Hey u/VersaceEauFraiche - your answer has fascinated me as I’m living with depression and anxiety and I’m coming to terms with life through the lens of Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) - I think your comment extends on that framework, but I don’t have the experience or academic background in philosophy to fully understand it. Could you reframe it for someone who doesn’t have training/education in philosophy? Context - I’m a 46-year-old married father of two in the UK who has recently been able to start really living again due to (in part) the aforementioned ACT which has given me the following mental tool “Yes, u/Yearsofpractice, this situation or emotion does feel unpleasant, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad. Celebrate the fact that you’re feeling something and remember that things change. You’re alive, you’re living to your values, so just accept the experience and look to the future”. Anyway - any feedback welcome.

What are those seven things? I am unfamiliar

When did YOU learn this? Was it not from the day you were born until now, making observations in your lifespan? Are you saying that's real at all? Infact I think it's more accurate to say that you left no association between whatever is observable and the objective. You are saying everything is a lie so essentially that statement in of itself is a lie, no?

Why does mind-body dualism make life meaningless?

It's not a question of assumption. There are at least seven things that we can literally know for a fact exist outside the imagination. Sartre identified one, meaning is another.

"Value" is a myth.

"Should" is a myth.

You're looking at "why" wrong. "Why" is asking for a fellow organism's motive.

The universe does not revolve around us anymore than it did the T-Rex or the dodo hence we are free to kill ourselves individually or nuke ourselves into extinction (e.g. in the 1960s over the Cuba missile crisis) but look at how vast the universe is and how "unlikely" our existence was (the dinosaur extinction etc.).

This universe is this universe (past, present, future) down to the tiniest detail. My lifetime exists just as the Big Bang (or whatever we want to call it) exists and it affects the future. If that lifetime ends with me committing suicide then that is how it affects the future, I cannot remove meaning from things, that is just this silly idea we humans have, that if we misbehave or misstep we "destroy" meaning like dirty fingers smudging the letters in a letter.

Art is essentially an organism trying (or achieving) to spark creativity (innovation, "newness"), even if only in itself. In other words, bats flying today is arguably due to the art of survival.

I don't see a reason to assume anything at all is outside of imagination, do you?

Caring is irrelevant. Ants and cats navigate reality just as humans do, trees follow the seasons and rocks meant something to dinosaurs long before humans came along.

EDIT: I'm curious, thought. When you said "The world is meaningless in itself.", what was your notion of what meaning is exactly?

Stuff and nonsense. Nihilists and cultists are equally stupid.

Have you heard of consequences? And patterns? Meaning is omnipresent, it always was and always will be. "Meaninglessness" is an utter impossibility. If the distance between the Sun and the Earth was half of what it is or twice what it is, we would not be having this conversation over the Internet right now. You cannot make the distance between the Sun and the Earth "meaningless". Every little detail of this universe (past, present, future) makes it this universe and not a very similar story (e.g. a tiny little detail is different in Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet so in the end Romeo and Juliet lived happily growing old together).

Scientists, poets, painters and sculptors use meaning. Our eyes and ears and brains use meaning. Because clues are everywhere whether detectives exist or have not evolved from primordial ooze yet or nuked themselves into extinction.

Yes, heroin means something e.g. if you find a lot of it in a dead man's bloodstream it either means cause of death was overdose or he was about to die from an overdose. Or do you mean heroin mean something in a vacuum? There is no vacuum.

We don't have "need" for anything. All life on this planet could have died out before there were even dinosaurs. "Necessity" is a myth, it never exists outside the imagination.

If it is unclear that the subject of my original comment uses a veneer of environmentalism as one aspect of his efforts to obfuscate his march down Umberto Eco’s ur-fascism list, it is due primarily due to a lack of skill by the writer, not the reader.

S’ok. Relearning how to write. Et écrit. Και να γράφω.

Though, it must be said, classical philosophy is often similarly constructed to how I wrote my message, and it similarly is misunderstood. “No thing” is not “nothing”.

But we can at least agree on the existence of a positive good and a negative bad, correct?

Ideally, try to spread pleasure and/or minimize suffering for others. At the risk of sipping hippy-ish; love.

>improves quality

well you have to make sense though

At the risk of potentially sounding like an early 70's hippy pseudo philosopher . . .

I feel like anyone who thinks that life is inherently meaningless needs to unplug from social media and withdraw as much as they can from the modern machine. Maybe they should even try some psychedlic substances (in a responbile way). The notion of human life being inherently "meaningless" is a thoroughly modern idea, and it's exacerbated by our consumerist tendencies toward excessive (or even exclusive) digital interaction.

Before the advent of existentialism, you would be the odd-one-out if you posited that life had no inherent meaning. The subjective life experience is so full of inherent meaning. The only way it's not is if you believe in a mind-body duality (a la Descarte) that separates the subjective observer from the objective observed. In truth, our subjective minds are a part of objective reality. What you feel matters. All you'll ever have is what you feel. Just because we can't find an objective "proof" that the universe was made specifically for mankind doesn't mean the subjective experience of that universe is automatically devoid of intrinsic meaning. The more we distance ourselves from a natural state of being, the more compromised of meaning our subjective experience becomes.

I believe nihilism is only explicable when viewed as a product of the modern dynamic - Baudrillard's "simulacra and simulation" thesis. We're so thoroughly distracted from a natural state of being that we have spent centuries now bending over backwards looking for a reason for existing when a reason for existing was never required. The universe is not a question that needs to be answered! The universe simply is. And so are we.

eco is a prefix often affixed to connote or denote environmental credentials.

writing poetically is a method to gently say things succinctly with wit and brevity while not sacrificing veracity. the practice improves quality and increases capacity of speaking sans mendacity. helps with my loquacity and nudges perspicacity.

Tell me what this 'meaning' is. This makes about as much sense to me as the idea that God is self evident.

Looks loke nihilism will reign forever then...

Well everywhere? Be careful? Is there meaning in heroin? Maybe you think that I just want you to understand that you think that. Also if we have no need for meaning is statement that can only be paired with "we don't have need for anything" otherwise is necessarily false.

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Ascribing everything to a comedy. Surly the must be a great deal of meaning in comedy in that interpretation. Since consciousness in turn spawned comedy again.

Something I never understood is why place any value on survival at all, what presupposition am I missing? Infact wouldn't death just be an easy just as meaningful way out? Honestly sounds a lot easier than trying to survive! Just kill all your desires then yourself? Well the reason I think the authors keep doing this is because of the core concept of pride, which ties in to the whole "make meaning out of suffering" ordeal.
if you think consciousness as a wild sea representing all the possibility, you can cope by 1- closing your eyes. 2- anchoring so that effectively the available part of the sea is a lot more manageable. 3- going with the flow of the tides, that's distraction and hedonism. 4- stand in place at the ocean floor refusing movement, now I argue that's pride, specifically the type that comes before the fall, thinking the ocean can't break you when you are body deep seems extremely absurd, because it obviously won't work, and, wait why are we doing this in the first place? Why are we deciding that we need to cope with ocean? If nothing else wouldn't it simply be better to let it break us? I guess we are too prideful for that!

Now the part about the creative endeavor angers me the most! If it's the thing that should be held at the highest place shouldn't it be clearly defined? What art? One can say "it's art because it's unidentifiable" then how is it different than the ocean? It's the exact same! And I say either 1- it's the ultimate distraction. 2- you believe it is pointing to something higher, above the ocean, you hold that view if you say "art is trying to define something other than itself" pointing at an objective principle!
If I got something wrong I would love corrections

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