> Absolute nihilism of all living things probably isn’t as obvious a philosophy as your comment makes it seem.

I do not quite understand your comment, but Wikipedia says: "Nihilism [...] is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless."

I do not seem to be of this view. I do not reject objective truth, etc, but I am of the opinion that the Absolute is inexpressible. (Therefore, effectively anything you will communicate (including these comments that I am writing) will be a simplification; if it was Absolutely everything, then you would not write nor even know all of it.)

Life is not meaningless, and truth, knowledge, morality, etc, is not meaningless, but its meaning/existence is related to everything else meaning/existence, or else it is nothing at all.

Within certain systems, you will have certain consequences of them, which are meaningful within them, by their relations (which are inevitable, and cannot be avoided), and in a larger system comprising them, or a smaller one, will be likewise correspondent.

(For example, any statement valid in intuitionistic logic is also valid in classical logic, although really since they are two different things, you must define how to convert them (which, in this case, you can merely use the same symbols and it will work, but that is because it is the convention to use the same ones and it will work, because they correspond to each other in such a way, that it will work). If you add/multiply natural numbers, the same corresponding result is as though you are adding/multiplying integers, reals, or finite discrete categories.)

(Other example is computer programs, too; they are also relation by the other programs in the computer and by the hardware I/O and software I/O, too. Without I/O (or if the program is not executed, or at least the source code read by someone who has printed it out), then the I/O of the program on the computer is not meaningful in relation to the umbworld, even though the program may be meaningful in relation to itself.)

(And, likewise, also living things; which also consists of biology which consists of chemistry which consists of physics which consists of mathematics, too.)

(And, yet, these things (numbers, living things, biology, chemistry, etc) are not even real "things" but only one way to define them in relation to the other things; it is the relations between things which are more "real" than the things themself, which are merely one way to define them. For example, a ball on a table is a ball but it is also many atoms. If you break the ball with a hammer then the atoms are not broken even though the ball is broken.)

> If nothing in life is valuable, including life itself, what gives?

Life is valuable. Things (whether this "things" is the world, or the life or some parts of the life, or numbers (or other mathematical objects), or even if it is the parts of the laws of physics) do not work in isolation, though. A life, whether they are human or fish or insects or trees (etc), is not a bad and a worthless thing, even though they affect each other.

Something might be good for one thing and bad for another thing (however you consider a "thing", whether you ignore the passage of time (or, alternatively, spacetime) or not), but it is to be avoided if it is bad in general.

Any life will have both help and harm (and, both at the same time, since it is not as simple as it seems); that is life. If any animal will eat a animal/plant that will harm that animal/plant, or if you defend yourself then this might harm whoever you defend yourself against, or sometimes the harm is caused by accident (in which case, hopefully is possibility to learn), but that means that creature is harmed (or that you are harmed). Each one, each part, is inevitably harm/help.

(If they are not affecting each other like that then nothing is ever worth anything at all. But, everythings is affecting each other in this universe, so it is worth everything, after all. This is true in biology as well as in mathematics (including platonic mathematics), physics, theology, etc. If a mathematical object somehow has no properties, theorems, relation to other mathematical objects, addition/multiplication with other numbers, etc, then it would be bad and worthless, but of course mathematical objects do have properties, theorems, etc.)

Anyone should try to avoid harm (although you (and the others animals) must eat/defense), and you should avoid to harm the world/life/environment; it should not be only beneficial to humans, or only beneficial to you, but it should be non-harmful to the world (including humans, trees, mosquitoes, and other animals/plants), to the degree that it can be achieved. (Likewise, in addition to not beinly only beneficial to humans, it also should not be only harmful to humans, either. If you say that human is good and others is bad, then that is no good, but other way around is also no good, either.)

You may try to defend yourself if a mosquito try to bite you, if you want to do; but you should not try to eliminate mosquitoes; they are right to live in this world too, as are humans, trees, etc.

> Do you still value less suffering over more suffering?

Yes, but you cannot take "less suffering" and "more suffering" in isolation, nor should it be limited to humans, or to animals that experience pain, or to animals in general, etc.

> Am I misunderstanding your perspective?

Probably, and probably it is because I am not communicating it clearly enough.

Please read my other comment (32535273) for some more things that I had written about the topic that I was replying to, though.