Very cool, if true

You haven't seen me battling with transcoding all afternoon, or discussing both mainframes and roleplaying this evening :->

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green-amber.livejournal.com

I think real hedonism has to involve some sense of loss of control, of letting the senses which give you pleasure take over and leave the intellect behind . I don't think you ever do that so actually, I don't think you're a hedonist at al - you're a geek and a slacker but they're both quite different.

says me - who IS a hedonist :->

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I disagree. Hedonism:
The doctrine holding that behavior is motivated by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

Just because my pleasure is largely intellectual doesn't mean it isn't pleasure.

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green-amber.livejournal.com

True. But I just think there's a nuance that "pleasure" here in the Greek sense means something involving the senses not the brain . (OK I know the brain interprets sensual data but I think you know what I mean.) But not necessarily the loins either. In fact to some extent the original Epicurean meaning (I've just had my memory refreshed by Wiki) goes with what you're saying - hedonism was about a tranquillity, almost a buddhist, be still, thing, not about active sensual/carnal pleasures of the "get hot babes" variety..

Rather like the sort of pleasure I get from lying on a beach in fact now I think about it:-)

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green-amber.livejournal.com

Hey I've actually found what I want on Google for once - I'm thinking clearly of the non Epicurean brand hedonism.. "The Cyrenaics made no distinction (as Epicurus later would) between better or worse pleasures. They were only concerned with how (1) immediate, (2) physical, (3) brief, (4) intense, and (5) diverse the pleasure we strive for. In this sense being able to eat a rich and sumptuously prepared meal or spending a few hours frolicking on a beautiful beach in the Caribbean are to be preferred to such intangible pleasures as the enjoyment of intellectual contemplation or stimulating conversation"

I'm of to bed too now for some simple pleasures of zzz :->

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blackmanxy.livejournal.com

Though I've never consciously reached the same conclusion as you, my constant refusal to actually decide what meaning there is or may be in life ultimately results in me living the same way.

That sentence was brought to you by adverbs.

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octopoid-horror.livejournal.com

You're a lot like someone who wants to be techno Bill in Dilbert.

Checking your home email from your PDA at work, when I tell you (in a work email) that I've sent something to it, for example...

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Life not having meaning allows us to give it the meaning we choose. This is called freedom.

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Can you take a game seriously if you can change the rules at any time?

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No, but the game can mean different things to different people. It's meaning isn't the rules it's governed by.

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What it it's meaning then?

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Whatever you want it to mean, nothing more and nothing less.

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Right, so we're back to my original:

"I believe life has no meaning"

which means I don't take it seriously.

For some reason you then decided to bring meaning into it...

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I'm just pointing out you can give it meaning if you want to. If it came readymade with meaning it'd be a deterministic world we lived in and so we couldn't give it meaning.

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But what's the point in giving it meaning?

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For some others, it has the same point as researching encoding formats has for you. They feel better if they think life has meaning. Which is why "meaningless" as a word has derogatory connotations. If life has no meaning then it has no purpose and so it doesn't make any difference what you do is how the argument goes. If you give it meaning you give it, and you, a purpose.

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That's the existentialist approach - create your own meaning.

But it leaves you with a meaning that you're fully aware is invented. You're playing a game with rules you've made up.When you're entirely aware that the rules could be anything arbitrary, can you really believe in them?

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> 1) I don't actually think that sounds like a lot of fun

Yep.

I think hedonism has a bad press because its biggest advocates are actually unhappy, but desparately trying to prove (mainly to themselves) that they "know how to have a good time".
Really they're mistaking sensory overload for enjoyment.

Which is not to say that staying out partying until it's light isn't fun... it's just that a quiet cup of tea with a good friend can also be fun.
(The jury is still out on whether or not my kids making loud kissing noises in my ears (as they're both doing just now) is fun... possibly for them...)

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nameandnature

Hello. You're a friend of a friend, apparently.

This sounds a bit like my entry on morality from a little while back. Lack of any externally imposed meaning or morality doesn't have to mean living only for now, although many people (both religious and non-religious) seem to think it does.

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I do wonder why they think that. Sounds like incomplete thinking to me.

Cheers for the entry!

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Interesting entry. Thanks for pointing it out.

> Lack of any externally imposed meaning or morality doesn't have to mean living only for now,

Ages ago (can't find the post) I was suggesting that one reason people act for the common good is that everyone (except sociopaths) cares about someone outside themselves, so on average there's a series of overlapping networks of people caring about each other and trying to help each other.

(I don't know if it was that post or another of my more optimistic pieces on the human condition that caused

andrewducker to ask what planet I lived on... :-) )

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Well, seeing as I believe in muchthe same thing (I call it Empathy Circles and you can read what I wrote here), I assume you said something else. I seem to recall you said that people were basically good, or something equally at odds with reality.

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It was something about people not being naturally inclined to murder each other, I think.
Can't remember the exact context, though.

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I seem to recall you were saying something to the effect that people didn't naturally kill each other.

I might have misunderstood.

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> I might have misunderstood.

Possibly I didn't make it clear enough in the initial post. :-)

I think it was about whether there were moral rules that applied to the whole of humanity regardless of culture (with the exception of the crazy cultures that self-destruct quickly), and I said that not killing people was one.

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I said that not killing people was one

Thus ignoring the vast amount of killing that goes on all the time in every culture?

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No, there's a small amount of killing in all cultures.
And it's almost universally regarded as a bad thing.

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The killing of people from other societies is frequently considered to be a good thing, at least at the time. Governments have even been known to produce media specifically to incite the populace to join groups who are then trained in killing techniques and flown thousands of miles to kill people.

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nameandnature

I'm told by my medic girlfriend that one of the diagnostic tests for sociopathy is being unable to imagine yourself in another person's situation. I also recall a recentish TV series about war where it was revealed that most soldiers with small-arms shoot to miss. I think that, sociopaths aside, there is a strong taboo against killing other humans, and that this can only be overcome by bloodlust in the heat of the moment, by training and conditioning, or by convincing yourself that the other person is not human at all. Sadly, those three (and there are probably others) cover a lot of ground.

That said, I don't think of myself as acting for the common good so much as acting in my own long-term self interest. When I were a Christian, I spent a lot of time trying to conjure up goodwill to all men without much success, whereas self interest is much easier to come by :-)

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