Comments by "Brent Jacobs" (@br3nto) on "How Nihilism Destroys You | Tolstoy's Confession" video.

26:44 Nihilism is very misunderstood by the great philosophers. Nihilism isn’t a state of mind, nor is it about lack of meaning. Rather, it’s a blank slate from which everything can build upon. E.g imagine you and only you exist. Even though it’s only you, there is also the nothing that surrounds. There is a permanent dichotomy that exists between everything that exists and that we can experience, versus everything that we cannot experience. Now let’s build upon this emptiness slate. Let’s add another person into this nothing. Everything you do is now relative to the other person and visa-versa. If they hit you, you get hurt, and visa-versa. All of a sudden, we’ve got game theory. Which forms the foundations of moral systems. Every action in the past informs and moulds the future. So everything is relative to what happened in the past. This is a bases for information theory. Information has an entropy… the effects ripple out. So two core concepts of Nihilism: the nothing always exists no matter how much we explore into that nothing; and every thing is relative to everything else… we can’t escape the actions of any other object in the universe.
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The nothingness that we all exist within is not just empty, but contains all the things we haven’t explored and all the things we don’t understand. There is both a physical and abstract component. It’s like a veil (or fog-of-war). As we explore the physical world, we see and know more, the vail shifts, but is never removed. The veil always exist and always hides more stuff. We have can have assumptions and hypotheses of what’s beyond, but these are only validated when we seek and find the answers. When we do find solid answers, the veil shifts. This is why both religion and science exist, and why both are useful, they pose questions for us to seek answers to. The problems occur when we see questions, assumptions, and hypotheses as truth. This is a problem because we stop expanding the veil and increase our understanding of the universe. Because of this, objective truths do exist, and everything without evidence is merely an assumption to be tested with answers hidden behind the veil waiting to be explored.
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@nejsnek1410 hmm… I have seen it a long time ago, but I don’t remember anything specific from that show informing my interpretation of Nihilism. I’ve also watched Optimistic Nihilism by Kurzgesagt, which I think was more influential.
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@PixlyPenguin If that’s what you find meaning in, then yes. Let me reframe it a little. The veil is a metaphor for the unknown all around us, both physically at the most smallest scales and the largest. It also wraps around intangible and conceptual things like thought and understanding. That veil will always exist, so there will always be new things to explore and to pique our attention. At the same time things will always change because we are always interacting with and reacting to everything around us and to that veil that surrounds everything. This isn’t just true for conscious beings, but for everything that exists. This also means everything in the past contributes to the future. I don’t think there is inherent meaning in any of it, however, I think we can derive some meaning from it while we exist by understanding that we can take actions now to leave an impression on the future. Or we can sit back and just take in the beauty of it all… it really doesn’t matter… well kind of… it does matter in some sense. For example, you may want civilisation to persist, so that takes many people putting in effort to keep it going. But that civilisation only exists because of the things that happened in the past. Maybe if people in the past put their energies to different things, we would have something else either better or worse. We would probably want to put in effort to keep that around… it’s all contextual. But I’m rambling now… there is a lot to this.
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@nejsnek1410 ohhhh!!! Yeah I see the connection hahaha, and yeah it fits.
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@TheBlackfall234 to be honest, the concept of Übermensch seems like a 1:1 replacement for Jesus. Just replacing one moral sign post with another. It seems unnecessary to me. Nietzsche seems stuck in the context of a hyper religious world so he can’t see how anyone could cope in a world without a god or godlike replacement. It’s quite a pessimistic outlook really. Because of this religious context, it’s easy to understand why philosophers get stuck on “lack of meaning in life” for individuals rather than considering why it’s necessary to even have meaning. What kind of meaning are they looking for? Why does anything owe anyone meaning? I assume the meaning they seek is again based on some analog of meaning similar to what religions impress upon their followers.
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