13 ms·

Meaningness

189 points by espeed 10y ago

mememachine 10y ago
Is this on topic?
- JadeNB 10y ago
  Exactly if it's of interest to hackers, and the best way to determine that is by posting it and seeing how it fares. If it's not of interest, then it'll sink into obscurity, and no harm will have been done.
  - JCzynski 10y ago
    At one point the way to do that was to post it to reddit. A bunch of things which are not what HN wants to cultivate rose to the top, and HN's core material sank into obscurity.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- myth_drannon 10y ago
  I think it is related to the many comments in "On Getting Older in Tech" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136060 Our software development work is meaningless in the grand scheme of life.
  - gkya 10y ago
    > Our software development work is meaningless in the grand scheme of life. This is a tool for presenting things meaningless. One can also say any sort of philanthropy and medicine as a whole are meaningless as we'll all die eventually.
  - randomsearch 10y ago
    Pessimism absolves the thinking classes of ideas...
- yarrel 10y ago
  From a quick skim, it has the potential to become a GTD-style geek cult. So yes-ish.
- abrichr 10y ago
  From [1]: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- surrealize 10y ago
  "A work in progress, consisting of a hypertext book and a metablog that comments on it." Sounds like HN to me.
scandox 10y ago
> “Meaningness” is a word I invented, referring to the quality of being meaningful and/or meaningless. ... > The various dimensions of meaningness are discussed in religion and philosophy; but, strangely, the topic as a whole is never addressed. I don't know anything about the author, but this feels like the classic sophomoric illusion of having discovered an entire field of "mysteriously neglected" ideas, combined with the classic sophomoric attempt at an overarching everything-fits-into-this theory of life.
- irickt 10y ago
  That may be. Here seems to be the heart of the argument: https://meaningness.com/meaningness https://meaningness.com/meaningness >>> Maintaining the confused stances — eternalism, nihilism, and existentialism — is actually impossible, because they are obviously wrong. At some level, we are always aware that they require extensive make-believe. >>> We may begin by asking: What is creative, but not eternalistic? What is realistic, but not nihilistic?
- EdwardCoffin 10y ago
  The author is a well known A.I. person, who wrote some landmark papers in the field, and played a role in the production of some others. His masters thesis Planning for conjunctive goals [1] is one. He's also written other works such as How to do research at the MIT AI Lab [2] and How to think real good [3] (don't judge this by the title, he chose the name as a deliberate ironic allusion to a badly translated book). [1] ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AITR-802.pdf [2] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41487 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41487 [3] https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think
  - scandox 10y ago
    That's interesting. "Soon after, I realized that AI was a dead end, and left the field." His bluntness and pith there are refreshing anyway.
- mizzao 10y ago
  This seems to happen a lot when accomplished academics from other fields discover philosophy.
dingdingdang 10y ago
Greatly appreciate the author giving this topic a shot (purpose/meaning is the grand elephant in room for humanity at large), reading through the introduction I am so far positively surprised - concise and readable. Whether this holds when it comes to the meat of it.. who knows, I'm giving it try. P.S. a compiled epub &/ pdf would be good (and once you got well formatted epub then the book can go on kdp.amazon.com as a bonus)
- yepguy 10y ago
  It was pretty easy to create a usable epub (not at all perfect but still very legible on an ereader). Make sure you have wget and calibre installed, then run: wget -r -l 1 -k -p https://meaningness.com/; ebook-convert meaningness.com/index.html meaningness.epub
  - dingdingdang 10y ago
    Thanks, great one-liner!
Analemma_ 10y ago
Meaningness: the blog that all the cool kids switched to in order to keep our hipster cred, once Scott Alexander got too mainstream ;)
ygmelnikova 10y ago
"Maintaining the confused stances—eternalism, nihilism, and existentialism—is actually impossible, because they are obviously wrong. At some level, we are always aware that they require extensive make-believe." Wow. How does the author know all this absolutely? He must be 'all knowing', therefore a god. I feel so complete now.
ashark 10y ago
My go-to read when I find myself getting too lost in the question of meaning: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/731 http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/731 (Frost, "Maple")
yks 10y ago
> Both these stances [eternalism, nihilism] are wrong, factually citation needed. Author throws around too many unsupported claims to be taken seriously. And then "nihilism is wrong" becomes "this stance is unworkable". Dubious logic at best.
- EdwardCoffin 10y ago
  It's a work in progress, and the page you got that from is an overview chapter that points to a later chapter that goes into the topics in more detail.
- callinyouin 10y ago
  This was the first page I navigated to and I too wondered how the author could make that claim. This is yet another case of someone projecting their personal belief system as objective truth. I'm actually pretty interested in having philosophical debates around the topic of existence, morality, religion, etc. in general, but I'm bored to death of people starting the conversation by assuming their position on the topic as fact without evidence.
  - hobarrera 10y ago
    For any debate of the sort, certain axioms must be accepted (otherwise, it's impossible to start a debate). However, that's not the case here, as he does explain why both of these are actually wrong.
jolux 10y ago
What's the difference between this "meaningness" and, say, phenomenology?
- Zelmor 10y ago
  That the author has not heard of the latter.
  - mbrock 10y ago
    That's uncharitable and definitely incorrect.
nxc18 10y ago
Having a "meaning" that you have given to yourself, that you truly believe in, and that is used to guide your life as a "meaning" should is, I think the bedrock of happiness, productivity and mental stability. Certainly, in a world where everything needs to be questioned and nothing faithfully believed, it helps to have a meaningful central anchor on which to moor your self and your actions. It is amazing to me that so many people go about their lives and couldn't reliably answer basic questions like, "why are you still doing this(life)?", "what is your purpose?", "how do you justify the value of your continued existence?" Alas, you can't ask those questions too often as they have a tendency to induce some dark thought patterns. However, having a well-constructed sense of meaning/purpose hardens you against those questions and also the many other problematic questions in life and it would do many well to answer them.
- projektir 10y ago
  It's amazing to me that anyone could answer those questions: there's nothing basic about them and I have yet to see any kind of solid source of knowledge.
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    This will probably sound sophomoric, but I like Aristotle's answer to the question of purpose: that a living creature's purpose is to live the kind of life characteristic of its species, to the extent that it's able to. Whether or not there's more than that is a matter of philosophy and theology, but I think he does well enough proving that this is a bare minimum level of purpose for all living beings...
    - projektir 10y ago
      That seems to be an assigned purpose, where the will is attributed to some other process. If a creature starts talking about having purpose, that usually means the creature's own purpose, not purpose assigned to it by something else. I imagine nxc1 had the latter in mind, not the former.
orasis 10y ago
A good post of David's to start with is "Developing Ethical, Social, and Cognitive Competence": https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/ https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-...
- danharaj 10y ago
  > Postmodernism’s accurate critique of modernity has had dire consequences for the possibility of growing from stage 3 to 4. The very essence of the contemporary, postmodern liberal arts curriculum is the claim that all systems are merely arbitrary, self-interested justifications for power. That makes positive identification with systems impossible. It’s mostly only STEM majors who can make this transition—which is probably part of why we are taking over the world. As a STEM major who has studied critical theory and postmodern thinkers, I laughed really hard at this. (because I think it's ridiculous).
  - paulbaumgart 10y ago
    I'd be interested in reading your critique.
    - danharaj 10y ago
      There's nothing to critique. It's a claim presented without supporting evidence. Trying to outright refute it is really hard because there's not much to grasp in all this alluring rhetoric. Here's another whopper occurring earlier than my last quote: > Political leftism tends to monism, and rightism to dualism. The communal mode tends to mistake the logic of stage 4 for rightish ideologies, particularly capitalism. However, stage 4 is not inherently rightist or anti-leftist. Marxism is a systematic, technical, rational critique of capitalism—and therefore a stage 4 ideology. (Notwithstanding that campus communists rarely understand Marxism’s details, and often misuse it as a simple stage 3 rejection of systematicity.) John Rawls’ Theory of Justice is an elegant stage 4 systematic justification for leftism. Conversely, stage 3 rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to “protect our traditional communities.” This guy thinks he's better at liberal arts than liberal arts majors and there is no justification for this level of arrogance presented here. This is just a constant stream of assertions that, I guess, are internally consistent but because they don't actually engage with the texts he makes claims about or the people who study those texts and ideologies don't actually say anything. The rhetoric is structured in a way that it gives everything a tinge of truthiness without doing any of the hard work of demonstrating something as true. "Conversely, stage 3 rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to “protect our traditional communities.”" Unraveling the condescension, the author clearly thinks everything in this world is driven by ideas and ideology. That doesn't make any fucking sense. For example, the resurgence of far-right politics in Europe and America didn't happen just because a bunch of people decided to start believing new ideas, but because they are driven by material circumstances, like the evolution of capitalism leading to large numbers of people in America's interior losing their middle class status and any hope of economic mobility, or the use of the "war on terror" as a justification for the expansion of the mass-surveillance state, the destabilization of the Middle East, and the subsequent refugee crisis in Europe. If he understood Marx at all, and he better if he's going to make claims about Marxism and have the gall to note how much better he understands Marx than those "campus communists", then he'd know how deeply materialist analysis utterly eviscerates his ideas. Ah, tut tut. I must be incapable of truly understanding stage 4 of his pokemon evolution of human enlightenment. > The communal mode is characteristic of pre-modern (“traditional”) cultures. It’s impossible to base a large-scale society on the communal mode, because it’s so ineffective at coordinating complex group activities. (If individuals frequently fail to do their specific, agreed tasks, nothing can get done.) Modern societies are based on the systematic mode (stage 4). This is beyond hilarious and to be quite honest implicitly white supremacist. Let's ignore all of the Native American societies whose structures not only influenced but directly informed many modern institutions. The examples I have in mind are the Iroquois and the Navajo. Show this text to any anthropologist and they will either roll their eyes so hard they pull a muscle or laugh until they suffocate and pass out. Only mild hyperbole. In short, lots, and lots and lots of assertions that sound nice together but have nothing backing them up and just end up being so much loquacious pseudointellectual masturbation. I hope he uses his intellect more solidly in whatever his STEM day job is.
Zelmor 10y ago
Was this linked again for the humour factor of low quality philosophy? Please stop. 9 times in 2 years now. We get it. It's mediocre.
moyix 10y ago
I've so far found most of his articles to be a bit too abstract and lacking in concrete detail (often with a "of course I'll elaborate on this in a future article" disclaimer). However, I did really like the article on Bongard puzzles: https://meaningness.com/metablog/bongard-meta-rationality https://meaningness.com/metablog/bongard-meta-rationality
combatentropy 10y ago
In https://meaningness.com/finding-god-in-a-casino https://meaningness.com/finding-god-in-a-casino, he says explains religion as an addiction to warm fuzzies, kept alive by the brain's ability to everywhere find patterns. I agree that such can describe many people, but orthodox Christianity doesn't prescribe wishful thinking or worse, blind faith. If you read the Bible, it is very much an evidence-based religion. A good summary is More Than a Carpenter, by Josh McDowell (192 pages).
- danharaj 10y ago
  It also definitely does not explain at all the material relations of society that have been grounded in religious rituals and practices throughout history. In a materialist analysis of religion, it is the role religion plays in mediating relations of economic activity and power that determine the structure of religion. There's something compelling about such an argument: It explains why religion's prominence in a society fades as it becomes less entwined with economy and politics. This idealism as opposed to materialism seems to be prominent throughout what I've skimmed of this site.
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    I'd add that you can be a religious believer, but still use and recognize materialist analyses of religion -- including your own religion. As an obvious and non-controversial example, any religion that finds itself widely believed in a world without central authorities is going to be pressed into service as an enforcer of oaths -- even if its founder's opinion of oaths was somewhere between jaded and openly hostile. Are you familiar with Marvin Harris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Harris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Harris)? I think he draws his causal arrow backwards -- it's not that a society develops ways of thinking because they'd be adaptive, it's that societies that happen to develop adaptive ways of thinking flourish -- but it's fascinating to watch his style of analysis in action, and he makes more good points than bad ones... at least if you ask me.
- lastofus 10y ago
  It's difficult to believe that orthodox Christianity is completely evidenced based and requires zero faith, blind or otherwise. If it did, I would imagine it would end up falling into the realm of science, and not religion.
nickstefan12 10y ago
> If you seriously attempt existentialism, you will fail. You cannot create your own meanings. If you take that failure seriously, and analyze what went wrong, you may recognize that subjective meanings are impossible. Then—since objective meanings are also clearly impossible—you will end up in nihilism. > The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don’t have locations. The word gymnastics used on that site to disqualify "everybody else's muddled middle" except for his own personal version of a "muddled middle" seems hypocritical. He talks in enough circles, and we are supposed to forget that his muddled middle is pretty much all the other muddled middles he says can't work. I wasted so much time reading philosophy stuff in college. Its like a virus that infects the mind, "there must be a RIGHT answer!" and the infected mind goes in circles arguing with itself. Its an infinite recursive loop without a base case. The base case is this: "would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?" its not meant to mean that we should all get on "brave new world" soma. what it does though, is get your mind out of that infinite loop of "i must know the RIGHT answer with certainty!". These sorts of topics have no certainty. They are topics worth considering, but trying to find "correct" is just missing the forest from the trees.
- smhost 10y ago
  But isn't that exactly what Chapman is saying? That there is no RIGHT answer, that there is no certainty, that each view has merit but isn't universally true, etc.
  - nickstefan12 10y ago
    I believe that you are correct. The essence of his "intent" is probably not much different than what I'm getting at. I think what bothers me is that there is such an emphasis on precision of language and precision of "history of vocabulary" that the idea gets lost in an effort to differentiate. It's highly likely I'm being too harsh on him. I probably have baggage from having read a lot of this kind of stuff and having it leave me less than satisfied. My apologies. Perhaps what bothers me is that he spends a lot of time tearing down and differentiating from others, and less time telling us what he actually does believes in.
spyckie2 10y ago
Having skimmed it over, this book summarizes a couple of traps that you can fall into if you're thinking too binary about meaning. The world is not 0s and 1s from a meaning standpoint. The best way I can describe it is a quantum theory approach to meaning. No meaning in life is like saying light is a particle, and meaning in life is like saying light is a wave. In reality thinking those things can lead to incorrect systems that lead to all sorts of trouble, and you must learn how to live in that quantum zone in order to find inner peace or something. Unfortunately, in the realm of self help which this is, you cannot avoid guru speak, which he falls into. His definition of religion is eternalism, and I think that is historically correct. However, he states clearly that you can't believe in a God because it leads to eternalism, which I disagree with - it's not nebulous enough.
hasbroslasher 10y ago
I found the author's chauvinism unbearable: dismissing nihilism and eternalism as "obviously wrong" throughout just re-raised the same question in me every time - why? I'll start with something that absolutely made me nearly snap my neck from shaking my head. > The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don’t have locations. First - what? This is the kind of drivel people in drum circles mutter about, not rigorous thought. This is pseudo-religious psychobabble, informed and supported by nothing but a hunch. To reject all of the worlds religious traditions, authors from Camus to Nietzsche, and several thousand years of disciplined human thought in favor of this guy's musings on a website would be the height of insanity. To be more specific: I understand that eternalism is unfavorable in the scientific mind, and don't feel too much need to explain or defend it. Though I will say this: if we live in a deterministic and finite universe, then everything has some sense of meaning or purpose, at least insofar as its relationship to the other moving parts. Eastern philosophy hints at this sort of part-to-whole meaningfulness constantly, to dismiss it wholesale in favor of your prejudice for your own wonky beliefs is the height of chauvinism. His bias towards nihilism was sickening as well as wholly circular. First, nihilists generally believe that "life has no meaning" - which is a good place to start the debate. If we believe that rocks have no meaning, that plants or clouds have no meaning, then what makes us so special? What exactly gives us meaning? Are we not a coincidence in the great book of history? Are we to just blindly commit the fallacy of placing ourselves at the center of our beliefs about how the universe works? I'm not saying that nihilism is the one true way or anything (as I'm not with Eastern religion) but I am saying that it's more coherent and rational than this dude's blog. Furthermore, it is okay to be a nihilist and have preferences about things while accepting that those preferences are either arbitrary, irrelevant to the world outside of them, pre-determined, unstable, or in some other way meaningless. In support of his belief that nihilism is obviously wrong, he generally points to a belief that "it doesn't work" or that meaning is obvious - when it clearly isn't. If meaning were obvious, why the hell would you have to write a half baked e-book about it? That which is truly obvious doesn't need the kind of straw-grasping this guy attempts to rationalize his worldview. In closing, I give this article a 2/10. I did like his emphasis on the practical, and on stances over ideologies. But the actual content is barren- marred by a need to make up new words while ignoring the work of others, as well as a totally lackluster conclusion that gets in its own way for lack of supporting detail. This is what happens when you give someone with apparently no formal understanding of the history of thought a platform to espouse their Freshman-level beliefs about the way the universe works to a crowd of interested onlookers.

Meaningness

189 points by espeed 10y ago

mememachine 10y ago

Is this on topic?

JadeNB 10y ago
Exactly if it's of interest to hackers, and the best way to determine that is by posting it and seeing how it fares. If it's not of interest, then it'll sink into obscurity, and no harm will have been done.
- JCzynski 10y ago
  At one point the way to do that was to post it to reddit. A bunch of things which are not what HN wants to cultivate rose to the top, and HN's core material sank into obscurity.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
myth_drannon 10y ago
I think it is related to the many comments in "On Getting Older in Tech" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136060 Our software development work is meaningless in the grand scheme of life.
- gkya 10y ago
  > Our software development work is meaningless in the grand scheme of life. This is a tool for presenting things meaningless. One can also say any sort of philanthropy and medicine as a whole are meaningless as we'll all die eventually.
- randomsearch 10y ago
  Pessimism absolves the thinking classes of ideas...
yarrel 10y ago
From a quick skim, it has the potential to become a GTD-style geek cult. So yes-ish.
abrichr 10y ago
From [1]: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
surrealize 10y ago
"A work in progress, consisting of a hypertext book and a metablog that comments on it." Sounds like HN to me.

scandox 10y ago

> “Meaningness” is a word I invented, referring to the quality of being meaningful and/or meaningless. ... > The various dimensions of meaningness are discussed in religion and philosophy; but, strangely, the topic as a whole is never addressed. I don't know anything about the author, but this feels like the classic sophomoric illusion of having discovered an entire field of "mysteriously neglected" ideas, combined with the classic sophomoric attempt at an overarching everything-fits-into-this theory of life.

irickt 10y ago
That may be. Here seems to be the heart of the argument: https://meaningness.com/meaningness https://meaningness.com/meaningness >>> Maintaining the confused stances — eternalism, nihilism, and existentialism — is actually impossible, because they are obviously wrong. At some level, we are always aware that they require extensive make-believe. >>> We may begin by asking: What is creative, but not eternalistic? What is realistic, but not nihilistic?
EdwardCoffin 10y ago
The author is a well known A.I. person, who wrote some landmark papers in the field, and played a role in the production of some others. His masters thesis Planning for conjunctive goals [1] is one. He's also written other works such as How to do research at the MIT AI Lab [2] and How to think real good [3] (don't judge this by the title, he chose the name as a deliberate ironic allusion to a badly translated book). [1] ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AITR-802.pdf [2] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41487 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41487 [3] https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think
- scandox 10y ago
  That's interesting. "Soon after, I realized that AI was a dead end, and left the field." His bluntness and pith there are refreshing anyway.
mizzao 10y ago
This seems to happen a lot when accomplished academics from other fields discover philosophy.

dingdingdang 10y ago

Greatly appreciate the author giving this topic a shot (purpose/meaning is the grand elephant in room for humanity at large), reading through the introduction I am so far positively surprised - concise and readable. Whether this holds when it comes to the meat of it.. who knows, I'm giving it try. P.S. a compiled epub &/ pdf would be good (and once you got well formatted epub then the book can go on kdp.amazon.com as a bonus)

yepguy 10y ago
It was pretty easy to create a usable epub (not at all perfect but still very legible on an ereader). Make sure you have wget and calibre installed, then run: wget -r -l 1 -k -p https://meaningness.com/; ebook-convert meaningness.com/index.html meaningness.epub
- dingdingdang 10y ago
  Thanks, great one-liner!

Analemma_ 10y ago

Meaningness: the blog that all the cool kids switched to in order to keep our hipster cred, once Scott Alexander got too mainstream ;)

ygmelnikova 10y ago

"Maintaining the confused stances—eternalism, nihilism, and existentialism—is actually impossible, because they are obviously wrong. At some level, we are always aware that they require extensive make-believe." Wow. How does the author know all this absolutely? He must be 'all knowing', therefore a god. I feel so complete now.

ashark 10y ago

My go-to read when I find myself getting too lost in the question of meaning: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/731 http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/731 (Frost, "Maple")

yks 10y ago

> Both these stances [eternalism, nihilism] are wrong, factually citation needed. Author throws around too many unsupported claims to be taken seriously. And then "nihilism is wrong" becomes "this stance is unworkable". Dubious logic at best.

EdwardCoffin 10y ago
It's a work in progress, and the page you got that from is an overview chapter that points to a later chapter that goes into the topics in more detail.
callinyouin 10y ago
This was the first page I navigated to and I too wondered how the author could make that claim. This is yet another case of someone projecting their personal belief system as objective truth. I'm actually pretty interested in having philosophical debates around the topic of existence, morality, religion, etc. in general, but I'm bored to death of people starting the conversation by assuming their position on the topic as fact without evidence.
- hobarrera 10y ago
  For any debate of the sort, certain axioms must be accepted (otherwise, it's impossible to start a debate). However, that's not the case here, as he does explain why both of these are actually wrong.

jolux 10y ago

What's the difference between this "meaningness" and, say, phenomenology?

Zelmor 10y ago
That the author has not heard of the latter.
- mbrock 10y ago
  That's uncharitable and definitely incorrect.

nxc18 10y ago

Having a "meaning" that you have given to yourself, that you truly believe in, and that is used to guide your life as a "meaning" should is, I think the bedrock of happiness, productivity and mental stability. Certainly, in a world where everything needs to be questioned and nothing faithfully believed, it helps to have a meaningful central anchor on which to moor your self and your actions. It is amazing to me that so many people go about their lives and couldn't reliably answer basic questions like, "why are you still doing this(life)?", "what is your purpose?", "how do you justify the value of your continued existence?" Alas, you can't ask those questions too often as they have a tendency to induce some dark thought patterns. However, having a well-constructed sense of meaning/purpose hardens you against those questions and also the many other problematic questions in life and it would do many well to answer them.

projektir 10y ago
It's amazing to me that anyone could answer those questions: there's nothing basic about them and I have yet to see any kind of solid source of knowledge.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  This will probably sound sophomoric, but I like Aristotle's answer to the question of purpose: that a living creature's purpose is to live the kind of life characteristic of its species, to the extent that it's able to. Whether or not there's more than that is a matter of philosophy and theology, but I think he does well enough proving that this is a bare minimum level of purpose for all living beings...
  - projektir 10y ago
    That seems to be an assigned purpose, where the will is attributed to some other process. If a creature starts talking about having purpose, that usually means the creature's own purpose, not purpose assigned to it by something else. I imagine nxc1 had the latter in mind, not the former.

orasis 10y ago

A good post of David's to start with is "Developing Ethical, Social, and Cognitive Competence": https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/ https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-...

danharaj 10y ago
> Postmodernism’s accurate critique of modernity has had dire consequences for the possibility of growing from stage 3 to 4. The very essence of the contemporary, postmodern liberal arts curriculum is the claim that all systems are merely arbitrary, self-interested justifications for power. That makes positive identification with systems impossible. It’s mostly only STEM majors who can make this transition—which is probably part of why we are taking over the world. As a STEM major who has studied critical theory and postmodern thinkers, I laughed really hard at this. (because I think it's ridiculous).
- paulbaumgart 10y ago
  I'd be interested in reading your critique.
  - danharaj 10y ago
    There's nothing to critique. It's a claim presented without supporting evidence. Trying to outright refute it is really hard because there's not much to grasp in all this alluring rhetoric. Here's another whopper occurring earlier than my last quote: > Political leftism tends to monism, and rightism to dualism. The communal mode tends to mistake the logic of stage 4 for rightish ideologies, particularly capitalism. However, stage 4 is not inherently rightist or anti-leftist. Marxism is a systematic, technical, rational critique of capitalism—and therefore a stage 4 ideology. (Notwithstanding that campus communists rarely understand Marxism’s details, and often misuse it as a simple stage 3 rejection of systematicity.) John Rawls’ Theory of Justice is an elegant stage 4 systematic justification for leftism. Conversely, stage 3 rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to “protect our traditional communities.” This guy thinks he's better at liberal arts than liberal arts majors and there is no justification for this level of arrogance presented here. This is just a constant stream of assertions that, I guess, are internally consistent but because they don't actually engage with the texts he makes claims about or the people who study those texts and ideologies don't actually say anything. The rhetoric is structured in a way that it gives everything a tinge of truthiness without doing any of the hard work of demonstrating something as true. "Conversely, stage 3 rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to “protect our traditional communities.”" Unraveling the condescension, the author clearly thinks everything in this world is driven by ideas and ideology. That doesn't make any fucking sense. For example, the resurgence of far-right politics in Europe and America didn't happen just because a bunch of people decided to start believing new ideas, but because they are driven by material circumstances, like the evolution of capitalism leading to large numbers of people in America's interior losing their middle class status and any hope of economic mobility, or the use of the "war on terror" as a justification for the expansion of the mass-surveillance state, the destabilization of the Middle East, and the subsequent refugee crisis in Europe. If he understood Marx at all, and he better if he's going to make claims about Marxism and have the gall to note how much better he understands Marx than those "campus communists", then he'd know how deeply materialist analysis utterly eviscerates his ideas. Ah, tut tut. I must be incapable of truly understanding stage 4 of his pokemon evolution of human enlightenment. > The communal mode is characteristic of pre-modern (“traditional”) cultures. It’s impossible to base a large-scale society on the communal mode, because it’s so ineffective at coordinating complex group activities. (If individuals frequently fail to do their specific, agreed tasks, nothing can get done.) Modern societies are based on the systematic mode (stage 4). This is beyond hilarious and to be quite honest implicitly white supremacist. Let's ignore all of the Native American societies whose structures not only influenced but directly informed many modern institutions. The examples I have in mind are the Iroquois and the Navajo. Show this text to any anthropologist and they will either roll their eyes so hard they pull a muscle or laugh until they suffocate and pass out. Only mild hyperbole. In short, lots, and lots and lots of assertions that sound nice together but have nothing backing them up and just end up being so much loquacious pseudointellectual masturbation. I hope he uses his intellect more solidly in whatever his STEM day job is.

Zelmor 10y ago

Was this linked again for the humour factor of low quality philosophy? Please stop. 9 times in 2 years now. We get it. It's mediocre.

moyix 10y ago

I've so far found most of his articles to be a bit too abstract and lacking in concrete detail (often with a "of course I'll elaborate on this in a future article" disclaimer). However, I did really like the article on Bongard puzzles: https://meaningness.com/metablog/bongard-meta-rationality https://meaningness.com/metablog/bongard-meta-rationality

combatentropy 10y ago

In https://meaningness.com/finding-god-in-a-casino https://meaningness.com/finding-god-in-a-casino, he says explains religion as an addiction to warm fuzzies, kept alive by the brain's ability to everywhere find patterns. I agree that such can describe many people, but orthodox Christianity doesn't prescribe wishful thinking or worse, blind faith. If you read the Bible, it is very much an evidence-based religion. A good summary is More Than a Carpenter, by Josh McDowell (192 pages).

danharaj 10y ago
It also definitely does not explain at all the material relations of society that have been grounded in religious rituals and practices throughout history. In a materialist analysis of religion, it is the role religion plays in mediating relations of economic activity and power that determine the structure of religion. There's something compelling about such an argument: It explains why religion's prominence in a society fades as it becomes less entwined with economy and politics. This idealism as opposed to materialism seems to be prominent throughout what I've skimmed of this site.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  I'd add that you can be a religious believer, but still use and recognize materialist analyses of religion -- including your own religion. As an obvious and non-controversial example, any religion that finds itself widely believed in a world without central authorities is going to be pressed into service as an enforcer of oaths -- even if its founder's opinion of oaths was somewhere between jaded and openly hostile. Are you familiar with Marvin Harris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Harris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Harris)? I think he draws his causal arrow backwards -- it's not that a society develops ways of thinking because they'd be adaptive, it's that societies that happen to develop adaptive ways of thinking flourish -- but it's fascinating to watch his style of analysis in action, and he makes more good points than bad ones... at least if you ask me.
lastofus 10y ago
It's difficult to believe that orthodox Christianity is completely evidenced based and requires zero faith, blind or otherwise. If it did, I would imagine it would end up falling into the realm of science, and not religion.

nickstefan12 10y ago

> If you seriously attempt existentialism, you will fail. You cannot create your own meanings. If you take that failure seriously, and analyze what went wrong, you may recognize that subjective meanings are impossible. Then—since objective meanings are also clearly impossible—you will end up in nihilism. > The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don’t have locations. The word gymnastics used on that site to disqualify "everybody else's muddled middle" except for his own personal version of a "muddled middle" seems hypocritical. He talks in enough circles, and we are supposed to forget that his muddled middle is pretty much all the other muddled middles he says can't work. I wasted so much time reading philosophy stuff in college. Its like a virus that infects the mind, "there must be a RIGHT answer!" and the infected mind goes in circles arguing with itself. Its an infinite recursive loop without a base case. The base case is this: "would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?" its not meant to mean that we should all get on "brave new world" soma. what it does though, is get your mind out of that infinite loop of "i must know the RIGHT answer with certainty!". These sorts of topics have no certainty. They are topics worth considering, but trying to find "correct" is just missing the forest from the trees.

smhost 10y ago
But isn't that exactly what Chapman is saying? That there is no RIGHT answer, that there is no certainty, that each view has merit but isn't universally true, etc.
- nickstefan12 10y ago
  I believe that you are correct. The essence of his "intent" is probably not much different than what I'm getting at. I think what bothers me is that there is such an emphasis on precision of language and precision of "history of vocabulary" that the idea gets lost in an effort to differentiate. It's highly likely I'm being too harsh on him. I probably have baggage from having read a lot of this kind of stuff and having it leave me less than satisfied. My apologies. Perhaps what bothers me is that he spends a lot of time tearing down and differentiating from others, and less time telling us what he actually does believes in.

spyckie2 10y ago

Having skimmed it over, this book summarizes a couple of traps that you can fall into if you're thinking too binary about meaning. The world is not 0s and 1s from a meaning standpoint. The best way I can describe it is a quantum theory approach to meaning. No meaning in life is like saying light is a particle, and meaning in life is like saying light is a wave. In reality thinking those things can lead to incorrect systems that lead to all sorts of trouble, and you must learn how to live in that quantum zone in order to find inner peace or something. Unfortunately, in the realm of self help which this is, you cannot avoid guru speak, which he falls into. His definition of religion is eternalism, and I think that is historically correct. However, he states clearly that you can't believe in a God because it leads to eternalism, which I disagree with - it's not nebulous enough.

hasbroslasher 10y ago

I found the author's chauvinism unbearable: dismissing nihilism and eternalism as "obviously wrong" throughout just re-raised the same question in me every time - why? I'll start with something that absolutely made me nearly snap my neck from shaking my head. > The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don’t have locations. First - what? This is the kind of drivel people in drum circles mutter about, not rigorous thought. This is pseudo-religious psychobabble, informed and supported by nothing but a hunch. To reject all of the worlds religious traditions, authors from Camus to Nietzsche, and several thousand years of disciplined human thought in favor of this guy's musings on a website would be the height of insanity. To be more specific: I understand that eternalism is unfavorable in the scientific mind, and don't feel too much need to explain or defend it. Though I will say this: if we live in a deterministic and finite universe, then everything has some sense of meaning or purpose, at least insofar as its relationship to the other moving parts. Eastern philosophy hints at this sort of part-to-whole meaningfulness constantly, to dismiss it wholesale in favor of your prejudice for your own wonky beliefs is the height of chauvinism. His bias towards nihilism was sickening as well as wholly circular. First, nihilists generally believe that "life has no meaning" - which is a good place to start the debate. If we believe that rocks have no meaning, that plants or clouds have no meaning, then what makes us so special? What exactly gives us meaning? Are we not a coincidence in the great book of history? Are we to just blindly commit the fallacy of placing ourselves at the center of our beliefs about how the universe works? I'm not saying that nihilism is the one true way or anything (as I'm not with Eastern religion) but I am saying that it's more coherent and rational than this dude's blog. Furthermore, it is okay to be a nihilist and have preferences about things while accepting that those preferences are either arbitrary, irrelevant to the world outside of them, pre-determined, unstable, or in some other way meaningless. In support of his belief that nihilism is obviously wrong, he generally points to a belief that "it doesn't work" or that meaning is obvious - when it clearly isn't. If meaning were obvious, why the hell would you have to write a half baked e-book about it? That which is truly obvious doesn't need the kind of straw-grasping this guy attempts to rationalize his worldview. In closing, I give this article a 2/10. I did like his emphasis on the practical, and on stances over ideologies. But the actual content is barren- marred by a need to make up new words while ignoring the work of others, as well as a totally lackluster conclusion that gets in its own way for lack of supporting detail. This is what happens when you give someone with apparently no formal understanding of the history of thought a platform to espouse their Freshman-level beliefs about the way the universe works to a crowd of interested onlookers.