>>24309247
>Why does a reality of pure bliss and unceasing pleasure seem odious to so many people?
Because I care about the world and its mysteries! I want to become conscious of what's out there. I want to connect with human history and culture and explore where they can go next. I don't want to be a bunch of nerves quivering in solitary chemical pleasure, I want to be a living conscious being in contact with the mysteries.

Meaning cannot be reduced to measurable units of pleasure or pain, it's something qualitative and unique. It has an independent existence, and calls to you, from the Outside, like DH Lawrence's strange gods who 'come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self', into the small circle of your conscious awareness.

You live when you commune with that Outside, and encounter those incomparable, irreducible gods, but if the Outside only registers to you as flickering pulses of X amount of dopamine, you are not living, you barely exist as a human, you have sunk back into a kind of single-celled organism, and have already forgotten all it is you've left behind. You cannot exist as a human unless you exist in a world.

Strangely it's people who call themselves spiritual who most often dismiss the idea that the world is inherently meaningful, who don't care to explore the possibilities of human life, who see the world and its infinite unique moments of meaning as one big uniform thin grey veil, behind which lies the promise of obliterating transcendent bliss.

True materialism is not the notion that two paintings are equivalent if they both produce equivalent amounts of aesthetic pleasure in your brain (that's how AI works: it serves up fungible images whose details don't matter, they just need to keep you pleasurably distracted and online).

True materialism would recognise that the unique coming-together of light and imagery and colour in this painting can in no way be compared to the different coming-together in that painting. It would recognise that the meaningfulness of a painting is unique to its singular substance, like a ritual performed once, and disappearing into black time, but flickering very bright with torchlight while it lasted. If anything in life could be called a sacred duty, it's the duty to attend to those uniquenesses, to go out into the world and find new zones of experience, and commune with the strange gods who dwell there, waiting for you. — The Pontificating Materialist.

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Why does a reality of pure bliss and unceasing pleasure seem odious to so many people?