scientism comments on Ontological Crisis in Humans - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Wei_Dai 18 December 2012 05:32PM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 18 December 2012 06:51:07PM 8 points [-]

should we be very sanguine that for humans everything must "add up to moral normality"?

No. People do go out of their minds on nihilism now and then.

And I've already seen two LWers who have discovered such compassion for the suffering of animals that they want to exterminate them all except for a few coddled pets, one of whom isn't sure that humans should exist at all.

Less dramatically, any number of Buddhists have persuaded themselves that they don't exist, although I'm not sure how many just believe that they believe that.

"If nothing really exists and it's all just emptiness and even the emptiness is empty of existence, then how could I have killed all those nonexistent people with my nonexistent hands?

"Tell it to the nonexistent prison walls, buddy."

Comment author: scientism 18 December 2012 11:32:29PM *  7 points [-]

Buddhism merely states that there's a psychological continuum in which there is nothing unchanging. The "self" that's precluded is just an unchanging one. (That said, in the Abhidharma there are unchanging elements from which this psychological continuum is constituted.) The Mahayana doctrine of emptiness (which isn't common to all Buddhism, just the schools that are now found in the Himalayas and East Asia) essentially states that everything is without inherent existence; things only exist as conditioned phenomena in relation to other things, nothing can exist in or of itself because this would preclude change. It's essentially a restatement of impermanence (everything is subject to change) with the addition of interdependence. So I'd imagine few Buddhists have convinced themselves they don't exist.