Editing Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/4.4r/1002 entropicism

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<h3 style="margin: 0 0 0.9em 0; padding-top: 0;">[[Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/5.1r/1611 monkey-farm|"monkey-farm"]]</h3>
<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">"[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/08/kazuo-ishiguro-uses-artificial-intelligence-to-reveal-the-limits-of-our-own the pain and brevity of human existence]" ... "Isn’t there something artificial in the way that humans conspire to suppress the certainty of their own extinction?"  no, because the existence of populations is real. ...

if you die but a population is Factical somebody has to clean up your messes, and history keeps going, and somebody is responsible for that history. equally you can ask who is responsible for you and what you are responsible for while you exist. ...

if there's any real question of "whether our brief individual existence means something"
then can't it be the case that it means absolutely nothing to fight racism because every individual subject to racism just has a short, brief meaningless existence? same for misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and everything else. ...
our individual existences always mean something because we're always part of populations and histories ... and they always keep going.
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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">I don't believe in existentialism, the philosophy that we simply keep existing each day unless we choose to die and it is some kind of big meaningful question to ask what it means to keep living.

I believe in _entropicism_, [*] the philosophy that by default any of us has the potential to die of natural causes every day unless we decide to take the effort to maintain our bodies, and it is an entirely practical question to ask how each of us remains alive. under entropicism, the meaning of each individual life is subject to a weak anthropic principle: the fact we ask the question at all is a complete accident of being alive, since death makes it impossible for us to consider the question worth asking much less worry about it. existence does not occur by default, but ironically enough, the meaning to one's life _is_ always already filled in. every time we survive anything, from hunger to danger to depression, we always unintentionally answer the meaning of our lives before we ever consciously think about the topic. to even think about the meaning of life is ridiculous because every mere act of survival is an act of determining our day-to-day purpose, and the sheer array of things anybody has ever done, lived through, or been is fully as rich a field of asking and answering as thought, language, or philosophy. every person inherently has a functional purpose through the act of interacting with the rest of the universe, and inasmuch as our body makes free or unfree decisions to create and change that series of material interactions and connections into a new one we make that purpose ours. it doesn't matter at all if we have Free Will because we do not need Free Will to be separate or different from other people, or to try our best to create a purpose which uniquely suits the needs of each of our individual bodies.

of course, because it is so honest, entropicism has a dark side: any external factor that takes survival away from individuals inherently takes away all meaning to their lives. if meaning can only be contemplated by living individuals, then dead individuals have no power to assign themselves meaning, and very easily become meaningless if everyone alive chooses not to care about them. this is inevitable — at least in a descriptive sense, even if not in a prescriptive one. in some periods of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition, it is said that Lived Experiences have inherent meaning even when people are dead and nobody is living those experiences. in entropicism, this is not treated as reality given that it only exists within human opinion and it is easy for the human opinions of every possible mind to flip over to the worst possible opinion. human opinion is a sandbox open to the wind. this is to say, people need to actively maintain the significance of dead people in order for it to exist, and they keep the most significance for themselves when they avoid an untimely death. plurality is taken to be more of a reality than Lived Experiences; for every particular Lived Experience, if there are ten people who don't consider it significant, they inherently have the power to try to assert that they are more significant. we can't escape significance and meaning being a competition, or act as if each individual creates it in a vacuum in conflict with nothing else. the fragility of existence and the fragility of human opinion inherently picks favorites on meaning through the fact some people live and some people die, and living people have a lot more agency than dead people. of course, this also means that when we die, everything we did for other people lives on. if we do anything that is positively remembered, then we become part of history, and through our lives we exercise responsibility for the future. this is part of our unintentional purpose and meaning we all have without thinking about it. we each inherently exist to contribute to the future. "our" significance is not our own. "our" significance is not ours to agonize about, it belongs to our children or younger relatives, as well as our neighbors' children. to think that "our" significance is our own is to arrogantly try to take agency away from the next generation, or to try to take agency away from other groups of people. entropicism does not hold that Lived Experience is inherently real, but in any event, "the rest of reality containing material people and physical towns I can't see" certainly is, and to not look where you're going is a recipe for disaster. this is true in the present, and this is also true of failing to understand how different groups of people interact to produce history.

[*] I have no idea whatsoever if this philosophy already has a name.
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{{Template:BopFwd|Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/5.1r/1611 monkey-farm|v4.4-5.2 scraps/ Dragon Ball and Journey to the West versus Animal Farm}}
{{Template:BopFwd|Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/4.3r/1002 loss|v4.3/ we have everything to lose but our chains}}

{{Template:BopFooter|2025-01-08T02:33:58Z|entropicism|v4-4_1002_entropicism|v4.4 scraps/ entropicism, existence-philosophy's opposite where you have meaning and refuse death}}
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