Sean Kelly: Existentialism, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #227
Video Statistics and Information
Channel: Lex Fridman
Views: 807,533
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, camus, david foster wallace, dostoevsky, existentialism, harvard, heidegger, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, mit ai, nietzsche, nihilism, philosophy, sartre, sean kelly
Id: cC1HszE5Hcw
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 172min 58sec (10378 seconds)
Published: Thu Sep 30 2021
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.
If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. Not everything is permitted therefore God exists.
The guest said something like this when he was talking about Dostoevsky, And I'm 10 years removed from my intro to logic class, so I'm not sure exactly how to describe what's wrong with that with the proper terminology but it's clearly false. Things not being permitted is not proof of God's existence, everything being permitted would be proof of his non-existence. If the conditions were "If, and only if, God does not exist, then everything would be permitted." Then you could use the existence of restrictions as proof of God's existence, but that's not what he said. Anyway, I was shocked when he said that because it was such a rudimentary mistake
Letβs go. Something non-STEM
Awesome episode!
But believing in communism should not be equated with believing in nazism. They couldn't be more different as a set of beliefs, values, or ideals.
Terrible things happened under communism, for sure, but that's because it failed. The evil wasn't in Marx, it was in Stalin, Mao, etc (the fact that they came to power was the tragedy of communism, not the evil of its philosophy).
With Nazism, the evil is by design.
(Also, Ayn Rand doesn't seem right for Lex - she is too filled with hate.)
One of the best episodes ever.
Self-propriety has been extolled as virtuous since at least Kant, but what I find missing is the discussion of the individual as historical artifact. A lot of Western philosophy has been committed to extolling the need for oneself to proceed in life as a sort "leap into the darkness" with a sort of singular courageousness and autonomy, sometimes grounded as necessary from the view of a certain ontology (Kant's Categorical Imperative; Nietsche's Eternal Return).
But most of us are actually just repeating patterns we've unknowingly picked up as responses to various forces that bear down on us. This is not only the point of cognitive behavioral therapy but also psychoanalysis, the difference being psychoanalysis goes much further in asserting that humans encode repetitive behavioral responses in a radically literary way (to the point of being non-falsifiable).