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BertM comments on Mark Manson and Rationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (18)
What is important though? Isn't that just subjective as well as illusionary? Purely objectively speaking (if such a thing is possible) everything is relative, even importance e.g. what is important for me, might not be for you, what is important in 1765 might not be important in 2015, what is important on earth might not be important on the moon, etc. etc. Is saving someone's life important? Yes, to that person and those who love that person it is...for a while. 500 years from now, not so much any more. So once you find something important you must also realise that this importance is only important within (your) context. Thus making it unimportant. In order to keep it important you must believe in it. Believe it has importance, believe the context justifies the importance. So in the end aren't you just rationalizing importance and thus your reason to live?
As I see it (please correct me if I am wrong) everything we do is just to kill time. importance and unimportance are just qualifications we invent so we can avoid feeling bad.
Okay. Not sure what the reason is for the negative points on my last 2 replies. I will admit my response to this article was fuelled by my own frustrations. But still I do not see where my logic fails when I say: "Life is objectively without purpose afawk. The rational thing to do is accept that."
For the past 30 years I lived a life without meaning, purpose, passion, importance, you name it. Still, I feel no need to end it, nor does that mean I cannot enjoy things. But what that does do is make me feel lonely. I see everyone around me, everywhere, hiding behind their own self-created "purposes".
To me, it is like everyone is digging holes and trying to find something, totally oblivious to that fact that there is a vast world above ground. It is just an -no doubt biased- observation/feeling. I didn't respond to disagree with the article, but to see if anyone can give me a logical, rational reason to agree with it (=start digging a hole).
I failed in that. Sorry.
"Thus"? I think that only follows if you take "important" to mean something like "universally important, to all people at all times and in all places, and even in places like the moon where there are no people". In that case: sure, pretty much anything you care to mention will fail to be "important". But why should we demand that?
I take "important" to be a human invention. Which is, like you say, not universal. Each importance is individual and at best shared by a group of people. As such I would argue it is a belief which does not relate to an 'objective' reality. I suspect that everyone needs a false belief in order to have a drive to live because reality puts us in a catch-22 (programmed to survive, but death is inevitable).
I am not saying we should demand a universal, objective importance. What I am saying is we must demand rationality and truth. There is nothing wrong with believing something is important, as long as you also admit it is a false belief. My problem (personally) is that once I accept it is a false belief, I can no longer believe it thus making it impossible (for me) to find importance in life.
I apologise for not making clear I was replying from a personal point of view.
Being alive is important* to me. And that is probably just my survival instinct talking. I fail to see the rationality behind the 'urge' to explain it any other way. If we do, don't we go the road of religon?
*) Not sure if 'important' is the right word. I feel my body and mind wanting to be and remain alive. Not sure if I consciously and rationally would label it as important.
Yup. So is cricket. None the less, there is a definite answer to the question "Did so-and-so score 100 runs in the last game, or not?".
OK. But it might (like beliefs about cricket scores) relate to a not-so-objective reality. What you certainly can't rightly do is leap from "is not a statement of objective truth" to "is a statement of objective falsehood". If "important" is a predicate that only has a definite meaning once you say for whom, the same is true of "not important".
But that's exactly what I'm saying you don't need to do. (Unless the belief in question is that whatever-it-is is universally, eternally important. That might be false. But I don't see why you need such beliefs in the first place.)
I'm not sure exactly what "it" is here. The urgency you attach to remaining alive probably is just your survival instinct talking. (Though it may also be influenced by, e.g., other people's interest in your remaining alive.) But whatever sense of importance you attach to things other than remaining alive surely has other origins.
I am sorry. I must word my argument/question very badly because we are drifting away from my gripe with the article. Perhaps I'll just close with explaining how I experience life:
Life just is. Life just tries to keep alive. To keep alive, humans (and other animals) feel good/bad in certain situations.
To me, nowhere in this, there is anything important, useful or goal-centric. Since we are aware, cognitive beings, we struggle with reconciling our survival-instinct with the fact it is all pointless. So we invent things like cricket, money, importance, life purpose and whatnot.
Personally I think/believe it would be much better if we all just found comfort in the fact we are all useless and we are all struggling with the cognitive dissonance and we are all in the same pickle and help each other deal with it. rather than trying to find solace in external things, or worse; constructs like 'importance' . These may help at times, but they should never be elevated to the status of 'truth/solution/whatever). They are just things we do to kill the time, preferably in a pleasant way. That doesn't make it important. It is just the way it functions.
Then again. Perhaps I just think and feel like this because I have Dysthymia.
I'll conclude here the same as below in my other reply: Life is objectively without purpose afawk. The rational thing to do is accept that. To invent subjective purposes is to deny the objective truth. that's all I am proposing.
The idea is that identifying what you consider to be important and not important is more tractable than trying to discover your "life purpose".
To me, they are the same things... human concoctions; words for things that do not exists anywhere else but in our imagination. Then again, I hope I am wrong about that.
The text states:
It should have read:
Some of these things are important to you. Some of them are unimportant to you.
But even then it still implies that things that are important and unimportant exist for you. It is a statement of fact where no fact exists.
The best way to have phrased that would be something like:
You can make yourself believe some of these things are important to you, and some unimportant.
To me (again, I hope to be wrong) what is said here translates as: 'You can make yourself believe anything in order to be happy'. And that just doesn't feel right. Besides, personally I don't see how I can make myself believe something full knowing it is just a belief.
"It should have read: "Some of these things are important to you. Some of them are unimportant to you.""
The importance being relative to you is implied and I believe that most people get the implication. Remember the Typical Mind Fallacy.
"But even then it still implies that things that are important and unimportant exist for you. It is a statement of fact where no fact exists." - what you don't think people have things they consider important?