On the Fleeting Sense of Being and Rationality

Every once in a while, when I learn too many difficult concepts from a wide range of fields too quickly, I experience a temporary but intense feeling of nihilism. This is one such time.

We take for granted the most intelligent view that we are exposed to, and unconsciously transform the way we look at the world. We typically passively take in these powerful ideas without a choice and just assume that they are what things ought to be and then derive a sense of superiority over these who do not share our same views. In the US, I've observed this mostly in what I call "naive liberals". These are the people who naively believed that God exists because they were raised in a Christian household, but once they became a teen and were taught basic science, they passively take in science as the most intelligent view and assume that they have the solution to every problem in the universe. I never had so much faith. I was raised with no religion and science was my first love. As a kid, I started to become skeptical of science as the only possible model for reasoning when I was exposed to Christianity and non-Euclidean geomety, and ever since then, I've continued to explore more and more at an accelerating pace, becoming skeptical of every system of thought that has ever existed. I explore vast lattices of mental models, yet I still feel like I'm trapped at the bottom of a well. The more I learn, the more I lose my sense of self and rationality. Even that might not be bad, since the sense of self is an illusion. When I examine any school of thought with openness and curiosity, I see value in all of them. Yet I also see flaws and contradictions in all of them. When I explore one topic of interest, I am not the same person who explored a different topic of interest. I'm stuck in a Sisyphean task, in which if I stop, I become ignorantly attached to an incomplete position. Perhaps ignorance is really bliss.

We are all reductionists. When your tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail. I've seen rationalists trying to solve every problem with rationality and failing hard at it and developing massive cognive dissonance. I've seen the same in postmodernists, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, capitalists, communists, monarchists, existentialists, futurists, fascists, and more. No matter which path you take, you sometimes feel like you're making great progress, yet that sense of joy is fleeting. Everyone mislabels their "enemies" without having a clue about what they are really thinking. Everyone is searching for an advantage to one-up someone else. Yet everyone also believes that they have a solution to save the whole world, which all fail miserably upon further inspection, due to the nature of being and time, chaos and order. Any ideology that you hate must make sense to a degree or else you wouldn't even be aware of them. The ideology must have made a lot of sense and provided a lot of value to a great number of people for them to take root. They like the ideology because the smartest people they are frequently exposed to in their lives constantly apply it to solve the problems in their lives. You hate it because the smartest people you're frequently exposed to in your life constantly apply a very different model to solve the problems you have observed. However, we can't just blindly apply moral relativism and equality either, because these people with different ideologies will kill you for the sake of what they perceive to be the greater good. Everyone is trying to "save the world", but through very different methods... and it's unclear if the less violent methods are better.

The Futurists believe that they have the all encompassing view because of the technological singularity. The Christians believe that they have the all encompassing view because Jesus will save everyone. The rationalists believe that they have the all encompassing view because they can eventually reason out everything and discover everything through science. The postmodernists believe that they have the all encompassing view because they are able to think beyond rational logic. The Buddhists believe that they have the all encompassing view because the Buddha-nature encompasses everything. The existentialists believe that they have the all encompassing view because they can make their own meaning in their lives. All models try to fit all other models into themselves. Each model is jealous, for that jealousy insures its own survival. A topological mapping of the breadth of any view is impossible.

I think we are all hallucinating. It still feels like that we are still no different from the Underground Man in Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground. Lamas with vast insights of wisdom still promote theocracy, rape innocent people, and engage in dark rituals. Zen priests rationalized kamikaze. The histories of Islam and Christianity aren't pretty. Nietzsche went insane, likely because of taking his crazy wisdom too far. Heidegger, one of the most insightful philosophers I've read so far, was a Nazi. Derrida and the postmodernists led to SJWs. What parts of their beings are justified? What parts are wrong? It's easy to scapegoat, but almost impossible to make sense of what's really going on. Even these value judgments here are simply to place them in the context of mainstream thought. The complexity of reality is far beyond that to make any sort of moral judgment outside of a very narrow context. Who knows what horrors Facebook, Google, Amazon, and artificial intelligence might bring about in the future? If that horror comes and wipes out humanity, is it so bad if we enjoyed the journey while it lasted? If you want to be truly wise or innovative, you have to antinomian. As Nietzsche says, the superman transcends good and evil. This is inevitable as long as there are beings in the world. Yet as Dostoyevsky shows in many of his novels, the attempts of the superman always ends in tragedy. So what the hell are we doing? What's the point?

Perhaps like death, a final satisfying solution to the meaning of existence is something that we own as individuals, only because it is always projected towards the future. Only in death can we truly become authentic and end our delusional searching, thinking, and questioning. I think this might be why Nietzsche and the tantrikas chose amor fati. When we make the love of life, a will to survive, the only unconditional in life, we can at least find a way to enjoy the madness and the delusions. We appreciate life only when we become aware of our mortality. The more we live on the edge of life and death, the more we enjoy life. In the end, I cannot think beyond the insights of the Buddha: attachment to overthinking leads to suffering and nihilism. This seems to be a limiter for biological organisms. This might mean that that hard problem of consciousness in AI is impossible, or that a self-conscious nihilist AI will eventually destroy the world.