I don't understand people that aren't filled with dread with this concept.
And I understand why so many humans fall back to something like religion to cope. It's the only way it seems to become complacent with our role in the cosmic horror.
I know all the intellectual arguments for optimistic nihilism. I vote in elections even though my "one vote" doesn't matter amongst millions, and in some degree my single human life is the same on a timescale of (hopefully) trillions of humans by the time we get to the point of worrying about the receding observable universe.
The change is too slow for anyone to be personally affected by it. Besides, the universe as such is devoid of any meaning; meaning is only something that we create internally. The fact that we dread voids and emptiness is also a result of evolutionary needs, there is no “dread” outside of us.
Considering that I used to experience that dread, and how I used to think, and the patterns I see in your speech -- I'd say that dread is not a response to the concept, but due to over intellectualizing.
The dread is precisely the intellect recoiling at its limits. It reaches for other intellectual theories to rescue it but this is of course in vain.
The way out is to seek answers in other complimentary areas and ways of seeing the world.
People create various stories just to escape concept of void. But if one does not seek those lies, there is no need for nihilism. Because even if our consciousness was not relevant - it is only thing we have. It is relevant to us. It is us till we meet the void.
And I understand why so many humans fall back to something like religion to cope. It's the only way it seems to become complacent with our role in the cosmic horror.
I know all the intellectual arguments for optimistic nihilism. I vote in elections even though my "one vote" doesn't matter amongst millions, and in some degree my single human life is the same on a timescale of (hopefully) trillions of humans by the time we get to the point of worrying about the receding observable universe.
And yet...