this picture will never not be funny
just the absurdity of donald duck putting out that statement (which even makes some sense and fits donald’s overall depressed mood) and mickey mouse being the sly one and contradicting donald, coming out with the upper hand from the argument, is just so amusing.
Seriously. Why are chemicals absurd? Answer: They are not absurd. They are arranged and tuned to your relations with your surroundings. They are sensory organs. Ignoring your senses is a choice I guess, especially when they are badly calibrated or misinformed by fake inputs (social media, rage bait, w/e)
Yeah - reducing things to material components isn’t absurd and doesn’t destroy subjective meaning.
Like, I don’t believe in free will, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find life meaningful - it’s just a fact about how the world works. I still perceive choice, I perceive meaning - it’s a subjective and phenomenological matter, not an objective/material one.
I think it is also about the terms of the debate and definitions of self. For me the absurdity is to propose invisible essences that transcend physical reality. My body is my self and I kind of own or rent the material that makes me work. The processes are physical as well, but they are mine too. I freely make decisions all the time, all by myself. There is no other self worth talking about.
These chemicals have been assigned moral and intrinsic value based on how they affect us. In a universe of unfeeling, indifferent chemicals we derive meaning. Like divining order in a storm of chaos. The miracle is that we can find meaning in the meaningless.
This is the existentialist stance. Misunderstood by many as being nihilistic (which it is not) but I think it is correct. As Jean Paul Sartre said, Existentialism is humanism.
existentialism imho is finding meaning in the nihilism. i.e. if there is no meaning, that means that we ourselves make the meaning, therefore there always is meaning in the world (which causes the existence of a conscious observer in the first place)
Something like that, yes. Meaning is a human construct and we are meaning seekers. So in this way, unlike in nihilism, meaning becomes possible even if things in the world don’t come equipped with it.
Yeah, sometimes the chemicals are signals and they are telling you things. Sometimes they are noise. Either way they are hard to filter.