Alone With All of the Suffering in the World

Alone with all of the Suffering in the World, it is our nature to find the beauty in life. Merely consider that phrase, “find the beauty,” does this not admit that beauty is not evident to begin with? To admit that the appearance actually is what it ought to be is anathema to all of us. How could something which is essentially beautiful cover itself in such hideous outcomes? How can that be beautiful which bares poison fruits?

It is not possible to escape one's subjective bias. It is however exceedingly simple to be honest. 

Death must be, or at minimum appear to be, a terror, else why endure? Pain, fear, and hunger are the substance of life, only made preferable by the familiar thought of greater evils yet.

Find the people you want to die with and love them everyday. Suffering is the general rule and any small moment of happiness should be held with much gratitude.

How many have been cut down, whose season never came?

Stolen from nothingness and sentenced to this prison of flesh. At anytime we might escape, were it not for some genetic spell that not only compels us to prolong our exile from non-existence, but further drives us to capture the ghost of unbegotten souls and entomb them into bodies made of rotting meat and goo. Reason can scream until her lungs collapse, but every sunrise and every new baby born casts the seductive allure of Hope.

Those who claim faith is a virtue are likely the same as those who cannot live without God, or meaning, or some affirmation of life. It is unscrupulous to make a virtue of what one deems as necessity.

Revising history so that the nation or *the party* has never done wrong is a prerequisite for facism. This is followed by more general anti-intellectualism, which must be explained by some Marxist conspiracy from the left. Which eventually leads to political violence towards dissidents. 

         All the while reinforcing the image of a centralized strongman (a gendered word I will continue to use until we see a female fascist leader) as the one true voice of the people. These are the *real* citizens of the nation and not the traitors who fell for or else cynically perpetuated the conspiracy against it. He is democratically elected and then does away with democratic norms. He locks away immigrants, minorities, and dissenters, all of whom can not be trusted.

         How does the business class, which has up to now used the state to manage its affairs under the guise of democracy, react to such a man? He has no desire to empower or unite the workers. If anything, he assures them he will consolidate their private ownership of the means of production. Regulations are gutted. The military helps to expand markets by means of neoliberal colonialism. A strong economy means a strong business class, the strongman uses ideals of patriotism and masculinity to justify giving them whatever they need. The people are happy to do it, because their heroic man of action has never let *them* down.

Claiming that this is the best of all possible words is not an absolutely positive claim. Rather, if rape, genocide, and eating the flesh of others merely to deter one's inevitable demise is the best God could do, then the argument against the morality of his decision to create anything is all the more bulstered.

Theologians have a lot of abstract sophism to justify why the parts of the Bible that agree with the culture they were born into are still valid and the ones that don't are no longer. What a coincidence.

       Jesus told his followers to give up their belongings and walk the Earth to preach the Gospel. He told everyone he met to do that. At the end of Luke 9, a man said he would follow him but first he ask jesus to wait for him to say goodbye to his family, but Jesus said no one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of god.

           It's been mainstream scholarship for over a century now that the historical Jesus believed the apocalypse was coming during his generation. That's why he preached forgiveness, faith, humility, and giving up all of your stuff to the poor. Literally, none of that stuff had any value because the apocalypse was coming any day now. 

          But the real religion of today is capitalism. Where are the Christians that preach any part of the Bible that doesn't mesh with the arbitrary moral values of the society we happen to be born into? 

          They used to kill men for working on the sabbath and sure, Jesus healed some people, but that didn't mean the rule was totally gone. In Acts 5, Paul and his followers were captured by the Sanhedrin and ultimately released. If these early Christians had been telling people it was OK to eat pork and work on the sabbath, the Jewish court of law would not have let them go.

         So sure, professional theologians wouldn't give you the answer I did. If they did, they'd be out of a job. But it's pretty obvious what they're doing. Religion is just a tool to reinforce the ideological superstructure of whatever culture it's present in. Well, the dominant religion. When Christianity was a cult of rejects, they had different values. It was when the Roman equivof the bourgeois appropriated it that the message and morality changed. **How could it not?**

Just as man as claimed 10,000 times that God is the source of fire, lightening, the wandering of the stars, and every other scientific phenomenon, so too has he claimed that the laws of his society or his economy are immutable laws of nature; though we now know those laws were mere sadistic rationalizations of slavery, apartheid, and established power hierarchies. Do not think that your God or your society is anything different.

One need not scour books of history to see that all revolutions either ended in massacres or else devolved into the state of tyranny we currently find ourselves in. Every progress in the goods of society, as in knowledge and medicine, was also a progress in its evils, mass incarceration, climate destruction and the possibility of nuclear war. 

The problem is that anything can be justified by a principle. Morality is compassion and compassion is just some arbitrary emotion. Logic matters, but intuition matters too. There can never be a settled answer. You want to reduce suffering? Kill everyone, slowly and painfully, so long as they don't have offspring. No matter what principle you abide by, morality taken to its logical conclusion is evil. Compassion, nonsensical, random, feeling is the best you can do.

Life: Insufferable byproduct of hydrogenated carbon.

People strongly prefer to be the way they are, goodness, logic, science, whatever values and ethics be damned.

When everything hurts, and has always hurt, and nothing is beautiful, nor has it ever been so, it is difficult to notice. One needs a point of reference but there are none. Our senses adapt and become dull. Any reprieve from suffering seems a blessing. This is the point I aim to make in this tome; that ours is a world of boundless horror, much of which is man made, though some is due to the inherent nature of existence. Our MALIGNANTLY USELESS consciousness is ultimately to blame for all of it. We are biological machines, bundles of behaviors and responses. Society is a brainwashing cult, worshiping capitalism and mediocrity. We are alone in our dystopia. It is not at the hands of an evil cabal that we suffer, but a pernicious force that has restricted the scope of possibility itself. There is no act of rebellion which will not be assimilated and then devoured by the black atrocity. The blood of Meaning itself has been drained and we are the dying cells of God's corpse.

Anyone who wants to be remembered after their death fails to appreciate what it means to die.

Science makes progress by extracting all philosophy from its theories. What remains is an agnostic structuralism and inhuman, mathematical descriptions of the thing in itself. Indeed, the word "thing" may be too strong and misleading a description for reality. There is no experimental principle that can discern between theoretical realism or procedural heuristics which yield desired outcomes. To the truly initiated, there is no difference between science and magic.

Living ethically is inherently absurd and the attempt is an egomaniacal delusion. Each moment is determined by the position and motions of the previous moment. All of the universe has been, is, and will be a chain reaction of dismal torment. The scripts of our lives have already been written and mass reproduced. We are clones but available in every color. All the same, how one can know of the agony and unnecessary suffering for the sake of pleasure that is animal agriculture and still lick one's lips is beyond any concept of compassion.

Depression can be caused by the loss if smell. It's not a big deal, it's an animal process.

Therapists like to say that alcohol is a depressant. Don't let them confuse you. Alcohol is a depressant because it depresses parts of your brain associated with motor function, speech, and inhibition. Clinical depression is the result of a serotonin abnormality. Studies show that alcohol temporarily modulates serotonin in a way similar to SSRIs. In other words, alcohol has nasty side effects, but it is technically an antidepressant. Why else would people "self-medicate" with alcohol?

Driving a vehicle and using a computer are the 2 most universal and necessary skills in modern society. We don't learn these skills by going to school, which would be redundant at best. We learn by doing and especially by doing wrong. We learn by watching friends and family, we learn because we are interested, and we learn by experimenting. School is not the kind of thing that can provide that sort of experience. It seems that compulsory education is set up to as much as possible, prevent learning. Every graduate on the first day of their new job will be familiar with the line, "forget what they told you in the classroom, this is how you really do it." Teachers try to justify their positions by saying that a degree shows that you can commit and follow through on something. This apology only makes sense if you forget the immense price that has been paid during years of meaningless tasks and rote memorization. The emphasis on grading discourages experimenting and learning creatively. Time that could have been much better spent on the job. What else could be the explanation of the age old platitude, "those who can not do, teach." Prospective carpenters and mechanics learn by watching from a young age. The original hunters and gatherers, who occupied over 90% of human existence, learned by watching. They begin doing simple tasks and gradually take on greater responsibilities. Doctors follow a similar pattern, as does any profession in which competence matters.

Everything you do is a natural reaction, given what you've been through and the biology you have. You're not special. You're not held to any higher standards than anyone else. Life is painful enough and plenty of people are out to get you. Be a friend to yourself, forgive yourself. Let go of guilt.

What would self actualization even mean, when the self is swamped in a muck of aggressive mediocrity? A little gray blob, flourishing among a big gray mess. No one truly cares about abstract deontologies nor do they even far revere their own happiness, whatever that is. We run towards pleasure and away from pain using the habits and perspectives handed down to us by the factory education system. The Earth gave rise to life so that it may hydrogenate carbon as society did the individual so that they could work and consume; all of their fruits trickling upwards. For most humans, that is the entirety of their purpose.

Organize, say the socialists. Socialism is little more than a book club and few will even go that far. Time is up. The Earth is dead and what remains is the nervous reflexes of a rotting, cosmic corpse. 

The problem of suffering is the first, true, and only bit of philosophy that matters. Without seeing a question from first this perspective, nothing can be in its appropriate context. The reality of pointless suffering immediately debunks every false doctrine because it is anathema to the imagination, which is why most philosophers fail to rightly account for it. It is the only problem because without it, there would be no stakes of any kind. 

After God, the biggest lie is that humans have no purpose. A hammer was made to hit a nail. Tables were made to hold cups. Cars were made to drive. Humans, for the most part, are made to be slaves. Some humans don't have a purpose, they get to do whatever they want. The rest of us are this. Machines who convert suffering into value. Nihilism is yet another optimistic delusion.

The most pernicious idea is that we are the creators of anything. Humanity is only a symptom, not a cause. Life, or existence if you prefer, is the disease.

I don't know if its some quality of human nature, or just dumb luck. Maybe there is a God who guarantees doom to sentient life. Whatever mechanic or occult force it is, this true gravity, the pessimistic force that bends the arc of history, must exist. It is palpable in the world. Both history and daily life reek of it. This inhumane manifestation of dismay and entropy. Perhaps, given the stupid affairs of people everywhere, this dark power over existence is the only true justice there is; that a virus kills itself in the process of killing its host.

I am speaking as a prisoner behind my own eyes. I am a homunculus, trapped in whatever defined form you can imagine. My soul is formless and this jagged existence stifles me. We are all chemicals. Different chemicals interact and each combination of interacting chemicals has a unique output. Each chemical molecule has its own personality. They bounce into each other, during the course of the constantly shifting sands of change. 

All we know is inputs and outputs. Same cause yields the same effect. Our senses are the input and our behavior is the output. Whatever happens in between input and output is irrelevant. Maybe our souls are magic. Maybe we're a complex harmony of nerve cells. The highest knowledge we can attain isn't questions of how or why, but simple associations between inputs and outputs. Whatever reality is, whatever we are, it seems we're in some sort of vehicle that interacts with reality. If I do this, that happens. If she does that, this happens.

Scientists, philosophers, and theologians all describe what we are and what the world is like and why things are the way they are. There questions are eternal, unprovable, and immutable in our hearts. We long to know why, but the only progress we've ever made in our pursuit of wisdom is in correctly identifying patterns of inputs and outputs. Sensory information comes in, we form beliefs about that information, behavior comes out. Certain behaviors will help the human animal survive and reproduce and others will kill it. Additionally, human molecules are competing with other complex molecules for resources, thus non optimal behaviors do not propagate. There is a constant blast of ephemeral, unique chemicals interacting in new ways and the molecules that successfully reproduce themselves begin to propagate. Various propagators compete for resources. The surrounding environment constantly changes, causing the meaning of "optimal behavior" to constantly change as well. 

Skepticism is only possible when one appreciates the difference between belief and understanding.

Models are imaginary simulations of how reality might work. They may lead to correct predictions or false predictions. Science is the creating and testing of models. When a model makes correct predictions long enough and widely enough, we behave as if it were true. We can never know for sure, the only thing we can do is make associations between inputs and outputs. Theories or models are merely a clever narrative that relates inputs and outputs, the specific how's and why's don't matter. These models are like heuristic devices to help memorize what inputs lead to what outputs. Naturally, humans mistake these narratives for reality, because they forget that reality is inherently unimaginable. Color only exists in the mind, objectively only the frequency of electromagnetic wavelengths exist. Different animals represent these stimuli in different ways, from slightly varying shades of color or else not visually at all but through the media of other senses. Perhaps by echolocation or even as tactile sensation. Alien species may have evolved yet more foreign media of representation. 

Descartes believed that the existence of the self was indubitable. There are, as with any beliefs whatsoever, metaphysical assumptions behind this stance. That the self is a thing, rather than an action, for example.

What can be more pessimistic than Augustine's doctrine of original sin or the Stoic doctrine of assent? To say that the evils upon which we are inflicted were caused by our fathers, or to say that we might deny these evils by force of will if only we were stronger or more rational, are these not multipliers of evil? That it is indelibly stained in our nature, or that it is by our own weakness that we suffer. In either case, wouldn't all of our suffering, everywhere, be deserved? Infants, animals, and the diseased? These philosophies stimulate the intellect only enough to lie it back into slumber, believing itself wiser in its ignorance.

The problem of suicide, a la Camus, is not the problem of the phenomenon of suicide. The problem he is concerned with is whether or not life itself is worth living. To be so famously quoted is hideous when so often those who quote him do not read the very next lines. Suicide is almost never the result of a rational calculation but most often the result of emotion over powering reason. To intellectually conclude that existence has a negative value seldom inspires one to commit suicide, nor does simply speaking honestly morally require one to take any such action. That is only insisted by those who do not wish to hear the whispers of despair that they have long ago locked up in the attic of their soul.

The genius of Greek philosophy is that humans do not intentionally harm themselves. No one desires an ultimate outcome which is evil to them, even if they accept minor evils in expectation of major goods. For all of humanity's rancor, we are simply ignorant of, or powerless to attain, what is good. On this basis all are due sympathy as radical as soliloquized by none other than Jesus Christ, who's dying words were said to be "Forgive them father, for they know not what they do."

Look at it this way, all the bad things in life are problems you wouldn't have and all the good things in life are solutions you wouldn't need. By all means, carry on the life you have begun, but to create new life can not be permitted.

It is essentially absurd to eulogize about the wretchedness of humanity while pleading that we voluntarily walk into extinction. For the very reasons that give rise to the problem, our pleas will fall on deaf ears.

A broken leg isn't so bad that you need to be euthanized, yet it is bad enough that a reasonable person wouldn't want to be the cause of it. Likewise, the human predicament isn't so bad that it requires suicide but it's still bad enough that we shouldn't want to cause it. A non existent person isn't being deprived of beauty and happiness, "they" don't desire the things we consider goods in life the same way a healthy person doesn't desire medicine for a condition they don't have. "They" don't exist. Once they do exist, however, they're guaranteed to suffer, struggle, age and die. For first world countries, you and I are most likely to die of heart failure after about 3 billion beats and cancer second most likely, that's assuming everything goes as well as it could. We are more likely to kill ourselves than be killed by someone else. Admittedly, there's good in life but look at it like this; in a situation where it's impossible to get consent, it's one thing to harm someone in order to prevent greater harm, but that doesn't mean we can harm someone in order to benefit them. Especially if the harms vastly outweigh the benefits.

Sadness doesn't make me cry. I laugh at sadness. It's happiness, the real and pure happiness, that makes me cry. I'm not tough. I'm acclimated to one thing. I cry like I laugh; as much as possible.

Philosophical pessimism means (1) there is significant, purposeless suffering in the world (injustice) (2) happiness is merely the absence of desire/ suffering (3) nothing can be done to fundamentally change these facts.

Countless species of countless individuals, generated and regenerated countless times across countless stars. A universe of endless blackness, punctuated with confusion and death, ending in eternal entropy.

Anyone who claims that you cannot derive an ought from an is has forgotten the throes of suffering.

Prejudice is often a self fulfilling prophecy. Goodness requires opportunity.

Morality is simply trying to make life better. This is a highly subjective and controversial endeavor, open to lots of interpretations, but it's also completely unavoidable. 

To learn to desire that things be as they are is admitting that fulfilling your actual desires is impossible. In truth, it's the same thing as giving up hope.

Having to work your whole life just to have your basic needs met is not freedom.

Love is another failed distraction from the human predicament. Historically, romance became a prominent theme in the arts as religiosity declined. Humanity needed something to believe in, but it's hard to idealize another person the way we can idealize our fathers in the sky.

Almost everything, almost everywhere is black and void. It's stuff that's weird.

That's the problem with good and bad, there are people on both sides who are suffering because they believe in something. None of us asked to be born and most of us aren't handling it well. Some of us are handling it better than others, but all of us are suffering. Maybe we die of cancer, maybe our kids get shot up at school, maybe we're poor and everything we do is wrong, maybe we protest and accomplish nothing. There isn't much good any of us can do, there aren't really any good choices.

        So why don't we stop dragging it out? It's all going to end anyway, why not stop dragging more innocent souls into this mess? Enlightenment is not an option, but voluntary extinction is.

"Science" can explain everything because it's just another word for what seems to work. We pave roads in hell, we invent patterns in the chaos.

You live, you die, nothing very important happens in the middle whatsoever.

A suicide is forced to accept treatment while women who are told pregnancy will most likely kill them are not prevented from breeding. In otherworlds, killing yourself is only legal so long as you leave at least an orphan behind to replace you.

When competition is involved, success is proof of hard work. That hard work makes the outcome "fair". The alternative, that 10,000 background factors besides hard work coalesced into an essentially random outcome, is unthinkable. That we actively create and participate in a system where the few get the most and the most get little is unquestionable.

L

Existential nihilism in itself isn't a problem. If life were perfectly like heaven, no one would care if it had a purpose. Life isn't, though. History is a tale of constant domination, exploitation, and destruction. Something like 75% of the global population lives below the dollar amount it takes to feed, shelter, and clean themselves. The UN has a rough estimate of several million child sex slaves globally. The environment is in certain collapse and already causing people to starve, lose their homes, and loved ones. Not just in 3rd world countries, it happens everywhere, due to floods, hurricanes, wildfires, basically every natural disaster except earthquakes. The cherry on top is that almost none of this suffering is completely necessary. We have food, shelter, and soap/ basic medicine for everyone. We could have avoided global warming. 

That's not even considering animal suffering. As a group, factory farm animals make up the majority of land mammals, and they all experience holocaust level suffering. Wild animals don't fare much better. As Schopenhauer said, compare the feelings of a rabbit to the wolf that is eating it. The rabbit's terror surely far outweighs the wolf's ephemeral satisfaction, which itself is

I find it difficult to see how human connection, or nature's beauty, or whatever else outweighs the problem of suffering. Think about what satisfaction is. It's just the waning of some sort of pain/ desire. Most of the "good" things in life can be seen as merely the termination of a pain. There are some undeniable joys in life, from mere pleasure to self-realization and true love, but they can't outweigh the suffering in the world. We all know of several forms of chronic pain, from injury, aging, or mental illness, yet there is no complimentary form of chronic pleasure. In fact, we eventually become acclimated to pleasure while sufferers of chronic pain gradually become more sensitive to pain. Some suffering (from mere pain to Guantanamo level horror) is unavoidable, while happiness is quite avoidable. Even enlightenment, the rarest and supposedly highest form of happiness, seems to merely be the cessation of all desire, a neutral tranquility.

The problem isn't that life is meaningless. The problem is that suffering - the heart of all life - is meaningless. 

The essence of Christianity is love for God and love for man. While pre modern religious devotion has declined in response to scientific progress, stability, state dominance, and creature comforts, platonic compassion for all living things is still possible. It will likely never happen but it is the single, most life affirming ideal to live for. The world may never change but I can live more in line with those ideals, you likely can too. We can collectively live better, more compassionately than we presently do. I personally cannot escape the feeling that I could be doing more and I believe that feeling dwells within us all. We only need to search the chambers of our being to find it.

         Why would you want to see life as a fundamental horror? The question itself betrays that knowledge and/ or belief is at least somewhat subjective. Why choose to believe something so depressing when there are self consistent alternatives that are *true enough*? Truth itself is incoherent without some subjective epistemic values, why not compromise truth for reassurance? Both are legitimate values.The answer is because there is something inherently selfish about ignoring the truth, especially when there are others who do not have the privilege.

      So much extreme suffering is avoidable, if only we were more conscious of it. Most of us can donate some leisure money to effective charities. Most of us can buy vegan alternatives instead of animal products. We can be nicer, we can be more forgiving and tolerant. Most importantly, we can end suffering permanently as we gradually fade back into nothingness. Those that have meditated seriously on death and have truly come to accept it as nothing to fear, as well as lived a life reasonably in line with their ideals do not run from the light but embrace its warmth with a dignified peace.

Man made God to comfort himself in his horror.

A typical shovel at a hardware store is designed to hold 21.5 pounds of dirt. This number was arrived by a man named Frederick Taylor, who paid multiple workers to move piles of dirt from one place to the other. At the end of the day, he recorded how long it took and cut off a bit of their shovels. The next day the workers would mirthlessly shovel all the dirt back to where it was. Taylor recorded the times and cut a bit more off the shovels. 

     At first, each day the workers finished a bit faster. Eventually they started taking longer. Taylor used this data to find the optimum size for a shovel. Too big and the loads were too heavy, too small and workers had to make too many trips. 

       Frederick Taylor didn't stop at shovels. He and his methods eventually came to inspire Henry Ford and every corporate manager since then. He was trying to solve a problem of inefficiency and disorder. 

         Before industrialization, most workers were artisans. They picked their hours and they created products from start to finish. They sold the products of their labor. When they started working in factories, they generally worked on, say, cars, from start to finish.

        For Taylor, this was a problem. Workers often showed up irregularly for work and frequently drunk. Worst of all, they possessed knowledge and skills that made them more valuable than the managers and possibly the owners. This would make controlling them difficult, since they had significant leverage over the company.

       The solution was simple, division of labor. From now on, the workers would only do 1 or 2 tasks. It would be repeated to such an extent that they'd become specialized and ruthlessly efficient. Best off all, no single worker would understand the overall process of manufacturing (only managers would understand this) and if they didn't fall in line, they were easily replacable.

         Taylor's scientific management ultimately led to increases of several hundred percent for the companies that employed it. This ultimately led to a problem humanity had never faced before, over production. People only needed so many cars, so many beds, so many dishes, meanwhile companies needed to continuously grow and generate higher profit margins for capitalists or else they'd lose to their competitors. 

       Enter Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He is largely responsible for modern advertising and the public relations industry. His job was to convince us we need more things. He is the reason we don't just buy clothes or cars, we buy Gucci and Lamborghini. We don't buy something because we need it for practical reason, we need it as a symbol of status and identity. 

      This, then, is overwhelmingly the state of our lives (those lucky enough to be in developed countries.) We roll a big stone up a hill, 21.5 lbs at a time. Then, as we buy fashionable clothes and get drunk at clubs, hoping to attract a mate with the right brands and pop culture references, watch it all fall back down. Eventually, our bodies and minds will fails us and we will die knowing we helped the line on the graph go up a little bit more.

Many are appauled by the possibility that we have no rights. Most people consider it synonymous with morality and even if you're simply offering an alternative to deontology, you sound like you're disparaging morality altogether. Where do these rights come from? God never mentioned them in any religion. Nature is wholly indifferent and at best is the dry well of sterile moral-facts. The government, although arbitrary and wrongfully discriminatory in enforcing them, can really be said to be the only source of rights

I'll never find love because I don't love anyone or anything.

Cioran had the best line regarding suicide, something to the effect of, "What's the rush?"

The heroic narrative that justified your life has been annihilated. You're suddenly realizing the cruel and terrible consequence of your egomaniacal actions is a life of indefinite but extreme suffering and psychological mutilation. You will be treated like a filthy fucking animal until you eventually die alone, in a cage with only the knowledge that everyone hated you and it was all for nothing.

    You carry on every day. You lack the will for suicide.

Monsters, villains, they always hum these happy little tunes. It adds to the horror. What should be so scary about a nursery rhyme? What is it about the context that turns even innocence into eeriness?

    Was anything ever normal, or was normality itself a childhood illusion, cast upon us by those we trusted? 

There are plenty of things I swore I'd never do. Yet, every time I drew a line in the sand, time and circumstance conspired against me and I ended up failing myself.

Both Hesiod and the old testament considered work to be a curse. From childhood we've all experienced a disdain for work. It's only over time that we are inculcated to believe work is an honor. Only since the rise of capitalism has this phenomenon occured.

     Consider that the earliest conception of "freedom" was the antithesis of slavery. Further we have countless historical examples of hunter-gatherers who preferred to commit suicide rather than be forced into slavery or even simply modern civilization. The only work they knew was the types of things many of us would do in our free time. Hunting, fishing, strolling in the wood, building for ourselves, helping loved ones. 

       Some may argue that it is only a matter of perspective. Rather than seeing work as a curse we ought to look at it in a positive, life affirming light. There can be no more potent heroin than wilful brainwashing and CBT, especially when it benefits the hegemon. 

What does it mean that life is fundamentally horrifying? When looked at honestly, which is the closest to unbiased we can achieve, life is something that should inspire fear. 

     Reality outside of our minds is incomprehensible and to quote Lovecraft, "the oldest and most powerful fear is the fear of the unknown." We are chemical puppets yet we can never truly feel that we have no freewill or true self without having gone insane. The universe is completely indifferent to our existence yet we feel the need, many of us desperately, to believethat we are significant and made with purpose.

      The objectivist may reply that none of this should trouble us. It's all a part of life, perhaps it's even arrogant of us to want more than this. We are lucky to exist at all, right? There is a rare beauty that we would be missing out on had we never come to be.

     This assumes that those rare jewels of intimacy and glimpses of the aurora above our heads somehow justify human trafficking, child rape, malaria, starvation, decimating earthquakes that trigger tidal waves, and 10,000 other tragedies that are not at all rare.

     The objectivist is guilty of looking away from suffering; of having had the stupid fortune to even be permitted to look away. 

Everyday is a funeral, you just aren't usually invited. 

Birth, school, work, disappointment and jaded cynicism, a body filling with entropy and the inevitable succumbing. This is what we condemn our children to. The old haze the young with the torture they were initiated into. Generational trauma.

    Stop kidding yourself, we only give birth for the feeling of narcissistic superiority. 

They try to call it "reductionism" like it's a theory. The fact is, once you know how every little cog in the machine operates and interacts, you know how the whole will behave. 

    Freewill is an illusion. The future is already predetermined. It's not a theory, it is one of the most well proven facts of physics and honest common-sense. It isn't even complicated, it just isn't the answer they were looking for. 

At night there are unknowable predators, your languid thoughts. You beg for sleep but there is only paranoia. You remember the day and realize it was a pyrrhic victory. "But at what cost?" 

It is possible to want to reduce suffering in the world without morality. 

Nietzsche claimed we cannot evaluate the value of life from the inside. This was his refutation of Schopenhauer's rejection of life.

   This is the atheist's version of the platitude, "God works in mysterious ways." Life is not mysterious. Not if we're being honest. 

>so why not live to spit this absurd existence?

     You're not spiting anyone, you're just perpetuating the same torture for yourself and others. Just because something is so unlikely or improbable doesn't mean it's worthwhile. There are times when one has bad luck on top of bad luck and despite all odds, they find themselves in the worst of all possible circumstances. 

         You can still look away from death, that's why you sputter the things you're saying now. The closer you are to the whirlpool of death, the further behind you the event horizon lies. Eventually you will have to admit, dying is horrible. This is terrifying. All of this pain and suffering, my endurance and my sacrifice, it amounts to nothing. Erasure.

       You and I will be replaced with new, naive infants who too will be sucked into the black waters and realize the same yawning horror we felt in our final moment.

      The only praiseworthy thing a human can do is to deny their programming. Stop having children.

       Creating your own values, rebelling against nihilism, or whatever; that's the flimsiest excuse for perpetuating meaningless suffering there is. At least Christians believe in salvation. Absurdism says there's no reason to believe in salvation but do it any way. Just like Tertullian, "I believe [in the Trinity] because it is absurd." 

       Do you believe in unicorns because it's absurd? Do you believe in ritual sacrifice because it's absurd? Hell, even people who did believe in those things didn't believe *on account of* it being absurd; in fact, given what they knew about the world, it was perfectly sensible.

       It's only at the edge of the abyss, which gazes so deeply into man, that he decides to become absurd. His ego will not allow any other course of action.

In truth, religion is a subset of philosophy. Any thinking / observant person has a philosophy. I see the world as some meaningless, powerful physical/chemical reaction and I do have moments I can only describe as "religious." Or better, "affirming."

       I was talking to my wife about the G spot and how to find it. The conversation led into a demonstration and it was kind of clinical. I was fully dressed and initially not even aroused, while she was on her back and exposed. I started fingering her while I continued to watch TV.

     She was initially skeptical but I kept hitting the spot and making the right gestures. It didn't take long. She gave in. Moaning, grinding, yearning for more. She grabbed my arm and squeezed my muscles. She finally lost control and came.

      I felt like a doctor. I felt like a scientist who just finished some sort of presentation. I felt like I had some sort of objective control over her, like, "you can say or believe whatever you want, but all I have to do is reach inside of you and press this button and you will succumb to this overwhelming orgasm."

     There was an obvious sexual component to this experience however it was also quite affirming in my worldview that we are nothing more than biological robots. 

"Sadness gives measure to happiness. Death gives meaning to life." 

    Except that happiness is merely the absence of sadness. Pain, in it's many forms, is what drives us to eat, to work, to fornicate, etc. Satisfaction is only meeting your desires. You can eat or have sex or whatever and be satisfied. Pain has no satisfaction, you can always hit a lower rock bottom.

      The fact is that we only suffer (with brief commercial breaks from suffering) and then die, ultimately to be forgotten. That we die, means all of this horrible life was for nothing. There is no greater purpose. We are an accident, a byproduct of physics. In the end the sun will swallow the earth, every star will be extinguished and none of the human drama will ever have happened, except in the mathematical data of indistinguishable particles, swirling in the black void of cosmos.

Where does alcohol come from? Yeast eats sugar and excretes alcohol. A small amount of yeast, in a sealed container, can be given an enormous amount of sugar and it will inevitably consume and overpopulate. The foam in beer is the dead corpses of the yeast.

     Similar phenomena have been seen with rats, given enough food they will consume and overpopulate until their fixed income isn't enough and the population perishes.

      The same thing happened on Easter Island. Green abundance, yet totally isolated from the rest of the world. They ate all the fish. They ate all the mammals. They chopped every tree. Then they ate themselves. Humans are exceptional, after all.

       Now here we are, a global civilization, on a tiny island of green abundance amidst the infinite abyss.

Suffering cannot be eliminated; only shifted. Even if man were fully satisfied he would, out of spite, find a way to ruin paradise. Is this not the meaning of the allegory of the garden of Eden? 

There are micro-meanings and values. They are the subjective experience of various drives and desires. 

There is a distinction between wanting not to be born and wanting to kill yourself. Once alive, we have an interest in staying alive. It may not be rational but it is real. While it may not be immutable (certainly there are fates worse than death which we my wish to avoid) it is felt.

Ideas, especially scientific theories, are merely tools we use to manipulate the world. Whether or not they are true is irrelevant. Ignoring the question of truth or even intelligibility is what allowed physicists to develop quantum theory, a theory so convoluted that it cannot even be explained in natural language without sounding like mysticism.

    This is the embarrassing distinction between "materialism" and "physicalism." Modern physics knows that more than simply atoms and the void exist, so materialists updated their ontology to say "whatever is required by physicists to explain reality is what exists."

      However, you merely end up being led in circles when you ask physicists what particles and fields actually are. Eventually they will tell you it is up to philosophy to explain that. Scientific theories live and die by their predictions and this is all we can say about scientific theories; the ones we have now have so far stood up to observation and will likely be updated by future generations.

      The progress of science, as far as truth is concerned, has been a wandering in the desert, towards the unpromised land.

Their go-to response to pessimism is something like "if you think that way you'll make it come true." That same logic doesn't work the other way, being optimistic doesn't make it come true. At any rate, since most people have a Pollyanna bias, realistic expectations are automatically considered pessimistic.

Not all lives are worth living, even Plato's Socrates admitted this. In Xenophon, Socrates argued that his old age and waxing senility was, at least in part, why he accepted the hemlock.

The problem with there being no God isn't that there must necessarily be no moral facts. It's possible that we live in a world with moral facts and no God, but without someone to dole out justice, there's no practical reason to care about morality. Those that seem to are often fooling themselves. At best it's because they need to see themselves as good people, but even then there's always some aspect of themselves their entirely blind to.

Most will admit that it is possible to exaggerate the gloominess of one's life; yet few admit one may be wrong about how cheerful their existence is. There is ample psychological evidence that, while we may accurately judge our present conditions, we are exceedingly and inaccurately optimistic about our past experiences and future prospects.

Nietzsche criticizes secular compassion as an unjustified bias inherited from Christianity but fails to show that Christianity is the origin of these sentiments. Surely, if there never was a God to command our love, then divine beneficence came from the realm of human experience and imagination to begin with. 

Sometimes the only response to the overwhelming evils of this world is to chip away at it. Winning battles in a war that is ultimately lost because, for some, that is the only way to be.

Quantum weirdness largely comes from the difficulty in translating the mathematics of quantum mechanics into natural language. Ultimately, all human ideas are invented to model aspects of reality; thus they represent a compromise between reality and the limitations of our knowledge.

Art, too, serves science (not to imply a hierarchy of disciplines that all act as handmaidens to scientific discvery.) Artists generate evocations of the beautiful and mysterious; new realms for human theories to map out. The imagination will have more or less degree of relevance to reality, but there's no way of knowing where theoretical inspiration will come from. 

Sanity is gradual and those at the extreme of insanity are just as unacceptable as those at the extreme of sanity.

Beautiful creatures may only exist when there is a monster to protect them. 

We all have an optimism bias about our future likelihood of happiness. I think just about everyone I know sees their problems are temporary and that they are on the verge of "getting their life together." Needless to say, they've been like that for years and my parents have always been that way. We are forsaken and unable to admit it. To really, viscerally understand that everything we do is cosmically meaningless is painful, especially when you're already suffering. It's only through redemptive illusions and limited awareness of reality that we survive long enough to start the cycle over with more lives. Further, as we are prone to familiarity and habit, we often repeat cycles in our own lives. Nietzsche's eternal return rings true as a psychological allegory.

The same system that exploits and dominates the weak also exists to sell us the opiate of religion and the myth of order. Everything is fine. Everything has always been fine. Keep working.

Idealism and panpsychism are very elegant and creative ways to create an ontology that is completely unfalsifiable and immune to evidence either for or against. Science itself really has no privileged access to reality either, but scientific theories are conceptual tools for manipulating reality. Ideas like freewill and whatever other abstract realm you think the brain is picking up on have no value in that regard.

          What good are theories that have nothing to do with the world we find ourselves interacting with?

The double slit experiment has nothing to do whatsoever with consciousness. Physicists define a "measurement" as any event that destroys quantum behavior, meaning measurements can happen without a conscious observer. Your theory might be true the way any "hidden world" mythology might be true. It's purely unscientific either way.

       "I think therefore I am" contains the unquestioned assumption that there is an "I" over and above the thinking. Strictly speaking, there is only the thought that is happening. Our intuition that there must be some entity or soul to which the thought belongs is another example of this. Evidence can neither confirm nor deny it, and to posit such a soul has no explanatory value. You mentioned that you're familiar with Occam's Razor.

        Philosophy is great for critical thinking and analysis, but without science, it's easy to make up perfectly consistent and interesting metaphysical theories. If they could ever be tested empirically, they'd either become established science or dismissed. The rest is mental masturbation and religious faith.

        "and the truth might be hidden from the public..." If there's some conspiracy to get most people to be materialist atheists, it isn't working on the vast majority of people. If anything, there is some complicit agreement among the faithful of all kinds to tolerate each other so long as everyone agrees there's something out there that can be described as divine or perfect. Most especially if it offers the possibility of eternal life.

Amputees still experience the sensation of their severed limbs. fMri imaging shows the brain making decisions before participants are consciously aware of them. Psychologists cam swap out pictures of faces, food, or various other things participants choose with generically similar selections and participants will lucidly defend the selection they think they made. Psychologists can subconsciously prime subjects in ways that create statistically significant deviation from control group behavior. The fact that we can be mistaken about our internal motivations and inner sensations shows that we do not directly experience the psychological world within us any more than we do the physical world around us. 

There was a story about an ancient stoic philosopher on a ship that was nearly toppled over by a wave. His crew mate noted that when the wave struck, he was just as terrified as the rest of the crew, despite his stoic training. He went below deck to find a copy of Epictetus' writing and showed how even in stoic philosophy there are certain impulses that even the sage cannot suppress, but after being hit with them he can either assent to or deny his impressions. 

          So terror, induced by a wave for example, acts upon the soul so fast that it cannot be completely suppressed, although the stoic prokopton may afterwards deny the impression as irrational. 

        Of course, all of this assumes the existence of freewill, which stoicism cannot reconcile with its strict materialism. If everything is material than the stoicism choice to assent or deny an impression is as determined as the rest of the cosmos.

         I am also a materialist (well, physicalist but the difference is irrelevant here) so I don't think we're free to reinterpret things however we want. Our interpretation is a higher order reaction to stimuli but just as determined as any unconscious impulse. In fact, assuming there is only the physical world, there is no self or identity that can have freewill. "We" are ultimately the complex vibrations of the quantum field. Just as individual waves are nothing over and above the ocean water, individual beings are nothing over and above the vibrating quantum field. Fundamentally speaking, we don't exist.

If there is even a single instance of true injustice or a creature for whom it would be better not to have been created, this proves God is either not all powerful or not all good. If hell exists and some of his creatures will go there, why did he create them? The damned would have been better off, as would the people they harmed, if they didn't exist. What about animals? If they have no souls and are not capable of moral improvement, why must they suffer? What would a hare not do to save its own life, yet it must die in the jaws of a wolf. What about the mentally ill who succumb to suicide, why were they created with such a defective faculty of reason and sensitivity to pain? What about the severely intellectually disabled? What point is there in their suffering? What of the misalignment of justice? Why do the wicked prosper and the good suffer? If there be a perfect world in the next life, why are we here now? If he gave us the freedom to sin, why did he leave us knowing we would fall from grace, as leaving children alone with daggers?

        Maybe there is some irrelevant creator out there. The God that matters most certainly does not exist. The God that will save us has watched humanity achieve nearly every wicked ambition he has placed in our nature. God has bound his own hands, and for what?

Courage and patience, says the Sage, are within our power; God gives us virtue so that we overcome any evil. This sort of idea confuses making the best of a bad situation with not being in a bad situation to begin. To suffer evil is one thing. To forebear it with grace, another. Not to suffer it is yet a third thing.

Optimists say we are ungrateful to think of existence as an evil thing and that we intensify misery. We, for our part, show that it is callous to deny suffering and arrogant to deny the fragility of life. In extremis, one's nothingness may be a good if their being is an evil; but it is the optimism of ancient Stoics which never hesitates to recommend suicide at the slightest complaint. Philosophy is another art form, a kind of escapism, and that one's beliefs should execute them on force of honor is as ridiculous as dying for a piece of music.

Drugs give you the power to just flip a switch and be happy. It doesn't matter how bad life is in every other aspect, you snort some chemicals and your synapses start gushing with serotonin. That's all we are, after all. Every single thing you love is just a thing that causes your brain to release endorphins. When your life is in tethers, drugs give you the power to be happy for no fucking reason. 

Life is more fragile than glass. There's no reason why we should exist. Given enough time, anything will happen. The sky and the ocean appear to us as colossal gods, but even they are microscopic on larger scales and it doesn't take much to topple the environment we find ourselves in. And yet we are so arrogantly destroying the world, like a mold chewing on a fallen tree. We too are another inanimate force of nature, and will be as a flash in the dark.

Most people aren't capable of anything unless it's easy.

For all of history, some sort of local government has been in charge. As rcivilizations expand, so too do these little governments. The ones that become exorbitant invariably begin to decline. It isn't a matter of "if." It's never a blockbuster apocalypse but a process of structural violence that slowly kills off most people around at the time. Everyone acts like it's normal and it is. It isn't a sudden surge in drama, there isn't some cohesive narrative that each and every civilian can agree on. It's just a line on a graph going up. 

       The number of people incarcerated. The number of people dying of heat exhaustion. The number of people food insecure. The cost of living. The exponential debt. When billionaires celebrate record breaking profits, they're celebrating the fact that they've secured more of our finite resources for themselves. 

     Or it's a line going down. Average crop yields as temperatures rise. Wages relative to rent. Habitat and animal population. Unthawed ice in the arctic circle. 

People don't think systematically. All the great systems philosophers built in the past are founded on some insight or intuition that they expanded to try to explain everything. For this method to work, reality must be intelligible and if the history of philosophy is testimony of anything, it is that it is not. What is valuable are the insights and knowing where to apply them, but no piece can represent the whole.

Outspoken atheists tend to blame religion for all human ills. It is our irrationality that drives religion, not the other way around. All the same, you will be hard pressed not to find some ugly aspect of society or human nature that isn't justified by superstition.

"What is the meaning of life?" is a coherent question, not a category mistake. There might have been a loving God who created us to mature, flourish, find true love and tend to the Earth as if it were a garden of blessings. We might have had a purpose, or many. It may even have been something mundane, such as humans merely existing to provide nutrients for microbes. A meaningful life is a part of something bigger than the individual, which is considered valuable in of itself.

For all their "Eat the Rich" sentimentality, when a political breakdown occurs, the poor are most likely to attack each other.

The Great architecture of Providence laughs, "I await all of humanity, if only they did not abuse their own freedom." Is it not a cruelty to place a prize before us and tell us we may have it only if we deny our nature? Yet unless it is our nature to deny our nature, how can we? No matter how long we might hold our breath, we will succumb to the urge. 

If we have no grounds on which to judge God's incomprehensible morals then we have no grounds on which to think his ends will be desirable to us at all. Yes, he may do everything for the greatest good but for all we know that greatest good is our most terrible undoing. And even then, deep in the bowels of hell, you will still tell me god works in mysterious ways.

AI programs, playing prisoner dilemma type games, eventually evolve a "tit for tat" strategy. Players cooperate by default, punish cheaters, and eventually forgive them. This is the most optimal strategies and it one we see in social animals everywhere. This is why detecting free riders is so crucial. Maintaining that equilibrium requires punishing overly altruistic players. Activists of all kinds will be familiar with this social response, known as do-gooder derogation or antisocial punishment.

      This is the evolutionary origin of our cynical dismissal of certain altruists, the knee jerk impulse to hate overly benevolent individuals. Perhaps a utilitarian argument could be made for promoting cooperation; at any rate, there being a naturalistic explanation for this particular suspicion is not a moral justification in of itself.

If God permits human evils to protect from will, then these evils are not evils at all. This is tantamount to say that it would be a true evil for God to have intervened in genocide. This particular theodicy is simply denying that evil exists and affirming that all is well. The crucial insight of pessimism, even if allegedly overstated, is that evil does in fact exist. Unhappy, unbidden, and undeserved evil.

How are our trials and tribulations justified by another life, we who are damned? Why create even a single individual who can wisely be said to have been better off not to be created? Why should the population of hell ever exceed 0? Was God cajoled into creation against his will?

It has been said that the righteous have no claim to being rewarded, merely for acting dutifully. This would imply that the wicked ought not to be punished either, since punishment would discourage evil and we would never see one's true character. Terror at the sight! A global nightmare where the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished until, finally, all are saintly.

       Further, why should the virtuous go to heaven and the vicious to hell? It has been established that the good man has no claim to happiness merely for doing his duty.

If poetic justice is proof of God's love, the all too common misalignment of justice is proof of God's malice.

The idea that depraved men and women suffer pangs of bad conscience is a myth. As soon as they are not confronted with the consequences of their actions, conscience fades.

Virtue ethics are essentially egoism, but with the added delusion that virtuous habits are inherently rewarding. This is true in some circumstances, but not at all inherently so. Prudence has a foot in both pools; the clear pond of virtue and the swamp of vice.

A glorious afterlife does not justify pains in this life. It permits us to be patient, but unless our current suffering is shown to be necessary and unavoidable, that is, unless it can be shown that God is not truly all powerful, this is merely another dogma meant to silence thought.

Hope is irrelevant. If there is even a .01% chance, you take it. Giving up means complete certainty the worst will happen.

There are no a posteri reasons to suspect a benevolent hand guides the sensible world. 

You are not good. You are a force of nature, no different than a hurricane or a virus.

However poignant the Stoic View from Above may be, whatever beauty the Whole of Creation has which may be missing from the smaller, individual perspective, it is at best irrelevant. That my suffering serves a higher purpose, which divinity has deemed good, does not make it any less felt. However aesthetic a beast's coat may be to our eyes, it's life is filled with hunger, fear, and odorous filth. As we have no access to any sensation of the whole of the cosmos, this poignant higher order is in all likely mere wishful thinking. Nothing more than imagination. 1 possibility amid 10,000 others.

Rousseau believed man was originally innocent in the state of nature and subsequently corrupted by civilization. Hobbes, representing the other pole, held that man was savage in nature and tamed by strong, centralized authority. These views may be synthesized: Man was more carefree, though superstitious and savage at times, but has been gradually tamed by an increasingly corrupt central authority. The majority of us are inconsequential, cooperative egoists, while a few of us have our fingers over red buttons. (NEEDS WORK)

The price of hope is paid in disappointment after one has attained that for which they endured. 

Yet another asymmetry: suffering spawns philosophy and the search for truth, answers, and meaning. Suffering cries out, "why!?" It is not obvious that in a world without suffering man should ever have bothered to devise all of the systems of philosophy or religion. What would ethics be if we could not harm one another at all? What need for any sort of political order when all of our needs are met at all times? Who would search for a hidden God in a world without evil? Epistemology, metaphysics, perhaps, and other riddles. Whatever remained of philosophy would be reduced to a type of comedy that produced bafflement instead of laughter. A science of trivial paradoxes.

The orthodox marvel at the question, "Why is there anything at all?" They conclude that life is a tremendous debt. The wise still proclaim this statement as a meaningful metaphor, that we ought to witness the spectacle of existence with gratitude. A more apt metaphor is that life is a debt. We pay off the interest in suffering until finally, the principal is paid. This is the only true theodicy, that all of our misery is deserved. Our sin is existing at all.

Happiness, once considered a privilege, is now a duty. We are responsible for our own happiness and our failure adds shame to an already, by definition, unhappy state.

Life is like back pain. You can't take on the endless sea of suffering in the world and the only healthy thing is to repress your consciousness of it. Hence the back pain. There is no way to get comfortable. You can't even sleep through it, a claw pulls your mind up and refuses to let you sleep. You have to suffer. You have to feel this. Keep searching for a reason, but the only reason is that you were born. Either there are no deserts in life or you deserve to suffer because you were born.

Philosophy is not meant to be a kind of science. There has not been progress in philosophy the way there has been in science. The value of philosophy is to answer the sort of questions religion and spirituality but without dogma and superstition. Philosophy is the attempt at true religion.

Dostoyevsky claimed man would sooner go insane than admit he has no free will. Where does this need for freedom come from? Hope. Suffering. Rebellion. Hope. If reason is misery, all the worse for reason.

You can do what you want but you can't want what you want. Resisting some predetermined impulse does not mean that the prevailing impulse was not predetermined. Humans are unpredictable and we can forebear our impulses, but that forbearance is merely another impulse. Philosophers who pretend not to understand this simple truth do so only because they heard a respectable philosopher do the same. 

      The impulse to see what you want to see is less prominent in depressed individuals. Most people aren't depressed, or at least not actively. Depression is realism.

"If everybody did…" is irrelevant. No social movement is going to come together by the spontaneous organization of the will of individuals. Nor will the apocalyptic consequences of people universally breaking the social contract. If an argument rests on "but if everybody…" then it should be dismissed with the rest of the irrelevant "What if?" questions posed by pseudophilosophers.

We're all playing pretend anyway… if human life is a fantasy world, in my fantasy I want the good guys to win 

Cogito Ergo Sum. There is the brute fact of thought and experience. The argument, i.e. the creative part Descartes added to the simple observation, is that the existence of thought implies there is an I behind it. The ego is not what is experienced and is therefore inferred. Thought and ego have the asserted relationship of smoke and fire, but if this assertion is true, no one has ever offered up a simple reason to support it. Most people don't even realize it is being asserted at all and thus do not examine it.

       Further, the idea that there is an I which is the cause of the thought contradicts the observation that thoughts are not chosen but rather come to us uninvited. We can not simply choose to stop thinking and if we are observant enough, as we fall asleep we can catch truly non sequitur thoughts just popping up in our heads.

Mankind has invented innumerable gods, innumerable myths, innumerable natural laws. The game of philosophy is to invent a story and or characters to explain the world around us but to provide reasons for these explanations. It is not enough to say that Zeus formed man out of clay, there must be supporting arguments or observations that lead me to accept why this, rather than any other story, must be true.

       Reasons are ultimately some sort of intuition. Logical tautology, appeal to observations, even faith is a reason why. In trying to examine which reasons why are valid and which are not, we are forced to appeal to other reasons why. At this point we have hit bedrock and will ultimately be forced to accept some reasons over others merely because of our own subjective values. Life has led a one to value these heuristics more strongly than others. When 2 different values conflict, one must be regarded as the stronger of the 2. The weaker may yet be stronger than a 3rd epistemic value, And yet other reasons why may have no value at all.

Free will is the act of the self giving commands to itself. 

The narcissism of small difference is the sociological phenomenon where 2 different groups or individuals have significant hostility for one another even though they have largely identical characteristics. An example would be various Christian denominations who debate each other constantly while largely ignoring Nordic Pagans, which they instinctively dismiss.

     A similar phenomenon may explain why all other species of the genus homo were driven to extinction. Our similarities with homo floresiensis would have caused us to compete with each other for the same resources. This may also explain the uncanny valley sensation we experience when seeing images of creatures that have a particular similarity to ourselves. Creatures that look not too different, yet different enough would be instinctively recognized as a threat.

The future, if not entirely set in stone, is a potential. The laws of physics may potentially alter and cause the next moments to be totally unprecedented. Most people would rightly say that is out of the realistic range of possibility, though it is technically possible. Uncertainty is perhaps the last bastion of optimism in so much as it expands this realistic range of possibility as much as it can muster. Moralist ideas such as the existential freedom of humanity to make itself into anything try to summon this god of the gap, appealing to the male ability and unpredictability of human nature. 

          On the other hand, human nature has always been as multifaceted as it is now; therefore if there is any optimism about humanity's future, signs of it ought to be visible in humanity's past. From this point, the question becomes another game of weighing the goods and evils against each other. An experiment that has no agreed upon methodology and can only ever be rhetoric which reveals more about the person speaking than it does the world.

We can not fully conceive of nothingness, of our own not-being. This is why we fear death and this is why we affirm life. We think of beauty and ecstasy and we think "had we not been born, we would have missed an opportunity." To at least reason that if we don't exist, then we would have no interest in happiness. If we had no interest in being happy, then life had nothing to offer from the outset. 

      This is why the mere presence of suffering settles the question of life's value. Had there been no pain, life would be an indifferent thing. Pleasure is of no use to the not-being, but after becoming, pain is surely a blight.

Freedom is measured in leisure. Working to sustain the creaturely needs, even if one is not restrained by anything but physical circumstance, is not what people care about when they talk about freedom. Having those needs met and then being able to do as one wishes with their life is what is worthwhile in freedom.

Rather than determining if our lives have meaning, we ought to determine what sort of meaning it is that would be meaningful to us. If there is any purpose to life, it is clearly unknowable. The leap of faith is to identify what it is that we long for and then live for it, because if we are wrong, then none of it matters anyway. Even if there is a fraction of a minute possibility that our meaning is true, it is the only thing worth fighting for. The situation is akin to a patient with 1 of 2 apparently identical diseases. 1 can be treated and cured while the other is incurable. There is no way to determine which disease the patient has but at any rate, the doctor treats for the curable disease, since there really is no alternative.

      Once you have identified this meaning, Your Meaning, the question of whether or not it corresponds with God's meaning or the meaning of the universe, or the accepted values of mankind. What matters is that it is Your Meaning.

The gift of life is paramount to giving a billion dollars to someone stranded on a deserted island.

Either there is a process, a chain of events, that results in one's actions, or actions arise spontaneously, out of nothing. Science doesn't have a the complete picture, just as we don't have a complete fossil record, but we know enough of the process to know there is a chain. Behaviors don't arise spontaneously. The illusion of free will comes from the fact that we are only consciously aware of the end result and not the process from which it was begotten. 

A brutal existence doesn't necessarily induce pessimism. More often than not, conditions of misery lead to undue optimism and faith.

Divided we fall. The rest is irrelevant. 

To reconcile the contradiction of becoming a nihilist himself, Nietzsche drew an arbitrary line between the good nihilists and the bad nihilists. He needed to conclude that something mattered, even when it didn't. He needed man to march onward. There is no "onward" but only the marching. 

       Rejecting the being of God, Nietzsche praised the state of becoming. 

"Exile." Some of us exist in a state of exile. We are barred from promise. Some of us deserve it. Some of us, our parents deserve it. Some of us merely sprang fourth as prey animals. Nonetheless, we are exile.

If there is a God, the understanding has no need of him. If, despite a universe of suffering, you insist that he is good, I do not wish to puncture such a faith.

Condemned to come-what-may, you have not been seen. A judge looks at only the details they see, and yet you entirely remain unseen. A crime, even your crime, is only a sliver. In prison, in war, in love, you are never entirely seen. You are forever an unknowable mystery, a question begging to be asked. A riddle, unspoken.

You keep looking, hoping to be stumped. In truth, you have the answer, you aren't ready to stop searching.

Rationality is a tool we use to navigate reality but we can't know if the world is rational in of itself or if it is merely phenomenological. Rationality may not exist in the familiar way we experience it.

If an all powerful, sentient being created humanity, it is hard to imagine how such an entity could be considered benevolent to the rest of life.

We can't know that reality is orderly or rational. Everything we experience is mediated by our senses and intuitions. We have no direct concept of what reality is like. Analogously: I can't comprehend binary code on a computer, but I know how to use certain computer programs. 

          We experience reality through an interface. Order and rationality are built into our perceptions. As are space, time, color, sound, and the rest of the sense-data. This is the consequence of Kant's transcendental idealism.

         We invented math, it doesn't exist outside of us. What does it mean to say that the number 1 exists? Where is it? What is it made out of? By what faculty do we experience it? We certainly don't see it or smell it. Does the square root of -1 exist? 0, the literal concept of nothingness, by definition doesn't exist.

          We created the rules to mathematics, just like we created the rules of morality. We created the rules of knowledge. You can't use logic to prove logic is valid. You can't use evidence to prove evidence is valid, these are just subjective, epistemic values that most of us share.

          But leaving all of that aside, the Bible was written long after the events it depicts. We don't know who wrote the gospels (John, Matthew, etc... are just later traditions the church added, the text themselves do not claim to be written by the disciples of Jesus) but they couldn't have been eye witnesses. Back in Jesus' days, ~90% of the population was illiterate. The fisherman and carpenters that Jesus spent his time with certainly would have been illiterate.

          So we have these stories about a guy performing supernatural miracles, written decades after the fact, by people who could not have been eye witnesses. Why should anyone believe them? Eye witness testimony is already quite flimsy and we don't even have that. You can't walk on water. Snakes don't talk. You can't command lepers to stop being sick.

          And finally, why don't the Jews believe Jesus is the messiah? It's because the basic definition of the messiah is that he is the ruler of the earth during the end times. Once there is finally peace on earth the messiah will be the king of the earth and act as God's direct messenger. That has obviously not happened yet. Dying on the cross and being resurrected never had anything to do with being the messiah. That's also the reason why Paul gave up on converting jews and started converting pagans. Jews knew that Jesus didn't meet the minimum requirement for the messiah. 

I find the whole "atheism is the lack of belief" position to be tedious. I know there is no God just as much as I know my car will fire up when I turn the key. I don't have 100% certainty, but we don't have 100% certainty of anything. I might be wrong, but as far as I can tell, supernatural phenomena don't exist. There are things I can't explain, but of all the things I can explain, the explanation has never-not once- been that it was supernatural. 

      Some people, influenced by Eastern tradition, basically consider reality itself to be divine. To them, God is existence itself. In that case, sure I believe in existence. It seems to be completely scientific and apathetic towards human flourishing, but if you define God as reality then all I can say is I don't share your definition. Although by such a definition, yes, i believe reality is real, as does literally everyone.

      Getting back to the point, if we're talking about a supernatural, benevolent, creator, I am literally willing to bet my eternal soul that no such entity exists. If i am being completely honest with myself, I actively believe there is no god. 

      Tl;Dr There are things I can't explain, but nothing has ever been explained by invoking the supernatural. By that admission, I can be as certain that there is no God as I can be of any other belief I have. I don't 100% know the sun will rise tomorrow, but I still believe it.

Morality is almost always just virtue signaling. Virtue Signaling is the millennial slang for hypocrisy. It's important to see through it because the world is full of cynics who do it better than the naive idealists. It's even more important that you don't lose it. One day you might get a chance, less of a chance than winning the lottery or getting shot by lightning, but an immensely greater pay off- you might get the chance to do something that matters.

      And if it ever happens to you, for the love fof God, yes God! you have to take it.

If a future man showed ancient people modern technology, they would think it was magic. Whatever miracle God helped Moses perform, the Hebrews got over it the second Moses went up the mountain. Why didn't god teach his prophets science and technology? 

Children in hospital being bombed, families dying of starvation and malaria, little girls raped, child soldiers, all of the unthinkable horrors, the extremes that *only some* people endure. You tell me I can't fix the suffering of the world, it's too oceanic, too abysmal. I'm just a privileged white boy. 

     Just because it didn't happen to me doesn't mean it's not real. Sure, I have the option to not think about it. Not make it a part of my identity. The problem is real. Maybe I'm not the right person to speak on it, but someone is. For someone, there is a reality that you're fragile reality can not accommodate. 

      That insane sorrow that fills the world, they say you can do nothing about it. You can't change it. And they're right. You can't change it. That doesn't mean it isn't real. Focus on what you can control means turn off your feelings, look away. Focus on yourself means lie to yourself. The abysmal ocean of horror is out there. This world is a cancer. Man is wolf to man.

Don't think about it because your Rage and your despair won't change anything. That's comforting? The absolute fact that I am futile, impotent, that if I were to scream the blood out of my lungs, nothing would change. I might as well save my breath. I might as well knuckle under. I might as well consent. This is the meaning of comfort? This is what suicide looks like when cowards commit it.

There are essentially only 2 replies to the problem of suffering. Option number 1 is “the big picture perspective.” What it says is, basically, we don't know the cosmic perspective. For all we know, these individual instances of suffering actually enhance the value of the cosmos. This means that evil doesn't actually exist but is an illusion. Similar to the dissonance in a piece of music, or stained-glass windows. This is mere wishful thinking. You're saying “we can't see the bigger picture, so maybe these blue notes are actually enhancing the value of the symphony as a whole.” Or, the more active variation, “Since we can't know one way or the other, I choose to believe it's for the best.” Aside from being mere wishful thinking, it still doesn't change anything from the lived experience. Say you've got a patient, late 70s, 3rd time having cancer. They can't handle any more chemo. They're in pain. Their family dropped them off in a home. They're too busy, too tired, it's depressing, all the reasons why people don't visit their elderly. You're saying this lonely, agonizing demise is for the best. The problem is made worse if you're claiming such an existence is the best of all possible worlds. You would have been better off never having been born to start with, and I think that's a much higher standard than most people realize.

    Option number 2 is even more demeaning. It's some variation of “you deserve this.” The medieval Christians really hit you hard with that. It's Original Sin. You're being punished because your very nature is vile. And this was the optimistic position. Everything happens for a reason, good people are happy, bad people are miserable. Since you're miserable, you're bad. It just so happens, almost everyone is bad and miserable. OK, well that's not a popular view these days, but the logic is still there. “Your thoughts create your reality.” or “You have to look at the bright side.” Something like that. “You could be happy, you're just choosing not to be.” First off, this all presupposes free will which is an oxymoron in of itself. Second, is it wrong to feel upset about something? Again with the nursing home example, you could blame the patient for expecting their family to be there for them. You could blame them for being upset about their cancer, which is presumably out of their control. You're not supposed to worry about things you can't control right? Well that's what they did wrong. And because they're worrying about things they can't control, which is irrational, then (and no one ever says or thinks this, but logically it is nonetheless implied) it is their fault they're suffering. Choose to stop worrying about it and you're ennui with clear right up. 

     This is mere victim blaming. You can dress it up and soften the delivery, but the message is the same. And are you saying that it's wrong to feel upset about some things? We are entitled to expect certain things from loved ones, from society, if there's a just God, then even from life itself. This is the basis of justice, after all. Being a nihilist, I don't believe in justice, but presumably if you're the type to try to make sense of suffering, it's because you believe the universe is just. Well, this sort of argument requires that you sacrifice that belief. Or else, you retain a sort of inhuman, mysterious justice that bares no resemblance to our intuitive sense of the word.

     In the end, some things just don't make sense. I mean, yeh, mechanically, you can explain it. But in the comforting, existential, spiritual sense, there is no meaning in it. Not everyone wants to be told the world is better off because they're suffering. Not everyone finds comfort in the belief that if they just try harder, they can be happy. Some people don't want you to “make it right” because they know it isn't and won't ever be. Some people just want you to sit there and show them they aren't alone. No matter how bad it is, and there is no anti-hedonic treadmill where we eventually tolerate suffering the way we build up a tolerance to happiness; no matter how bad it is, sometimes the best you can do for someone is to let them know you're there with them. You're powerless, they're powerless, it isn't fair, and honestly your misery isn't even special because it's happening to billions of other sentient beings right now. 

     But, you aren't alone. And that has to be enough.

Pain can be instrumental, but it isn't necessarily so. Pains related to cancer, for example, don't typically present until it's too late to do anything about it.

FINAL NOTE ON DETERMINISM (probably not)

"You" are just your brain. Over time your RAC is going to become more efficient at making the decisions the brain wants, but since the mind is a product of the brain, it's not like there's a contradiction between the two. That doesn't mean that different areas of the brain itself don't have contradictory "desires" (hence why the RAC exists to begin with). 

           Anyway, yes, over time, the brain gets better at doing extremely specific things. That's why it takes around 25 years for it to develop fully. It's not that your brain is so complicated it takes that long to build, but it's basically recording social/ cultural information that whole time. A teenager has a bigger ore frontal cortex than an adult. The last stage of development is mostly trimming away certain parts of your PFC and maximizing the connections to others. 

         The result is the same, though. The brain gets better at doing what it repeatedly does. It's like a slime mold in a maze. It sends out random dendrites, which in turn send feedback to the neurons. The dendrites that find the most efficient pathways then get stronger while the neuron lets the less efficient ones die off. Honey bees do the same thing. They leave the hive on random trips, scouts come back and dance to communicate what they find. The more food, the longer they dance. The longer they dance, the more bees are likely to see their dance and get directions. This causes more bees to do that dance more often until everyone knows the most efficient paths to find the most food. 

          Our brains, complex as they are, are fully deterministic. People get confused between ontic determinism and epistemic determinism. Chaotic systems are unpredictable, making them epistemically indeterministic. That said, there are computer programs like the Game of Life that are fully deterministic despite being unpredictable. There are fixed rules that determine the next generation and the one after that. But if you want to know the state of the game at the 1,00th generation, you have to calculate each generation. It's unpredictable because there is no formula to find the X-th generation.

         Your brain is like that. A fully deterministic, chaotic system. It's so sensitive to initial conditions that even without getting into Heisenberg's Uncertainty, we could never have the data necessary to make predictions.

        Then again, all of the complicated science is somewhat irrelevant. There's a very simple, logical way to look at it. Either a behavior is determined by prior events, or it isn't determined. The opposite of determined isn't freedom but randomness. People trying to use quantum indeterminacy make this mistake. There's no evidence whatsoever that QI plays a role in the neurological basis of our behaviors, but if it did, it would mean randomness. Daniel Dennett, or perhaps someone less famous, tried to make an argument that the brain generates random possible behaviors and then selects the appropriate one.

        Say you're at an intersection, the light turns green. Time to generate **random** options and choose the appropriate one. Do you (A) Eat a banana (B) Confess your feelings to the love of your life (C) Write a manifesto (D)... etc. 

        Ignoring that problem, think about even if it was true. It's a 2 step process, step 1 is purely random (no room for free will) and step 2 is the brain choosing the appropriate response. This second step would be determined by your neurology, which is determined mostly by your environment (including prenatal) and biology. 

         Even if there was a metaphysical soul that somehow guides the brain (there isn't or else we would see its effects on an fMRI; instead of a poltergeist throwing furniture around in your house, it would be neural pathways in your brain spontaneously being triggered) that wouldn't solve the logical problem of either P or not-P. Either the soul is determined or it is not-determined (random).

I'm tired of this right-wing ideology that says everyone can be rich and successful so long they work hard and do right. There is not room for everyone at the top. That's ignoring mental illness, ignoring disability, ignoring adverse childhood experiences, ignoring systemic discrimination. In a perfect world, there would still not be room for everybody at the top.

          We live in the most inequiquitable, developed country in the world. We pay taxes and that money ends up in the hands of defense contractors and cronies. Dems and Reps both work for the rich at the expense of the poor. Republicans deny the problems exist, and Democrats pay lip service to them, but once elected, they consolidate wealth and power for themselves and the business class.

         If I have to pay taxes, I want that money to go to the people in our society who need help. Not to the rich and well off. America is the richest country in history. We CHOOSE to have homelessness. We CHOOSE to have inaccessible Healthcare. We CHOOSE to bail out banks instead of families. We CHOOSE to fund never-ending wars instead of making education more accessible. We CHOOSE to keep burning fossil fuels so natural disasters drive people off of their lands so the rich can buy up the cheap real estate left behind.

           Skid Row is going to grow like a cancer. America is in decline and as long as the wealthy business class, and their puppeteered politicians are insulated from the effects of that decline, the problem will continue until we pass the point of no return.

Absolute free speech only makes sense in a world where speech is merely descriptive. In reality, speech can be a call to action and conspiracies are meant not to be believed but to inspire individuals to act on their fears and anger.