It’s easy when people define their own terms. :(

All that matters is being first, not being factual. Clicks over truth.

I'm a scientist, not a philosopher. But since we are getting into physics, I will say this:

I don't think we know enough about existence to have much certainty whether or not we have free will. I understand the argument that free will does not necessary follow from either a predetermined or stochastic universe. But it could be an emergent property we don't yet understand. The deep intuition argument is, to me, the best. We have to define axioms to make sense of anything, and perhaps (like existence itself) the best argument for free will is the fact that we all seem to experience it.

This reminds me a bit of Macchiavelli. Of course I haven't read Macchiavelli, but it seems to me that he wants to achieve his goals optimally, even if it means making decisions that are immoral in the eyes of the public. A bit favoring the end over the means, like in the trolley problem, when you are killing people in war to prevent a greater evil. Goal-based over principle-based ethics.

In terms of strategy, you could look at game theory. The prisoner's dilemma is about waging cooperation against betrayal or competition. Peace might be better for both countries, but if you are in a war, it's better when you do the first strike. It's still possible for cooperation to be strategically better, for example when you build up a trustworthy reputation over time in the "repeated prisoners dilemma".

Some countries are torn by corruption or civil wars. That might be just because they haven't had a chance to build a trustworthy reputation with each other.

The "Golden Rule" or Kant's similar categorical imperative say that you shouldn't do to others, what you don't want them to do to you. That would mean that you shouldn't start wars. I think this doesn't work then the other party is either evil or irrational or weak. You wouldn't want your kid to send you to bed at seven o'clock, but you can still do that to your kid. You can also imprison an insane murderer.

If you threaten violence, you might be able to control more people than if you actually exert violence. If you have one nuclear bomb you can hit destroy one enemy country but you can threaten to destroy multiple countries.

Practically speaking, in international politics you also have to consider the opinions of every other state. When you are an aggressor, they might ally against you. International law works similar to national law. Abiding to laws is often advantageus. Thomas Hobbes said something about that without laws, humans are wolves. But we have international laws or at least conventions, so states shouldn't be wolves either.

On a battlefield it is of course sometimes better to be defensive. I think Sun Tsu said, that you should only engage an enemy army, when you are stronger (like twice the number of soldiers or something). When you are behind a wall or on a hill, you don't leave your advantageus position. A chess move that takes a piece is not always better than one that doesn't. This is probably not what you meant, is it? "Always take the more aggressive tactical option!"

We don't put moralistic judgements on things we think don't have choice, but if determinism is true than this is sort of trivially untrue: we have in fact been making moral judgements on humans who don't have control over their choices. I think what some compatibalists are saying is that regardless of all the arguments and assumptions pinning morality, judgements of the choices that are made, to determinism, to the causal origin of choices, the one function is useful and points to soemthing real while the other isn't. Usually it seems to be framed as keeping one register of what freedom means socially while loosing others, identifying a function freedom has had and identifying freedom with whatever serves that function.

Basically, a choice is an empirical fact one could argue. I'm not talking about "a thing determined by nothing other than a person's agency" when I say a choice, but I am talking about whatever we have been pointing to for over a thousand years and calling a choice, an emergent phenomenon of the brain. So, what a compatablist might argue is that anything which undergoes a sufficiently close analogue of certain neural processes, and/or perhaps if treating it/them as free we can enter into a meaningful social relationship with it/them seeing it/them as free, then we can call it free.

The reason I wouldn't call a volcano free is that I can't enter into a relationship with a volcano as if it were free, and it does not have any (deterministic) process of determination. AI is in many ways I think free, but I don't think modern AI is necessarily conscious by virtue of being free. I think freedom as such likely preceeds consciousness. Even humans I think are free to varying degrees, not just politically and socially but phenomenologically. Just because something makes a free choice doesn't mean it should be held accountable IMO, if an AI decide to do harm, even nondeterministically with quantum randomness, that could be a free choice, yet I wouldn't think it should be held morally accountable if it didn't have sufficient sense of self. The more I think about the more morality and accountability seem to have little do with freedom to me.

Asserting that determinism removes choice from the equation is question begging. The compatibilists don't think it does and you didn't give even one reason why it would. Compatibilists would say that humans make choices and volcanoes don't for reasons that have nothing to do with the deterministic nature of the universe.

Thales is considered to be the 1st western philosopher, but who was the 1st philosopher overall? Was it Guan Zhong, or is there someone who was born even earlier than that who was practicing philosophy or something similar to it?

> Here I should mention the best Existential Comic in years (almost on par with SMBC at its best), according to which an AGI would see randomness as more detrimental to freedom than determinism, because it hinders its ability to have control over its environment.

In RL, stochasticity through some level of (pseudo-)randomness can be useful to balance exploitation-exploration. However, I am not sure "true randomness" is particularly any more or less helpful than "pseudo-randomness" in most of those contexts (what is gained, if we map out an unfolding of a pseudo-random process and change it to a world where the exact same sequence of actions is unfolded from a true-random process?)

I honestly feel like so much of "philosophy" is just miscommunication lol.

Took me a few rereads and looking up whatever/whoever he was referencing, but I think I'm getting the gist of what he's arguing? The main points I got from this I think were:

• Definitions of concepts/words matters a lot here
• Compatibilists definition of "free will" can be defined as having the freedom to act on our desires, even if these desires aren't something we were responsible for
• The conflict between our desires and the outside world's doesn't prove that free will exist in a compatibilist context. These desires after all, were just products of past events and causal chains
• Who we are has to be defined somewhere down the causal chain though, the alternative would mean that we would be free of all our desires and thus not really "us". Being free of all desires would mean that we are not really ourselves since our desires are important to our identity

Very interesting read, I think he makes a pretty compelling argument that is a lot more well defined/coherent than my take on free will up to now which kind of just boiled down to "all of who I am up to now has kind of been predetermined but even if free will is an illusion it's better to believe, even if falsely, that I am free so that I can function in society" Would love to hear other takes, especially if I interpreted some of this incorrectly.

>Have you actually never heard the term “free will is an illusion”? I feel like it perfectly describes compatibilism.

Whether this does or does not perfectly define compatibilism, I do not know.

I do know that this description is in fairly direct opposition to the relationship between free will and compatibilism as presented in the article.

>The author has redefined it to make it a negligible epiphenomenon.

The author has attempted to redefine it, and at the same time attempted to leverage the "common sense" perception of moral responsibility that is most certainly not based on his new definition.

The author is playing a semantic shell game, all while desperately attempting to convince you that he gets to go to dinners with more interesting people, and that those who disagree with him and his cool friends are just "Philosophy 101 students."

Compatibilism clicked for me once I realized it's basically talking about emergence. When you input "2+5=" into your calculator and it displays "7", is it because 2+5=7, or because the buttons changed the pattern of electric current in the calculator's circuits and caused a chain reaction resulting in the digit appearing on the display? Both answers are true, but the former one operates on a higher level than the latter. The same works for the question of whether you do what you do due to your soul's desire or due to neurons firing - both are true, but work on different levels. (This line of thought is used in Hofstadter's I Am A Strange Loop)

A different way to look at it - free will, in Berlinesque terms, is a form of negative freedom - an absence of constraints. Since the freedom worth talking about is the one that affects our lived experience, the only constraints that matter are those we actively feel, or know about. Free will can therefore be violated only when the levels cross, e.g. the Oracle of Delphi tells you your fate and you want to change it but unable to; a company targets you with effective subliminal advertising, and so on. As long as the level where determinism is located is untouched by the level where you live, your freedom is intact. This is why randomness, chaos and fuzzyness feel liberating.

Here I should mention the best Existential Comic in years (almost on par with SMBC at its best), according to which an AGI would see randomness as more detrimental to freedom than determinism, because it hinders its ability to have control over its environment.

Free will being an illusion is obviously compatible with determinism. That’s the whole point of determinism, that isn’t a free will worth wanting, and that’s OP’s point. The author has redefined it to make it a negligible epiphenomenon.

> I suppose that I think that the compatibilist redefinition of the terms make everything less literal and more metaphorical

I think that again brings the same question what is supposed to be the original "literal" sense in the first place and what would be the criteria to find it.

> it is less in line with what I believe most people mean by the terms, "free will", "morally responsible", and "choose".

Could be. But I see that as an empirical claim that would require experiments, interventions, survey to determine. I am neutral to how that will turn out.

> Also, there's often a real difference in belief between us: I really don't think anyone is in any important sense "morally responsible". This means I support preventative justice but I don't support retributive justice.

Same.

Well, not all philosophers are very "compatible" themselves lol. But that aside, yes you might call that flavor of compatibilism, illusionism. But for the most part, I think they just have a different definition of free will. I.e. one that isn't:

• If someone acts of their own free will, then they could have done otherwise (A-C).
• If determinism is true, no one can do otherwise than one actually does (D-E).
• Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will (F).

Compatibilism reminds me of Absurdism, in that you're embracing "the absurd" (even though it's a slightly different absurd here lol)

>Determinism is already compatibilism.

It is yeah, most compatibilists believe determinism to be true.

>It's just biased minds that can't accept biologically predetermined minds have a decision making apparatus, and it's all been accounted for, already, for several billion years.

But most compatibilists do accept that things are pre determined, they just don't believe that negates free will.

>It's once again, philosophers, unable to easily let go the ego and linguistic sphere of their thought process.

This seems quite an extraordinary claim, compatibilism has been around for centuries, it pre-dates back to the stoics, it's not some sporadic desperate invention by philosophers in reaction to scientific consensus regarding determinism.

This all makes sense. I suppose that I think that the compatibilist redefinition of the terms make everything less literal and more metaphorical, and it is less in line with what I believe most people mean by the terms, "free will", "morally responsible", and "choose". Also, there's often a real difference in belief between us: I really don't think anyone is in any important sense "morally responsible". This means I support preventative justice but I don't support retributive justice.

Sure, but why is that called compatibilism and not illusionism, which seems like a much more appropriate label? It just feels to me that compatibilists want the claim that free will is compatible with determinism (because they are physicalists who like the idea of moral responsibility) more than they want clarity around the words "free will".

Have you actually never heard the term “free will is an illusion”? I feel like it perfectly describes compatibilism. You can never escape the subjectivity of your personal perspective, objective truths might exist but they will never be known to you. Determinism might ultimately mean that your fate is inevitable, but that whole discussion is redundant since you can’t see the future. Even if it might be an illusion I do experience, and I am not omniscient so I feel free.

I personally have zero intuition about freedom, control, responsibility. I am more of an outsider who can play along with the "tune", and play "games" with the words, but I don't have any clear intelligible sense of them, beyond the rules of how some of the words get used in certain language games. Even then the rules are ill-defined and fuzzy in most contexts. I share very little intuition with most philosophers.

> First, notice that one of the main reasons anyone cares about free will is that it seems to be a requirement for moral responsibility. What you do can only be your fault, or conversely to your credit, if it’s under your control.

How do I notice it? How do you notice it? Have you taken an empirical survey? Some psychological experiment as to what anyone "truly" cares for? Have we find some cross-cultural and cross-temporal invariances (beyond WEIRD)?

Philosophers like to sneak in loaded statements about "this is common sense" "this is what we care for" here and there. As Lance Bush says, philosophy is often psychology with a sample size = 1.

There are some approaches in experimental philosophy seeking more into these questions but a lot can depend on how the questions are framed, and results seem somewhat mixed (people have both compatibilist and incompatibilist intuition) from the last time I check.

So I overall experience a tension here, it seems like the investigation as to what we really care for (at a statistical level -- otherwise what we care for in regards to "free will" is very unlikely to invariant accross individuals -- I have a discussion long ago with someone who really really wanted true randomness for freedom), and what should be called 'free will' if they are properly constrained into well-defined problems turns into questions of psychology, anthropology and such. I am not sure what philosophy is left to do. Perhaps, then people should use philosophical tool to create their own conceptual boundaries to track what they personally care for and analyze if such a thing is coherent and if there is good warrant for believing them. Philosophers, can then, simply "list" different conceptions that reflective people (philosophers) have considered and objectively discuss what we gain and lose from each, instead of forcing one as uniquely "true" or consistent with what people, in general, care of (that's psychology). We can perhaps then have some voting process as to which conception to choose or prefer. Or we can discuss some clear evaluation criterion (eg. from a conceptual engineering perspective).

> And so he claims they are compatible, but to do so he redefines free will, then claims he hasn't and that was the definition of it we were working with all along. It just isn't convincing to me.

But what makes a "definition" primal (true, non re-defined, original)? Is there such a "definition" in the first place and how to determine it? Should we make surveys accross culture? Should we analyze how "freedom" is used in practice? Should we look at historical lineage and development? Are you sure your linguistic intuitions track the "right definition"?

Sure, compatibilist free will may not match with the kind of free will you are concerned with; that's fine. You can say that's not the "free will I am concerned with", but that doesn't say anything about what's the true definition of free will is supposed to be, and what is supposed to be the "criteria" for distinguishing true definitions.

Compatibilists go as far back as Stoics and ancient. And the incompatibilist ideas of randomness-infusion is also explicated by philosophers. So it's not clear why the explication of some philosopher should be automatically privileged above others.

Personally, I don't think words really mean much of anything deep. Words are used within a pragmatic context. It can involve complex rules of play and how one person use it can subtly diverge from others. And internal intuitions can be incoherent. So neat and clean "definitions" are a lost cause. I don't think there are "definitions" out there to discover such one is "true" or "false". There's just messy usages of words to attain some pragmatic means.

Any attempt of definition is an approximation; I personally believe we should focus more on conceptual engineering (in a sense it can be "re-definition" but with a purpose -- to give more exact form to a usage and rules of usage that comply with how it's practically used and also simple)

Note that science does "conceptual engineering" too. For example, making pluto "not a planet", or defining temperature in terms of mercurial expansions, or making whales not a fish. Much of it is based on keeping some harmony with past usage, while keeping a trade off balance between simplicity of the concept, fruitfulness in a theoretical context, or practical use, among other things. There is nothing special about such "re-definitions".

From a conceptual engineering perspective, any compatibilist free will will fare far better than any any incompatibilist ones, as far as I can see.

I am a moral anti-realist (or anti-realist against anything "normative" (unless it is intelligibly conceptually re-engineered)), so the point about "moral" responsibility is also moot to me whether we get compatibilist free will or not. Responsibility assignment is a matter of pragmatic needs for intersubjective co-ordination. It just so happens that such assignment can help intervene and invest resources at critical points of "failure" so to say in certain kinds of autonomous causal systems. I think retributivist justice is meaningless and unintelligible either way.

Edit: sorry for the lack of paragraphs. Reddit decided to merge them when I copy-pasted this part for some reason

Well here, I think it's important to distinguish between good and bad, and moral and immoral. Maybe your action wasn't ultimately bad (aside from the trauma you might've given to the kids but work with me here), but it was immoral because you did something that had a great risk of death, even if it didn't end up happening. Like if you leave a loaded gun in a room with a toddler and he goes on an killing spree in the local Walmart, you can't really use the excuse 'but I didn't do anything, I didn't actually kill those people'. It's like yeah, but you neglectfully did something that you knew had a great risk attached to it. So let's go back to the 'good/bad', 'moral/immoral' table here. I'd say what makes something ultimately good or bad is based on how much negative or positive emotion it produces, measured in serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, etc. If it's a net positive, it was good, and if it's a net negative, it's bad. You get it. And whether something is moral or immoral is based on whether a moral agent (that is, a person who has the ability to make decisions) acted in a way that was likely to cause harm. Meaning if two people shoot up in the air but only one of the bullets lands on someone and kill them, while one of the actions was worse they were both morally equal. It also means that, say, hypothetically if the long-term consequences of WW2 are ultimately good, that doesn't make a certain sussy moustache man a moral person. This flies in the face of the philosophy of a dude named Immanuel Kant and his idea of a 'categorical imperative'. He thought that there was this big list of moral codes [list of rules that gets progressively sussier] that are always wrong to break, no matter what. He uses the example of someone with a family opening the door after getting a knock. Standing there is a psycho axe murderer who asks him where his family is. Now the question is, should he lie? Well I think most people would say yes. While lying is usually wrong, doing it to save your family is ultimately good. But Kant would disagree. He says that if you were to lie and say they're not home, the psycho axe murderer would disappointedly turn around and walk away, thinking about how he's an embarrassment to his psycho axe murderer ancestors when all of a sudden, he sees your family climbing out of the window. Turns out they overheard the conversation and decided to escape, but if the guy had just told him the truth that they were in fact home, they would've had a chance to escape. Now, I've been keeping a veneer of objectivity in this video so far, but I've gotta say this is one of the dumbest ideas in philosophy I've ever heard. I mean, leaving aside that he's totally taking for granted that the family would overhear the killer and try to escape through a window that's conveniently in his line of sight, you're tellin' me if a billion people were strapped to a conveyer belt being dragged to the pits of Hell, and you can stop it all by slapping a kitten, he'd be like 'nah bruh it's still fucked up like you can't justify slapping a kitten over anything durrr". Like HUH? Are you ok bro? Side note he was also a weird dude. Apparently in his 79 years of life he never ventured 20 miles away from his home to go to the coast. I mean, I think he'd be right at home with the Discord moderators of today. But anyway, what I'm getting at here is that the ultimate good we can strive for is positive human emotion. Now while this sounds obvious, once you take it into consideration, you'll start to spot people all around you, whether that's a co-worker by the watercooler or the mailman or whatever, who justify their ethical beliefs based on things that have nothing to do with the betterment of human wellbeing. I remember when I was around 15 or 16 I considered myself a 'libertarian'. And not a kinda cool libertarian, like yeah, like that kinda libertarian. I thought of freedom as the highest possible good. 'We should always strive to maximise freedom!'. Now, looking back this lacked any kind of class analysis and only served the interests of the bourgeoise, but I digress. Eventually, I started to think 'hey... maybe businesses shouldn't be allowed to deny services to people based on their race or sexuality'. I mean yeah it might be restricting freedom, but these people are just making the world a worse place for people who are already getting fucked over on a daily basis. What great harm is gonna come about if old Cletus has to bake a cake for a couple of femboys, huh? I then started noticing this way of thinking in just about every debate with a conservative. They'd make points like 'yeah maybe kids should learn about gay people, but that's the place of the parents to teach, not the school!' So we're acknowledging that learning gay people exist normalises them and would lead to less discrimination, and many parents aren't willing to do that, but schools shouldn't because... it's the parents' "place"? It's appealing to this mystical order that things have to be in. 'You have schools that teach a2 + b2 = c2, the parents teach social issues if they want, and there's no mixin''! It's like, did you ever sit down and think 'what policy would ultimately be the best for human wellbeing? 'What I'm referencing here is known as a 'core value' or 'axiom'. Most people have no idea what theirs is, despite having no shortage of opinions on ethics and politics. They generally base their views on their culture around them and what they feel is right. They'll say things like "I think men should pay on the first date because that's just how it's meant to be!" and "I think criminals should face brutal punishment because... they deserve it!" despite these attitudes objectively leading to tangible harm. The truth is, if we want to build the best society we can, we have to first establish wellbeing as our axiom and use science to decide how to best achieve the maximisation of that axiom. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video. It was my first attempt at an animated video essay thing, so please leave any thoughts, criticism or questions in the comments, smash like and sub to help with the algorithm, click here to watch a video where we build a society from scratch by going through each political and economic system to decide which is best, and I'll catchya later nerds!

**Is this script accurate?**

Hey everyone reading! I just wrote a script for a YouTube video I'm going to make about what makes something bad/immoral, and I just want to make sure that everything in it is accurate before I produce it (keep in mind that there's gonna be some amateur MS Paint animation, so that kinda explains the dialogues). Anyway, here it is. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! Also I have to split this into two parts because of the 10k character limit (even though it's literally 7800 characters???) so that'll be in the replies

Me: murder is bad... right?

Stewie from Household Dude: well yeah no duh. Everyone knows that murder is bad you ******

M: but why?

S: whaddaya mean why? You kill somebody, it's bad, alright? Stop tryna complicate things, you [Peter saying 'stupid ni']

M: well what if you kill baby Hitler?

S: sigh alright well if you kill Baby Hitler I guess that's fine

M: ah, so you admit that murder isn't bad in all cases...

S: [pause] [Peter saying 'I'm cu-']

[Transition]

There are many things that we take for granted in society. Things we picked up as kids and never really questioned. Like what actually makes something 'bad' or 'good'? It seems like a pretty fundamental question, but no one can give a concrete answer... or can they?

Well for many ancient people, the answer was simple: if something upsets the gods, it's bad. If it pleases them, it's good. Simple as. Didn't say bismillah before eating your dino nuggies? You're going to the slammer, Jimmy.

But we're not living in ancient times, and we have much more sophisticated ways of thinking about the world. We're living in the modern era, where science and logic reign supreme!

So why don't we use a logic to find what makes something 'bad'? Let's have a thought experiment. Let's say you have a flowerbed that you care for everyday. Now let's say, hypothetically, I were to walk over and take a giant shit in your flowers.

Would that be 'bad'?

Norton: well of course it would be bad

Me: but why?

N: because now all me flowers are fucked up

M: what's so bad about that?

N: well I worked hard on these flowers. You're really starting to piss me off

M: ah so we're getting somewhere! Maybe what makes something bad is the 'negative emotion' it produces.

I mean it makes sense, right? Negative emotion is something we're born with and understand pretty quickly. If we get punched in the face, it hurts and it's bad.

This idea is called 'consequentialism'. Something is bad because it has negative consequences.

So that's it. Negative emotion is bad. Period.

Well, maybe not. Why do we have negative emotion in the first place? It should be pretty uncontroversial to say we evolved it to keep us safe. If our ancestors heard a predator rustling in the bushes [Dream], the ones with a greater fear response were more likely to run away faster and survive. It's natural selection.

S: So hold on, if negative emotion is what helped us survive to this day, how is it bad?

Well I don't think it's that negative emotion is bad, but that 'bad' is 'negative emotion', meaning it can be good as long as it ultimately produces more 'positive emotion' in the long-term, such as when it keeps us alive.

This idea is called 'utilitarianism'. Something bad can be justified if it's necessary for the 'greater good'. A utilitarian would switch the lever in the trolley problem, killing one person instead of four.

But let's go back to consequentialism for a second. Let's say it's 9am on a nice Tuesday morning, and you decide to rev up the Buga'i whey and go 200ks down the school zone. But let's say, due to the superior driving abilities you've gotten from playing endless hours of Mario Kart, you manage to not hit a single child in the endeavor, meaning your action had no negative consequences.

Is that still wrong?

Sisyphus is happy

In my view, the entire idea of Sisyphus it's just doing something that ultimately is meaningless and monotonous, and because of this meaninglessness and monotony, Sisyphus must be sad. Camus comes and says that we must image Sisyphus as happy, and now I would want to argue that Sisyphus it's indeed happy.

Psychologically, there is always a conflict between reality and our perspective (standards) about our reality. We can decide if we change reality to fit our perspective (standards) or if we come up with a perspective that embraces reality. Considering that Sisyphus has no alternative but only to push the rock, then reality can't be changed, thus - as a psychological mechanism - his perspective will embrace its current situation and will try to come up with self-defensive mechanisms to avoid mental health issues (e.g. erasing from his interests everything that can't be done considering its circumstances).

Now, what Sisyphus does do? Right. It pushes a stone, infinitely. Good. Psychologically, we're happier when we pursue a goal than when we achieve it. Dopamine is what your brain releases when it anticipates a goal. Acknowledging that getting to the peak of the mountain, with the rock, won't achieve anything, Sisyphus must shift towards goals focused on himself and not the task per se (reaching the peak). This could be anything, but for the sake of it, let's come up with some easy ones: Physical, mental, and crafty goals.

Physical - Pushing the stone through a mountain requires stamina and strength. After each time it gets pushed, Sisyphus becomes stronger and faster on the task. There is no end point on how strong and fast you can become, so Sisyphus will never achieve this goal, the only thing he can do is strive for his ideal.

Mental - When you do something monotonous or mundane your brain switches off and gets into a deliberate thinking mode, thus, Sisyphus can think about many things and come up with his philosophy, which again, doesn't has limits and every day can be improved. This is like the last step into Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where one's self-actualization is the last thing that a person would be willing to do forever as long as his other needs are covered.

Craftsy - Pushing the rock is not only a matter of physical endurance but also, it's what Sisyphus is settled up to do for his entire life. There are no alternatives, so Sisyphus must focus on his new and unavoidable duty. The more he'll try to come up with new ways to be more efficient at what he does (experimenting with different pushing techniques, with different paths on the mountain, etc.), the greater its engagement and flow state. Still, you can only go so far in terms of efficiency. But, when he reaches 100% efficiency with this goal, then he can shift towards the previous 2 (which is also the idea in one's life, when there's no more room for learning or improvement, you find happiness by pursuing something else).

At the end of the day, this only shows that what Sisyphus does it's just a task, and the way he decides to approach will ultimately determine his emotional state. So the entire point of Sisyphus, in my opinion, is not to show that life is meaningless and assume that someone is happy with this meaninglessness, but instead, he must understand why they're happy with this meaningless and see how their ideas, perspectives, thoughts, etc. differ from ours.

Even those that may say that this argument holds true only if we see Sisyphus as some type of Nietzschean ideal, and not in a scenario where Sisyphus is interested in beauty, for example. Well, Sisyphus can definitely appreciate the natural beauty that surrounds its mountain (sky, animals, nature, etc.), but he has no means to express it. Again, because Sisyphus can't change his circumstances, he must lower his aspirations if he is a rational individual.

Disclaimer: I didn't study philosophy. I'm an amateur. I just was cleaning my room and this came to my mind haha. Found it interesting and decided to write it. Happy to hear your thoughts or be redirected to some philosophers who also defend this view.