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Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 days agoI 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?