this picture will never not be funny
just the absurdity of donald duck putting out that statement (which even makes some sense and fits donald’s overall depressed mood) and mickey mouse being the sly one and contradicting donald, coming out with the upper hand from the argument, is just so amusing.
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Wow, side burn Pluto
Donald duck states a fact, Mickey Mouse says some off the wall shit someone in a mental institution would rant about. OP agrees with Mickey.
Perfect shit post.
this but replace homer laying on a sofa with a shitpost thinking of a shitpost
Always hated this meme because Mickey’s dialogue is set up to give the confident and condescending “vibe” of correctness but actually makes no sense if you stop and think about it. "Trusting the chemicals in your brain to tell you they are chemicals " when declaring emotions to have material basis isnt hypocrisy, it’s self consistency, essentially the reverse of hypocrisy. And if the universe is just a material thing with no basis for intrinsic value, what even is there to “fight” about that? You cannot exactly punch the nature of reality into submission, or change the behavior of the universe through sheer force of will. And if you could, there isn’t even a reason given for why you would even want to do so, it’s just implied that human values and emotions being a result of material reality is undesirable because what? “chemicals bad” I guess?
Mickey wants you to fight nihilism.
What does that even entail though, you cant exactly force things to objectively matter if they don’t already, there’s no mechanism by which we could influence that. If you just assert values that you hold personally, you’ve merely created subjective meaning and done nothing relevant to nihilism’s truth value. Meanwhile If nihilism turns out to be objectively false, then you can’t fight it because it wouldnt even exist to fight. You can fight nihilists I guess, but then you’re in the generally disliked position of fighting people based on a belief of theirs that does not require them cause any harm to you or anyone else, because it doesn’t require anything at all.
Its about as bizarre a call to action as declaring that you dislike some branch of math and want people to help you fight it.
You’re kind of an idiot, huh.
I used to agree with you, but then I realised why it works:
Mickey is basically repeating the old absurdist critique, “if nothing matters, it doesn’t matter that nothing matters”. He’s saying why are you despairing that everything in your brain is chemicals? Is it because the chemicals in your brain told you to? Then stop giving a shit, they’re just chemicals!
And then he goes on to take up an Existentialist position in the vein of Sartre and declare that to live a meaningful life is to struggle against your base urges and cultural indoctrination, and to instead live a life whose meaning is determined by your own choices.
Ah, then I see my point of confusion: I do not see “nothing matters” as a fundamentally undesirable position (actually kind of the reverse), so to me Donald’s statement does not read as despare at all, it just reads as a neutral explanation of his stance on it. As such, Mickey’s statement doesn’t read to me as absurdist reassurance, rather, Donald’s reads more as something an absurdist might say and Mickey’s response reads more as “how dare you believe that, that idea must be somehow made false even if it is true and I wish to use violence to bring that about”
What happens on the next panel!?
This sounds like the kind of stupidass discourse you get when Jordan Peterson sits with Ben Shapiro with Joe Rogan trying sniff both their butts.
Seriously. Why are chemicals absurd? Answer: They are not absurd. They are arranged and tuned to your relations with your surroundings. They are sensory organs. Ignoring your senses is a choice I guess, especially when they are badly calibrated or misinformed by fake inputs (social media, rage bait, w/e)
These chemicals have been assigned moral and intrinsic value based on how they affect us. In a universe of unfeeling, indifferent chemicals we derive meaning. Like divining order in a storm of chaos. The miracle is that we can find meaning in the meaningless.
This is the existentialist stance. Misunderstood by many as being nihilistic (which it is not) but I think it is correct. As Jean Paul Sartre said, Existentialism is humanism.
existentialism imho is finding meaning in the nihilism. i.e. if there is no meaning, that means that we ourselves make the meaning, therefore there always is meaning in the world (which causes the existence of a conscious observer in the first place)
Something like that, yes. Meaning is a human construct and we are meaning seekers. So in this way, unlike in nihilism, meaning becomes possible even if things in the world don’t come equipped with it.
I think most people have gotten over this fallacy when it comes to organic intelligence these days, but people still make it with regards to machine learning. They say LLMs are reducible to an equation (which is an oversimplification) and therefore they can’t have any subjective experience.
But if your math is complex enough to reduce an LLM to an equation (something no human has ever done, but is theoretically possible), then you’d be able to do it to humans too. Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, and all that. So yeah, humans are just a mathematical equation. A human brain is just a machine that predicts the most likely action to help you eat food and have sex.
And if you believe talking creatures can lack subjective experience, well congratulations, you’ve invented p-zombies. Which I think is dangerous. We don’t need millions of people walking around who seriously believe in p-zombies.
I’m currently watching Infinity Train season 3 and
Spoiler
There’s a whole season about how some kids (“anarchists”) run around and smash things. They call themselves the “apex” (clearly a reference to apex predator) so they don’t have to respect anything or anyone besides themselves. Needless to say, they’re often very cruel to the environment, destroying living rooms and beings alike.
The twist of the whole series is, however, that the whole world is fake. It’s all a kind of computing machinery that’s driving the train and all of its natural inhabitants. So in a way, you could say that all the beings in it are computer generated anyways, so they don’t actually feel real emotion. Does that make it ethically unproblematic to smash them? It’s a really nice way to think about things
Anyways i highly recommend watching infinity train season 03 in this context.
Infinity Train
The Apex aren’t anarchists, they’re fascists. They think everything different than them exists to be exploited and abused by them.
They deliberately try to increase their numbers, but the numbers measure personal growth, we learned that in season 1. They don’t know what the numbers mean, but by optimising for bigger numbers, they’re steadily becoming worse and more unhappy people. Even if the denizens didn’t have feelings, the Apex would still be hurting themselves.
But I believe computer generated simulations of people can have feelings. Look at Lake. She’s from the train, she’s also literally Tulip’s reflection. Tulip doesn’t have a reflection anymore, even outside the train. This shit goes deeper than we know. I believe Lake has feelings. I also believe Alan Dracula and Atticus and Samantha have feelings.
Tulip risked her life to bring Atticus back from the dead, and it made her a better person. It doesn’t matter if Atticus is real. Not giving a shit about what’s “real” makes you a better person.
The Apex aren’t anarchists, they’re fascists. They think everything different than them exists to be exploited and abused by them.
yeah i know but they consider themselves that way. that’s why i put “anarchists” in quotes.
also i heard a very nice saying a while ago “we should treat our enemies well, not because of their humanity, but because of ours”. i.e. treating others around you well, makes you a better person, and that benefits you yourself. it is therefore insignificant if the other ones are actually human or not.
Hey thanks for talking about Infinity Train and inspiring Me to talk about it. I really value that show.
Peterson: “What do you mean by ‘Let’s say’?”
