[ExI] Existential Nihilism.

[Alan Grimes]

Since I'm the single most provocative poster on this list, I'll keep up
my tradition with a spiel for the philosophy which guides my
understanding of the universe.

Existential nihilism is a philosophy for understanding the world. It is
not intended to make the user look smart to other people, it is
absolutely not intended to make you feel good about anything. On the
contrary, it is intended to make you feel bad about exactly the things
you need to change in yourself to make you feel genuinely good. On the
other hand, it does not tell you what you should feel bad about or what
you should do about those things. What it does do is blow away all the
bullshit you are immersed in from the culture and the propagandists and
see the true mechanisms behind how the world works.

Existentialism contradicts essentialism. Essentialism insists that
everything has an essence that dominates it. For example, that a person
is defined by his brain pattern. That this brain pattern can contain
one's essence which can be bestowed upon any 8088 that happens to be
available. Existentialism, says that you are exactly what you are, I am
what I am, and the world is what it is.

Sartre gets into a psychological phenomenon he calls "Existential
Angst". A great deal of human psychology can be explained by an effort
to escape existential angst. Existential angst is what you feel when you
switch off your persona and put yourself into a meditative trance (om)
where you focus on all of your attention on your senses and the nature
of your own temporary existence. If you do it right you will feel angst.
You will feel limitations in your own body and mind that you spend most
of your time ignoring. A good existential nihilist intentionally keeps
his mind as close to this feeling as he is able.

Nihilism comes in when you realize that the world is nothing but this.
Ideas and concepts are tools not things. No useless concept should be
entertained and all ideas must always be open to examination. I am not
still arguing with the uploaders because I have failed to consider their
ideas, I argue with them because I have and because I cannot reconcile
them with my own world view because they rely on a dualist/essentialist
viewpoint. The threads prove that they refuse to leave it alone and
continue to try to change my mind even though I have not spent any time
in recent memory trying to get into their personal space. (Admittedly, I
do definitely take a pot shot at them every now and again but mostly
because I feel left out of the transhumanist movement.)

Me: I think the world r0x0r$ and I don't want anyone turning it into
computronium.

them: Are you still going on about your pathetic anti-uploading
luddisim, once uploaded everything will have so many more *PIXELS*!!!

In general their arguments have strongly trended towards being more
patronizing so for that and several other reasons, I won't respond to
posts which nit-pick things I've said. I will only respond to truly
insightful posts, or sufficiently well crafted flame bait.

Ultimate nihilism is achieved when you see nothing but chemically bonded
swarms of atoms around you. By reaching this state, all forms of
self-delusion are nullified.

Our consciousness, however, defies ultimate nihilism because it exists.
We each should believe in our own consciousness and suspect those around
us also exist (except for the philisophical, brain-obsessed zombies that
I call uploaders).

Now, what do we do with this existence in a wilderness of clumps of
atoms? Knowing your own mortality, that becomes one obvious thing to
work on. There are other things you might want to change about yourself
but that quickly spins off into the world of personal idiosyncrasies. As
a matter of personal policy, I don't criticize other people's choices
because I don't want to be so judged. I criticize uploaders only because
they continue to argue that they should be allowed to reduce the world
to computronium for no other reason than that it is the object of their
fetish. On the day that main-line transhumanism is about immortality and
body modification and uploaders are marginalized, I'll gleefully shut up
about it.

Anyone who has ever cracked a textbook knows that survival in the world
is a hard, grand challenge problem. It is only our exquisitely evolved
forms that allow us to forget this stark truth. Only a transhumanism
that faces all the challenges of survival head-on can even hope to
improve anything about the human condition. Strong AI is indispensable
for even approaching the problem. But then I see several organizations
dedicated to brain uploading, a tiny handful of individuals working on
AI, and hardly anything at all (explicitly) working towards medical
enhancements.


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