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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Wannabe Rational - Less Wrong
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If "feels bereft of meaning" doesn't mean that it makes you unhappy, the only other interpretation that even begins to make sense to me, is that an important part of your terminal values is entirely dependent on the truth of theism.
To experience what that must feel like, I try to imagine how I would feel if I discovered that solipsism is true and that I have no way of ever really affecting anything that happens to me. It would make me unhappy, sure, but more significantly it would also make my existence meaningless in the very real sense that while the desires that are encoded in my brain (or whatever it is that produces my mind) would not magically cease to exist, I would have to acknowledge that there is no possible way for my desires to ever become reality.
Is this closer to what you're talking about? If it isn't, I'm going to have to conclude that either I'm a lot stupider than I thought, or you're talking about a square circle, something impossible.
It is much closer to what I'm talking about.
Orthonormal writes that in the absence of a Framework of Objective Value, he found he still cared about things (the welfare of friends and family, the fate of the world, the truth of my his beliefs, etc).
In contrast, I find my caring begins fading away. Some values go quickly and go first -- the fate of the world, the truth of my own beliefs -- but other values linger, long enough for me to question the validity of a worldview that would leave me indifferent to my family.
Orthonormal also writes that in response to my hypothetical question about purpose,
And none of these are terminal values for me. Existence, happiness, fun and beauty are pretty much completely meaningless to me in of themselves. In fact, the something which causes me to hesitate when I might feel indifference to my family is a feeling of responsibility.
It occurs to me that satisfying my moral responsibility might be a terminal value for me. If I have none; if it really is the case that I have no moral responsibility to exist and love, I'd happily not exist and not love.
Orthonormal, yourself, Eliezer, all seem to argue that value nihilism just doesn't happen. Others concede that nihilism does happen, but that this doesn't bother them or that they'd rather sit with an uncomfortable truth than be deluded. So perhaps it's the case that people are intrinsically motivated in different ways, or that people have different thresholds for how much lack of meaning they can tolerate. Or other 'solutions' come to mind.
It seems to me that you conflate the lack of an outside moral authority with a lack of meaning to morality. Consider "fairness". Suppose 3 people with equal intrinsic needs (e.g. equal caloric reserves and need for food) put in an equal amount of work on trapping a deer, with no history of past interaction between any of them. Fairness would call for each of them to receive an equal share of the deer. A 90/9/1 split is unfair. It is unfair even if none of them realize it is unfair; if you had a whole society where women got 10% the wages of men, it wouldn't suddenly become massively unfair at the first instant someone pointed it out. It is just that an equal split is the state of affairs we describe by the word "fair" and to describe 90/9/1 you'd need some other word like "foograh".
In the same sense, something can be just as fair, or unfair, without there being any God, nor yet somehow "the laws of physics", to state with controlling and final authority that it is fair.
Actually, even God's authority can't make a 90/9/1 split "fair". A God could enforce the split, but not make it fair.
So who needs an authority to tell us what we should do, either? God couldn't make murder right - so who needs God to make it wrong?
Thank you for your effort to understand. However, I don't believe this is in the right direction. I'm afraid I misunderstood or misrepresented my feelings about moral responsibility.
For thoroughness, I'll try to explain it better here, but I don't think it's such a useful clue after all. I hear physical materialists explaining that they still feel value outside an objective value framework naturally/spontaneously. I was reporting that I didn't -- for some set of values, the values just seemed to fade away in the absence of an objective value framework. However, I admit that some values remained. The first value to obviously remain was a sense of moral responsibility, and it was that value that kept me faithful to the others. So perhaps it is a so-called 'terminal value', in any case, it was the limit where some part of myself said "if this is Truth, then I don't value Truth".
The reason I feel value outside of an objective value framework is that I taught myself over weeks and months to do so. If a theist had the rug pulled out from under them morally speaking then they might well be completely bewildered by how to act and how to think. I am sure this would cause great confusion and pain. The process of moving from a theist world view to a materialistic world view is not some flipped switch, a person has to teach themselves new emotional and procedural reactions to common every day problems. The manner in which to do this is to start from the truth as best you can approximate it and train yourself to have emotional reactions that are in accordance with the truth. There is no easy way to to do this but I personally find it much easier to have a happy life once I trained myself to feel emotions in relation to facts rather than fictions.
Upvoted for honesty and clarity.
I'm not sure there's much more to discuss with you on the topic of theism, then; the object-level arguments are irrelevant to whether you believe. (There are plenty of other exciting topics around here, of course.) All I can do is attempt to convince you that atheism really isn't what it feels like from your perspective.
EDIT: There was another paragraph here before I thought better of it.
I'm not sure that's possible. As someone who's been an atheist for at least 30 years, I'd say atheism does feel like that, unless there's some other external source of morality to lean on.
From the back and forth on this thread, I'm now wondering if there's a major divide between those who mostly care deeply without needing a reason to care, and those who mostly don't.
I'd thought of that myself a few days ago. It seems like something that we'd experience selection bias against encountering here.
I would expect to see nihilist atheists overrepresented here - one of the principles of rationality is believing even when your emotions oppose it.
I'm not surprised to encounter people here who find nihlism comfortable, or at least tolerable, for that reason. People who find it disabling - who can't care without believing that there's an external reason to care - not so much.
I don't feel that way at all, personally - I'm very happy to value what I value without any kind of cosmic backing.
Perhaps we could say "needn't be what it feels like from your perspective". It clearly is that feeling for some. I wonder to what extent their difficulty is, in fact, an external-tribal-belief shaped hole in their neurological makeup.
Agreed. I should remember I'm not neurotypical, in several ways.