there's a certain kind of "following the dao" philosophy i think i know a lot of people who hold implicitly in some form, which i think if taken sufficiently seriously suggests the bizarre conclusion that literally everything follows the dao automatically *except humans*
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like compared to the rest of the universe we're these alien eldritch entities invading the harmony of the dao, the only things capable of disharmony. it's a weird, depressing, and frankly confusing pov. how did our ability to disharmonize evolve? do any monkeys have it partially?
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if you keep poking at this story it just turns into original sin i think
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the alternative, which is bizarre in a different way, is that everything follows the dao automatically *including* humans, that all of the indignity and suffering and horror of modern industrial civilization and so forth is still somehow harmonious
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everything *can* be viewed as fine. doesn't mean you have to view it as fine. thinking-it's-not-fine is also fine.
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the sense in which "things are fine" is hard to explain because it's not "fine, compared to some other not-fine thing that also occurs in reality" but "fine, compared to an imaginary horror that it turns out doesn't exist"
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"not-fine" is itself something that you are doing. You instantiate "fine" and "not-fine" judgments when you model things in a moral framework.
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I get the sense that a theme is that you can just choose to only feel the goodness of good stuff, and then choose to never feel the badness of bad stuff. And this feels intuitively like it won't work, but then it just does?
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this feels too coarse to me, there are several different senses of “good” and “bad” and maybe “feel” that need to be untangled here. there’s an interpretation of what you wrote that is straight up just spiritual bypassing, that i don’t think nick would endorse
Something like:
I see a happy kid enjoying a swingset, I feel good knowing that they are happy.
They get hurt and start crying. I wish they felt better and want to help, but I don't feel their pain and fear. I don't become upset and suffer because of their suffering.
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In my personal experience the basic version of this as described doesn’t work perfectly, but also works waaaaay better than it has any right to
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