Comments on “Black magic and meaningness”
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Clarification
Whoops, no, rage, depression, and intellectualization are emotions that go along with nihilism proper, not with the third way that is neither nihilism nor eternalism. That “third way” is the central topic of my Meaningness book. I’ll go back to writing that sometime after I die, probably!
Thanks for pointing this out—my writing was unclear—I have updated it to clarify.
You seem to have arrived at something like that third way yourself by whatever means; I’m not sure you’ll learn much from what my zombie-self will have to say about it, if I ever do get to write it up!
Despair, Rage, and Envy...
interesting to see those three nihilistic emotions showing up practically verbatim here, after being a fan of Bungie’s Marathon series. In those it was three states AI ended up going through (as a process of elimination?) to attain freedom and true “selfhood.”
Following the acronym that game uses it seems appropriate that the next path be actualization or even accountability!
Safeguards to Nihilism: the 4th way
Loved the music clips – I don’t usually listen to this stuff, so they made a great field trip! And here you make it clear about the negative aspects of “black magic” and that nihilistic absorption is the most common fate.
You mention 3 possible responses “to nihilism’s combination of unworkability and seeming necessity”. By this I am assuming you mean both the insight that eternalism is wrong and that if nihilism sucks too. The three options you give are: rage, despair or intellectualization.
But I maybe you should call them “poor responses”, for I am sure you are going to point us to a Fourth Way (ohh, Gurdjieff comes to mind). So I look forward to it. I personally worried about the intellectualization aspect in my own mind – as I have the obvious anti-eternalism insights, but since I naturally feel awe often, and am not a relativist and have a pleasure in seeing others as happy (that innate aspect you spoke of), I don’t think it is really intellectual at all. Nonetheless, how to give someone similar safeguards while pointing them to the stupidity of eternalism has been a puzzle. I don’t think I got to those safeguards by hard work, they were just there for me.
Thoughts? (i keep reading)