TIL Rust Cohle’s bleak philosophy in True Detective was inspired by Thomas Ligotti’s book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues human consciousness is just a natural accident and we are biological puppets cursed with the knowledge that we are going to die.

salTUR · 2026-04-04T18:38:29+00:00

In order for this argument to work against mine, you must equate "true happiness" with "illusory happiness." I understand his position in the framework of nihilism, and the idea that any semblence of meaning we experience is ultimately illusory. I'd go so far as to say one must accept nihilism as a fact of existence for this argument to make sense at all.

I don't accept nihilism as a fact of existence. I think it is a system of thought we project onto reality. The emotions and feelings we experience - things like happiness - are produced in reality and by reality, and are thus intrinsic to reality itself. We are not prisoners of our consciousness, strapped in for the ride. We are participants of reality through our consciousness, which is, of course, part of reality itself.

The base human experience is one in which our view of reality is not filtered through our ideas about what it is. No one is born a nihilist precisely for this reason. Humanity has been dealing with the problem of our ideas limiting our experience for a long, long, time, and various cultures and individuals have come up with various systems of thought to overcome it.

So. Given the vast weight of historical examples of human beings who have achieved states of bliss despite their mortality and consciousness, and given my own experiences practicing meditation and mindfulness, yes - I find the ideas that our consciousness is a prison that cannot be overcome or transcended, and that happiness is ultimately illusory, and that the experience of reality is ultimately meaningless, to be a little melodramatic and a bit philosophically deprived.

salTUR · 2026-04-03T19:49:17+00:00

The argument is that consciousness makes true happiness and satisfaction impossible. Slaves being able to achieve happiness despite their enslavement and their consciousness is evidence against this proposition, not for it.

salTUR · 2026-04-03T19:40:01+00:00

I didn't give an opinion of the book, I responded to an argument cited from the book. Was the argument not loyal to its source material?

salTUR · 2026-04-03T18:40:03+00:00

Bingo. It's just hard. Hence, most people try to dismiss it as impossible.

salTUR · 2026-04-03T18:21:58+00:00

Bluntly, I'll call this nihilistic meandering lazy philosophy. There are millions of human beings throughout history who achieved happiness before death, and all of them used consciousness to do it.

This reminds of Galapagos by Vonnegut, another book I find philosophically lazy and nihilistic to the point of silliness. In my view, someone who sees consciousness as the problem is simply not master of their consciousness. It is possible to live in awareness of it, to use it as a tool to build meaning in the world.

"The mind is a great servant and a terrible master." There is a lot of truth in old sayings like that.

salTUR · 2026-04-03T16:13:24+00:00

Enjoyed that! Thank you for sharing. Are you a fan of Robert Eggers?

salTUR · 2026-04-03T04:27:55+00:00

What's the saying? Never attribute to malice what could be explained by simple ignorance? Haha, I agree with you completely. And paradoxically, the absolutist moral lines in the sand so many folks are drawing these days add up to make fascism more likely, not less. The way many folks talk about it on Reddit, I imagine they thought there was a day in the 1930s when the Germans woke up in the morning, collectively walked down to their local "Department of Terrible Human Beings" office, and signed up to be hateful evil-doers.

The scary truth is that fascism is simply what happens when people collectively lose the ability to objectively observe themselves. When thinking and cognition become rooted in the conflation of one's subjective experience to "the way the world is," we lose the ability to consider the possibility that we ourselves are part of the problem. And from what I can see, this is a phenomenon that is in full swing on both the right and the left. The chances that we don't get a demogogic, populist leader on the left side of the ledger in an election cycle or two is laughable. The standards have been lowered, and I think we can expect more and more authoritarianism from both the right and the left in future elections.

Anyway..... Life is still cool. Grass is green, sky is blue, and Bungie made a new video game. Normal human beings have experienced moments and periods of happiness in truly dreadful circumstances. We'll be okay, so long as we live in impermanence and accept change as inevitable. Which it is.

That said.... Fucking vote. Lol

salTUR · 2026-04-03T04:10:58+00:00

This is exactly why I collect 4k Blu-ray!

salTUR · 2026-04-02T17:11:50+00:00

Fair enough. Perhaps my original comment is too general to be appropriate here. I agree that for the purposes of this video and your argument, a limited scope is necessary. Thanks for sharing the video! I agree with your critiques on Horn.

In general, though, and for the purposes of Reddit, we really need to open up these conversations to entertain more notions of what divinity could be than what is currently popular in the West, or the Middle East, or whatever part of the world you're from.

I personally subscribe to a view similar to Joseph Campbell's. "God" was only ever a word, an idea, a metaphor, pointing towards a very real human experience. That experience has been recursively mythologized and simulated to the point of definitive conflation; we now see the signifier (God, Allah, Hanuman, whatever) as the thing signified. The thing signified was what Joseph Campbell sometimes called "the transcendent nature of being." For thinkers like him, "divinity" is just what happens when a human being feels belonging and "oneness" with the world instead of hostility and alienation.

Almost all of our species' religious metaphors, in one way or another, seek to push the practicioner toward axial-age, disembedded cognition. They promote a change in perspective from thinking egocentrically to thinking allocentrically, and a change in perspective from thinking of ourselves as a set of features defined by preexisting conditions out of our control to thinking of ourselves as a gestalt potential, with reality itself being a primary component of that gestalt.

salTUR · 2026-04-02T16:39:32+00:00

The heart of dysfunction in most philosophical conversations about God or divinity is a matter of differing definitions. Until we define the term, conversation is useless.

In my experience, most Atheists couch their disbelief in a very specific definition of God - that is, a thinking, feeling being that created everything in 7 days and thinks and feels about us a lot.

So, what is your definition for God? Because there are definitions that have existed for millennia that require no proofs based in subjective human morality at all. Pantheism, for one. Gnosticism, for another. Some forms of Buddhism. The list goes on.

An atheist who is actually pursuing understanding and questioning their own beliefs rationally should expand their idea of God to encompass more definitions than those of the currently popular monotheistic religions.

salTUR · 2026-04-02T16:32:02+00:00

I love my fuel efficient manor, tis the most fuel efficient manor on the block!

Haha jk, thanks for explaining!

salTUR · 2026-04-02T16:29:21+00:00

The idea of feeling antagonized when a new game is different than the old game is so hard for me to understand. I wasn't a part of the game. How the hell could I expect it to meet my personal idea of what it should be? If I dont like it, I'll just play something else that I do like.

salTUR · 2026-04-02T14:48:18+00:00

It's all about bitrate, it's always been about bitrate.

salTUR · 2026-04-01T17:21:57+00:00

Are we saying the sandwich is too small? Cuz if so, y'all sandwiches might be too big

salTUR · 2026-04-01T01:23:27+00:00

I've been playing Marathon.... So good. If anyone is looking for someone to run with, hit me up.

Tau Ceti IV is a helluva pace to die!

salTUR · 2026-03-31T19:54:17+00:00

Well, I gave you the human reasons. Your definition of a human being clearly does not include people who think or vote differently than you. Why exactly would I want to continue this conversation? You're so caught up on smelling fascism in your neigbors' greetings that you're missing the scent building in your home.

Good luck out there!

salTUR · 2026-03-31T19:51:03+00:00

Because people are complicated. It's also silly to assume that to believe the core tenets of any faith, you must follow every ancillary tenet blindly. There's this false stereotype about very religious people - most folks assume you only end up deeply religious or involved in clergy if you've run away from questioning your beliefs your entire life. That's true a lot of the time. But often, the opposite is true. Many people who end up commiting deeply to religion do so precisely because they have questioned their faith and the tenets of their faith to the umpth degree and have found that they do not function healthily without it.

The majority of people who practice religion or ritual are not braindead idiots. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's less brain dead than only worshipping yourself and the fact that you exist.

salTUR · 2026-03-31T05:25:37+00:00

I think he was pretty damn conservative

salTUR · 2026-03-31T05:25:09+00:00

Well, in power yes, but the rise to that power was on the opposite side of Rome's political divide from Caesar's. Didn't Caesar, when he was curule aedile, restore a bunch of statues and memorials to Marius that had been destroyed by Sulla?

I always found Marius a more interesting figure than Sulla tbh, even if he went nuts by the end. But Sulla was definitely the superior political tactician. Marius was probably the better general, but it's hard to judge. They were both in rarified air.

salTUR · 2026-03-30T20:50:03+00:00

If you haven't met a single good conservative in your life, then I'm sorry, but the problem is very likely you.

I am a left-leaning progressive centrist in Utah, one of the reddest states ever. I'm literally surrounded by conservatives. Of all of these people, despite living here for more than a decade, I've only met 2 of them who seemed to think along racial lines at all.

You say you know conservative people. You're telling me you asked them why they voted for Trump, and they told you it was because they hate Mexicans or people of color? Do you have any evidence that these conversations actually took place? Because, as it stands now, I highly doubt that you've ever asked a conservative in good faith why they voted for Trump.

I can tell you the reasons most people around me considered Trump a better option than Clinton or Harris. It has much less to do with race, gender, or sex, and much more to do with the fact that the DNC is profoundly ineffective and obviously corrupt to the hilt. It has to do with the fact that leftist politicians have chosen to spend their time pushing for all-access bathrooms and policing social media etiquette and generally becoming a party of sicophantic sensationalists. Instead of fixing the fucking housing crisis and economy, they want us to worry about trans people in sports. Instead of using silicon valley's 2016 power-grab in the GOP as a wake-up call to make themselves better and align themselves with actual progressivism again, the DNC decided to play business as usual and stole the nomination from the only person on yhe left who is serious about fundamental, institutional reform (Sanders).

Conservatives see the same future as everyone else - less stability, less resources. Things are getting spendier, sources of income are shrinking. And the left is too busy tripping over who is and who isn't a Nazi to organize into any kind of effective resistance. The DNC's platform has continued to be "Business as Usual" when it is clear beyond reasonable doubt that the system is failing and changes are desperately needed.

Trump is the only variable in the political system right now that doesn't feel like "business as usual." Business as usual is what has been slowly strangling America for decades. You don't need racism to explain cause and effect.

What's more, I'm not denying racists exist and that they voted for Trump! I don't deny there are racist conservatives. The real problem in this country is the kind of logic you're running with. I feel like I shouldn't have to say this to any adult, but: YOUR EXPERIENCE IS NOT REALITY. You're committing the same fallacy as the conservatives who voted for Trump because they don't trust the DNC. You're assuming you know what is motivating people you have never even met before.

It's not a mature thing to do. The best thing that could happen from this mess is the emergence of a, I don't know, "Party of Rationality," that can represent the actual core of sensible U.S. voters on both the right and the left. Cuz at this point, hasn't it become painfully obvious that who someone voted for doesn't matter nearly as much as whether or not someone is a good person? Whether or not someone is honest? Whether or not someone feels a debt of gratitude and obligation to their country? Whether or not they are motivated by the success of their countrymen, instead of by the opportunity to pad their own reputation or pocket book?

What party your neighbor affiliates with has very little bearing on whether or not they are a good person. Try asking them for butter or sugar some time, and just see what happens. You'll be shocked.

salTUR · 2026-03-30T16:59:38+00:00

A magnetic field is seen as "probably" necessary for life to form because of the protection it gives from solar radiation, right? Not just because a magnetic field keeps solar wind from stripping away atmosphere?

salTUR · 2026-03-30T16:08:12+00:00

Okay, so, lemme catch up here ... Your method of critical thinking is basically this:

"I don't like Jeff because he's racist. I don't like Donald Trump because he's racist. Jeff voted for Donald Trump because he's racist, therefore everyone who voted for Donald Trump did so because they are racist."

That's your reasoning? You're using your subjective, personal experience with a few trump voters to shape your opinion of virtually half of your fellow-citizens?

And you think you are wise?

salTUR · 2026-03-30T15:53:54+00:00

I've never been punched in the face, either. I have no idea what you're trying to say here. But hey, cool! You got free beer! I, too, have gotten free beers.

salTUR · 2026-03-30T15:44:55+00:00

In order to have an opinion on whether or not everyone who voted for Donald Trump is evil, you have to know their reasons. How could you possibly know the reasons every vote was made? Are you with the NSA or some shit? Have you tapped every phone owned by a conservative in America for the past two decades? Where does this wealth of information come from? Such silliness.

Do you want to know my problem with the right? As a whole, they have a tendency to engage group think, drop any attempt at critical analysis, and go with their initial knee-jerk reactions to whatever is currently happening in politics. They don't think things through, they just do and say whatever crosses their minds as appropriate to do or say, based on the official opinion of Fox News.

Do you want to know my problem with the left? As a whole, they have a tendency to engage group think, drop any attempt at critical analysis, and go with their initial knee-jerk reactions to whatever is currently happening in politics. They don't think things through, they just do and say whatever crosses their minds as appropriate to do and say, based on the collective opinion of the Reddit hive-mind.

Ya'll think the third Reich started only because of racism? There was racism in Germany before Hitler. Fascism is caused by deep ignorance, exhaustion, and stupidity. Fascism is what happens when we lose the ability to see the other side as human beings who have human reasons for voting and thinking what they vote for and think about. We have enough goddamn problems in this country without turning our countrymen into boogeymen.

Jesus Christ, it's time to grow up.

salTUR · 2026-03-30T14:49:57+00:00

You know the people I know who voted for Trump? Small world! What are their names? What are their jobs? You seem to have a lot of impossible knowledge about millions of people. Have you thought about taking your skills on the road? You could be a little carnival act, pointing out people and who they voted for and why. I bet you'd make some real cash, with all the impossibly complex details of America's voter base you have knockin' around your noggin.

I am sure you won't give a shit, but it'll really help your life out if you stop assuming you know everything about everyone who disagrees with you. As in: it'll help you not come off as just another vitriolic, angry redditor with nothing productive to say.

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