Is the main appeal of materialism the fact that it allows you to reject responsibility?
Is the main appeal of materialism the fact that it allows you to reject responsibility?
Is the main appeal of materialism the fact that it allows you to reject responsibility?
No? I'm sure some losers describe themselves as materialists who avoid responsibility, but if you try to reject responsibility in the real world you're usually punished for it, either by other people imposing rules on you or by being forced to live a sub-par lifestyle, because we live in "le society". Materialism is less useful as a lifestyle and more of a way of describing the physical nature of the universe.
which it describes as being essentially deterministic in nature and that concepts like the soul are false. The point isn't to reconcile the fact that you are punished in the "real world" or whatever for rejecting responsibility, such as blaming something on socio-economic factors ,trauma, or whatever material condition tickles your fancy in the moment. It's about convincing yourself that that is how the world works and therefore this capitalist society is simply bad or something and the normies don't want to admit that free-will and all that self/soul stuff doesn't exist because of some perfidious ideology.
It also replaces worship of God with worship of the self, so it placates a lot of dumb selfish people.
materialism usually ends up denying the self. Not sure what you're on about
The irony being that the self is an illusion.
>self is an illusion
Sure but I believe it so that's fine
Who is being deceived by the illusion of self?
Quite the opposite actually. Persons are the ontological foundation, personalism being the best evolution in our thinking in the 20th century. But of course Mr. 6666, you knew this and want to mislead people with your Satanism. Hume, Nietzsche, and the other atheists were all very fond of denying personhood.
>But of course Mr. 6666, you knew this and want to mislead people with your Satanism.
This is like how ugly guys say women reject them because they're too nice. It spares their ego by projecting the shortcoming onto the women who reject them. Likewise the dualist, unable to substantiate his claims, feeling insecure and frustrated, projects an ignoble motive onto materialists.
Materialists can't account for subjectivity, which is the basis for knowing that "matter" even exists in the first place. I bet you're one of those "type B physicalists" insisting they're not just dying of copium overdose ever since your moronic worldview was blown out by qualia/intentionality half a century ago
so many IQfyizens reject materialism and then twist philosophy into some new age spiritualist nonsense. everything you mentioned is irrelevant
"Matter" is a universal, which materialist nominalism also denies exists. There are really no such things as cats or trees or planets or stars. These are all just human created names for sensory experiences, whereas the real world is inaccessible noumena. So only quarks and leptons are actually real, because small things are more fundemental and thus more real than big things because, uhhh, reasons, this has to be true.
Or maybe not, maybe there is just one totally undifferentiated thing called nature and any multiplicity is made up human mind stuff. Either way, knowledge is sort of impossible and nothing has any meaning or purpose. Oh, and freedom is impossible too so don't worry about developing self-control and the virtues, because actually only really small things can be real enough to have causal efficacy because small = more real.
But if knowledge were possible, it would definitely show that this is all true and there is only matter. No, don't ask if mathematical truths exist outside of matter, that's silly.
Materialism entails quite the opposite of a rejection of responsibility.
When there is no transcendent organising force giving meaning to history, then it falls to your responsibility to create that meaning.
Art can no longer just be the passive reflection of nature or the outpouring of divine inspiration. It has no predetermined end and final form. So it is your responsibility to invent aesthetic values, and to follow them down the unimaginably infinite different paths they could lead you.
Similarly, there is no longer a perfect society, a City of God, which would mirror the divine ordering of heaven. Societies can be as varied as the productive force of human minds and human labour can make them. And it is your responsibility to find some way to realise that daunting, overwhelming potential.
Similarly, your own life will find no ultimate redemption in an afterlife, it will not be given meaning by slotting into a divine scheme. It is your responsibility to make it meaningful yourself, to understand how infinitely much there is to experience and create, and to do what you can to experience and create it.
Meaning cannot be created if materialism is true. You're just coping.
>too much of an NPC to create his own meaning
>too much of an NPC to accept life has no meaning
>too much of an NPC to see that the meaning is objective
Ah yes, deny God and create your own meaning. This leads to true responsibility. Which is why our culture is all about responsibility and beauty, not empty hedonism, numbing the mind with drugs and alcohol, gluttonous eating on an industrial scale, and a constant focus on consooming and "muh GDP growth."
Such a transcendent vision. Those poor sad sacks who looked for meaning in external things, who believes in the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, they did things like spend whole centuries, generation after generation, building things or great beauty like Notre Dame, Saint Paul's, etc. whereas now we know better and make pic related on a colossal scale.
But, I guess that makes sense. What are we responsible for really? We're just particles right? The Good isn't real, it's like, just opinions man. Freedom means getting to smoke weed and on demand abortions and promiscuous sex and vidya and porn and fast food. Freedom is fulfilling whatever desire you want!
The future is now. Stace was right! Man must put aside childish ideas like God. Nominalism is the only way, everything is relative. Behold, your new cathedral! Sports shall be your new mass! Big Macs and beer your new Eucharist!
Meanwhile, what the backwards ages produced. They didn't have science or Netflix or birth control or porn or known the truth that truth is simply relative.
They listened to deluded, homeless virgins who didn't know about science. Plato, Porphery, Augustine, Bonaventure, Maximus, Aquinas, Eckhart, Proclus, Dionysius, Eriugena, Aristotle these guys were all weak and deluded. They didn't have the strength and genius to see the truth like Nietzsche, Marx, Camus, Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens — the real power house intellects. They believed in feel good delusions; Plato had nothing that could match the vision of Dawkins.
Imagine, those cave men actually thought bad things would happen from violating the Great Chain of Being. Hahahaha.
No matter how much you hate being a surplus male in an egalitarian society it will not make Christianity real.
>"Egalitarian society"
>He says surrounded by stores filled with clothes made by slum dwelling Bangladeshi children getting paid $0.25 a day.
>Next to food all wrapped in one time use plastics that get dumped in the Philippines.
>In a country where the top 1% has 15 times has much wealth as the bottom 50%, who still have 50 times as much wealth as the people who make all the products they consoom over seas.
>The egalitarian paradise of inner city ghettos and favelas, where refugees are welcome so long as they'll work in factory farms without safety protections for $4 an hour and pick crops for $20 a day.
Ah yes, that's what makes our society sickening to me. How incredibly equal and fair it is.
No matter how much you hate being a surplus male in a capitalist society it will not make Christianity real.
No. But Christianity is real, and this society is deeply sick.
There are no "surplus males." Everyone has dignity and is made in the image of the divine. "Surplus" humanity only exists in the sick system you've apparently wholeheartedly bought into. But why should I care about such standards? It's about as meaningful as Ted Bundy telling me I'm a "buzzkill" because I don't like rape, or some CCP member I don't show sufficient concern for my social credit score. The Good is the Good, and no amount of "orgy porgy, Ford and fun," changes that.
Anon didn't have a response for this one lol.
I don't understand your premise. What is the connection between materialism and responsibility?
I think OP is thinking about the connection between materialism and determinism.
The case used to be something like this,
>god exists
>god says, "homosexuality is bad"
>homosexuals don't like being told by God that they are degenerates
Now materialism comes in, and says
>well, God doesn't exist
>if there is no God, then there is nothing to condemn my degeneracy anymore
>therefore, I can spelunk in other men's buttholes without feeling bad about it
Most homosexuals don't become materialists because they thought long and hard about theology or even materialism itself, they became materialists because they didn't want to be judged for their homosexuality and materialism was the perfect candidate for a rationalization of that train of thought. They sought justification for what they already wanted to think rather than arriving at their conclusions through reason.
You seem to be quite interested in homosexuals.
And anyway, social shaming for aberrant behavior happens whether you believe in god or not.
I'm not him but I'm petty sure everyone shilling materialism is a fed or demon possessed or part of a firm or something. Maybe AI. I have the reading comprehension abilities to be able to suss this out. There's never any intention to communicate or come to an understanding. It's like an animal imitating its prey's calls.
>reject responsibility
So long as there are laws one shirks one's own responsibility (paying taxes, obeying the speed limit, honoring contracts, refraining from unsanctioned violent acts,...) at one's own hazard. If one wants to behave as if a 'free spirit' at parties beneath this aegis however, one can: it's allowed.
Why would materialism allow you to reject responsibility? Even if everything is materially deterministic, the correct interpretation of the question of free will is compatibilism, meaning that you're still ultimately responsible for the actions that are caused by your material self.
who are the philosophers in this comic?
They're just characters the cartoonist uses for some of his dialogue-based comics, they're not real philosophers.
Yes. If everything phenomenal is somehow illusory, reducible to "bits of stuff bouncing around," then there is no right or wrong, good or evil, beautiful or ugly. This also means that good and evil, beauty and truth emerge as sui generis illusions within the mind. This makes man the measure of all things. This in turn makes it so that the world must be meaningless and purposeless. This is key if you take existentialism as your religion, because you need this to be true to be le ebin Nietzschean overcomer. If this isn't true, then you aren't some ebin overcome, you're a deluded pathetic sinner being ruled over by desire, instinct, and circumstance.
But there is really no good reason to think reductive materialism of the sort pushed in the early 20th century is true. Support for it has been slowly withering away, such that reductionism is probably a minority opinion in the physical sciences today.
Ex falso quodlibet alohamora
yes
Only morons are materialists. It's the official midwit position. It's for people who don't want to actually think out their position, they just want to have one that allows them to be "clever." When a moron looks up, he sees the cynicism and reductionism of materialism dangling above his head like low-hanging fruit, and he plucks it eagerly, so that he can lord it over the other morons even shorter than him.
It's about rejecting uncertainty. It's like they want there to be no unknown.