From Existential Angst To Existential Hope – Existential Hope
Thomas Nagel answers Camus: “If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? Like the capacity for epistemological skepticism, it results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis ==there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair==.“
If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation…, then what reason can we have to resent or escape it?… it results from the ability to understand our human limitations.
The ability to recognize absurdity is equivalent to, or at least requires, an inkling of ones limitations.
It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so.
In fact, we could instead celebrate that we have the capacity to observe the absurdity. It means we have some sort of perspective and a sense of our place.
A kind of reversed [[../_inbox/inbox-2020/inbox-2020-12/rokos basilisk]]
as Youtube video and paper by Nick Bostrom. Imaginary letter to humanity from potential future being living in Utopia, who urges us to bring them into existence. “We love life here every instant. Every second is so good that it would blow your mind had its amperage not been previously increased. My contemporaries and I bear witness, and we are requesting your aid. Please, help us come into existence! Please, join us! Whether this tremendous possibility becomes a reality depends on your actions. If your empathy can perceive at least the outlines of the vision I am describing, then your ingenuity will find a way to make it real.Human life, at its best, is fantastic. I’m asking you to create something even greater. Life that is truly humane.
by Erika Ilves, Anna Stillwell: “We are all individual waves in the ongoing stream of human existence. ==We would like this stream to carry on and keep evolving infinitely into the future. In fact, we want to make it our explicit purpose==. It may sound like a tall order but we believe that for a learning species nothing should be impossible. ==To keep the human project going as an infinite game, each generation needs to know the game we are playing and learn to play their round well==.” The Human Project
This feels me with hope. Just… A nice feeling that I do not get from consuming news or most mass media.
[[../To/to.book - the beginning of infinity, david deutsch]]
[[../To/to.book - meaningness]] [[../To/to.book - the evolution of everything]]
Mentions [[../www/scifi]] books with unusal plots
topic:: [[../Notes/existensialism]] related:: [[absurdism]]