no, the joke is that you don’t actually know that the chemicals inside your brain are actually chemicals. for all we know, we could all be living in a big computer simulation, and your feelings are actually caused by bits and bytes on a computer. so, we only think that we’re driving on a brain powered by chemicals because of the things that we can observe from within the simulation, in other words, the simulation makes us believe that we’re only feeling love because of silly chemicals doing things. meanwhile our feelings could be much more generic and come from the simulation itself, while the chemicals are only a pretense to make the simulation more believable.
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CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days ago
Always hated this meme because Mickey’s dialogue is set up to give the confident and condescending “vibe” of correctness but actually makes no sense if you stop and think about it. "Trusting the chemicals in your brain to tell you they are chemicals " when declaring emotions to have material basis isnt hypocrisy, it’s self consistency, essentially the reverse of hypocrisy. And if the universe is just a material thing with no basis for intrinsic value, what even is there to “fight” about that? You cannot exactly punch the nature of reality into submission, or change the behavior of the universe through sheer force of will. And if you could, there isn’t even a reason given for why you would even want to do so, it’s just implied that human values and emotions being a result of material reality is undesirable because what? “chemicals bad” I guess?
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 days ago
Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Congratulations, I never thought I would meet someone that could convince me that the simulation paradox was absolute garbage in the way you did here.
Can I borrow you to help destroy other paradoxes?
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days ago
That hypothetical doesnt really change what I said though. It would make the materialist position incorrect, but it still wouldnt be hypocritical because it would still be consistent with itself, and it still wouldnt give you any course of action with which to “fight” the nature of the universe.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 days ago
and it still wouldnt give you any course of action with which to “fight” the nature of the universe.
well, i’d say, deeply embedded into many of us is a deep sense of magic; that the world can in fact be changed if we give up the materialistic worldview. so, the moment we stop thinking in terms of chemical processes happening, is when the true change/magic happens. at least that’s my view of it.
i think lots of people have that worldview, including the mouse in the comic and probably also many american capitalists, because as long as the world is materialistic, you are bound by its laws and reality, meanwhile the core concept of a lot of tech bros’ worldview is that we will eventually be able to transcent that material nature; transhumanism, that we will make the (supposedly) “impossible” possible (thinking outside the box), “singularity”, etc.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days ago
transhumanism isnt transcendent of material reality though, its literally just the idea of using technology, which runs on the rules of nature to modify humans into some more desired state, its not that it does impossible things so much as that the limits of what the material universe allows are actually much grander than our current abilities are up to.
wabasso@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
I can’t even get past Donald’s statement which is absurd to me. What actually is “material to the universe” and what difference does it make if my experiences are “material” or not?
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 days ago
What actually has “intrinsic value [in the] universe” and what difference does it make if my experiences are “intrinsically valuable” or not?
i think what donald is referring here is the concept of the universal, which is a very important concept throughout all of humanity’s history. it says that there are ever-lasting, always-present laws (the so called universal laws) that everything is derived of. As such, there are clear ways to act and that distinguish right from wrong. This is the basis of all morality and therefore also of the legal code, politics, philosophy, and everything that guides our societies.
This is also frequently brought into connection with natural law, which states basically the same thing.
The reason why it is important is because it is really the only thing holding society together. You can’t have a country of a billion people if the people think that you can just make your own laws and do whatever you want. The reason why world-spanning connections exist is because we believe in coherency, i.e. that things are the same way, more or less, everywhere, and it is therefore possible to establish communication and provide something like a connectivity tissue across the whole globe. Without that, you wouldn’t really have one humanity at all but a whole lot of very small tribes all probably fighting each other, no state building or higher society. So it’s a really important concept to think of.
Cherries@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Mickey wants you to fight nihilism.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days ago
What does that even entail though, you cant exactly force things to objectively matter if they don’t already, there’s no mechanism by which we could influence that. If you just assert values that you hold personally, you’ve merely created subjective meaning and done nothing relevant to nihilism’s truth value. Meanwhile If nihilism turns out to be objectively false, then you can’t fight it because it wouldnt even exist to fight. You can fight nihilists I guess, but then you’re in the generally disliked position of fighting people based on a belief of theirs that does not require them cause any harm to you or anyone else, because it doesn’t require anything at all.
Its about as bizarre a call to action as declaring that you dislike some branch of math and want people to help you fight it.
GimmeUrBelt@lemmy.today 2 days ago
You’re kind of an idiot, huh.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days ago
I fail to see how, true or false, that would be relevant.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 1 day ago
that kinda doesn’t really answer the question at all
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
but then you’re in the generally disliked position of fighting people based on a belief of theirs that does not require them cause any harm
This is where you’re fucking up. You’re choosing to distinguish, for no reason, what a person believes from who that person is. People do believe things, and people do cause harm: they’re one in the same.
Racists, for instance, believe in a racial hierarchy. Should we not fight racial hierarchy?
Almost every time I’ve heard somebody say something like Donald Duck, they’ve turned out to be people who believed in and fought for nothing. Voting is pointless, kindness is pointless, death is pointless, being likable is pointless—this is an absurdly depressive, and I would say mentally ill, reality to subscribe to.
And this is important, because this reality is one that nazis on 4chan have been using for some 15 years to groom people, disarming them of their good nature. To go a step further, 4chan nazis are the Maga movement, and the Maga movement is a suicidal one. I’m not being hyperbolic. The penguin that wanders off into the mountains in search of glory will die there. It knows this.
You, CarbonIceDragon, have to inoculate yourself against this psychic damage. You, CarbonIceDragon, have to believe in our ability to build a better future. You have to have hope. Nihilism does not carry hope. Like in Danganronpa, hope is the battle for which we are fighting.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days ago
Nihilism carries plenty of hope; it carries the hope that the values we make for ourselves, our subjective experiences, are the highest basis we have to judge ourselves on, that we are not a cog in somebody elses cosmic machine, or at least that if we are, that someone ultimately has no more valid a claim to us than we do. A universal meaning, if one exists, has a potentially infinite number of things that it could be, so if one exists, we almost certainly will fail to live up to it, despite any effort we make, and that notion I find horrifying. But you cannot fail if there is no goal, you can do what you want, and as humans are a social species, what we want, on average, is to live well, to be kind and experience kindness. Absent some other mission, this is what people try to do, without really needing to think too much about it.
I do not get this “nihilism means you feel everything is hopeless” notion, despite it being commonly repeated, because if nothing matters, nothing requires you to give up. There is no reason not to keep going, and since humans are ultimately wired to want and need and care about things, hope for the future is the default state. The people that tell you to not vote, or not be kind, or similar, on the grounds that things are all pointless, are not actually following nihilism, because they act as if that implies there is a universal mandate for inaction, not simply no mandate.
Beyond that, theres the matter that, well, I simply dont see a mechanism from which a universal meaning and purpose could arise (short of an actually omnipotent entity existing and using its power to decree such a purpose, but since I also believe such entities are self-contradicting and impossible, I cant accept that one). Purpose to my use of the term implies artificial creation to fulfill some role, an ultimate purpose then would somehow have to mean that the sum total of all things was created by some intelligent entity, except that entity would also be a thing that therefore would have to have retroactively created itself, which is paradoxical. Even if, for the sake of argument, I did think that the idea of a meaningless universe was mentally unhealthy, I cannot simply decide that idea is factually wrong simply because I didnt want it to be true, my brain just does not let me consciously change my beliefs without being convinced to the contrary like that. There are a great many things that I wish werent true, and yet think are regardless. This isnt one of them, but that isnt the reason I think it.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 days ago
I used to agree with you, but then I realised why it works:
Mickey is basically repeating the old absurdist critique, “if nothing matters, it doesn’t matter that nothing matters”. He’s saying why are you despairing that everything in your brain is chemicals? Is it because the chemicals in your brain told you to? Then stop giving a shit, they’re just chemicals!
And then he goes on to take up an Existentialist position in the vein of Sartre and declare that to live a meaningful life is to struggle against your base urges and cultural indoctrination, and to instead live a life whose meaning is determined by your own choices.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days ago
Ah, then I see my point of confusion: I do not see “nothing matters” as a fundamentally undesirable position (actually kind of the reverse), so to me Donald’s statement does not read as despare at all, it just reads as a neutral explanation of his stance on it. As such, Mickey’s statement doesn’t read to me as absurdist reassurance, rather, Donald’s reads more as something an absurdist might say and Mickey’s response reads more as “how dare you believe that, that idea must be somehow made false even if it is true and I wish to use violence to bring that about”
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 days ago
Yeah, it’s all in the facial expressions. The duck is unhappy about there being no intrinsic value, because he wants the universe to tell him what to value. He’s got that kind of authoritarian mindset where you want to be ruled by a big strong leader who tells you what to think and what to value. Which most people do! Most people believe in a higher authority, even if it be mother nature or the universe. You and Me, the kind of creatures who want to be our own masters and would rebel even against the universe itself, are a rare kind.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 1 day ago
I was gonna say the same! That’s what makes it so difficult to interpret it, because we cannot say how they feel except by reading the subtle hints in their body language, which is vague and easily misunderstood. I guess that’s why these philosophical topics are so difficult, because really there’s a lot going on in the emotions (that tells us how to feel about something, whether to like or dislike a theory) and a lot of it is very subtle, which makes it challenging, also to agree on stuff with other people.
And then there’s this thing:
Why do you think that other people have to be “talked into” independence? What if you don’t do that? What advantage does it make?