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To make life into a story is to project onto it meaning. If you don't view life as narrative, what do your actions matter? The "happy endings, fairness, justic

by hodwik 11y ago

To make life into a story is to project onto it meaning. If you don't view life as narrative, what do your actions matter? The "happy endings, fairness, justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma" JoshTriplett lists are the narrative projections which make life feel valuable in spite of life's trending towards wavering extremes of boredom and suffering. The OP's argument coincides with the Buddhist and Taoist positions, who prescribe a lack of attachment to all mental constructs -- be that family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, progress, and so on. I get the logic behind it, it's an attempt to reduce life to the unassailably true. However, I think that sort of detached reductionism invariably leads to the view of the universe as a meaningless expanse of material, with an ordered procession of predestined material actions and reactions. Is the meaningless material universe the true universe? Perhaps, but life feels like much more than that. I prefer the ancient Hindu philosophical counterpart. They also believed, as the Buddhists and Taoists do, that at the most fundamental level it's all meaningless, but that by some miracle the meaningful emerges from the meaningless by way of our experience of it. The mind gives reality to the unreal, and that's a good thing. Sure, the narrative we project onto the world may be fiction, but without it the material universe is a blank book. If life be fiction, give me fiction.

meric 11y ago
The Taoist position is more nuanced than to have "a lack of attachment". The lack of attachment is so you wouldn't feel compelled to force the existence of mental constructs like family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, progress. Imagine if the law prescribed the words you can say to your parents/brothers/sisters/friends/shopkeepers. You may be saying "Thank you so much" to the shopkeeper, but by being forced to do it, the meaning behind "Thank you so much" is completely lost. The Taoist position is not to have no narrative. It is to apply relentless non-interference to things, people, and ideas that are in our lives. It is only by standing back, feeling unattached, doing nothing coercive, that family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, and progress arise naturally, so you can experience life to the fullest. e.g. By trying to force a relationship/family/reunion/ideas into happening, it breaks it, and what was going to be, no longer will be.
- hodwik 11y ago
  You're confusing the Dao of heaven with the Dao of sages, to borrow from Dao Chapter 81. That is to say, you're confusing Daoism as a practicable and political philosophy (à la Chapter 19, Chapter 80) with Daoism as a metaphysical position (à la Chapter 1). Their actionable practice is to teach the common man and governors some amount of detachment. Their metaphysical position, the one the Dao mentions less, is one of a foundational non-being -- "The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth", "What does 'the greatest misfortune is the self' mean? The reason I have great misfortune is that I have the self. If I have no self, what misfortune do I have?", and particularly nihilist: "Heaven and Earth are impartial, they regard myriad things as straw dogs. The sages are impartial, they regard people as straw dogs." (Straw dogs meaning straw effigies of dogs burnt during holidays.) I'm arguing that their metaphysical position (not their actionable practice) if followed to the end, with the addition of a modern knowledge of physics and biology and so on, ultimately leads one to a metaphysical nihilism.
  - meric 11y ago
    That quote with the straw dogs is particularly relevant. Straw dogs are important during the festival. Hours and days are spent procuring and preparing them. - while you have family, your family is important. The straw dogs are then burnt and forgotten. When your family goes don't be attached to force it to stay. Everything is like clothes. While you're wearing them they will keep you warm, and you treat them with some respect. When the clothes are worn out, you throw them away and find new clothes. Are your clothes part of your self even as they keep you warm? Just because you have family does not mean you have to make them your identity, you can still tell a narrative about them, just as there is a narrative with the straw dogs on the day of the festival. If they wanted to use a metaphor to represent something completely unimportant I don't think they'd choose straw dogs. Maybe leaves on the ground or ashes after cooking dinner. Straw dogs are important for a short period of time, like everything.
Retric 11y ago
Young children don't need 'meaning' to enough life, which IMO is a philosophy as valid as any other. I used to have quite a bit of existential angst and personally I found the most useful thing to do was finding something interesting and do/learn it. It's easy to get into a rut where month after month you follow the same patterns. Especially when living in doors most of the time removes most seasonal variations.
- hodwik 11y ago
  Children live a life of pure fiction. My two year old in the last day has believed himself to be a Jaguar hunting our chihuahua, a pirate sailing our living room couch, a bear eating ravioli, and countless other tiny dreams. All of them are fundamentally narratives about power. Children incessantly dream of having more strength than they currently do. Why that is the case should be profoundly obvious. It may not seem like meaning to us because of its naive purview, but to children their own narratives about their power are all-encompassing epics detailing a hoped-for relation to the world. And why should the season matter? Outside of its aesthetic attributes, attributes we project upon it, it is merely a small change in temperature as the angle of the sun's rays move in relation to the crust of the Earth, followed by some shifts in the flora and fauna populations -- beings which are themselves merely carbon-based machines arising from the repetition of simple chemical processes over very large time scales. Those things that we find interesting are so because of what we project upon them, not as a result of what they fundamentally, physically, objectively are. The very idea that something should be "interesting" implies a subjective witness to project their own feelings onto the meaningless physical trivia of the universe. If your goal is to live a life without lies, you'll be living a life without meaning. There is no meaning outside of the beautiful, nay, holy fictions we tell ourselves. The beauty in childhood isn't that it's all truth, it's that its all lies. They don't yet have a concept of truth and lies, and so are free to live entirely within their dreams. We, on the other hand, are in some ways shackled to reality by our experiences of materiality.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    > There is no meaning outside of the beautiful, nay, holy fictions we tell ourselves. The presumption-to-word ratio of that sentence is pretty off the charts.
joesmo 11y ago
I see meaning (and really consciousness itself) existing in a similar way that software exists in relationship to hardware. There is little meaning in the physical hardware itself, none really that we can experience directly as humans. Nevertheless, the running software contains a lot of meaning, even if it's fleeting and that information is stored in different places by different physical parts. I think this is akin to the miracle of the emergence of meaning you describe. In that way, I think meaning is about as much fiction as software, which is to say it's both real and imagined (or abstracted if you will).
- hodwik 11y ago
  That's a very interesting analogy. Thanks
vineetraja 11y ago
>>I prefer the ancient Hindu philosophical counterpart. Actually there is no one counterpart, It is a spectrum. At one end we have the likes of Advait folks who reduce everything to an Absolute devoid of any quality, while at the other end we have the Bhakti folks who are happy chanting praises at the feet of their beloved Supreme with all qualities.
- omarchowdhury 11y ago
  You have no clue about Advaita or Bhakti. Advaita is translated as nondual, ie. not-two, that is, the manifested is not separate from that which is the cause of the manifested (ie. that which gives rise to all is all, and everything is a modification of it). Bhakti is a method towards the experiential realization of what I just stated, one wherein the subject-object (which in your case is the 'Bhakti folks' and their 'beloved Supreme') dichotomy collapses (or to put it in Buddhist terms, extinguishes, which is the proper translation of nirvana/nibbana) from the intensification (one can even say exaltation) of the human yearning for union.
bishes 11y ago
So, let's say it is an interactive story.

by hodwik 11y ago

meric 11y ago

The Taoist position is more nuanced than to have "a lack of attachment". The lack of attachment is so you wouldn't feel compelled to force the existence of mental constructs like family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, progress. Imagine if the law prescribed the words you can say to your parents/brothers/sisters/friends/shopkeepers. You may be saying "Thank you so much" to the shopkeeper, but by being forced to do it, the meaning behind "Thank you so much" is completely lost. The Taoist position is not to have no narrative. It is to apply relentless non-interference to things, people, and ideas that are in our lives. It is only by standing back, feeling unattached, doing nothing coercive, that family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, and progress arise naturally, so you can experience life to the fullest. e.g. By trying to force a relationship/family/reunion/ideas into happening, it breaks it, and what was going to be, no longer will be.

hodwik 11y ago
You're confusing the Dao of heaven with the Dao of sages, to borrow from Dao Chapter 81. That is to say, you're confusing Daoism as a practicable and political philosophy (à la Chapter 19, Chapter 80) with Daoism as a metaphysical position (à la Chapter 1). Their actionable practice is to teach the common man and governors some amount of detachment. Their metaphysical position, the one the Dao mentions less, is one of a foundational non-being -- "The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth", "What does 'the greatest misfortune is the self' mean? The reason I have great misfortune is that I have the self. If I have no self, what misfortune do I have?", and particularly nihilist: "Heaven and Earth are impartial, they regard myriad things as straw dogs. The sages are impartial, they regard people as straw dogs." (Straw dogs meaning straw effigies of dogs burnt during holidays.) I'm arguing that their metaphysical position (not their actionable practice) if followed to the end, with the addition of a modern knowledge of physics and biology and so on, ultimately leads one to a metaphysical nihilism.
- meric 11y ago
  That quote with the straw dogs is particularly relevant. Straw dogs are important during the festival. Hours and days are spent procuring and preparing them. - while you have family, your family is important. The straw dogs are then burnt and forgotten. When your family goes don't be attached to force it to stay. Everything is like clothes. While you're wearing them they will keep you warm, and you treat them with some respect. When the clothes are worn out, you throw them away and find new clothes. Are your clothes part of your self even as they keep you warm? Just because you have family does not mean you have to make them your identity, you can still tell a narrative about them, just as there is a narrative with the straw dogs on the day of the festival. If they wanted to use a metaphor to represent something completely unimportant I don't think they'd choose straw dogs. Maybe leaves on the ground or ashes after cooking dinner. Straw dogs are important for a short period of time, like everything.

Retric 11y ago

Young children don't need 'meaning' to enough life, which IMO is a philosophy as valid as any other. I used to have quite a bit of existential angst and personally I found the most useful thing to do was finding something interesting and do/learn it. It's easy to get into a rut where month after month you follow the same patterns. Especially when living in doors most of the time removes most seasonal variations.

hodwik 11y ago
Children live a life of pure fiction. My two year old in the last day has believed himself to be a Jaguar hunting our chihuahua, a pirate sailing our living room couch, a bear eating ravioli, and countless other tiny dreams. All of them are fundamentally narratives about power. Children incessantly dream of having more strength than they currently do. Why that is the case should be profoundly obvious. It may not seem like meaning to us because of its naive purview, but to children their own narratives about their power are all-encompassing epics detailing a hoped-for relation to the world. And why should the season matter? Outside of its aesthetic attributes, attributes we project upon it, it is merely a small change in temperature as the angle of the sun's rays move in relation to the crust of the Earth, followed by some shifts in the flora and fauna populations -- beings which are themselves merely carbon-based machines arising from the repetition of simple chemical processes over very large time scales. Those things that we find interesting are so because of what we project upon them, not as a result of what they fundamentally, physically, objectively are. The very idea that something should be "interesting" implies a subjective witness to project their own feelings onto the meaningless physical trivia of the universe. If your goal is to live a life without lies, you'll be living a life without meaning. There is no meaning outside of the beautiful, nay, holy fictions we tell ourselves. The beauty in childhood isn't that it's all truth, it's that its all lies. They don't yet have a concept of truth and lies, and so are free to live entirely within their dreams. We, on the other hand, are in some ways shackled to reality by our experiences of materiality.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  > There is no meaning outside of the beautiful, nay, holy fictions we tell ourselves. The presumption-to-word ratio of that sentence is pretty off the charts.

joesmo 11y ago

I see meaning (and really consciousness itself) existing in a similar way that software exists in relationship to hardware. There is little meaning in the physical hardware itself, none really that we can experience directly as humans. Nevertheless, the running software contains a lot of meaning, even if it's fleeting and that information is stored in different places by different physical parts. I think this is akin to the miracle of the emergence of meaning you describe. In that way, I think meaning is about as much fiction as software, which is to say it's both real and imagined (or abstracted if you will).

hodwik 11y ago
That's a very interesting analogy. Thanks

vineetraja 11y ago

>>I prefer the ancient Hindu philosophical counterpart. Actually there is no one counterpart, It is a spectrum. At one end we have the likes of Advait folks who reduce everything to an Absolute devoid of any quality, while at the other end we have the Bhakti folks who are happy chanting praises at the feet of their beloved Supreme with all qualities.

omarchowdhury 11y ago
You have no clue about Advaita or Bhakti. Advaita is translated as nondual, ie. not-two, that is, the manifested is not separate from that which is the cause of the manifested (ie. that which gives rise to all is all, and everything is a modification of it). Bhakti is a method towards the experiential realization of what I just stated, one wherein the subject-object (which in your case is the 'Bhakti folks' and their 'beloved Supreme') dichotomy collapses (or to put it in Buddhist terms, extinguishes, which is the proper translation of nirvana/nibbana) from the intensification (one can even say exaltation) of the human yearning for union.

bishes 11y ago

So, let's say it is an interactive story.