Following are the excerpts from “The Suicide Note”, a fairly comprehensive essay, a guy named Mitchell Heisman left on a website (http://suicidenote.info) before killing himself in Harvard campus last month as a part of his experiment in nihilism.
“… If there is no extant God and no extant gods, no good and no evil, no right and no wrong, no meaning and no purpose; if there are no values that are inherently valuable; no justice that is ultimately justifiable; no reasoning that is fundamentally rational, then there is no sane way to choose between science, religion, racism, philosophy, nationalism, art, conservatism, nihilism, liberalism, surrealism, fascism, asceticism, egalitarianism, subjectivism, elitism, ismism…”
“… If reason is incapable of deducing ultimate, nonarbitrary human ends, and nothing can be judged as ultimately more important than anything else, then freedom is equal to slavery; cruelty is equal to kindness; love is equal to hate; war is equal to peace; dignity is equal to contempt; destruction is equal to creation; life is equal to death and death is equal to life…”
“… The problem of philosophy is that the paradoxes of nihilism may constitute the most universal condition or “highest principle” that rational thought has “progressed”. At the very pinnacle of rational Western thought lays the proposition that life is meaningless. Is this the most comprehensive insight that human reason is capable? Is this the fundamental conclusion that every experience, all knowledge, and every moment of living existence must come to terms with?…”
“… If the rational life leads to the nihilistic life, what are the consequences of a living intelligence whose highest organizing “principle” is this hypothetical nothingness? What would it mean, in concrete terms, to live a rational life according the insight of the nihilistic? What would be the ultimate consequence of applying the hypothesis of unmeaning to every belief, every thought, every action, every emotion, every purpose, and every goal? To nausea, to fear, to love, to terror?…”
“… Can one live a philosophy of the nihilistic, reconciling meaninglessness with every thought and emotion at every moment? If active unbelief were the highest organizing principle of a life, would the consequence be rational selfdestruction? Could suicide represent the pinnacle of the rational life realized? …”
“… If life is truly without purpose, then no choice can have ultimate grounds that are more justifiable than any other. If no values are inherently valuable, then life has no inherent value. If life has no inherent purpose, then its end could be directed towards its negation or death. Death could be posited as the highest value. Since the other secular values are premised upon life, death is the test of all the others. To test life with death tests the most important question I can conceive of: whether there is an important question. It tests importance itself: whether there is anything at all that can be judged important…”
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If objectivity, reasoning and rationality are inherently capable of contemplating on their own existence and to discover the reality the way it is, then according to this model-based-reality, life inherently is purposeless in nature. If abiogenesis and evolution are the true representations of reality, if existence precedes essence, there is no inherent or divine purpose to life except the one we choose to ascribe. There lies the choice, perhaps. And our action in making that choice assigns it a value.
Previous post: Purpose of Life
Here are some excerpts from a recent discussion with one non-believer in evolution. These would refer to the posts on Purpose of Life, meaning in a purposeless life and the Allegory of the cave:
Critic – You say “we need to take time and Introspect. For only by introspection we can ascribe a purpose to our lives.” Why should we take time to introspect? Why should we ascribe purpose to our lives if purpose doesn’t actually exist?”
Ans – That’s a choice or perhaps an illusion of a choice. If evolution and abiogenesis are true, and there is significant scientific evidence that they are, there’s no inherent pre-defined value to anything whatsoever. So, to answer your question, you don’t “have” to. Its a choice.. or perhaps an illusion of choice (illusion because even choosing in not choosing is a choice). We all do whatever we want to and often our actions are defined by what we think we should do (introspection?).
Critic – “Doesn’t purpose become meaningless when it can be anything I want? When I can change the rules whenever I want the game ceases being a game.”
Ans – Who said there’s a meaning to it? It IS meaningless. Its us who give it a meaning, or the illusion of meaning.
Critic – “…You seem to be stating a lot of ‘oughts’ in your article but ‘oughts’ don’t exist in a nihilistic universe!…”
Ans – I agree. They don’t. Its a choice, or an illusion of choice. Those oughts just reflect my version of that illusion of meaning.. yours could be different of course.
Critic – “Are you saying that rationally there is no reason why I should listen to your argument?”
Ans – Absolutely. There is none. Its a mere choice.
Critic – “Are you accepting my thesis that the universe is ultimately nihilistic?”
Ans – Yes. I do. In our model based realism, evolution is a fact which strongly suggests that universe is nihlistic.
Critic – “…assuming that Naturalistic Atheism were true (which obviously I don’t :p)…”
Ans – You, I or anyone else have no good reason to decide if naturalistic atheism is true or not. Intuition and sensory modalities in the “absence” of “multitude” of empirical validations using methods based on “different underlying principles”, are highly deceiving. That’s the very basis of scientific method. Only those hypothesis can be said to reflect the picture of reality in this modal-based-realism which can be empirically validated. The picture we have so far is that of naturalistic atheism. I would love to believe otherwise, but I have no better reason to do so.
Critic – “…Also, just because we can explain how the brain “does” morality this has zero bearing on whether morality has an ontological basis to it. It merely addresses the epistemological question of how we have to come to our understanding and practices of morality…”
Ans – The underlying assumptions of neuroscience research on emotion, morality and higher abstract functions are not dualistic but are rather based on “evolution” of cortex, specifically prefrontal cortex and integrative processing through limbic systems. So, if the underlying assumptions are correct, than the above argument is logically flawed.