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537. Like Razorblade Pie: Deathbird (Feat. Griffin Rowell)

🕑 Added 2022-10-24 13:00:13 +0000 UTC

Comments

Dave Ruff

Just listened to this episode, and I love these existentialist talks with Swaim and friends. Just a few thoughts: Nietzsche and Nihilism is often misunderstood; his main point (God is dead, etc.) was that life has no meaning so make some yourself, you lazy SoB (or words to that effect). This is Active Nihilism, which I don't fully subscribe to--I'm more Absurdist, though not quite that either--but is far more palatable to Passive Nihilism, which is I think how most people "understand" Nihilism, say after watching Rick and Morty. Re: end of the world scenarios, how life started and all that, there's a too much to go over, but overall, if you're very science/evidence-based on your philosophies (huge intersection bet. physics and philosophy, btw), life (and also definitions on life) is a random occurrence, pan-spermia is a perfectly valid hypothesis, but the idea of an intelligent seeder is just fanciful speculation (i.e. religion). Mankind will end at some point, but I agree, most world-ending scenarios mostly mean end of our current state of "comfortable" civilization. Man-made catastrophes, whether nuclear war or just plain climate change and rise of fascism, will make make the world into a very shitty place to survive (to varying degrees), but humanity will scratch through most of it. I'm actually most worried about synthetic biology in apocolyptic scenarios. External threats are legit though, whether extraterrestrial--asteroids, coronal mass ejections, gamma ray bursts, but also somewhat astronomical in time scales as well--or terrestrial, like various caldera. Sorry for the rambling, but there was a lot in your conversation that really struck my philosophical fancy. Oh, and I do need to (re)read my Ellison. :)