I have a friend (a very intelligent friend, so patronise me with 'phase' talk and I won't be pleased).

He's managed to find his way into Nihilism, he's read every thing there is to read about it, he knows it inside out. He can't find a reason to live, and combined with depression, I'm frightened he's gonna do something drastic, and I don't have a clue how to turn him round.

Help me...

If you're honestly scared he is going to hurt himself, tell his family and even ring the local hospital. There are emergency services that can be activated to stop someone killing themself.

Other than that, try to find him a counselling service that works for him. Someone he can talk to to help him get to the underlying reasons why he might not wish to live. Nihilism is all well and good, but in my opinion someone does not kill themself for a philosophy, there is usually a reasoning that makes the philosophy so attractive in the first place.

Check www.reachout.com.au and you might be able to get some ideas from there.

I was like that once, and there was just one thought that took me out of it.

"What am I missing that makes the 6 billion other people see things differently?"

If you can get him to be intellectually honest and not just revert to dealing with "the masses" attitude, but think about each individual out there, a conversation like that might help him see things differently.

Also, try to use people from history that he respects (who did not commit suicide)

I'm not a philosopher. But I know this much: I think therefore I am (thank you Descartes).. but I can't prove anyone else's existence. It's a ridiculous argument, but you argue with someone about this who knows their stuff and you can't win. You can't prove they exist.

Which, for me, brings along a whole new corollary:

What the sod is the point of Philosophy anyway?


Life is enjoyable. Not always, but most of the time. We don't need a point to live, so long as we're enjoying ourselves. We don't need a higher reason, we don't need religion, we don't even need to prove that anyone else exists. Life's fun! Enjoy it while it lasts. That's my counter to Nihilism... now someone who knows what they're talking about can make some useful points. (nerfed - they did. I don't type fast enough)

i used to be very nihilist. one logical arguement that came from one of the many very philosophical debates with my friends and i was this;

if something is impossible to be disproven then it is false.

and i know it seems to violate english grammar, but i have no other way to say it. it make alot of sense in a language where being able to doing something and not being able to not do something are two different things, and where there's another word that means useless/false/untrue that doesn't conflict with the first part, but if you can understand it in english than try using that.
there is a large difference between "proven" and "impossible to be disproven" and i find that really hard to describe, but hopefully you can make sense of it, if you can't tell me and i'll try to explain it further.
this same arguement disproves a god and disproves total non-existance and anything that can fit into any situation which could be otherwise. i suppose it's a bit similiar to occham's razor, very very faintly.

Ah, the beginnings of science: only hypotheses which can be proven false are worthy. There's a good reason for this too- see Intelligent Design.

as a pro-science and logic person...you have both confused me...
If it can not be tested under lab conditions, is not repeatable, recorable, and measurable...sadly it is not science..

Gah, don't make me repower my basic philosophy logic neurons. Nooo!


Plagurised without permission from: http://koning.ecsu.ctstateu.edu/Plants_Human/scimeth.html

Help you? Look, let your friend do his thing. If your trying to find some counter-argument to nihilism that might help your friend, your going about it all wrong. Let your friend be himself, and not what you think he should be. People have a way of working things out on their own.

Bali is right. Just let him be, but don't leave him completely alone. He'll get over it. Most everyone does, since most everyone sooner or later figures out that applying philosophy to life is not the smartest thing to do. Doesn't have anything to do with how intelligent the person is either - we all think that we are awfully intelligent until we figure out how stupid we are most of the time.

Best you can do methinks (unless you tried that already) is to get him to walk you through his philosophy, sincerely trying to figure out how it works, instead of looking for ways to prove him wrong on every step. People love to be in an educator's position, and when a person can't see a reason to live then all he needs is a reason to live for one more day. Play Shacherezada the other way around.

And there's no such thing as an "unworthy hypothesis". If a statement can't be disproven then it is simply not a hypothesis. It's most likely a conjecture.

I was more worried about him not dying than proving him wrong...

Anyways, after hours of talking I got him to not want to die... which is good.

Do realize that just because something can't be proven in science or logic does not mean that it is false or wrong.

My favorite example of this was the Imperian website. There was no logical way to decode what the runes around the website were suppose to say, if anything, and yet I was very easily able to figure it out.

In my own life there are things I know to be true based on experience but there is no way I could have it tested, its just not testable, that does not mean that I do not know what images I saw when I had a dream last night.

Philosophy really is my area of interest.

Nihilism is a really attractive philosophy because it's true, it's real and it's the Real. The meaning we attribute to things is just that, something we create, it's all arbitrary. What is a stop sign? It's just metal right, or is it even that? Is there a stop sign? Where does the sign end and the air around it begin, and why, and why does it matter?

Nihilism is something we ignore because we want to be happy. We allow our meaning, our signs, to persist because of an illogical desire to enjoy. Our meaning is fence at the edge of a cliff, the bottom of which is beyond human comprehension and the height of which is insanity.

The answer to Nihilism is the ability to realize that you don't want to be a nihilist anymore. You can use any "logic" you want to get yourself out of it, but it can never be more than a rationalization.

Existentialism is my favorite pillow, consider it if you're stuck. If life is meaningless, existentialism says that necessitates a leap of faith in order to exist. Let's say your friend wants to exist. In that case, a leap of faith is in order, say, believing that things matter. It's that simple and complicated.

The only place Nihilism is "true" is in an academic environment where nobody is really interested in seeing or experiencing reality.

Polls and 'research' papers are proving to be increasingly wrong about things, mainly due to the fact that academics wish Nihilism and social reletivsm to be true, when its not.

I think anyone who truly believes in Nihilism is confusing complexity with the lack of an answer.

Not everything has to be Yes or No.
http://www.pittnews.com/vnews/display.v/AR...3/43e30b11acd99

could you back up any of the things you say here? i was going to try to argue your points but you haven't said any reasone why they would be that way, and so the only things i could think to say were stating what has been said before.
and everything boils down to yes or no. it just goes to how much you break it down. the only example i can think of at the moment is political charts. have you ever seen the political compass website? well, there are a few things that cannot be expressed by the left right line, and so in that sense it would seem that they are not yes or no answers, but if an extra dimension is added more different possibilities can be shown with yes or no answers, which can be broken down much much further.

also, your link doesn't work.

Is it? Nihilism by definition negates itself. I don't see how that is very attractive or "true" in any shape or sense.

Nihilism is the belief in that "truth" doesn't exist, is incomprehesible, or is unknowable.

As such if we cannot understand truth or if truth doesn't exist then a the philosophy of Nihilism that "truth doesn't exist" can't be true (because there is no truth) and thus it is inconsistent.




That's a rather bold generalization. Before I challenge it, I want to make clear that you are actually suggesting that *everything* can boil down to yes or no.

You might first want to clarify what's meant by "yes or no," actually. I'm a very firm believer in shades of grey in our objective universe, but I still think that carefully dissected statements can all eventually be extrapolated into a huge series of "yes or no" questions.

Shame my link doesn't work.

The link was to the explanation of a Quotom computer, where the spin of an electron is both Up and Down simultaneously. Everything in the universe is in multiple places at the same time, and when you isolate those electrons things can be "Yes" AND "No"

Nihilism is the biggest bunch of B.S. I've ever heard about.
Just because the word "stop sign" in english may appear arbatrary to you, does not mean that all people nomatter what language or culture they come from, will be able to sense that red octaganal sign.

You can take a bushman from africa, and just because he doesn't know tha the glass bottle he has is trash from an airplane, and not some gift of the gods, doesn't mean that the bottle suddenly stops existing.

The reason I bring up Quantom computer is because I'm a big student of Kabbalah (Not the trash madonna got conned into) and one basic premise is that when it comes to reality, nothing is concrete, many questions have the answer "Yes and No" and that is precisely why in this life of ours it is -very- important to act upon things with as much percision as possible. (something I fall very short on, so don't bring that up).. So while Qutaum physics may be a modern discovery, the idea that things can be both "Yes and No" has existed in philosophy for a minimum of 3,000 years.

Just an example of a non religious question that can be answered with "Yes and No" meaning, it is both simutaneously, and you can not truly seperate it....

Is Lusternia "real"? or Is Lusternia reality?


The famous religous question which is really a question about perfection more than it is about god...

"If god is perfect, can god become perfect?"

I'm not sure if you understand what I meant about the stop sign metaphor, so I'll try to explain it more articulately.

A stop sign, if we admit it's existance, is fundamentally a collection of metal atoms. There is nothing inherent in its construction that makes it a "stop sign" per se. What I'm trying to achieve here is the demonstration that nothing has inherent meaning, and that the only meaning is meaning that we create.

There's nothing inherent to love that makes it valuable, or to happiness that makes it "good" or valuable. Many people think happiness is valuable and pain is not, but that doesn't show, demonstrate or prove that there's something inherent in those things that make them valuable or not. We've chosen to arrange signifiers in a certain way and arrange values in a certain way, but there's no objective reason why they should be the way they are.

When I say Nihilism, what I mean is the realization that all meaning is arbitrary and thus not real in the way we usually think it to be real. Imagine what it would be like to really accept that up, down, in, out, love, chair, stop sign, and internet are just constructions we could throw away if we wanted. We couldn't make the physical objects or feelings go away, but we could change what they meant to us, we could make them mean anything we want.

If everything is arbitrary and has an arbitrary value assigned by us, then nothing is objectively valuable, because one person could think it supremely good and another supremely bad.

If nothing has inherent value or meaning then those concepts are useless.

Since every word you just used has a different meaning to each person who reads them, there isn't any way to have that conversation in English.

Try having that conversation in math with base 6, and then translate it to base 8 or 16 or base 10, and perhaps then you can start having a debate.


But since I like expressing my views to other people, I'll argue it anyways...


Every feeling and emotion needs to by its very existance, exist in a large continum of phases so as to have real meaning. So love has to both have its 'good' purposes and its 'bad' purposes, making it both valueable and harmfull or invalauble at the same time. This does not make its value arbitrary, it just makes its value subjective.

After a certain number of iterations of a subjective view you eventually are able to obtain an objective average of what moral judgment you should make on that action. In the Wester world, we have seen that Anger, though having some uses is normally a bad thing, and that love, while often having bad affects is normally a good thing.

Ofcourse as an idividual your only going to see one data point, and so if you arrogantly only look from your point, your not going to be able to come to any usefull conclusion, but thats why we live in society and not by ourselves.

This is expressed in most cultures as the Golden mean, or everything in moderation.. or don't go to extremes. If all you can see is an abosulte value of something, then you never really see anything.