The Absurdity of Existence
Considering that there could very well just be an existential plane of nothingness, involving no mathematics or random evolution of organic molecules. No mysterious dark matter expanding an infinite universe. No hopes of interstellar travel, no expeditions to the moon and neighbor planets. No satellite orbits, no dangerous solar flares. No red giants and blue dwarfs, no comets and asteroid clouds, no extraterrestrial visitors implanting lifeless planets with exotic DNA.
No viruses and blood diseases. No oceans and beaches. No rollercoasters, no battleships, no kites flying in the sky, no malaria, no brain-eating infections, no famine and poverty and homelessness, dying children, no common cold.
No Julius Caesar, no Greek mythology, no astrology, no Copernicus, no battle between good and evil, no yin and yang, no soccer moms doing yoga on Sundays, no pets and snacks, no pools and grass, no rain, no dark clouds, no car collisions, no history, science, language, art, theology, socialism, politics, capitalism, no dictators, no protests, no genocide, no endangered species.
Just nothing.
Why is there existence at all? This is truly absurd. This is the absurdity of existence. There is no reason that existence should exist. There should just be nothing. Nothing existing for all of eternity. Nothing on top of nothing on top of nothing...on top of nothing. And there should never be existence after that.
That is what truly makes sense. Existence does not make sense. It is merely a ball of crumpled mathematics trying to make sense of itself. The idea of a mad genius with nothing to do. A truly bored genius that with the flick of his finger says, "Today, I will start a world", and this world will be logical and have rules and laws, and there will be up and down, and far far far far far down the line there will be a tiny blue planet with people dying and mating and playing and crying and eating and defecating. And in their tiny pile of waste, they shall have little heroes and champions that everyone can look to with aspiration and admiration.
This is the absurdity of existence. It makes no sense. Tis the crumpled paper ball of a mad genius, bored and lonely, ruminating math equations to himself for eons of time, no longer able to laugh at the pithy jokes of his celestial goddesses.
And now, we casual debaters having tried for millennia to solve the trite existential dilemma, compliant, defeated, failed, beaten, misused, war-torn and servile. We have no dignity, no honor, no hope, no pleasure, no joy...Yes, it has come full circle, now we truly do have nothing.
How will we ever justify our existence? Our entire existence is absurd, it does not make sense, logically, mathematically, scientifically, historically, reasonably, ontologically, teleologically, phenomenologically, nor illogically for that matter. Even absurdity fails to truly capture the utter uselessness of existence.
What progress is there in an infinite universe? What change? What desire? What creation?
We are walking, talking, vermin infested, disease-ridden mammals. We fight, kill, argue, steal, mistreat, persecute, torment, and shame each other, every day, every week, every month and every year, until we all die. It's a rat race to immortality, a stewing pot of opinion, belief, superstition, lifestyle gurus, fake icons, pathetic soothsayers, and attention-seeking mavericks.
This existence truly offers nothing substantial for any life that it is plagued to bear, or that is plagued to bear it. We are prisoners of illogical nature, of discordance, hopelessness, agony, despair and destruction.
An existence born of some strange-wielding, corporeal mathematics. It's magic. We are all stuck in this forsaken magic. A self-created mathematics that somehow spawns tiny little particles of energy with stupid electrons and protons and positrons, and nucleons, all the known leptons, and now gravitons, invisible bosons. And quantum fluctuations and absurdity.
No viruses and blood diseases. No oceans and beaches. No rollercoasters, no battleships, no kites flying in the sky, no malaria, no brain-eating infections, no famine and poverty and homelessness, dying children, no common cold.
No Julius Caesar, no Greek mythology, no astrology, no Copernicus, no battle between good and evil, no yin and yang, no soccer moms doing yoga on Sundays, no pets and snacks, no pools and grass, no rain, no dark clouds, no car collisions, no history, science, language, art, theology, socialism, politics, capitalism, no dictators, no protests, no genocide, no endangered species.
Just nothing.
Why is there existence at all? This is truly absurd. This is the absurdity of existence. There is no reason that existence should exist. There should just be nothing. Nothing existing for all of eternity. Nothing on top of nothing on top of nothing...on top of nothing. And there should never be existence after that.
That is what truly makes sense. Existence does not make sense. It is merely a ball of crumpled mathematics trying to make sense of itself. The idea of a mad genius with nothing to do. A truly bored genius that with the flick of his finger says, "Today, I will start a world", and this world will be logical and have rules and laws, and there will be up and down, and far far far far far down the line there will be a tiny blue planet with people dying and mating and playing and crying and eating and defecating. And in their tiny pile of waste, they shall have little heroes and champions that everyone can look to with aspiration and admiration.
This is the absurdity of existence. It makes no sense. Tis the crumpled paper ball of a mad genius, bored and lonely, ruminating math equations to himself for eons of time, no longer able to laugh at the pithy jokes of his celestial goddesses.
And now, we casual debaters having tried for millennia to solve the trite existential dilemma, compliant, defeated, failed, beaten, misused, war-torn and servile. We have no dignity, no honor, no hope, no pleasure, no joy...Yes, it has come full circle, now we truly do have nothing.
How will we ever justify our existence? Our entire existence is absurd, it does not make sense, logically, mathematically, scientifically, historically, reasonably, ontologically, teleologically, phenomenologically, nor illogically for that matter. Even absurdity fails to truly capture the utter uselessness of existence.
What progress is there in an infinite universe? What change? What desire? What creation?
We are walking, talking, vermin infested, disease-ridden mammals. We fight, kill, argue, steal, mistreat, persecute, torment, and shame each other, every day, every week, every month and every year, until we all die. It's a rat race to immortality, a stewing pot of opinion, belief, superstition, lifestyle gurus, fake icons, pathetic soothsayers, and attention-seeking mavericks.
This existence truly offers nothing substantial for any life that it is plagued to bear, or that is plagued to bear it. We are prisoners of illogical nature, of discordance, hopelessness, agony, despair and destruction.
An existence born of some strange-wielding, corporeal mathematics. It's magic. We are all stuck in this forsaken magic. A self-created mathematics that somehow spawns tiny little particles of energy with stupid electrons and protons and positrons, and nucleons, all the known leptons, and now gravitons, invisible bosons. And quantum fluctuations and absurdity.
Comments (67)
Because it is logically necessary that there eventually arrive something in causality which has no prior cause, then it serves to reason that there can be no rules as to why, or why that thing should, or should not have been. It simply exists. As such, our entire universe is here, because it is. I DO believe we can obtain a morality from this, but again, I'll need more time to write it up than I have now.
You keep mentioning maths and then just as fast dismissing it. Couldn’t the cosmos have mathematical necessity and thus corporeal inevitability?
There are so many reasons, for example, why three spatial dimensions are the self-optimising outcome if there is any dimensional structure at all.
Only in 3D do the number of directions of rotation match the number of directions of translation. And thus only in 3D do we have the closure of Noether’s theorem and Newtonian mechanics where spin and straight line motion are “inertial” - an intrinsic symmetry or invariance of the geometry.
Meanwhile in other news….
Quoting Banno
…chickens come before eggs! Another deep metaphysical paradox neatly solved.
The "absurdity" comes from the demand for, or expectation of, there to be a "reason that existence should exist", and is especially so because, upon reflection it's clear, the only "reason for existence" which does not precipitate an infinite regress of reasons for reasons ad absurdum is that there is not any such "reason that existence should exist". Furthermore, It's absurd both to deny this ineluctable limit of reason and to devalue the indispensability of reason on account of this existential limit (e.g. platonism, finalism, objective idealism, fideism, super-naturalism, subjectivism, magical thinking, etc).
One can stop where one likes. I stop at the eggs. They made a decent omelet. That'll do for a meaning of life, until I get hungry again.
And thus ends philosophy.
Even pragmatism is a role you decide to play. But you are on a philosophy forum, apparently the eggs just weren't enough. Mans' main problem.
And yet, the fact I exist at all was because two other people weren't happy enough with themselves.
You must mean instrumentalism, or Jamesian pragmatism at a pinch.
The proper answer to the chicken and egg riddle, as any Peircean knows, is first came the pansemiosis, then came the biosemiosis. First there was the entropy gradient, then the genetic code that entrained it. :wink:
Surely not. I mean the degraded form we use today when we say, "That is pragmatic".
But humans can choose not to bring more life into the world. So they can choose nothingness in terms of a POV that another would otherwise take on. We are a species that can choose nothingness, contra the rest of the universe, perhaps, which can't help but follow its necessary path, coupled, with its contingent interactions.
Well we are here aren't we? :snicker:
Quoting apokrisis
Fascinating :)
Yep. There is something. And so that is a fairly severe constraint on talk about “absolute nothingness”. We can already rule that out, leaving us just with relative nothingness as something that might possibly need explaining.
Sure, you can choose oblivion I guess. But that would be a different thread - the absurdity of non-existence (as a “choice”, when all you have to do is wait - entropy may take its sweet time, but it will track you down eventually!)
This is absurd, of course, because even human extinction neither solves nor, for that matter, even addresses the problem of suffering (i.e. entropy).
Maybe the more people there are, higher the entropy.
No, there certainly is not. Perhaps one day there will be, and that shall change the whole of history of this very discourse. Looking back, we might see that it was not all in vain after all.
Quoting Tom Storm
Seems sensible enough, indeed.
Surely it is easy to say that we can always go back to nonexistence, but there is no way to prove this is so. We could come from an entirely different lifeform or plane of existence before having entered into this one. Aside from that small chance though, It is certainly true that we only know of this hemisphere of reality.
How could we ever wager on anything other than this bodily realm of natural reality. Though when we look at the minerals of life it seems to be entirely made of the most strictest of chemical reactions. From a distance it may give the appearance of artwork, but we are far from a wireless society; the cables are always showing.
The mere fact that existence persists beyond the cold and dark, empty void tells us that we know little about its mysterious origin. Our intuition is that it defies all logic. Therefore of course nothingness can never be taken from the proverbial table. It is just the same that we cannot imagine how existence relies on self-creation, or otherwise an inexplicable permanency, as it is its separation from nothingness. And of course a third party will always be the consolation.
"The absurdity of existence" is an exhortation that nothingness is proper. The culprit is thus not of nothingness but rather of interjection. Existence requires us to return back the perfection which was borrowed. Life is a chance to declare innocence.
:up: Très bien!
But why should the human predicament care about the impersonal entropic suffering? It seems perfectly reasonable that a human is concerned with human suffering and recognizing its source and stopping its perpetuation (onto yet another).
Same as 180, humans are the only beings (we know of) that can make a choice of perpetuating a POV of the absurdity. Entropy may have created our species, but it is us who choose to keep it going, each instance of procreation.
True enough, but mere existence need not be mere self-aware existence. We are not only being, but willing/becoming creatures with POV. But we are not only that, but self-aware versions of willing creatures with a POV. We are two steps removed from merely being in the, “just being there” sense of a universe that is something rather than nothing.
I think exactly his point is this habit of ours to think in terms of always a “there” there because once “we” are created there is always a sense of locus of being that we cannot get away from. Hence notions of heaven, other planes, other realities, or modes of existence. Non-sentient being isn’t nothing, but it is a “view from nowhere”. At the end of the day, without a locus of a POV, what’s the difference? People mentioned entropy, which can be metaphorically analogized or reified as something akin to Schopenhauer’s Will but it’s not that. Barring panpsychism, the view from nowhere, from this somewhere where I am, looks like nothing.
“Our” intuition? From Anaximander on, that doesn’t seem to have been the standard metaphysical position. It is a distinctly Christian mythos.
Quoting chiknsld
Well you are in luck. Existence for the Big Bang ends in a Heat Death. Oblivion Is delivered by entropy in the long run.
Fuck yeah! Not being in Treblinka is also quite helpful....
"The source", as you say, is the human interpretation of (maladaptation to) "impersonal entropic suffering" and not entropy itself. For example: Buddhists, Jains, Daoists, Epicureans, Stoics, Cynics & Pyrrhonians, each tradition in its own distinct way, exemplify that humans suffer more from what we make of what happens to us than from what happens to us. Existence is not "the source" of suffering and nonexistence neither prevents nor ends suffering – for the already born who actually suffer (plus all who have ever suffered), whom it is more "perfectly reasonable that a human is concerned" for than 'hypothetical sufferers'. Besides, what could be more absurd than the antinatal "nostalgia" (Camus) for, in effect, humans deliberately 'to destroy the human species in order to, they hope, save the human species'? :roll: :fear: :sweat:
Actually what you propose is what's absurd. To conceive of the possibility of nothing requires negating the appearance of all that is. This becomes completely absurd, and the possibility of nothing becomes a true impossibility. So pondering the possible reality of nothing is just like pondering the reality of any absurd impossibility, like a square circle, or anything like that. It's just another useless exercise in futility. The proposition of absolute nothing is the most preponderate absurdity, being truly inconsistent with absolutely everything.
Quoting chiknsld
This, unless you have access to some very strange intuition, is also the opposite to reality. Intuition surely presents us with the idea that existence is highly intelligible. That is what motivates us in our attempts to understand it. If our intuition was that existence defies logic, we would not be at all inclined to apply logic toward understanding it.
Only if philosophy consists of being disturbed by something completely beyond your control, in which case--
DIE, PHILOSOPHY, DIE! (copyright Ciceronianus 2022).
How on Earth can you possibly know that??
Quoting Banno
Nah. Today, it's Russian bombs, tomorrow it's tapeworms (talk about needing very little to make a happy life and said thing being already within yourself!).
There's always something. The problem is that one is living in a body that is subject to aging, illness, and death, and yet is fully relying on this body for happiness.
Indeed, and more importantly, "the absurdity of existence" is proof that nothingness is more justified.
If there were only nothing, no justification would be needed, but if we assume that existence also does not need justification, then automatically nothingness becomes more justified: Occam's razor.
THE, PHILOSOPHY, THE? :D
Philosophy might be defined as just that, especially anything beyond ethics or applied ethics. What is X? What is a truth statement? What justifies X action? Yeah.
It certainly is the source of suffering if we agree there is some form of inherent dissatisfaction with the animal and (amplified many times via) the condition of being a human.
However, if you speak of contingent suffering being circumstantial and stochastic, well, can you deny that plenty from rich to poor, tribal to industrial peoples get their fair share of trauma, troubles, and woes? If you deny this, then we can just stop talking cause I just won't believe your statements as true to what is going on and no further discussion can be had.
Quoting 180 Proof
It is the "waking up" to "being burdened thus" by this shitty, really tedious, inescapable (except through death/game over) video game we call existence that we can at least communally recognize. There is aesthetic value in this realization. The ethical implications for those who are born are to not take it seriously and to try to burden others as little as possible. It is impossible for sure, but at least keep it as a guidepost.
And of course for future beings, we not creating onto others more burdens that are entailed inherently (dissatisfaction) and contingently (all the harms that befall us from circumstance and interactions with the world over time).
But don't worry, you will again make the Optimist Fallacy, over and over..
Well, absurdity though only has impetus in how it affects us. I see it affecting us in the patterns of constant sameness, and yet novelty is also absurd.
The sameness in the turning of the globe, the getting up to make your way in a society for survival, comfort-optimization, and entertainment pursuits, and doing this over and over and over and over again. Even the so-called "novelty" being just a part of this dissatisfaction or inherent boredom in the species. Boredom is like the flat-bottomed proof. It is the feeling itself of the absurd. Being is just one long tiring game that has come out of billions of years of interactions.
However, as I said earlier, a view from nowhere as a non-sentient universe would be, is basically "nothing". The animal is a dissatisfied universe. A universe that cannot handle nothing.
Indeed, but the issue is that the absurdity I am alluding to, seems to differ from that of Schopenhauer's reference in one vital way. The absurdity of existence is discovered by man but extends even further out to declarative, logical inference. One of these declarations is based on Occam's razor that "nothingness" is indeed more justified than existence itself.
Can you explain this? I saw that earlier, but can you say it differently or expand?
Oh I see what you are saying. Just basically that there shouldn't be something but there is, and that is absurd.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But judgements are made not by the universe. Nothing is "inherently absurd". It is just absurd when an observer (the human) reflects upon it and points out the inanity that there is something at all rather than nothing.
However, my point to this was that brute "something" is pretty much like "nothing" unless there is a POV, because "something" without sentience just "is"(being), and you can call "being" absurd, because its there in the first place, but its the implications of how the reflector (the self-reflective being) assesses what is going on. This assessment is what makes the "absurd" take place. The POV has to be in the equation.. Otherwise, again, being mine as well be nothing without sentience.
Good point. One thing I noticed is that there's a common idea among these different school of thoughts -- capitalism, which fosters greed and power, is absent.
Consider: there could not.
Exactly, but the human here, is what makes all the difference. :) As a human, our logic becomes part of the universe. We discover mathematics, but it is still quite useful. Even the body uses mathematics, in a way our life is dependent upon mathematics. Tis the same with logic.
Quoting schopenhauer1
More importantly, if nothingness were to exist, it would not need a justification. Because it would be nothing, there would be no logic to exist in the first place. Simple enough right?
But nothing does not exist, instead "something" exists. But if we decide that existence does not need a justification either, then nothingness would actually be more justified to exist, at least according to Occam's razor.
Let's make it more simple:
We have x which has no justification (nothing).
We have y which could have a justification or could not have a justification (something) but we decide that for argument's sake that it has no justification.
Now I am saying that let's say we decide that either x or y needs to exist. That is, either "something" will exist or "nothing" will exist. And we will use Occam's razor to decide which exists. Whichever needs the least justification will (according to Occam's razor) be the one that exists.
Well nothing needs the least justification. In fact, if nothing existed a justification wouldn't even be possible. So nothing does not need a justification.
Therefore, according to Occam's razor nothing should actually exist. The way that I am wording it is simply confusing though, hence...if we say that either nothingness or existence is more justified to exist, it must be the case (according to Occam's razor) that nothingness is more justified to exist.
Where did I not answer you?
I get what you are saying, and I agree. I am just adding the fact that the absurdity of the unjustified existence is only gotten at by a sentient observer such as ourselves. In other words, its a post-facto epistemic understanding, though it just "is true" metaphysically. The epistemically is what matters here though because I am claiming, a non-sentient universe of "existing" amounts to about the same as "non-existing", again if there are no sentient beings in that world. What is "being" in a non-sentient universe? Is it atoms whizzing, and forces forcing? That would be an odd way of describing being.
I think the word “absurd” is better applied to your conception of existence and not so much to existing things. This is why we ought to rid ourselves of such mental containers—“existence”, “universe”, and so on—to make room for the less contrived. Any set of things is not itself a thing.
I didn't say you "did not answer", schop; you "answer" but without replying to, or addressing, what I've actually written.
And I asking how I did not do that. Right now you just seem itching to troll me or start a fight and not a dialogue.
Once more, the absurdity of existence ... I thought we had all agreed on that ... :smirk:
This is indeed petty. Point out what didn’t respond or get off the pot.
Trolling for what? I responded. You said it wasn’t responding to you. I’m asking how. Not trolling.
Oh yes?
You think that when we determine what something is, or what is true, or what justifies an action, we disturb ourselves with something completely beyond our control? All these determinations relate to how we live and conduct ourselves, which are things in our control. Why there is something rather than nothing, though, does not.
You don’t know unless you think about it. Thinking about it is in our control.
Certainly, you may think about what why there is something rather than nothing if you wish. I don't say you can't; I say you shouldn't, unless you want to disturb yourself about something completely beyond your control. Like why you're not Arthur Godfrey, or Jimmy Durante, or nothing at all, instead of yourself.
Theoretical physics of how the universe works is out of my control. It just is what it is. Some physics has no real use for humans. Should we not think about it?
I have to admit I don't know enough about theoretical physics to say whether it may have a "real use." I suspect it may, but don't know. It strikes me that it has a real use for someone who is a physicist, obviously, if they for example are paid for being one. It also seems from what I read that physics may be used in technology.
Regardless, though, I think there's a distinction between considering how the universe came to exist and considering why it came to exist, and why not nothing. Considering how the universe came to exist may actually be answerable, and the answer to that question may provide insight into how things work, which may be of benefit to us. To the extent the question why there is something instead of nothing doesn't seek to determine how things came to be, I don't think it's an answerable question at all. Do we want to concern ourselves with an unanswerable question--something that isn't a question?
But the axiom at we shouldn't disturb ourselves with things beyond our control addresses well-being, wisdom, living the good life, primarily. Seeking answers to pseudo-questions is certainly to pursue something outside of our understanding, and in that sense control.
So I stated that the info may be if no applicable value. And indeed it is important to the researcher as is some metaphysics that isn’t applicable is to the philosopher.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Why not? Does reading a fiction matter other than it being of some value to the reader of the book?
Quoting Ciceronianus
Not sure why it’s bad in any way. It’s something we can pose. That in itself means something. I’m just against limiting inquiry because it follows some pat answer or because it sounds cool to be more practical. There’s nothing inherently wrong with asking questions that might not have an answer. At least you haven’t provided a justification for not pursuing things, especially if it can be applied to any number of frivolous things we do. I guess if it is causing anxiety it can be a hypothetical imperative to refrain from it but unsure if that is the OPs problem necessarily.
Also sometimes frivolous seeming questions can lead to ideas adjacent so there’s even utility value in it for idea generation.
For example the OP has me thinking on the idea of the necessity of existence vs it’s contingency, modal logic and universes, a persistent apeiron that can’t not be, views of nowhere, perspective from nothingness.