Actually, why should anything matter? Why do people have kids, if in a few generations no one's going to remember anything among millions of humans? Population growth can actually make human life on the planet unsustainable, as garbage builds up and resources dwindle. Coming from an atheist point of view, let's say, what's the point of humans having a replacement rate when a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off?
Why build anything when in 20 years computers will do it better? All that software you wrote, why even do it? All those stories and art can now be remixed. The hive mind will have the answer to every question better than the people who bicker about stuff they don't even know about. Who cares about their opinion? In a couple decades, who needs them to even work? To tell jokes? To have sex? Do we need to pay the next generation all a UBI to make sure they get their needs met?
We may as well build a virtual reality for ourselves to experience whatever we want since it all doesn't really matter, right?
This is a long winded way to dance around nihilism.
Nihilism is much like a hidden tarpit on the philosophical journey. Easy to fall into and get stuck. Necessary in a way, but not the place to dwell. A primary thing to point out is perception of meaning is flexible and not static, and things don't need "to matter". Meaning is an emergent phenomenon of relationships.
As an example: Doing meaningful computer work is about the relationship between the coder, the computer, and the emotional/physical rewards of completing the work. If you define the relationship of "computer work now" vs "computer work in 20 years" that edge in our meaning graph is going to have a value bending towards not mattering at all.
> what's the point of humans having a replacement rate when a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off?
Sidebar: this is also probably wrong as far as I understand. Modern wealth is built off of leveraging large populations / economics of scale and has this implied requirement of growth to maintain stability. Until things are completely automated (AKA we have robots capable of matching a human's productivity) a smaller population would imply a population collapse which would not be good in the short term.
> what's the point of humans having a replacement rate when a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off?
It's arguable whether a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off. More people = More specialization and more minds solving problems = faster advancement = better living for everyone.
Yes I get you can make your own progression that goes negative. The point is not that more people = better. It's that less people = better is not a fact, it's an opinion or conjecture
To me there is a massive difference between “mattering” and “having worth”. I don’t believe anything matters, but I do believe there are things that are worth doing and there are ways of behaving that are worth following.
I’m not a philosopher so I’m probably not explaining myself well, but I don’t think anything at all matters in an existential sense. Whether I live or get hit by a bus and die tomorrow or whatever, it’s not important. However, I do think there are many things that are worthy. Helping other people, trying not to harm anything, being kind etc., I believe these things are all very worthy of doing, but I don’t think they matter.
I wish I knew what the philosophical terms for what I’m describing as “matter” and “have worth” were
I'm not sure why you'd think things you do have such little impact on the world?
In reality, it doesn't matter what you are doing if it can survive for a long time then it will eventually have a relatively high impact on humanity. Think of the things we see in museums: shaped rocks, ceramics, rudimentary art, bones. Anything that has survived for hundreds, thousands, millions of years is worth very much to us as humans because we are junk collectors.
In that regard, what's more durable than our genes being passed on? Reproduction is one of the easiest way to ensure some bits of your information are conserved. But in reality, anything you do has some kind of impact in the world; though I would say it's impossible to quantify and it's impossible to tell if what we do has a positive or negative impact.
With this in mind, why would anything matter? In reality, first we need to ask ourselves if we think our own present experience is valuable. Not everyone will agree. But if you think that you existing right now is desirable then you may agree that others existing right now is also valuable, from here, it's easy to think that others existing in the future is valuable. This, coupled with, the work of others in the past has been valuable to me in the present will give you that the work of people in the present will be valuable to other's existence in the future. And because it's not possible to really quantify whose work is how valuable at which point in time it's easy to say "my work, regardless of what it is, may become valuable to someone's existence in the future".
But as I said, if you think of things from this perspective, you might want to try and do things that will live through as many years as possible in order to maximise the chance of them directly influencing people's lives in the future. I think the digital age might prove very useful, if we build these repositories and we manage to keep them alive for as long as humanity exists. I mean, right now people's work are being used to train all kinds of artificial intelligence that do all sorts of cool stuff. They're data points, each almost as useful as the next one.
So yeah, the real pain point of nihilism is actually thinking the present matters; rather than the future. We can't tell what's going to happen in the future, but we know the past is valuable for the present and so it's very easy to concede that the present may be valuable for the future.
Why should the esteem of people you do admire matter? I’m genuinely curious why you added that qualification.