rationalskepticism.org

PensivePenny wrote:It sounds like you're able to be at least moderately objective about your condition, VazScep. Thanks for sharing. I'm not some genius brain-trust by any stretch of generosity. But, I'm not stupid either. The more you know, the more you see. I don't understand how any human could see the truth about the universe, and in spite of all its beauty and wonder, not be depressed. Take life for example... to have the awareness that it is not only finite, but an insignificant blip of time, that everyone you know and love will be gone. That awareness causes (me) a great deal of pain and I have had to deal with it by various means. Cope. Adapt. My point isn't to share my life's minor struggles, but to say that I think there is a connection between madness and awareness. You, as a mathematician, exploring to the heavens, have a bird's eye view that most of us don't have. You have an awareness that perhaps borders on if not fully enveloped in genius. Is it any wonder reconciling that knowledge with human emotions can drive one to madness? It's how I always imagined it for Van Gogh and those like him.

No matter what it learns, I think the human race will be stubbornly optimistic by majority. The species deals with it by whatever means. Cope. Adapt. That it doesn't give up in reflection of the trauma of its own existence is something that only anti-natalists will complain about.

For example, I don't get Richard Dawkins. He wrote this amazing book called the "Selfish Gene" that states, in the most dehumanising terms, that each individual is nothing but a temporary vehicle built for a temporary and wary coalition of genes that only exist because they do it so well. Isn't that one of the most nihilist accounts of existence ever published? Yet Dawkins is anything but a nihilist.

Or take Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot". He turns the image of this pathetic planet alone in the void into a positive message about values and humility. Wtf?

No matter their vantage, I think humans seek optimism, and us scant few pessimists will have to work twice as hard to remind them that "no: this isn't all right". I'm happy to do this because, for me, pessimism isn't a source of depression, but a way to satisfy a twisted sense of humour. I admit that might be a defence mechanism.

I don't mean to wax poetic. Like I said, I'm no genius, but I have felt at times that tension between knowing a truth and not wanting to know it.

It's an utterly delicious idea to me that the truth is the last thing we want. Forbidden knowledge, for our own sakes. I was just watching "Grizzly Man". The most powerful part of that film is when Herzog is sitting with a close friend of a couple who were killed in a bear attack. The friend allows Herzog to listen to an audio recording of the deaths, which she has kept but never listened to herself. Herzog, normally unphased by horror, becomes visibly upset, and says "Jewel, you must never listen to this."

Lovecraft was of a new order of pessimism, who simultaneously insisted that we stay true to a scientific, materalistic and thoroughly atheist outlook, but also realised that it contained an impending disintegration of human dignity that rendered us utterly useless. His opening to "Call of Cthulhu" nails it:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in their own direction, have hitherto harmed us little. But, some day, the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation, or flee from the deadly light, into the peace and safety of a new dark age."