Comments

  • Is Absurdism the best response to life's lack of meaning?


    Would you then,suggest being detached to such an extent that you no longer care if the universe possesses any sort of meaning?
  • Is Absurdism the best response to life's lack of meaning?


    the meaningful fragment, that can relate to and be related to the whole.Cavacava

    The things you say before the above quote seem quite reasonable.It is at this point that unintelligible phrases start creeping in.

    For starters,why does the fact that we can attribute meanings to meaningless things make us the "meaningful'' fragment?

    And then again it seems much too far fetched to say we relate to "the whole". How,for example,would you relate to,or attribute any meaning to,say,a random asteroid hurtling around in some distant galaxy?

    It seems only reasonable to say that we "relate to" merely things that are closer to us in the course of our lives.We may for an example,"relate to" the people we interact with,in this manner.To say that we possess some sort of cosmic "relatability" that helps us "relate to" the whole of the universe would be taking the point too far.
  • Is Absurdism the best response to life's lack of meaning?


    "Search for meaning" is a rather weird phrase to use since you concede in your first paragraph that life doesn't have any meaning built into it.

    Thus then the search for meaning you refer to, would be the equivalent of groping around in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.

    I think therefore that the solution lies not in ''searching'',but in thinking.Surely some amount of thought would lead you to some conclusion as to what you want your life to be like and this should be the meaning you subsequently ascribe to your life.
  • The Numskulls


    The recent kids movie "Inside Out'' shares this same idea of miniature ''people'' living inside our minds,and controlling the things we do,the decisions we make,etc.You'd enjoy checking it out.

    A flaw,however,that both of these pieces of literature have is that they make it seem as if these numskulls themselves have personalities of their own,thus leading to the natural question of whether they have ''sub-numskulls'' of their own,living inside their heads.

    And this infinite regress,I think,could be avoided if you simply made these numskulls representative of individual and distinct aspects of mental states.

    For an example,you could have a numskull who represents the emotion of happiness and nothing more,which would thus reduce this numskull to a mere emblem of living joy,thus deleting his personality.The same would apply to the numskulls representing other aspects of the mind.Now the question of sub-numskulls is answered since these numskulls couldn't possibly have any sub-numskulls since they don't have any personality in the first place.
  • Are we conscious when we are dreaming?


    I'll only be answering your first question since Libet's experiments are unknown to me.

    The answer to the question depends a lot on what you mean by "being conscious".

    If this merely means the ability to acknowledge the mental states you are experiencing,in the sense,for an example, that you have the ability to acknowledge the mental state created within you when you see the colour red,then the answer is yes.

    During the interval of time within which you see the dream,you are aware of the mental states created in your brain by the events of the dream and hence you are conscious during the dream.