Submitted 2 days ago by gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5a938f3d-7c20-4206-ad94-df5555d34a97.jpeg
this picture will never not be funny
just the absurdity of donald duck putting out that statement (which even makes some sense and fits donald’s overall depressed mood) and mickey mouse being the sly one and contradicting donald, coming out with the upper hand from the argument, is just so amusing.
Donald duck states a fact, Mickey Mouse says some off the wall shit someone in a mental institution would rant about. OP agrees with Mickey.
Perfect shit post.
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?
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.
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”
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.
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?
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.
Mickey wants you to fight nihilism.
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.
this is so funny seeing this image again. Like 10 years ago when I first saw this image itchanged my perspective on life and really helped me calm down
Why are my only options fight or perish? Why can’t I just vibe?
yeah actually that’s the only critique that i have about mouse’s comment. mouse is a machine, knows only productive output but no relax and chill.
When he says “fight or perish”, maybe he means fight for your right to party. Dog of course refers to I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges. The ego perishes under the weight of uncontrollable love.
I’m gonna eat junk food.
Yeah, I’ll take “Perish like a dog” for 0 dollars please.
happy for you though
or sorry that happened
i ain’t readin all that
Dogs fight just as much as humans
No intrinsic value? Don’t care, made my own meaning
Maroon@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This sounds like the kind of stupidass discourse you get when Jordan Peterson sits with Ben Shapiro with Joe Rogan trying sniff both their butts.
JangleJack@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Seriously. Why are chemicals absurd? Answer: They are not absurd. They are arranged and tuned to your relations with your surroundings. They are sensory organs. Ignoring your senses is a choice I guess, especially when they are badly calibrated or misinformed by fake inputs (social media, rage bait, w/e)
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 days ago
I think most people have gotten over this fallacy when it comes to organic intelligence these days, but people still make it with regards to machine learning. They say LLMs are reducible to an equation (which is an oversimplification) and therefore they can’t have any subjective experience.
But if your math is complex enough to reduce an LLM to an equation (something no human has ever done, but is theoretically possible), then you’d be able to do it to humans too. Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, and all that. So yeah, humans are just a mathematical equation. A human brain is just a machine that predicts the most likely action to help you eat food and have sex.
And if you believe talking creatures can lack subjective experience, well congratulations, you’ve invented p-zombies. Which I think is dangerous. We don’t need millions of people walking around who seriously believe in p-zombies.
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Yeah - reducing things to material components isn’t absurd and doesn’t destroy subjective meaning.
Like, I don’t believe in free will, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find life meaningful - it’s just a fact about how the world works. I still perceive choice, I perceive meaning - it’s a subjective and phenomenological matter, not an objective/material one.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 days ago
These chemicals have been assigned moral and intrinsic value based on how they affect us. In a universe of unfeeling, indifferent chemicals we derive meaning. Like divining order in a storm of chaos. The miracle is that we can find meaning in the meaningless.