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?
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CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days agoThat 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.
wabasso@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
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.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 days ago
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.