thought I’d just put it out there. :unamused:

Now that that’s out of the way I have a few more objections starting with this one.

Recently I was brushing up on some Nietzsche and came across an interesting criticism of “I think”, or to adopt your words “the ‘thinker’ dilemma”. Unfortunately it will not address the logic of this quote, but rather from this quote I mean to touch on the assumption of the “thinker” and the passage from Nietzsche will touch on the assumptions behind the “thinker”. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and if you’re wondering I have no why idea why I used this quote.

When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, “I think,” I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an “ego”, and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking…that I know what thinking is.

Nietzsche goes on to assert that “I think” is based on certain metaphysical assumptions, and offers these questions as a guide to understanding them.

From where do I get the concept of thinking?
Why do I believe in cause and effect?
What gives me the right to speak of an ego, and even of an ego as cause, and finally of an ego as the cause of thougt?

And finally in a thoroughly Nietzschean way he offers this as his parting comment.

It is improbable that you are not mistaken; but why insist on the truth?

There was one more thing I was going to comment on, but it escaped “me” :laughing: while I was composing the other parts of this post, if it comes to me again I’ll post it on the spot. Also, I look forward to your child vomiting on you for years to come.

Likewise if there is no external world then it becomes absurd to insist that sense organs would observe themeselves.

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So many new guests at my little Nihilistic theme-party… I must pop-out and get some more crisps. :smiley:

Dear İmp, first and most faithful of my party animals:

Are you saying that a thinker in complete sensory isolation would create illusionary speakers to converse with/draw experience from…? How…? With/From what…?

Yes - agreed.

They don’t create anything, simply express experiences through the filters of their art - to present/combine them in a new way. This does not detract from their art, but defines it.

Want…? Think ( :evilfun: ) about it - how often do you sit alone, silent in the darkness, and make up new words to describe something you have absolutely no inkling of even existing…? No, that’s not expressing what I mean, think of trying to make a word, when you’ve never heard a syllable spoken, and because you’ve never felt them, effectively have no lips, tongue, or breathe to push with. To create a thought concept when there is no sensation/sensed object to describe, would it occur to you…?

You may have got me here. Do you accept the body’s existance…? If not then hunger is the external meat crying. A sensation caused by a combination of low blood sugar and circadian rythms. Both avenues that the nasty scientist has nipped before the bud has even opened. The thinker has no input in the scenario I’m proposing, not even the most basic body dialogue.

How innate does innate go…? We discussed body/mind a long time ago and agreed it was one. (Till I changed my mind in favour of the informational standing wave idea) Do you suppose a thinker completely disassociated from the meat would still have instinctive sub-routines…? Not so much the brain in a vat scenario, but rather a wave-function trapped in a genie bottle perhaps.

Hi D. Nice to speak to you again, still pondering your prompt PM.

Perhaps the first hammer was a fist…? What was it you said on the other thread - their is no inventor to which we can attribute the act of knowlingly bestowing meaning - I must admit I couldn’t think of a way out of that one. Is all true invention done only by random events…? Is anything truly random, or is it all determined by the outcome of the first event right from the off…?

Can I change that to:

One can always question whether it is meaningful to think. A meaningless question perhaps for that which constucts thought.
An object is defined by its function, their are certain things it must (be able to) do without fundamentally losing meaning/itself. A thinker with no thought ceases to be a thinker…? So sensation is existance…? Sorry - I’m just rambling.

Hi Nihilistic, glad my post provided some amusement.

Hadn’t thought about it that deeply, but you’re right.

I must admit - I haven’t a clue, and I am massively under-read philosophically. What do you think…? Esp. * - You show me where you’re going and I’ll hang onto your coat-tails until I find my feet well enough to comment. Or Uniqor seems very Nietzschean - perhaps he can help us out.

I’m not sure if this is at all relative to what you meant but - I think, if you classify life as a bundle of sense organs walking about, then conscioussness comes about from “sense organs observing themeselves” in that your internal observations of yourself - your homonculus - is the very basis of self awareness, as you continually update your self-model, and effectively throw it forward in time, to predict the outcome of actions you are considering in the present.

Anyway - thanks for all the replies, is salt-and-vinegar alright…? They’d run out of Cheese-and-onion…

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T.R.,

“One can always question whether it is meaningful to think. A meaningless question perhaps for that which constucts thought.”

I’m not sure that “think” is the proper substitution, because quite a variety of experiences get shoe-horned into that vague word, but whether it is meaningful to use “knowledge”, for those that construct “knowledge”, may be apt.

Dunamis

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TR

I think there are many assumptions behind the notion of a “thinker”, many of which go unrecognized when we use the term. The concept designated by “thinker” is used as a foundation for many things, but it as a paradigm is hardly ever questioned or examined. We seem to take it for granted because we “know” what a thinker is as we undoubtedly are one. Likewise, we wish to wrap the complexities of our consciousness and behavior into one end-all-be-all concept, but I would venture to say that there are many facets of this notion(the individual) that must come together to form our theory of everything. However, the “thinker” itself rests on many metaphisical assertions that are shaky at best. A few being: I am the one who thinks, Some thing must think(causation), Thinking is the action that takes place in my head, an action that I am so familiar with that “I” cannot be mistaken about it. I don’t want to come off as if I think I’ve found a successful refutation of “I think”, but rather I simply wish to take the absolute out of this truth.

Uniqor

You paint a very grim picture of life if you believe one must live to be happy to be happy. A state of mind as your lifes goal, perhaps some drugs are in order.

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-Imp

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How could one be happy if doesn’t live to be happy? I must admitte that the nihilists around town are getting on my nerves…

Nihilist, let’s forget about Nietzsche for now, for you might never corretly understand him. As I said: the happy nihilists imagine that they see what others don’t; the sad ones believe that happiness is an impossibility. So which group do you belong?

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I don’t know, my priest seems to be pretty happy with living for god. But I guess living for happiness is just another attempt at teleology, perhaps they are the same thing?

And what of those who aren’t happy with such a shallow goal, should we adopt your nonsense and live to be happy knowing full well that it cannot make us happy and thus not really living to be happy? Or maybe we should live for something else that might make us happy, and disregard happiness as our goal in order to make happiness our goal?

I’m sorry you have to endure us, but you are in a thread about nihilism. Funny how that works, nihilists in a thread about nihilism.

I like you.

I’m glad that’s what you said, but seeing as how nihilists don’t claim to “see” anything your first explination is a little absurd. As for your second a nihilist would see sadness as being just as impossible as happiness. Keep trying though.

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Keep trying? I don’t know… One thing I’ve learnt about you guys is that you can’t be convinced - the nature of your philosophy is such that it can’t be proven incorrect - just like Christianity. You may say exactly the same thing to science or whatever, which I’d listen to you and suck on a lolipop, watch porno, enjoy life at the same time.

So Nihilist, tell me what do you want other than making yourself occupied and fulfilled? Birds jump around and feed every second of their life; fish shaking their asses and swim around all day… You philosophise about the wisdom of nothingness, yet you don’t realise that you are doing this nothingness for a purpose - the very purpose that I’ve just stated - the pupose of every single living breathing organism.

In short and not sacastically, your philosophy is nothing, no? It’s an intellectual rejuvenation that amuses the funky and sad, no? Most importantly, it so often takes happiness away, no?

If I was asked to choose between being a nihlist and a pornstar, I choose the later without a moment’s hesitation… at least I can get some actions from that…

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I love the smell of False Dichotomy in the morning! :sunglasses: Anyway, don’t you suppose there are more than a few nihilistic porn stars? Why not have you cake and mope about it, too?

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Actually, I just came up with another way to divide up the nihilists, it’s quite similar really:

  1. The disillusioned, those who are without regard to scientific facts, thereby hold the false believe of the impossibility of humanity, again, without regard to the fact that themselves, are human. For example, Nihilist.

  2. The pessimestic, those who loves what hurts, who could not bring up the stength required to be happy, instead, fall back into the lazy chair of sentiment, hence learned the gental art of extracting comfort from sadness. For instance, Fabiano.

While Nietzsche saw the ultimate irresponsibility and immorality as the scource of freedom; Ree saw in the opposite dark light. As Holingdale well said, that Ree could never have the ability to reach to the state of mind that Nietzsche had - a scientific state of mind.

So nihilists, work harder yet, for you might have Hume and Schopenhaur already behind you, but the bright land of the scientific is still - beyond your desperate reach.

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Hi people,

Tab’s feeling his lack of philosophic education once again.

İmp. - We could go on knocking heads a while longer… But I haven’t the academic ammunition…

eg:

You can extrapolate a concept of God from comparison of yourself with other humans…

etc…

But I’d rather just ask you a question:

“What do you think are the weak-points of the arguments for nihilism…?”

Dunamis is saying (I think) that it takes very few givens to construct a very complex internal language of thought. And that for us, given that we are fundamentally creatures that are defined by our urge to create/discover knowledge/thought - are we equipped to successfully comprehend the answers as to why and where these processes come from…

Anyway - hope my original post gave you something to ponder, and perhaps even shook your nihilist… Faith. :wink:

Over and out.