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Well, while it is obviously true that there's no "meaning" in life, many of the other statements are the consequence of sloppy thinking. Post-structuralists such as Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault were simply trying to be clever and annoying, and they succeeded but their posturings had no real value. Borges' halfway-there idea is Zeno's paradox revisited and we all know why it's wrong, so it's not clever at all. As for the idea that we're merely cellular automata, it is true that we have very limited consciousness and extremely limited agency, but that's not at all the same thing as being entirely without any agency at all. The reason no one cares about philosophy any more is because we have empirical science - which at least gets us closer to truths about real things, rather than spinning wheels in pointless armchair philosophy debates.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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