What am I with regards to life philosophy?

[Domino Quartz]

I don't know which category I fall into regarding things like nihilism, existentialism, etc. I believe that life has no inherent meaning, but that we make our own meaning in life. I'm not really sure what else to say about this, but feel free to ask me any clarifying questions.

[ufo]

Philosophy isn't really something where you have to pick a team. Think of it as different lenses through which you can analyze the human condition and it's of course cool to have preferences, but you'll probably also experience a shift in your preferences depending on your more material conditions - so don't get too comfy

It sounds like you might find someone like Albert Camus and/or Søren Kierkegaard interesting. They've both written about existentialism and absurdism.

[Razade]

I don't know which category I fall into regarding things like nihilism, existentialism, etc. I believe that life has no inherent meaning, but that we make our own meaning in life. I'm not really sure what else to say about this, but feel free to ask me any clarifying questions.

Biggest question is, does it matter? You don't need a label to be what you are. If people ask, explain. If not...then don't. Simple as that.

[shawnhcorey]

Everyone thinks they are the hero of their own story.

What is your story and what makes you the hero? That's the meaning of life.

[veti]

Philosophy isn't really something where you have to pick a team. Think of it as different lenses through which you can analyze the human condition and it's of course cool to have preferences, but you'll probably also experience a shift in your preferences depending on your more material conditions - so don't get too comfy

This, exactly. If you fit yourself into a position and try to defend it against contrary ideas, you're doing it wrong. (Even if you can succeed in your defence, all you're doing is closing your mind.) Particularly for a beginner, it's very important to be willing to shift and see things from a different angle from time to time.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I don't know which category I fall into regarding things like nihilism, existentialism, etc. I believe that life has no inherent meaning, but that we make our own meaning in life. I'm not really sure what else to say about this, but feel free to ask me any clarifying questions.

If your philosophy can be summed up in a single sentence, you're probably just not a philosopher.

If and when your philosophy grows more complex than that you probably start to in some ways defy classification anyway, your philosophy is your philosophy. If you're interested in philosophy you can start reading about these broad currents like nihilism and existentialism. This might give you an idea on where you fall on the spectrum, but the purpose of the reading you're doing would be to expand your own ideas, to build up your philosophy. It just happens that down the road you're reading about famous people who had views that were in some or many ways similar to yours, and you might start identifying with certain terms.

It's similar to politics really. The important part of having political opinions is not being able to label yourself, but knowing where you stand on issues. Labels are mostly just a tool to find others with similar viewpoints. (And that I think is exactly as far as that analogy can go around here.)

[BWR]

This, exactly. If you fit yourself into a position and try to defend it against contrary ideas, you're doing it wrong. (Even if you can succeed in your defence, all you're doing is closing your mind.)

To be all contrary and stuff, if you manage to defend your position through sensible arguments against bad counter arguments you're actually doing it right. As they say, keep an open mind but not so open your brain falls out.

[truemane]

For me, philosophy isn't so much about satisfying answers as it is about intriguing questions. I've read innumerable rational, logical, reasonably proofs for the existence of God (I used to be a real Aquinas nerd), and I'm still an atheist. But all those questions, all that time spent examining that question, has greatly enriched my life.

I've spent years reading about and thinking about ethics. I still don't know what THE ethical solution is. But having the tools to discuss and dissect and examine human behaviour has enriched my life even more.

Aesthetics? Same deal. I have no idea whether or not anything can be said to be objectively anything, but all the ways I've read of answering that question has deepened and strengthened my ability to enjoy art far more than any answer ever could.

Coming to the conclusion that human life is without meaning and that meaning must be constructed from within is a great starting point. But where do you go from there? What does that lack of meaning mean?

Do you decide there are no ethics, since there is no meaning, and therefore anyone is welcome to act in any way they wish and no one has the right to judge them or stop them? Or do you decide that ethics can only be concerned with practicality? With results? And how do you measure those results? The greatest good for the greatest number? What's the greatest good? What's the greatest number? What's the conversion rate between the two?

And how does all this translate into the way humans interact with each other in real space? How do you create laws when there are no ethics? How do you enforce them?

And if there's no meaning, does that mean no piece of art can ever be said to be better than any other? And if that's the case, then is anything better than anything else, or are all rational comparisons just illusions? And so, at that point, doesn't all rational discourse break down? If nothing has meaning, then how can we even relate to each other? How is there even language? How can we be communicating? How can we even be certain we ARE communicating?

But wait, you're saying maybe, I don't mean that NOTHING has meaning. Just 'human life.' Then what is 'human life' in this context? How can some things have meaning and not others? how do you decide what does and what doesn't? What's the dividing line?

It's all very fascinating stuff. And it's so easy to just not think about any of it and just accept the bundle of biases and unspoken assumptions inherent in anyone's environment and just go to work and watch tv forever. But once you start poking at this stuff, the more interesting everything gets.

And you don't learn it because you think you're going to change anyone's mind. I will engage any religious person in respectful debate on the existence of the divine any day of the week (and I do, whenever I can). Whenever someone stops me on the street to ask if I have time to talk about [RELIGION] I'm so excited I can barely contain myself. But despite the dozens of times I've done this, no one's ever converted me. And I've never converted anyone else (although I did make a dude once rub his chin and be all Jeeze I never thought about it that way before).

And I still don't know if comparing art is rational or absurd. And I still don't know if the morality of an act is contained in the intent, the action or the result. And I have trouble believing in human nature but I am aware that I know a human when I see one. And I don't THINK anything divine exists but I'm willing to be wrong.

So none of what I've learned has solved anything, but everything is a LOT more interesting when you have the tools to even frame the questions.

[Lord Joeltion]

The question is, why the need to label yourself? I've been called a lot of things in my life, from nihilist (at least I like that term), to anarchist, to existentialist, idealist and whatnot. Don't think it truly matters what you label/define yourself, as long as you have clear what you ideas you trust and defend and why. Few philosophical currents ask of yourself to trust its founding fathers; rather, they would impose you the task to think and debate their ideas yourself. Whether you share their conclusions or not is rather irrelevant, and less interesting than the actual journey you traverse while following your train of thoughts.

If your philosophy can be summed up in a single sentence, you're probably just not a philosopher.

Cogito ergo quisquis

For me, philosophy isn't so much about satisfying answers as it is about intriguing questions. I've read innumerable rational, logical, reasonably proofs for the existence of God (I used to be a real Aquinas nerd), and I'm still an atheist. But all those questions, all that time spent examining that question, has greatly enriched my life.

This, precisely. One famous local philosopher usually defines Philosophy as a field where the truly relevant elements are the questions, not the answers. Engage into Philosophy looking for answers and you'd be quickly disappointed. I think he is right, when you find a real answer in Philosophy, it is because either the meaning is more cryptic than it seems or because the question was never interesting/worth asking in the first place. Self evident truths are for Positivism and Math; philosophy at its core is about the unanswerable, the questions that science cannot deal with because there is no definitive answer. That's why I think philosophy is just as important as science to build human knowledge.

[Devils_Advocate]

The Wikipedia article on absurdism contains a chart comparing and contrasting existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism. (I find the Nihilism column rather amusing.)

I will admit that I am somewhat surprised at the apparent level of consensus that one should not ask this question, to the point that simply answering it seems to be the contrarian position.

But I suppose that I can't entirely disagree, either. Not that these categories are completely worthless, but being able to say "I'm an existentialist" isn't all that useful of a tool for communicating your specific beliefs, not because the term has no specific meaning but because it's likely that someone you're talking to doesn't know what it means or has a different understanding of the term. So you'd have to follow it up with an explanation of "existentialism" anyway it order to be sure of getting your meaning across, so it doesn't get you out of having to explain your beliefs. Besides which, saying that could give someone the impression that you developed your philosophical perspective through exposure to that specific named philosophical tradition. If that's not the case, it might be better to avoid self-labeling in order to avoid that particular false impression.

I suppose that the other main use of a label for a philosophical belief is being able to specifically search for the work of philosophers who agree with you on something, or at least for work addressing (if possibly arguing against) that perspective. And at this point, I think that I'm going to dispute the notion that narrowing your focus like this is necessarily a bad idea. That seems like saying that you should never be confident that you have the right answer to a question, such that now it's time to explore the implications of that answer. I'll agree that you shouldn't be 100% confident about anything, but a high degree of confidence isn't necessarily unreasonable.

Frankly, I feel pretty confident about my own position on this one. The "meaning of life", in this context, is the purpose of life, correct? And a thing's purpose is its intended function. Now, does intent exist independent of anyone to do the intending? Of course it doesn't, that doesn't even make any sense! But does intent nevertheless exist? You betcha! Intent exists within minds, and a mind's intent for something is its purpose so far as that particular mind is concerned. So life has no intrinsic meaning, but can have meaning relative to the individual.

Gosh golly gee willikers, that wasn't so hard, now, was it?

If you ask me, the big question here is whether it's possible to be mistaken about your own intent, desires, priorities, etc. And I think that there's a strong argument to be made that it is possible to be so mistaken. People certainly seem to experience revelations about questions of e.g. ethics, which is probably why so many people assume that "meaning" exists independent of our opinions. But if you don't already know your own values, then those are something that you can discover, so there's no need to appeal to any sort of external, intrinsic meaning to account for the subjective experience of discovery. Which is good news so far as I'm concerned, because I find the concept of "intrinsic value" incoherent and nonsensical.

Then again, maybe I just don't understand what that's supposed to mean. A lot of philosophical questions are, if not fundamentally semantic in nature, directly equivalent to semantic questions due to the manner in which words correspond to concepts. Ludwig Wittgenstein had a great deal to say on this subject, as I recall.

Anyway, those are my own thoughts on the matter.

[Goaty14]

I don't know which category I fall into regarding things like nihilism, existentialism, etc. I believe that life has no inherent meaning, but that we make our own meaning in life. I'm not really sure what else to say about this, but feel free to ask me any clarifying questions.

"The meaning of life is to give life meaning"

-Logical Positivism*

*ok, the link doesn't describe it that way, but it's the same line of thinking.

[darkrose50]

I don't know which category I fall into regarding things like nihilism, existentialism, etc. I believe that life has no inherent meaning, but that we make our own meaning in life. I'm not really sure what else to say about this, but feel free to ask me any clarifying questions.

Lots of ideas do not have a unified word. I think that lots of ideas deserve their own word.

Lots of ideas do not deserve their own word (or phrase). Studying theories where some idjit adds one little thing, then renames the theory, then the next idjit, and so on . . . is crazy annoying.

I have been working on an alignment system based off of Magic The Gathering. I have been trying to find singular words to fit into the doccument that fit the idea of the pentagram. It is challenging.

Also once the standard for intelligence was the number of words known (memory). Around the 1960's vocabulary lost out to IQ (troubleshooting). Perhaps we need a revolution in wordsmithing!

Lots of common/uncommon words became rare or are mostly lost in modern vocabularies. Like words for different kinds of mud like quag (there was a story on such words on NPR some years ago). Mud is good enough of a word I guess.

[veti]

Lots of common/uncommon words became rare or are mostly lost in modern vocabularies. Like words for different kinds of mud like quag (there was a story on such words on NPR some years ago). Mud is good enough of a word I guess.

The trend for the past couple of decades has been to cut down on the number of different words used - at least, in media aimed for public consumption - because the aim is to be clear to as many people as possible. Using uncommon words just to add a bit of variety to your cadences... creates a barrier to understanding.

I don't know if it still happens, but back in the day, Voice of America managed to convey all the news of the day using a total permitted vocabulary of just about 1000 words. And most native English speakers listening - wouldn't even notice the difference. That approach has become more popular now, as outlets bend over backwards to be "accessible". Sadly, it's harder than it looks - VoA put a lot of work into it, and most imitators either don't realise that or don't want to spend money to achieve the same thing.

[darkrose50]

The trend for the past couple of decades has been to cut down on the number of different words used - at least, in media aimed for public consumption - because the aim is to be clear to as many people as possible. Using uncommon words just to add a bit of variety to your cadences... creates a barrier to understanding.

I don't know if it still happens, but back in the day, Voice of America managed to convey all the news of the day using a total permitted vocabulary of just about 1000 words. And most native English speakers listening - wouldn't even notice the difference. That approach has become more popular now, as outlets bend over backwards to be "accessible". Sadly, it's harder than it looks - VoA put a lot of work into it, and most imitators either don't realise that or don't want to spend money to achieve the same thing.

I am sure this is also a contributing factor.

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There is some guy on YouTube that drives me nuts using simple words, slowly over-explaining, and slowly repeating everything. Whenever I click on one of his videos I cringe. One story involved an orphan, and he spent like a minute talking about what an orphan is and what an orphanage is. Sometimes it is interesting to see how many times this guy can say the same thing over and over again in a slightly different way. Whenever I clear my YouTube cookies, this guy shows up.

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I think that also IQ fell into vogue, and vocabulary fell out of favor as the measuring stick for intellect. We highly pay folks to be computer programmers and the like, and this is heavily linked to IQ. In the 90's my ex-brother-in-law's yearly Christmas bonus was like $30,000 - $40,000 (computer programmer at the stock exchange). Jobs like that do not care about how many words you know, but they are extremely interested in how many problems you can solve.

After WWII IQ was, in part, used to determine if a potential servicemen was unable to be trained. At somewhere about IQ 83 the Army will not take someone. The Army put a lot of effort into the IQ test, and it apparently is a good test to test for (at least) the ability to be trained.

Those with a high IQ may or may not be successful, but there is a high correlation, and even a pseudo-prerequisite for some professions. Surgeons tend to have an IQ of 230 or something silly high . . . lower IQ folks just wont make it . . . doctors tend to have an IQ of 140 . . . I do not think that they would make the cut.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Surgeons tend to have an IQ of 230 or something silly high . . .

Probably not quite. The standard deviation on IQ tests is about 15, making 230 8 and 2/3 standard deviations above the average. I tried to calculate the percentage of people that could be a surgeon, but it's so low that Excel still rounds it down to 0 when I let it use the maximum 30 decimals. The total human population has around 9 decimals.

[Jay R]

You don't need biological terms to digest food, you don't need physics terms to ride a bike, you don't need literary terms to read a book, and for the same reasons, you don't need philosophical terms to have a philosophy of life.

You need the philosophical terms to discuss your philosophy in-depth, or to compare various philosophies, but if you want to do that, you'll need to take a class or read books about it, not ask on an internet forum.

Similarly, I never needed the term "willing suspension of disbelief" to read fantasy literature. I only need it to discuss fantasy literature.

[Summer Lamb]

I think a lot about philosophy when i stay alone. Since childhood, avoiding the problem, perceived life as a different kind of films. And now, in different stressful situations, I immediately imagine that this is a stupid movie scene, you just have to go through everything, because in the end everything will be fine. It seems to me that everything works as it should, according to the laws of the universe, everything that happens in our life leads to something good, even when you are ill-equipped with light ahead of you. I think it's true
also think about sense of life - useless
like you know its not metter, even if you fund your sense, you feel like "ok what's next?"

[darkrose50]

Probably not quite. The standard deviation on IQ tests is about 15, making 230 8 and 2/3 standard deviations above the average. I tried to calculate the percentage of people that could be a surgeon, but it's so low that Excel still rounds it down to 0 when I let it use the maximum 30 decimals. The total human population has around 9 decimals.

I saw a list of occupations and IQs someplace . . . I will try to find it.

230 is rather high (I think the highest in the world is 260-something), and I thought it meant something like brain surgeon.

[Kyrell1978]

https://sciencetrends.com/highest-po...-world-record/

According to this that would put the average surgeon on par with the second highest IQ recorded ever.

[darkrose50]

I was referencing a chart that is not all that correct at the low and high ends (and likely more correct in the middle). The chart was attempting to link IQ with income by profession . . . a correlation to be sure, but no more than that. I apologize for the misinformation.

I just saw on the news that the highest IQ in the world was like 260 from some guy in India (if my memory serves, and the source was correct).

Evidently the highest ever was 250-300 by William James Sidis. The realistic maximum seems to be 200, with very few over that.

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Interesting observation: IQ's are scored in a bell-curve by peer group. There seems to be a greater range in the abilities of children that results in higher possible IQ's among children. This is why you often hear that IQ goes down with age. It would seem to also go up with age on the other end of the curve.

My IQ as a child (age 7?) was about 20-points higher than the last time I took an IQ test (age 38?).

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Okay, the bell curve thing isn't a perfect model, and IQ doesn't test all mental attributes needed for succes, and the scores differ per time someone takes a test etc etc but someone who consistently scores over 150 while being just as good at the attributes not tested is pretty much a genius. I'm willing to bet there are plenty of surgeons who score below that. And that's not to diss surgeons.

[vladimir520]

There's a high chance we're just a simulation, a kid's homework even. So life in the end only has the meaning we give it. We have to get used to the idea and I enjoy life for what it is and help other people who go through the same unfair, wild adventure which if looked the correct way is lovely

[darkrose50]

I agree that IQ does not equal success, but it is almost a prerequisite, and is often a very real prerequisite.

IQ is pretty much a test to see if we have the capability to learn. 83 and below means that there will likely be major learning struggles.

I have some learning struggles of my own with Asperger's Syndrome and Dyslexia.

My baby-sitter has three or four English degrees, an IQ of 160 (1 in 100,000), does not earn much money at all, and has a hard time keeping a job. I would not want her to perform surgery on me, and would pick the surgeon with a lower IQ in a heartbeat. Training and experience are extremely important.

I earn a lower salary than the range of the averages for my IQ. I have failed at things, and sometimes it kinda sucks having a higher IQ and Asperger's Syndrome. Sometimes it is fun.

[Kyrell1978]

I agree that IQ does not equal success, but it is almost a prerequisite, and is often a very real prerequisite.

IQ is pretty much a test to see if we have the capability to learn. 83 and below means that there will likely be major learning struggles.

My baby-sitter has three or four English degrees, an IQ of 160 (1 in 100,000), does not earn much money at all, and has a hard time keeping a job. I would not want her to perform surgery on me, and would pick the surgeon with a 140 IQ in a heartbeat. Training and experience is extremely important.

I earn a lower salary than the range of the averages for my IQ.

It may not equal success, but it is the best sole predictor of lifetime success. Other traits (most often social ability and drive) can compete certainly, but not unless they are combined.

[darkrose50]

It may not equal success, but it is the best sole predictor of lifetime success. Other traits (most often social ability and drive) can compete certainly, but not unless they are combined.

Indeed IQ has a strong correlation to income and success.

I updated my post above to include (at least) "I have some learning struggles of my own with Asperger's Syndrome and Dyslexia."

I can sometimes spot a potential problem, be ignored, and then later have the problem blow up . . . loosing sleep the whole time over the inability to make others see the problem.

[darkrose50]

I see IQ as almost more of an on/off switch, than it is a measure of intellect. If you have an IQ of 84+, then you can problem solve and learn, and are often good to go.

Higher IQ is often good for money and success, but maybe not so much for happiness.

I edited my post above to read: "I have failed at things, and sometimes it kinda sucks having a higher IQ and Asperger's Syndrome. Sometimes it is fun."

I would quite possibly take an offer to have a normal IQ and be neurotypical. It would be interesting to see body-language better, and experience a stronger emotional reactions to things such a music, or participate in those flirting games people like to play while dating. I just do not cry. I can go years or may even a decade without crying. I have the feelings, but the tears don't come.

I am also quite curious to see what it would be like to have an IQ of 83 or lower.