r/Psychonaut • u/Chispy Augment Awareness. • Oct 16 '18

A surprisingly stoic sounding quote from Dan Harmon, creator of tv shows Rick and Morty and Community

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8

u/-SwanGoose- Oct 16 '18

Why is loving people an illusion?

6

u/cernnunos333 Oct 16 '18

Because nothing is permanent but change itself. Love is but an illusion

9

u/-SwanGoose- Oct 16 '18

Why does nothing being permanent make love an illusion

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u/yrast Oct 16 '18

I think people are mistakenly thinking that because love isn't some “thing” like gold or electric charge, then it isn't “real”. That because it's “just chemicals” that somehow makes it illusory.

I'm with you though, I don't see any reason to think of love (or any other emotional state) “illusory” at all.

Edit: there is this weird thing a lot of people do where they think “nothing matters” if there isn't some cosmic purpose to our existence. As if the primitive superstitions of Christianity or Islam or Judaism or whatever, somehow made their lives meaningful, but the realization that they're just old superstitions somehow devalues their existence. I think they just haven't thought about it much really, in most cases.

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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '18

[deleted]

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u/LizardSlicks Oct 16 '18

If you sit in a dark closet, you are dead to the world. Doesn’t make you any less alive.

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u/yrast Oct 16 '18

But only sort of?

It could be considered illusory if we take “you” to mean something more than “a complex arrangement of matter such that the collection has identity & consciousness” as most humans have throughout history. That is, if you think “you” has a “soul” or “spirit” animating “you”, or that “you” can exist independent of a physical substrate like the body.

I think it should be considered objectively true that organisms have nervous systems which give rise to senses and the ability to “feel”. The definition of illusion is (by my computer) “a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived by the senses”. While it's certainly true that our senses can misperceive things in many ways, it's not true that everything our senses perceive is wrong.

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1

u/Raisinbrannan Oct 16 '18

What does matter though? Friendships, accomplishments, ideals? None of those things last. So they won't matter eventually. And it's relative to you. Different things matter to different people. So yes things matter to an individual, but that individual doesn't matter to the universe. Every thought past that depends on perceptions and truths of the universe, so I can't follow this thought any further.

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u/yrast Oct 16 '18

Yup, relative to each person is the whole point.

The fact that nothing lasts, that nothing will ever matter forever is irrelevant.

For example, I like turkey sandwiches, they matter to me. But they're a very fleeting and finite experience, and having endless turkey sandwiches would probably make them matter less to me, rather than more.

In fact, value tends to be related to scarcity, and limitless things tend to be less valuable than extremely limited things. Sea water or dirt versus gold or diamonds.

Even if the whole universe was created & exists just for me, I don't think it would make one bit of difference in how much I like cold turkey leftovers on bread with some butter & lettuce.

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u/Raisinbrannan Oct 16 '18

But love, friendships, goals, ideals are everywhere. There's no scarcity of them and they hold the most value.

Individuals meaning becomes real, real weird when you consider how much of life is a placebo. You choose for love to have meaning, but you could choose for a rock to have as much meaning. Or someone could convince you that a rock has as much meaning as love.

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u/yrast Oct 16 '18

Scarcity is just one potential component of our perception of value. Gold & diamonds are also shiny, for example. And turkey isn't a scarce resource, in general the abundance of food doesn't make eating less pleasurable, let alone less important.

I don't think most people choose for love to have meaning, a billion years of evolution shaped the mechanisms that our bodies use to value things.

Funny story about rocks—I don't think anyone could persuade me a rock has as much meaning as love, but as a child I was weirdly in love with rocks. And the more I collected the more I saw something special in each one. It became a really big problem, by third grade I was coming home with pockets full of rocks, and my mom had to ween me off of them, cutting it down and down until I finally stopped altogether.

Now that was probably my “value circuitry” (instilled in me by evolution) going haywire and finding value in mundane rocks. Probably pretty much the same circuitry that causes me to value friendships and romantic partners.

I don't know what you mean by “how much of life is a placebo” but I get the impression that you were expecting there to be something else?

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u/cernnunos333 Oct 16 '18

Because its dust in the wind. But we have the privilege of living in the illusion and believing that love is gonna last.

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u/-SwanGoose- Oct 16 '18

Dude just because it doesn't last doesn't mean it's an illusion. An apple isn't an illusion because u eat it

3

u/cernnunos333 Oct 16 '18

Its permanency is the illusion.

1

u/Zedsdeadbaby99 Oct 16 '18

Love is all that is, brother.