all structural parts of life — darthbarracuda

Along with being born, having fun, being royally entertained.

We are back to your one-side view of existence as usual. Are you trying to prove that one can indeed see black without ever seeing white? ;)

God forbid that we might narrow our definitions to the point where they would make a meaningful commitment to anything. How could we simply presume our conclusions if we had to start doing that? — apokrisis

Again, you miss the point of instrumentality to make rhetorical ones. Not cool man. I'd first like to see you define instrumentality in your own words, grapple with the concept before going on tangents about definitions being too broad.

I'd first like to see you define instrumentality in your own words, — schopenhauer1

But it already has a philosophical definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

You might need to coin a different word. What's Greek for "pointlessly eating free time"?

But it already has a philosophical definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

You might need to coin a different word. What's Greek for "pointlessly eating free time"? — apokrisis

I tried to avoid that term due to the fact that it has a different meaning otherwise- the pragmatist one you decided to divert the debate towards. I am asking you to define the neologism that I am using- just so I know we describing the same thing, before we start going down rabbit holes. I want to know you even understand the proposition.

I am asking you to define the neologism that I am using — schopenhauer1

You want me to define a term you invented....

You want me to define a term you invented.... — apokrisis

Yep, otherwise we are just talking past each other.

You lost me a number of times in your opening essay, but the part I was most confused about was this:

Therefore, many of our actions seem to involve a faulty image of non-existence and a need for a good outcome — darthbarracuda

At first I read that as if you must be talking about actions in general--like, for example, me getting myself a glass of orange juice, or taking a bike ride, say. But then I thought, "What the heck would getting myself a glass of orange juice have to do with an 'image of nonexistence'?"

Then I figured you must only be talking about the situations you're describing in some detail--where we'd be making decisions based on the idea of it being better to not be alive in particular scenarios. But then I was confused by you saying "many of our actions." People making decisions based on the idea of it being better to not be alive in particular scenarios is a very, very small fraction of the total number of actions that people take. Heck, I've lived over half a century and I've never taken action on anything based on a "better to not be alive" idea. But I've engaged in millions of actions of course.

Aside from that, a lot of your opening essay reads oddly to me because all that value is in the first place is a subjective assignment based on how individuals feel about the thing in question, and any individual might feel any imaginable way about the same thing.

Yep, otherwise we are just talking past each other. — schopenhauer1

Well I can only really talk about your instrumentalism in a fashion that fits my point of view. And the interesting idea to me is how the modern fossil fuel burning phase of humanity is having to construct its own heat sink in terms of "pointless activity".

So life in a general naturalistic sense is all about the negentropy that arises to dissipate entropic gradients - the organisation that forms to liberate energy stores. But life normally is stuck with a rate of burn defined by environmental accidents - like the actual amount of sunshine hitting the Earth and being available for re-radiation at a lowered temperature having done organic work. Life normally has to find its equilbrium balance with the daily solar flux.

Humanity, through its technological development, stumbled on the entropic bonanza of coal and oil - fossilised geo-distilled plankton. And that took the lid off human development. There was suddenly enough fuel to do anything.

The problem then was finding something to do with this fuel. Humanity had to evolve a mentality to match - one adapted to a new energy environment. And humanity also needed a heat sink - some activity that could dispose of all this potential work in terms of, ultimately, waste heat. So a reason for action had to be invented to complete the cycle. Humans had to invent the outcome that would allow fossil fuel to be burnt in exponential fashion in a way that "made sense".

A lot of this "making sense" of the fossil fuel bonanza has happened in normal biological fashion - a population explosion in which we are headed towards 10 billion people by mid-century.

But then you can argue that a lot about the modern fossil fuel based mentality is "instrumental" in being fundamentally pointless activity. This seems right because we can see that psychological flourishing does not seem high on the entropic agenda. Instead, life is driven by a blind consumption imperative - an over-riding need to generate as much waste as possible because more ordinary rates of fossil fuel burn aren't enough to satisfy its entropic imperative.

So Rolex watches, and Instagram, and McDonalds, are all symptoms of the need to create heat sinks beyond what nature makes readily available. Humans have to consume products in ways that keep cranking up the global rate of burn. Our part of the bargain is using our creativity to invent these pointless - from the point of view of psychological flourishing - activities. And it would be this aspect of modern existence that I would call "instrumental" - in as far as you can clearly define your neologism in a way I might respond to it.

But then this thermodynamic view of nature does not really justify pessimism or anti-natalism or other recent incarnations of Existentialism and Romanticism.

There still remains the possibility of psychological flourishing. There is a goal at the heart of human activity that we can still shoot at.

And then there is the question of exactly how much of the apparently wasteful side of modern consumerism is merely heat sink creation for the sake of heat sink creation. Clearly there is a worryingly large amount. But once you look at everything we expend resources on - which includes public health, universal education, national security (including natural hazard defences) - then quite a lot goes to propping up the various levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It is useful activity, rather than useless activity, in terms of a standard model of psychological flourishing.

So an actual examination of the human condition will certainly say there is a fundamental problem which humanity faces. We are being rather mindlessly driven by the entropic imperative of fossil fuel, and we already know that is going to end unhappily.

But that nuanced story - in which the future is an open question, given we are so involved in how it works out - is a far cry from the monotone droning of pessimism and anti-natalism.

The Otaku/gamers version of Romanticism lacks any entropic/organic realism and so its criticisms of modern life have no penetration. It is just a pathetic bleat from the sidelines. It says "I wish I wasn't here" without having any philosopical means to analyse why it is where it is, and where else it might more fruitfully be.

There still remains the possibility of psychological flourishing. There is a goal at the heart of human activity that we can still shoot at. — apokrisis

So where is this justified that we should/can "shoot" at flourishing? What is true is that we must survive/upkeep and entertain ourselves at all times. Instrumentality is the absurd feeling that can be experienced from apprehension of the constant need to put forth energy to pursue goals and actions in waking life. This feeling can make us question the whole human enterprise itself of maintaining mundane repetitive upkeep, maintaining institutions, and pursuing any action that eats up free time simply for the sake of being alive and having no other choice. There is also a feeling of futility as, the linguistic- general processor brain cannot get out of its own circular loop of awareness of this. Another part of the feeling of futility is the idea that there is no ultimate completion from any goal or action. It is that idea that there is nothing truly fulfilling. Time moves forward and we must make more goals and actions.

The Otaku/gamers version of Romanticism lacks any entropic/organic realism and so its criticisms of modern life have no penetration. — apokrisis

Ad hominem. Not that this has bearing on anything, but I do not play video games and I had to look up what Otaku is. The criticisms of modern life, already frame the debate in terms of "modern" vs. "non-modern", when instrumentality is an idea about life in general- fossil fuel burning or not.

You are close to certain ideas when you discuss the instrumentality of using fossil fuels, but the instrumentality is more pervasive than the specific focus on fossil fuels and its impact on culture. You make a pipe dream out of this "flourishing" rather than see the instrumentality that is inherent in all actions, situations, decisions, motivations.

. From the perspective of a sufferer, non-existence may come across as "peaceful", "tranquil", or "comfortable". Indeed, this seems to be the outlook of at least some Buddhist beliefs, which take nirvana to be equivalent to non-existence, yet peaceful at the same time. Non-existence, despite it's literal interpretation, is given existence-dependent values. — DarthBarracuda

This is a false although widespread conception of Nirvana. Indeed when the first Mahayana Buddhist scriptures were translated into European languages, many scholars and philosophers (including Nietszche) interpreted the Buddhist 'sunyata' and 'nirvana' as nothingness or non-existence. And 'nirvana' literally means 'extinction' or 'blowing-out', and it is often depicted in negative terms, so it is an understandable error.

Nevertheless I think it's a mistake to depict Nirvana as non-existence. It would be more accurate to describe it as 'beyond conception' - that also has doctrinal foundation, as Nirvana is often described in the texts as being 'subtle, difficult to see, perceivable only by the wise'. So it is an essentially religious conception, albeit conceived in a different way to Western religious conceptions. But it is more like a state 'beyond existence' than 'non-existent'. (This is symbolised iconographically in Tangka paintings of the 'wheel of birth and death', which depict the six realms (heaven, hell, earth, etc). In those depictions the Buddha (and the Bodhisattvas) are drawn outside the wheel.)

So where is this justified that we should/can "shoot" at flourishing? — schopenhauer1

How is it not justified exactly? You are arguing the minority position here.

Instrumentality is the absurd feeling that can be experienced from apprehension of the constant need to put forth energy to pursue goals and actions in waking life. — schopenhauer1

It's only absurd to you because you choose to frame it that way using antiquated notions about scientific determinism and cosmic meaninglessness.

You make a pipe dream out of this "flourishing" rather than see the instrumentality that is inherent in all actions, situations, decisions, motivations. — schopenhauer1

You say it is a pipe dream. I've yet to see your evidence.

And you don't seem to appreciate the monotonic nature of your argument that makes it invalid as any kind of theory. In claiming to explain everything, it can't in fact explain anything.

So start again and explain to me what a life would be like if lived in a non-instrumental fashion? Let's see if that sounds appealing as a counterfactual option.

How is it not justified exactly? You are arguing the minority position here. — apokrisis

But I don't have to claim something- we live out instrumentality even if the absurd feeling of it does not dawn at all moments for everyone. Shooting for flourishing is not a fact like instrumentality, but a value statement that must be justified with something other than "that's what the majority want". Flourishing is a pretty tawdry trope anyways. That's what some Greek philosophers said back in the day, and may have become the current trope for dialectic in modern ethical discourse, but besides the obvious that people survive to survive, and that time moves forward and there is no rest from the organism's need for need (which is essentially instrumentality but sans self-awareness of it), there is no basis for this or that principle (flourishing) being any inherent goal we are trying for or should try for.

It is easy to take a position with the word "flourishing" but, to just take some idea for granted because it sounds pleasant or is the recognized established trope among some schools of thought, or is recognized by a mass audience says little. It's simply catering to an established preference for what people are conditioned to hear as reasonable and thus another way for your argument to gain leverage through being the "sophisticated" understanding of way things are and how things got to where they are. It's like being at a Sunday cocktail party in a middle class suburb and discussing sports, mortgages, and school districts- it "seems" like the most responsible and sophisticated topic that everyone can agree on.

The problem with the way you argue is that you give little credit to the interlocutor. Just because I have a fundamental argument that describes the situatedness of the human being, does not mean I have not considered other arguments and the nuances of history/linguistics/neuroscience/anthropology/contingency/hard sciences/social sciences/actuality/potentiality/entropy and the like.. However, understanding the hows and whys of the world described via empirical apprehension and modeling does not nullify the human condition itself.

So start again and explain to me what a life would be like if lived in a non-instrumental fashion? Let's see if that sounds appealing as a counterfactual option. — apokrisis

Life could not live in an otherwise fashion. The closest thing to describing non-instrumentality is perhaps (and a big perhaps) something like what I described in the first response to the OP which sort of kicked this whole debate off: Schopenhauerian ideal world All would be stasis and not flux. There is no want or need as one would be completely unified with everything else. Thus a unitary existence where everything is everything is almost equivalent to everything is nothing. It is absolute completeness in the metaphysical sense. Nothing is lacking.

However, the above situation is not possible (and never was/is.. hence the discussion of the whole transcendental nirvana thing being a pipe dream). To strive for flourishing is not only not justified, it is actually the process of instrumentality sentimentalized... To flourish to flourish to flourish is not much different than to do to do to do.. It is just deciding certain things are valued more than others.. for some instrumental reason (keeping such and such going to keep it going to keep it going). I've discussed Maslow's hierarchy before and I can do it again if you so wish (as for some reason I predict you moving in that direction).. The idea if humans had a certain set of needs met, some sort of completeness or "full potential" is reached.. Please, let us hash that out.

the discussion of the whole transcendental nirvana thing being a pipe dream... — Schopenhauer1

Desert-dwellers think the ocean a fantasy.

As someone who hasn't studied much philosophy but has struggled over suicidal thoughts stemming from issues related to the topic of this thread, I'm wondering how you guys are able to avoid internalizing such issues to the point of madness.