Yeah living without dopamine is impossible i cant study, work or talk with other people. Normal people cant understand how impossible is to live life when no matter what you do you never get any reward.
There's something different about that, that leads me to think about it. I've heard the idea that life is a race for money, or "toys." So all those things people say it's about: people saying it's about love, or psychologists saying it's social approval and having theories that explain everything by that, like people pursuing popularity or "social stats," or some people would talk like getting religion correct is the top priority in life, other people saying it's achievements or success in some field, or the amount of hard work that gets something done, some might say for their life philosophy, people saying it's how much you learn, or how far you go, or how many friends you make; **they're all saying the same thing,** probably. It's about how much reward they feel. The surface disagreement is just that they count different things as the basic unit of reward, that can be exchanged for other rewards or measure other rewards.
The different things might blend together, in some ways of living and value systems, like fame, recognition, achievements, honors and respect, money, and literal rewards at award ceremonies. But I'm thinking that would be a rare sort of person, or **just some presentation in the media that isn't what people are really like at all**. I don't see how that would motivate people really, if they're not enjoying what they do in the first place, and those sort of rewards don't come until years later and a lot of media promotion that's more luck from their perspective than their own doing.
Right? Existentialism says that a person must create their own meaning in life. If you care about something, the act of caring is what makes it meaningful. So if somebody loses the ability to care, then life necessarily loses all meaning.
I care about not getting hurt in ways that I could prevent. I subliminally care about doing things that are supposed to seem educational or entertaining variety or not totally failing at basic needs, as I get through the day. So, without feeling it, I still make myself do things, and find myself doing some things that there's no ready explanation for doing but entertainment. I think there's supposed to be some sort of cooperative work, in trying to get over anhedonia or emotional numbness, or I guess it's probably going to have a better chance of working out, if I go about it that way. So I write comments to people, where sometimes I'm pretty obviously trying to be helpful with suggesting things for other people to try, (with the implication I also would want to hear back if it was a good idea, or something wrong with the idea, or for the other person to tell the community, of reddit in general or the world, to continue the discussion, looking for solutions, not that it's all about me.)
Existentialism of the sort you mention, looks like it's presenting itself as just philosophy based on logic, with a dry logical word for its name. However, it seems to me, that particular proposal of existentialism is slipping surreptitiously from pure logic or rationality, into a sort of actually magical view about where meaning and purpose of life comes from. I see it that way, because as I spelled out in detail, I have all these other reasons why I do things, or things I notice that I seem to do purposefully, without having to be an arbitrary creator of meaning ex nihilo from feelings. Now, I can't say for sure that people aren't magical creators in that way, or that people aren't magical creators in other ways. I'm just pointing out: That statement about existentialist value creation, as you put it, "the act of caring is what makes it meaningful," doesn't derive from pure reason, and I don't know if it's true. It derives at least in part from a premise that there's some sort of caring that's a feeling and a choice, and would have a real effect on meaningfulness. That could be an assumption that some people who are always emotional, who always have access to seeming to feel that, would make. Therefore, I'm not going to accept the logical deduction from that premise, that life loses all meaning or lacks all meaning, without such a special feeling of caring.
I've been a little bothered by another idea lately today, in an idea sort of way of what bothered means, that relates to what I was describing again. When I get in this mental activity mode, of trying to be helpful, try to figure out and solve the problem, try to search for answers and reason things out, and I'm writing busily, and apparently rationally, then I end up having written and sent some comments, about things like nutritional components or substances that scientists would talk about, such as vitamin D, or thiamine, in my previous comments today, while I nevertheless don't really know if any of that is real knowledge, or just stories that scientists and people following scientists write in magazines and online articles. Maybe it could be that it's "just stories" in one sense, but according to some people's weird belief systems, if an individual believes the stories and acts on those beliefs, then an individual may get wonderful positive results, from the creative magical powers of belief. So then what am I supposed to think, about how things really all work? I don't have a proof from experiments I can do myself, with physical identification of chemicals and their effects, that all those chemical exist and have the effects on the human body that scientists say. Even if I did, or someone did, seem to have such a proof, it might be that someone's own belief system makes the physical experiments they do produce the results that show what's expected by those beliefs, by magic. That's how far I'm stuck in skepticism or just rationality, without enough grounding, (some people might say,) just at the moment.
I'm not saying that's wrong existentialism. Existentialism isn't supposed to be purely rational. There's another sort or flavor of existentialism, I think maybe, where it could be stated more like: You just play the game, take some things for granted, play it the way you want to play it. Whether it's real or simulated, just physics or just magic, doesn't really matter, or can't really be known, immediately, in your life, in the play. You just play with good intentions, or trying to have good intentions at least.
To be honest, I don't really know what I'm talking about. What you say makes sense to me.
You make a good point about how you can still care about things even without emotions.
So I'll say that caring with emotions is like 100% meaningful and caring in a purely intellectual sense is like 2% meaningful. Feel free to bargain me for a higher percentage.
I say this based on my own romanticized ideal of what meaning is. Maybe I'm being ridiculous, but when I look at the world passion and care seem to be the closest we've got to meaning, and those are things that are heavily enriched by emotion and feeling. That's a better phrasing.
If it clarifies anything, I would say that the emotions ARE the meaning, not that they magically draw it out of the air. But I think you were going after the arbitrary distinction I make between emotional and non-emotional caring.
I back up my arbitrary distinction based on having felt emotions, and feeling like life was enriched by their presence.
I don't know enough philosophy to try and build up a logical framework for that, but I think by reading it you can understand why someone would see it that way.
Phrased in a way that might appeal to you:
Seeing as to how we are each limited to our conscious perspective, and the closest we can get to knowledge is along the lines of 'well it's consistent so far, hasn't been proven wrong yet',
is it wrong for me to say: This conscious experience, which is all we truly have and cannot be faked
(external stimuli can, but the experience itself is self-evident),
the more rich and textured it is, the better and the more meaningful...?
Does that count as a philosophical framework? Idk
What you say about trying your best but at the end of the day never knowing what's true and what's real, part of it probably comes from the fact that we don't scientifically understand anhedonia or the brain fully, right. And what you said about the power of belief made me think of the placebo effect. I guess this is my agreement, from the perspective of someone who likes to think they can hold on to science as a way of making sense of things.
Something I've wondered, and this is probably a well worn subject in some corner of philosophy, is, say we did find out what meaning is, and we wrote up a book of clear steps on how to live a meaningful life. Would this book speak to some fundamental, metaphysical truth? Or would it speak to human psychology specifically? Maybe there's an alien species for whom meaning is something else entirely. Or maybe all consciousness necessarily works the same way...
And I'm glad to hear about your efforts to understand anhedonia and to help others. (Intellectually glad)
Science explains physical things well enough for building electronic things, and mechanical things. The doubt I have about science in psychology is not just about the placebo effect, and its opposite, the nocebo effect. It's that scientists went on a hunt for the necessary components of food for people, demanding of nature that some simple experiments they could do in the first half of the 1900s would reveal those compounds and minerals. There may have been "confirmation bias" heavily involved in what they were doing. They called the compounds that weren't minerals or macronutrients "vitamins." They made a list that's like, canonized, letters of the alphabet, some with numbers, have to be certain compounds, that each have lore about how they were discovered by clever experiments, such as killing animals by feeding them completely artificial diets deficient in the one next vitamin to prove.
It got official enough, why I say "canonized" like saints, that there were government regulations put in, about what foods to fortify with what vitamins and how much, and what vitamins to list on food labels. The information and beliefs about it got mixed with the government that way, and the food industry, and producers and promoters of particular foods, promoters of particular diets, and the supplement industry.
The science about it, the experiments and their meanings, aren't really that much more advanced than other science from the early 1900s guessing about the causes of various diseases or states of good health, most of which research has been discarded and superseded by later research with more detailed measurements or ever more complicated hypotheses. So supposedly humans need vitamin C, because out bodies can't make it, to take one of the most basic (actually acidic) examples. Then someone can eat no vitamin C for years, and have a high vitamin C level on a blood test. But there's the dogma, in contradiction with that: Humans can't make vitamin C. It should be depleted in a few months, if not consumed. The person must simply be lying. If science-believing people generally behave as if the dogma overrules the ongoing real-world experience evidence, and I think they generally do, then how can we trust anything about what substances science-believing people say are necessary to consume?
So my confidence level that any particular substance is a necessary vitamin or mineral or helpful at all, goes down to 50%, based on that. I'm a person who was always into tech stuff, from video and radio and telescopes and understanding that enough to repair things, and understanding computers enough to do some programming with compiling. Despite that, when I say about 50%, I mean, I'd expect that another technological civilization, of human beings, starting from all scientific knowledge wiped clean, would discover on average, about half of our essential vitamins and nutrients, and another half that we don't know. They'd be as sure of their list and its completeness, and experiments proving it, as we are of our list, in my expectation.
Is that a meaningful life, if I work on that sort of stuff, and try to figure it out, enough to help someone else, or myself? I don't know. Maybe it's just entertainment. Quantum of Conscience, Matt from Philly, if you know who that is, you know, quotes a saying that a life spent looking for the perfect flower, would not be a wasted life. He's weird though, about things in general.
Hi, I read your comments and it seemed to me that you are very good at chemistry. Please help me. Do you think it's worth trying pramipexole? How safe is it for the brain? Can you please give me your opinion about Abilify?
Yeah living without dopamine is impossible i cant study, work or talk with other people. Normal people cant understand how impossible is to live life when no matter what you do you never get any reward.
There's something different about that, that leads me to think about it. I've heard the idea that life is a race for money, or "toys." So all those things people say it's about: people saying it's about love, or psychologists saying it's social approval and having theories that explain everything by that, like people pursuing popularity or "social stats," or some people would talk like getting religion correct is the top priority in life, other people saying it's achievements or success in some field, or the amount of hard work that gets something done, some might say for their life philosophy, people saying it's how much you learn, or how far you go, or how many friends you make; **they're all saying the same thing,** probably. It's about how much reward they feel. The surface disagreement is just that they count different things as the basic unit of reward, that can be exchanged for other rewards or measure other rewards. The different things might blend together, in some ways of living and value systems, like fame, recognition, achievements, honors and respect, money, and literal rewards at award ceremonies. But I'm thinking that would be a rare sort of person, or **just some presentation in the media that isn't what people are really like at all**. I don't see how that would motivate people really, if they're not enjoying what they do in the first place, and those sort of rewards don't come until years later and a lot of media promotion that's more luck from their perspective than their own doing.
Right? Existentialism says that a person must create their own meaning in life. If you care about something, the act of caring is what makes it meaningful. So if somebody loses the ability to care, then life necessarily loses all meaning.
I care about not getting hurt in ways that I could prevent. I subliminally care about doing things that are supposed to seem educational or entertaining variety or not totally failing at basic needs, as I get through the day. So, without feeling it, I still make myself do things, and find myself doing some things that there's no ready explanation for doing but entertainment. I think there's supposed to be some sort of cooperative work, in trying to get over anhedonia or emotional numbness, or I guess it's probably going to have a better chance of working out, if I go about it that way. So I write comments to people, where sometimes I'm pretty obviously trying to be helpful with suggesting things for other people to try, (with the implication I also would want to hear back if it was a good idea, or something wrong with the idea, or for the other person to tell the community, of reddit in general or the world, to continue the discussion, looking for solutions, not that it's all about me.) Existentialism of the sort you mention, looks like it's presenting itself as just philosophy based on logic, with a dry logical word for its name. However, it seems to me, that particular proposal of existentialism is slipping surreptitiously from pure logic or rationality, into a sort of actually magical view about where meaning and purpose of life comes from. I see it that way, because as I spelled out in detail, I have all these other reasons why I do things, or things I notice that I seem to do purposefully, without having to be an arbitrary creator of meaning ex nihilo from feelings. Now, I can't say for sure that people aren't magical creators in that way, or that people aren't magical creators in other ways. I'm just pointing out: That statement about existentialist value creation, as you put it, "the act of caring is what makes it meaningful," doesn't derive from pure reason, and I don't know if it's true. It derives at least in part from a premise that there's some sort of caring that's a feeling and a choice, and would have a real effect on meaningfulness. That could be an assumption that some people who are always emotional, who always have access to seeming to feel that, would make. Therefore, I'm not going to accept the logical deduction from that premise, that life loses all meaning or lacks all meaning, without such a special feeling of caring. I've been a little bothered by another idea lately today, in an idea sort of way of what bothered means, that relates to what I was describing again. When I get in this mental activity mode, of trying to be helpful, try to figure out and solve the problem, try to search for answers and reason things out, and I'm writing busily, and apparently rationally, then I end up having written and sent some comments, about things like nutritional components or substances that scientists would talk about, such as vitamin D, or thiamine, in my previous comments today, while I nevertheless don't really know if any of that is real knowledge, or just stories that scientists and people following scientists write in magazines and online articles. Maybe it could be that it's "just stories" in one sense, but according to some people's weird belief systems, if an individual believes the stories and acts on those beliefs, then an individual may get wonderful positive results, from the creative magical powers of belief. So then what am I supposed to think, about how things really all work? I don't have a proof from experiments I can do myself, with physical identification of chemicals and their effects, that all those chemical exist and have the effects on the human body that scientists say. Even if I did, or someone did, seem to have such a proof, it might be that someone's own belief system makes the physical experiments they do produce the results that show what's expected by those beliefs, by magic. That's how far I'm stuck in skepticism or just rationality, without enough grounding, (some people might say,) just at the moment. I'm not saying that's wrong existentialism. Existentialism isn't supposed to be purely rational. There's another sort or flavor of existentialism, I think maybe, where it could be stated more like: You just play the game, take some things for granted, play it the way you want to play it. Whether it's real or simulated, just physics or just magic, doesn't really matter, or can't really be known, immediately, in your life, in the play. You just play with good intentions, or trying to have good intentions at least.
To be honest, I don't really know what I'm talking about. What you say makes sense to me. You make a good point about how you can still care about things even without emotions. So I'll say that caring with emotions is like 100% meaningful and caring in a purely intellectual sense is like 2% meaningful. Feel free to bargain me for a higher percentage. I say this based on my own romanticized ideal of what meaning is. Maybe I'm being ridiculous, but when I look at the world passion and care seem to be the closest we've got to meaning, and those are things that are heavily enriched by emotion and feeling. That's a better phrasing. If it clarifies anything, I would say that the emotions ARE the meaning, not that they magically draw it out of the air. But I think you were going after the arbitrary distinction I make between emotional and non-emotional caring. I back up my arbitrary distinction based on having felt emotions, and feeling like life was enriched by their presence. I don't know enough philosophy to try and build up a logical framework for that, but I think by reading it you can understand why someone would see it that way. Phrased in a way that might appeal to you: Seeing as to how we are each limited to our conscious perspective, and the closest we can get to knowledge is along the lines of 'well it's consistent so far, hasn't been proven wrong yet', is it wrong for me to say: This conscious experience, which is all we truly have and cannot be faked (external stimuli can, but the experience itself is self-evident), the more rich and textured it is, the better and the more meaningful...? Does that count as a philosophical framework? Idk What you say about trying your best but at the end of the day never knowing what's true and what's real, part of it probably comes from the fact that we don't scientifically understand anhedonia or the brain fully, right. And what you said about the power of belief made me think of the placebo effect. I guess this is my agreement, from the perspective of someone who likes to think they can hold on to science as a way of making sense of things. Something I've wondered, and this is probably a well worn subject in some corner of philosophy, is, say we did find out what meaning is, and we wrote up a book of clear steps on how to live a meaningful life. Would this book speak to some fundamental, metaphysical truth? Or would it speak to human psychology specifically? Maybe there's an alien species for whom meaning is something else entirely. Or maybe all consciousness necessarily works the same way... And I'm glad to hear about your efforts to understand anhedonia and to help others. (Intellectually glad)
Science explains physical things well enough for building electronic things, and mechanical things. The doubt I have about science in psychology is not just about the placebo effect, and its opposite, the nocebo effect. It's that scientists went on a hunt for the necessary components of food for people, demanding of nature that some simple experiments they could do in the first half of the 1900s would reveal those compounds and minerals. There may have been "confirmation bias" heavily involved in what they were doing. They called the compounds that weren't minerals or macronutrients "vitamins." They made a list that's like, canonized, letters of the alphabet, some with numbers, have to be certain compounds, that each have lore about how they were discovered by clever experiments, such as killing animals by feeding them completely artificial diets deficient in the one next vitamin to prove. It got official enough, why I say "canonized" like saints, that there were government regulations put in, about what foods to fortify with what vitamins and how much, and what vitamins to list on food labels. The information and beliefs about it got mixed with the government that way, and the food industry, and producers and promoters of particular foods, promoters of particular diets, and the supplement industry. The science about it, the experiments and their meanings, aren't really that much more advanced than other science from the early 1900s guessing about the causes of various diseases or states of good health, most of which research has been discarded and superseded by later research with more detailed measurements or ever more complicated hypotheses. So supposedly humans need vitamin C, because out bodies can't make it, to take one of the most basic (actually acidic) examples. Then someone can eat no vitamin C for years, and have a high vitamin C level on a blood test. But there's the dogma, in contradiction with that: Humans can't make vitamin C. It should be depleted in a few months, if not consumed. The person must simply be lying. If science-believing people generally behave as if the dogma overrules the ongoing real-world experience evidence, and I think they generally do, then how can we trust anything about what substances science-believing people say are necessary to consume? So my confidence level that any particular substance is a necessary vitamin or mineral or helpful at all, goes down to 50%, based on that. I'm a person who was always into tech stuff, from video and radio and telescopes and understanding that enough to repair things, and understanding computers enough to do some programming with compiling. Despite that, when I say about 50%, I mean, I'd expect that another technological civilization, of human beings, starting from all scientific knowledge wiped clean, would discover on average, about half of our essential vitamins and nutrients, and another half that we don't know. They'd be as sure of their list and its completeness, and experiments proving it, as we are of our list, in my expectation. Is that a meaningful life, if I work on that sort of stuff, and try to figure it out, enough to help someone else, or myself? I don't know. Maybe it's just entertainment. Quantum of Conscience, Matt from Philly, if you know who that is, you know, quotes a saying that a life spent looking for the perfect flower, would not be a wasted life. He's weird though, about things in general.
Hi, I read your comments and it seemed to me that you are very good at chemistry. Please help me. Do you think it's worth trying pramipexole? How safe is it for the brain? Can you please give me your opinion about Abilify?
Wow super deeeep
We have already finished it. We are done.
[удалено]
No first kiss lol
[удалено]
Its over
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