Is human connection possible?

General Discussion
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Not really, the point of seeing through something is that you cannot go back to the way things were. They don’t always lead to building meaningful relationships either. When you see social interaction as theater you doubt folks intentions.

Going deeper when you realize “who they are” or their “self” is more just a phantom, nothing but memory and nothing really about them. So when you hear “them” talk about “their” life it’s hard to take it seriously because it’s just a fiction, a story being told, it’s not real.

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That’s your decision. It is not the point. How did you make up that there is a point? You’re doing the very thing you say is fake; deciding how things are based on something you heard.

That’s what you do. If everything is theater then how do you know what ‘not theater’ is?

It’s the same unsolved dilemma. How do you know there is something else that’s real if you see everything as fiction? I don’t have a solution to hard Solipsism so I’m just pointing it out. It’s an interesting philosophical conundrum, but doesn’t offer much in terms of a way to live.

If you’re looking for an ultimate source of wisdom or guidance or something more real, Solipsism is an end. If you’re looking for what to do with the limited time we have and the power we have to create, it’s a beginning.

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@inthedarkness

The questions in the above are intended as open questions, for discussions. They don’t have easy answers. I’m not challenging you, I’m inviting you to consider them.

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I’ve been learning about Candace Pert yesterday and this morning, It helped me recall that I’d actually read about her work, back in the day, and I can recognize how it definitely impacted my thinking moving forward, before drifting into the purgatory of forgotten thoughts.

Now she’s another one who belongs on my list, in solid foundation for appreciating the actual factual reality that your body interacting with the world is the only stuff producing your thoughts, including philosophy and theology and gods, and so on.

Now Candice was quite a woman, driven by two polar passions, and apparently a touch of mental illness. (Like who isn’t, at least among the interesting people.)

So with that background, I think of you and how everything resolves into nothing. And nothing anyone can say, dispels that unsettling reality.

I realized what you are missing is that life is all about making something out of nothing, be it on a grand evolutionary scale - or that naked little newborn human, where biology and environment build something out of nothing.

Take Candice Pert life, she rode the extremes and you can bet she tasted the best and some of the lowest times. She I can relate to, though to use Arthur Uptown colorful language, I and my life, isn’t a bootlace to her, intellect and accomplishments. But that’s okay, we came from different stock, with different lives and different hurdles.

So we add up positives and negative and it added up to zero, nothing. Eh?

So what is the purpose of life?

To make something out of nothing! Even if it is only a fleeting moment that will dissolves back into the nothing.

You’re okay, you think deeply about your thoughts, perhaps too deeply, thus not recognizing the dog chasing tail, but hey, what do I know. You have resolved your truth that you will dedicate your energy to obsessing, or is it worshipping, the ultimate emptiness that is. People revere monks who lived their lives in caves and seclusion. What you are doing is as morally acceptable, so far as I’m concerned, now that I think about it (love those long walks following Maddy around).

Like they say, you do You.

I appreciate that it’s meaningless that I shared the above for you,
but it feels good to me,
to be able to understand the conundrum that your persona
has been for some of us over here at CFI,
well, enough to finally crystalize it into words - so I share.

145

I think I’ve mentioned Jonathan a few times. In his latest long article, he notes that meaningless is trending. Maybe worse, a conservative circle can protect a young person from those feelings. It doesn’t protect them from the distractions, from the erosion of wisdom, or from turning everything into a marketplace. Those of us who have lived through the decline will recognize the trends discussed.

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146

It’s not theater if you stop performing.

This isn’t solipsism but rather recognizing that the things that matter are just stories we tell ourselves. The social constructs that only exist because we all pretend they do and that they matter.

I looked through that and the supposed “Destruction of next generation” (apart from the red flag of asking chatgpt for ANYTHING) is that everything he described is pretty much waking up to how reality really is like instead of the construct we have made to believe is how things are.

147

That’s one of the more insightful things you have said. But my question was about the other things you say. You say that it’s all theater. This is not a revelation that only you see, given Shakespeare put into eloquent prose. It’s something people are aware of in different ways. Some say “playing the game”, or “putting on a face”, or “faking it”. I’m not asking my questions because I need you to explain it, I’m asking how you handle this.

There is definitely a difference between what is going on inside my head, my thoughts, and how I express them, but that’s not a decision I made. I don’t try to pretend that I’m someone else when I talk. Usually, I’m trying to communicate how I’m feeling, my desires, but I come up short. I can’t tell my whole life story to make a point in the moment. People would cut me off, or I would get tired. That’s not acting, that’s trying to be real, within the limits of what language can do.

I assume this stuff is going on to some degree for most people, although some obviously don’t give it much thought, and just go with the flow, talk about the weather, whatever. When I say “solipsism”, I’m not accusing you of taking a position that you are the only being that you can know and it might be that everyone is a zombie. I’m saying whenever I ask a question you answer with something like, “not real”, “we all pretend”, “everything is a social construct”, etc. Those are all along the lines of solipsism.

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I don’t handle it, I don’t understand it no matter how often I play it back.

I do. It’s the only way I know to be. I’d be myself but I don’t know who that is and I’m too afraid of doing something wrong that I’m always trying to live according to “reality” and what is true, regardless of how I feel.

My point is more with the social construction of reality that we live in and how much of it isn’t for granted…I still cannot reconcile that. Even love (something I value a lot) is an invention:

Though some disagree: Is Romantic Love a Western Invention?

Did love begin in the Middle Ages? | University of Oxford.

And so I can’t tell who’s right or how to feel. What is the correct answer here? How do I be right? What is reality in this situation?

149

Actually , love was invented by mothers. :face_blowing_a_kiss:

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150

That’s quite a conundrum. I have heard the idea that seeking what is true is a good place to start if you want to live a good life. I don’t want to walk through that right now, but you might think about it. This one sentence shows a lot of what you have tangled up, like how it seems you think that there is something you feel and something that’s true and those are seperate. Thing is, your feelings are part of what’s true. The part about being afraid is really important. We’re all afraid. We’re afraid of being wrong. We’re afraid of harming someone inadvertently. We’re afraid of how people will react to us. It’s a problem when that fear stops you.

I don’t have time to read these. I’m pretty sure they say something about the word “love”, or some cultural version of what love is. No poet, no philosopher, certainly no scientist, has ever expressed what love is in a way that everyone agrees. If you can reconcile that, you’ll have done something no one else has. You don’t need to, live with the feeling, find others who like to talk about it. You don’t need to figure everything out.

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Hello ITD,

I’ve run out of thoughts to share, but can’t seem to resist peeking on the continuing dialogue. Then this morning I read a fascinating short article by Aadarsh Aanand, over at Medium.com that has you fresh on my mind again.

How we rebuild meaning when we’ve stopped believing in it -

Nov 6th - Aadarsh Aanand - at Medium.com

Since I prefer believing you are sincere, and not a pointless troll, I feel obligate to share because I the feeling you will find this write up intellectually interesting because he eloquently speaks directly to your ongoing debate and frustrations with life and the meaninglessness.

Nietzsche called it the death of God — not as a blasphemy, but as a symbol of liberation. The collapse of external meaning leaves us in an empty field, staring at the sky. It’s terrifying, yes. But it’s also silent. And in that silence, something begins to breathe again.

Sometimes I think nihilism is not the end of meaning, but the exhaustion of false meanings. …

When the idea of “why” collapses, the ground beneath us seems to disappear. You wake up in the morning and ask — Why go to work? Why study? Why love?
And for a while, nothing answers back. …

But maybe it’s not purely negative. Because when the ground falls away, something else becomes visible — space. A strange, empty, open space where everything can begin again.

The Space That Opens Up …

Maybe that’s the secret the void was hiding all along — that meaninglessness is not emptiness, but possibility.

When the ground falls away, the horizon appears.

From Absurdity to Authenticity …

To live after nihilism is to live without needing justification.
It is to love because love itself is beautiful, not because it redeems anything.
It is to create art not to explain life, but to express that we are alive.

In that, we move from absurdity to authenticity — from demanding meaning to embodying it.

The New Horizon – Living Beyond Meaning …

I know lots of quotes, and lots more words & ideas between them. Check out the entire article, live wild, challenge the author with your concerns - I’ll bet Aadi might have some worthy responses for you to chew on.

Good luck

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I can’t read the article because I don’t have a medium account, but looking at the replies you’ve given it has the same problems as I had with Camus. The author cannot see that they are still needing justification or relying on common meaning.

Love is not beautiful, that’s the culture talking and also as the link I mentioned says wasn’t the prevailing attitude over time.

The same with art as well, it has no meaning or expression other than what you derive from it and that is based on how you’re raised.

Ironically they fall back on the same errors in thinking in believing they have moved beyond nihilism when in reality they’re still hiding from it.

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I kinda do because that’s how I know I’m doing the right thing and not living a lie.

Like how I read something someone posted about there being no self and that it’s just brain cells and neuron connections and the like, that consciousness is illusory, things like that. Sometimes being right isn’t about what feels good. I can’t remember the source…

154

Here’s an interesting way to look at it. Culture creates a mold but each of us is unique. The key, not explicitly mentioned in this one sentence, is that we have the opportunity to shape culture with every unique action we take.

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That is so ironic. Because it sure looks like you want to feel good about what you have figured out. You figured out there is no inherent meaning and what I hear from you is you think there’s something wrong with that. You think it demands a nihilistic response.

Nihilism is about meaning, knowledge, and morality. You say there is no reason to be happy and use that as a reason to be unhappy. And you don’t see the bad reasoning.

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More than that it’s also looking at what neuroscience says about us as individuals and the nature of selfhood.

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Neuroscience does not tell us to be nihilistic.

I’m not taking a stand on this, but I’m aware of a range of possibilities that come out of neuroscience.

While the self might not be a material entity that you can hold in your hand, there’s a growing mountain of empirical evidence suggesting it is a very real phenomenon with a measurable physical correlate that emerges from the intricate dance of cognitive processes within the brain.

**

A robust sense of self is crucial for ideal human experience, as it can have significant effects on mental health and moral reasoning. It allows individuals to make sense of the world, take responsibility, make value-based decisions, and connect meaningfully with others.

On this forum, the idea is that we say more than “neuroscience says”. You’re referring to decades of study, gigabytes of data, unresolved hypotheses. What is it that you think it says and what source backs up what you think? The process of developing that explanation will help you answer your own questions.

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Unfortunately the source given to me is lost because the forum closed down and there aren’t copies of my posts. As for what neuroscience says the common response I got is that it says there isn’t one, though that could just be the folks I look for. There was some source about Telonomic matter but I never understood it.

Though I’m not sure how reliable the source I got was given other topics usually posted to that forum in that time: Lying as Murder - Page 2 - Philosophy Now Forum

159

Yes. Exactly. This is called confirmation bias. We address it on this forum all the time. It is common on all social media, including ones that seem sciencey.

This is not data. This is you looking around and keeping a rough estimate of what you find which is you confirming your bias and getting trapped in internet algorithms.

Then find a real study and some real experts and do real research. Otherwise what you are doing is, “well, I saw this article once, I think it meant what I believe is true.”

Then you are not qualified to draw conclusions and make claims. This is why everyone argues with you and then you feel isolated. But the sad thing is, you say it about yourself, that you have doubts about what you know. I have those all the time, but I call it curiosity and I revel in the joy of learning. That’s what we’re all doing, we know we don’t know. Some people deal with it by drinking, some by learning and discussing.

That’s part of critical thinking. Back when people on the Internet were telling me my reasoning was flawed, I stopped and studied that first. Then I went back to figuring out the mysteries of the universe.

160

Source? Neuroscience isn’t one monolithic thing.

You interpreted something you read somewhere. I’ll bet others can interpret something else from what you said. But will never know because you keep your source to yourself.

Regarding

What’s that really telling you?

If an absence of an absence is a thing and the absence of a thing is an absence is reality purely absence considering all things are an absence of absence?
…
What even is so-called ‘pure absence’? And, ‘Reality’ IS ‘Reality’, and NOT so-called ‘pure absence’.
…
A pretty good example of the fact that reality isn’t made up of words.
…
absenceOf(x) is a predicate while “absence” (value 0) and “thing” (value 1) are values in the domain, which is a finite Galois field of order 2.

The absenceOf predicate can be implemented with the x+1 expression:

absenceOf(x) = (x+1) mod 2

Example calculations:

absenceOf(absence) = absenceOf(0) = (0+1) mod 2= 1 = thing

absenceOf(thing) = absenceOf(1) = (1+1) mod 2= 0 = absence

So, in general, the relationship between “absence”, i.e. “nothing”, and “thing”, i.e. “something”, can be modeled by arithmetic in a Galois field of order two.

This functions in an abstract, Platonic reality that may or may not be structurally similar to some aspects of physical reality.
…
absence has nothing on nonsense
-Imp

It’s all notions bouncing around within our mind-bubble, what’s missing is some fundamental foundational recognition for Physical Reality. And for a serious foundation, you would have no choice but to better appreciate the fact of Earth’s Evolution, and how that directly led to your own human being.

Trying to figure out your Mind (your self), without acknowledging the biological creature that is your body, leaves one with an empty dog chasing tail exercise.

For what it’s worth, Medium.com doesn’t charge a fee, so “joining” is as easy a filling out a couple questions. Since Medium.com also aspires to being a discussion platform, it makes all the sense in the world, that they require participants to sign up. Lots of interesting author over there, serious science, serious stuff, and woo, and Jesus saves, it’s a multi-ring circus of the imagination.