I think the main thing I took from science fiction was wallowing in the pessimism of authors like James Tiptree or Peter Watts The POV that all of this shit happened by chance, there is no God, evolution is a mindless heartless force The world doesn't really want you here
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And people really really resist and resent this message Like a lot of people say they're atheists and believe in the basic tenets of materialism and evolution but they don't get what that really means They still talk like an Intelligent Designer set all this up for a reason
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Like... it's not a fair game you're intended to be able to win The challenge of living a good life is not a good faith challenge, with rules and a referee so that it's doable if you work hard and don't cheat and figure out the correct solution It is completely not that
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When I was a teen I was really into Christian apologetics, which is largely based on just refusing to think certain thoughts because they hurt A lot of it was this argument from perversity, what
@AlexandraErin calls the Shirley Principle "Oh, no, surely not"1 reply 1 retweet 47 likesShow this thread -
A big argument for the existence of God is this circular thing about the argument from desire or argument from need The idea that if human beings desire something, like a relationship with their Creator, such a thing must therefore exist and be possible
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That it would be perverse, cruel, just WRONG to give people a desire for something that doesn't exist and therefore can never be fulfilled Well, why the fuck not? The only reason to believe such a thing is impossible is believing in God in the first place
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It is, in principle, trivially easy to imagine a desire for something that doesn't exist and can't be satisfied - a desire for a three-sided square, a desire to be simultaneously hot and cold, a desire for the comfort of being loved without the terror of being known
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You could easily program a robot that wants there to be a three-sided square and spends eons trying to stick three 90-degree angles together and never actually succeeds and therefore is always unhappy and always will be unhappy It sounds more like the human condition than not
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So I mean this family discourse "It's built into the way human development works: we all start as helpless babies, we need some adult or group of adults to have absolute power over is to survive, and those adults will have a profound effect on our psyche" Okay and that's bad
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Replying to @arthur_affect
This isn't a good argument. "That's bad" isn't a coherent thing to say if you are starting from the "Its all meaningless" stance you took in the first tweet. You don't get to handwave away everyone else's intuited sentiments and keep your own.
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I'm not *making* the argument here, I'm just stating that that's what I already believe and why I find people's intuitions that it can't be true so easy to dismiss
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