> 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.
I don't think it's fair to say that because the answer to the question of "there must be a right answer!" is very hard to find, that the question is not worth pondering.
What if we approached physics that way? And decided that we shouldn't bother trying to explain gravity because many people in college pondered the question in circles and couldn't answer it?
Hard questions may just be... hard. And maybe this is far harder than physics.
Its more than things being "hard". Its about the nature of the questions philosophers try and answer.
Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason has those 4 quadrants of "knowing". A priori vs posteriori. Synthetic vs analytic. Its literally a CRITIQUE of how far pure reason can take us. In the area much of philosophy dances in, pure reason simple cant take us very far!
I'm generally interested in philosophy relative to most normal people as opposed to philosophers, and, to normal people, there are many very real questions that are worth answering, including those relating to meaning.
Those questions seem like they can be summarized as "What is going on, what should I do, and why?"
> Finding "a" reason to live matters far more than finding "the" reason to live. Would we rather be happy or would we rather be right?
This framing seems strange to me.
When you make this statement you already make a claim: that the reason to live is to seek happiness.
The difference here is that physics has an established set of rules to define what is a meaningless question and what is a meaningful question. There is a reason metaphysics is not physics.
This perspective is a bit uncharitable towards metaphysics - there are rules in that game as well. You're still not allowed to ask logically inconsistent questions or twist words into nonsense and expect to be taken seriously.
For instance, saying things like "Meaningness is neither subjective nor objective" sets off alarms in my mind - that's quite the claim! If you're making that claim, you better be well prepared to provide a rigorous explanation of what you mean or be laughed out of the room by people who understand what those words mean. The author chooses to just throw a couple of pseudo-intellectual sentences together and then say "it's obvious!" and move on.
Another example of this is when people say that determinism and free will are consistent with one another - it's a big claim and it takes some work to explain. A few people actually do this well, but it's because they resort to really really rigorous explanations and models of how "will" works in people - taken in part from everyday experience. Those who provide shoddy accounts of this or just say "yeah whatever let's move on" are no more metaphysicians than is the person who says "what if electrons are the particles that cause love, man??"
I assume this is a statement to provoke thought, and surely not a literal inability to understand his context.
The difference is that something like "meaning of existence" can never be defined or even predicted since it depends on the individual, since it's only relevant within the fictitious ramblings of a single mind. An insane persons meaning could never match a rule since it would be capable of defining its own fictitious rules, which would be equally relevant.
Physics doesn't depend on a mind or understanding. It will "be" regardless.
It's just something I've never seen outlined like that. That makes it sound like there's a committee out there that decides what questions can be asked.
I've been reading a lot about physics lately, and many things are quite... out there... and I felt like I had to go back and sort of rewire my brain a few times.
Some physics questions are simple enough: "What happens if we do this?" But some seem less tractable, such as what does it mean for something to be the last level of "matter", what does "one dimensional string" really mean, why is the speed of light the maximum, etc., and a lot of theories come from what seems to be philosophical intuition more than number crunching.
I'd be very curious to see a strict definition of "questions physics scientists are allowed to ask".
> The difference is that something like "meaning of existence" can never be defined or even predicted since it depends on the individual, since it's only relevant within the fictitious ramblings of a single mind.
Funny, I can't agree with that. That to me sounds like you're just pushing your own opinion. I fully believe that there is such a thing as meaning of existence, but I may be using a very mundane definition of "meaning". Perhaps such questions seem undefinable because someone forgot to define the word "meaning" again.
I believe it's all physics in the end, one is just a lot better understood than the other, so the other looks like you can't nail it down and therefore isn't "real". But just like with physics, it leads somewhere, and predictions can be made...
"Its like a virus that infects the mind, 'there must be a RIGHT answer!' and the infected mind goes in circles arguing with itself."
I think that's a strange and, honestly, naive way if looking at the whole thing. As far as I see it nearly every philosophical position basically makes a sense. They're all valid, and as far as their soundness goes, often the subject matter doesn't allow us to have any good strong opinions. It's interesting the variety of thinking there is and the arguments to be made for one position or another.
If you're caught looking for the one right answer then yeah, I agree that's a virus, but it is independent of philosophy.
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.
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.
David Hume arrived at a reasonably rigorous framework (Principle of Nature's Uniformity) that allows your conclusion, in my opinion. He's worth reading, if only to find enough closure to move on from philosophy.
Agreed. I'll take that one step further. Take responsibility for all that you output AND all of your input.
I.e If someone does something that makes you unhappy, on some level you have agreed to allow that to make you unhappy. You can also decide to not be affected by that input.
Not saying it's easy, just saying that that it's possible to have some control of response to input.
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)
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:
> 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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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...
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.
> “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.
I would at least try a couple of the articles before you write Chapman off completely. Anyone is going to sound dumb if you just read their thesis statement, but he backs it up pretty well in the succeeding writings. Try the bits about fundamentalism [0], the two counter-cultures [1], and the history of going from pre-modern to modern thinking and the problems it created [2]. You may not think the has the Ultimate Answer, but he's not a New Age BSer either.
The thing is (and he even references Lyotard at one point) this stuff is all pretty concretely addressed in postmodern phenomenology and semiotics etc. I'm not sure what the unique addition is quite yet, but I suppose even if this is just a reconstitution of postmodernism for techies it would be worth it too :P
Yeah, I think "postmodernism for techies" is part of what he aims for. He writes,
> Unfortunately, the postmodern pioneers chose to write in obfuscatory riddles. Their insights were difficult enough to understand without that. Few followers could extract the insights. Most teachers are second-generation professors who didn’t understand pomo when it was new, and third-generation ones who were mainly taught dumbed-down second-generation “pseudo-pomo.”
A part of his project seems to be to pick what he considers to be the "good parts" of postmodernism, and explain them in a way that makes sense to people from a STEM background.
Yeah, it's actually not bad. My initial assessment was perhaps too harsh because I assumed he didn't know the literature. I'm still not sure that he does entirely but it's still good on its own I think.
Well, I'm not saying he has to read absolutely everything that could be read on the subject because nobody has; especially not I. I just mean that on first pass I kind of assumed he was trying to be as original as possible and I thought he was failing but then I realized he was more trying to translate inscrutable brilliance into readable form. The latter he succeeds with, the former he does not.
I didn't understand his distinction between subjective vs neither objective nor subjective at first, but the examples he gave illuminated the distinction, and he thus changed my perspective on the issue.
It is not postmodernism for techies, but hermeneutics for nerds.
I think Chapman is acutely aware that postmodernism poisoned the well of the humanities and largely killed them. Now, the stem nerds have to repeat history, by reinventing and reimporting hermeneutics into their intellectual canon. It is happening largely outside academia, and somehow the inevitable next step after Bayesianist epistemology infused rationalism has reaped the low-hanging fruits and lost most of its steam. Postrationalism marks the return of the narrative in nerd intellectualism. Those few folks that are still alive and sufficiently versed in the scholastic canon of the prepostmodern humanities may scoff at it, but I think Chapman is serious, has high intellectual integrity and may gain serious cultural impact. Thanks to Kegan and Caplan, he also found a bunch of sufficiently original starting points to make it worth wile following his explorations.
I think that's a great way to characterize Chapman's writing.
As an Internet phenomenon postrationalism currently resembles Bayesian rationalism before LW. Meaningness might be its Overcoming Bias. Do you know if anyone is building a LW-style discussion hub for it?
I went down this same rabbithole - Bayesian rationality to 'postrationality'.
('post' implies 'better than', but literally means 'not'. Still, Chapman knows a lot more about AI than Eliezer, and has an interesting write-up of his research into AI based on Heidegger's philosophy).
I was saved by Ayn Rand - yes, the person analytical, continental and other philosophers all agree to dismiss - specifically her epistemology and theory of concepts. (The Rand to read is "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology". Or click around here: http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html)
I think David might cry if you interpreted his writing as postmodern. He quite explicitly critiques the developmental dead-ends of postmodernism.
I can't do his ideas justice, but the path of postmodernism is essentially a form of nihilism that must be broken through to a new level of meaning-making. That is to say, a modern level of development believes there are self-evident truths. postmodern would say that all truths are relative, without basis. An integral or construct-aware level would have insight into meaning-making itself and be able to create "solid" values out of nothing - essentially a post-nihilism.
I don't think theres good language for these stages, so I'm just using "construct aware" from Susan Cooke-Greuter:
More so than postmodernism, the author seems highly influenced by Mahayana Buddhist 'middle-way'* and 'emptiness' philosophy and epistemology. But presents it in a very fresh and relatively easy to understand way.
Now that he would be very happy to hear you say, because that is precisely his goal. Meaningness was actually originally a side project branched off from his original blog about Buddhism (Chapman is a Dzogchen Buddhist, which is not Mahayana but you get partial credit for being close) when a commenter asked him, almost as a joke, if he could explain the ideas he was talking about in a purely secular way to STEM folks.
Yes but the thing is I see postmodernism as in the mode of construct-aware thinking. That's kind of the entire point, that modernist totalities do not exist and that truth and meaning arise in a historically dependent context relative to the faculties of the investigator. The only way that Mr. Chapman creates solid values out of nothing is through rejecting metaphysics entirely and claiming that he is arguing for the way things actually are, not the way people claim them to be.
Herein lies the problem: everyone who asks these questions thinks they have discovered the way things are and that everybody else is wrong. If this argument is nothing more than a statement of the way the world is, it is not worth reading. Otherwise, it must proposes several "oughts" which modify its meaning past describing what "is," and in my opinion you have then failed to eliminate metaphysics and/or phenomenology.
I can see how you interpret postmodernism that way. I don't disagree with it. But I observe a practical ceiling on most postmodern thought because our postmodern institutions, such as liberal colleges, don't bring people to that construct-aware level. Most people either end up in a pseudo-nihilism or falling back to concrete beliefs.
I'm not defending David's writing as being overly original-most of it is old Buddhist thought. I do, however, think it's important that people today be thinking, writing, and discussing these topics. Many of the worlds problems are related to cognitive development and a lot of us are left floundering when we run into the limits of our institutional education.
Someone above linked a writing he had about pomo that I almost completely agree with, the main problem with it being that understanding it pre-rationally leads to nihilism. That does not, however, mean that pomo is nihilistic, only that incomplete interpretations of it are.
Postmodernism as a canon is almost too powerful for its own good, which is ironic in that each of the individual writers almost aspire to powerlessness in their desire to eliminate modernist structures of domination. There have been a few times in my life where I could literally feel my perspective on the world shifting to a higher mode in an instant, the first was with Sartre, and the most recent was with Foucault. Approaching it at the right time and with the right teachers can fucking change your world, but the process to get there is heavily individualized and I fear perhaps can't be standardized. If you don't arrive willing to accept the ideas as divers furtherances on your own conceptualizations, you will reject it as nihilism.
Said another way: I used to consider my own thinking very postmodern. I ran into limitations and adopted new modes of thinking that are different than the ones I previously called postmodern. So even though you may still call my current mode of thinking "postmodern" I see utility in adopting language that points beyond postmodern.
I'm not sure that makes any sense at all: silly language
I agree, but at the same time I prefer the idea of meta-rationality that David uses, actually. It explains why if you try to teach postmodernism to someone who is pre-rational they end up a relativist. As much as it is talked about I don't think postmodernism actually does reject objective truths as such, and when it seems like it is, it's because the writer is assuming the reader can understand that this doesn't mean that science and positivism aren't valuable, just that they're ultimately lacking as philosophical pry-bars.
I'm curious now, because this is very close to how I see pomo and I always find myself in distress trying to express this to hardcore STEM-my people (I was one myself, but nowadays thoughts are much too layered for just that.)
Anyway, the thing I'm curious about, have you read House of Leaves? I always explain the book to people as something that exploded my senses of (traditional) scientific certainty and then I went on a huge voyage of pomo, Wittgenstein etc. It also showed me in an intensely terrifying way how fluid in concept my mind could be, something like 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me (Pascal)'.
He is postmodern, but hipster postmodern who's noticed that postmodernism is unfashionable and wants to attract the people who liked the concept but are too hip to stick with it.
And if that makes him cry, I'm OK with that. Consider it retribution for all the junk he's shoveled out.
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).
The author is pretty well known, technically, and has been applying Buddhist-style inquiry patterns to a western vernacular for a long time. I don't think the knee-jerk cynicism is warranted. You may disagree with his conclusions, but he isn't a superficial guy.
And the fact that you think a search for meaning outside traditional religious models is 'mysteriously neglected' is baffling. Nothing in your comment seems to correspond to David's work, as far as I can tell.
I agree with you that the comment seems very off-hand. However scandox doesn't claim that this search, outside of religion, is neglected; instead he uses sarcastic quotes to claim that it's not, while meaningness.com would pretend it is.
I don't want to try and answer whether it's really neglected or not. My personal experience is that I haven't seen an approach as reasonable, methodical and clear as this one (so fa in my reading).
Making a slightly better answer here. Your last observation seems to misunderstand what I'm saying. I only mean that it is common for people new to a field (in this case undoubtedly the art-science formerly known as philosophy) to imagine that they have discovered new territory of investigation.
In a sense I'm saying the opposite of what you think I am. I'm saying that the whole topic under discussion has been broadly under discussion since the beginning of recorded civilisation. So saying "strangely, the topic as a whole is never addressed" seems a tad like a new minted programmer saying "strangely no-one has addressed the entire topic of OO programming".
When I was first getting into philosophy for the first year or so I was convinced I was brilliant because I was coming up with all these great ideas that people loved to talk about but then I realized that it was all addressed (largely by the existentialists and postmodernists, but also the German idealists and Plato) decades, centuries or millennia ago. Now when I have what seems to be a unique idea I spend a while googling different formulations of it to make sure it's truly original.
This isn't to say that philosophy has already asked and answered every possible question, just that the most obvious versions of these (obvious for the kinds of people who would bother doing this in the first place, i.e. relatively intelligent people) probably have good discussions going on and that the philosophy of those questions is more about joining that discussion and adding your perspective (if it's new) than about formulating original paradigms and meta-narratives for solving them, because that's been done already for a lot of questions.
> Now when I have what seems to be a unique idea I spend a while googling different formulations of it to make sure it's truly original.
The problem is that you often can't really find this through Google, unless you know the name we've given it (or happen to phrase your question in almost the same way someone else did on StackExchange). That's why it is so valuable to have a good human search engine to talke to (say, a professor who knows their field really well).
For me I know the fundamentals well enough that I can kind of winnow it down to a couple movements that would be good to start looking around in, but I'm not sure if it's a strategy you can use when you're just breaking in. You first have to know the history, then you can determine how original your ideas are.
I've read/skimmed a ways in. I'd say your judgement of it was sound. There's been a lot of, "wait, you know this is a whole thing, right? [reads a little farther] Huh, guess not." More than you might expect from the introduction, in fact—it keeps stumbling against the edges of those sorts of well-explored topics across a surprisingly broad range.
I'm pretty sure the author is in fact well versed in various philosophical traditions, but intentionally chooses not to directly engage them (in the course of the main text) because the project is not intended to be a discursive philosophical text but rather a sort of self-help book, for lack of a better term.
I was going to say, I discovered a comment on that site when searching to see if it knew it was talking about phenomenology, semantics, semiotics, etc.
On the one hand, this seems to fulfill Kant's definition of genius (independently arriving at concepts that would have to be taught to most people) but on the other hand it reflects a certain naïveté that people in the sciences seem to have about the liberal arts: that meaningful (ha) questions such as these have not been properly considered in philosophy even given the fact that philosophy predates positivist Western science and the enlightenment by a few thousand years and there's like a 90% chance that Plato addressed these questions of "meaningness" somewhere and possibly even that he came to the same conclusions at one point or another.
At that point of course it's sort of a psychological question for me: why are highly intelligent people often drawn to the same questions and the same answers multiple times independently over thousands of years? I think the answer lies somewhere in sort of the "death of the author" problem in that language ceases to be useful in discussing certain questions past a certain level of abstraction and thus abstract communication is doomed to be imprecise such that we sound like we're repeating ourselves when we might not actually be. The revolutions in philosophical understanding, then, would seem to happen almost as if by chance: somebody articulates a shared meaning so successfully that its presence is evident to other people where once it was hidden. This is sort of what Wittgenstein was getting at I believe with Tractatus and the proposition that philosophical misunderstandings are shortcomings of language and thus if you can manage to simplify language enough that overloaded, idiosyncratic, and imprecise meanings are eliminated then you can formally deduce all of philosophy from a few first principles. I'm butchering him of course but this attitude is similar among lots of analytics and (as far as I know) originates with Wittgenstein and Russell. A meta-narrative so to speak of the continental approach would seem to be something along the lines of creating and articulating original ideas with universal scope which are not perhaps falsifiable but provoke thought in the subject. (somewhat Deleuzian I think)
it seems like more of a "classic sophomoric illusion" to dismiss an entire work because you didn't like a sentence you read in the first 5 minutes of seeing it.
If only the process of our life wasn't time-bound! There's so much to read that we can't help but look for signals, especially ones in an introduction which is designed explicitly by the author to get people to continue reading the book and which takes as its subject the book as a whole.
It's not a matter of merely "not liking a sentence", it's that the author makes false or misleading claims to bolster his own standing (like the one quoted), fails to display a mastery of the relevant material, and gives enough clues in style and substance about the kind of book this is for me to know, from past experience, that it won't be my personal cup of tea.
What really matters:
I won't be reading this book given what I've seen so far, but I don't intend this as a general criticism.
Writing like this is essentially therapy and different people respond to different treatments. It may well be that for many science-y/CS folk this is just what the doctor ordered! And I have no interest in undermining that! And even if it is, to my sensibility, messy and lacking in the forceful individual style truly soul nourishing books require, it can still be valuable. Lord knows there are many books which I can rationally pick apart every which way or which just mouth one platitude after another, yet which truly moved me and made me a better person and of which I wouldn't change a thing.
Thanks. Perhaps. I'll check him out more. I do like people who try to pull together diverse threads. The black magic article seems kinda interesting.
But my personal taste in "meaning of life" stuff these days is more the free spirit and cutting judgements of "The Education of Henry Adams" than a heavy-handed ology of meaningness. I'm suspicious of how tidy all his little categories are, how little self-awareness is exemplified (as opposed to mentioned), the seeming lack of humor despite being about a topic as complex and open as the living of life. Again this is just from a skim and I could change my opinion quickly.
While I liked the attempts to test the teaching with modern rational thinking, there're some misunderstandings of the core concepts that resulted into article-sized straw man fights.
>>> 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?
It seems like this argument could be applied to, well, literally anything, and I don't know how it could be defended against. "sophomoric" doesn't actually convey any information besides a raw dislike of even the idea of new discoveries made by new people, yet that's exactly how a lot of things went about.
Meanwhile, I feel like this is the kind of thing people are not doing anywhere near often enough. It's very hard for me to find ways of thinking that are new. Many areas definitely seem "mysteriously neglected", although I'm lately having doubts about the "mysterious" part...
I think in society there is a very strong push against things that try to be special, to the point that we're going to shut down all the things that actually are special along the way since we can't be bothered to tell the difference.
Off the top of my head Heidegger pretty directly engages the problem of meaning. That said, when I recently polled a selection of my friends (professionals in their late 20s) on if they found life to be meaningful and why, none could offer a coherent answer. I was very happy to see this effort on hn; and not surprised to see a dismissive comment at the top, like, "meaning, that tired old problem"
The validity (or lack thereof) of meaning as a "property" of a linguistic expression ("utterance") is a central focus of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. If "neglected" ideas are the focus of the most popular philosophy book of the last century, they probably aren't all that neglected.
I'm already noticing that it offers a tepid indictment of modern philosophy for retreating from the "big questions" and immediately proceeds to do the exact same thing by narrowing its scope to avoid the approaches and definitions that make this particular "big question" practically unaddressable in any satisfying way. Invoking philosophy in this manner feels like slight-of-hand aimed at stroking the readers' egos, which triggered my "danger: beware charlatanism and/or cynical reader-pleasing self-help advice" alarm.
(I wrote more on this but deleted it, because I don't want to pile on the author too heavily in case this is offered earnestly, and the effect was accidental)
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).
It would seem categorically incorrect to claim that faith is evidence based. To paraphrase the apostle Paul himself: Greeks look for reason and Jews look for miracles, but I preach the power of Christ (viz., Neither a reasonable nor an evidence-based faith). And elsewhere paul undermines the "wisdom of the wise". Moreover, to call Josh McDowell an expositor of Orthodox Christianity is a bit offensive, since he is most clearly not Orthodox by any commonly-held definition, but only according to a fundamentalist's believe that a "true Christian" is more Catholic than Roman Catholics more Orthodox than the eastern Orthodox and more Jewish than the Jews.
> It would seem categorically incorrect to claim that faith is evidence based
Everyone lives by faith. How can you be sure --- I mean really sure --- that the chair will not collapse beneath you, this time? I guess you don't know, 100%. But nevertheless, you sit in it.
Faith != Blind Faith. Blind faith is a particular kind of faith, which has no reason for its being --- in fact has reason against its being. Faith, by itself, is just to go on believing something that you have been given enough evidence for, in spite of irrational fear or self-centered temptation to disavow. There is a reason that sexual loyalty is also called "faithfulness."
The Bible is evidence-based because: in the Old Testament God said, believe that I am the one true God because of this or that miracle that I just did; in the New Testament, it keeps talking about testifying, "I bear witness," "believe on the testimony of these witnesses," citing them by name.
Here someone will say, but how do we know any of that really happened, just because it's written in a book? That's where manuscript evidence comes into play, whether the people who say they wrote this or that really wrote this or that, and that's where I point you to a book like Josh McDowell's, which will talk about how the Bible has tons more manuscript evidence than any other book on the face of the earth. We know that John wrote John far more than that we know that Homer wrote The Odyssey. There are other books too, like The Case for Faith. I just generally pick Josh McDowell because it is the shortest, and I know your time is valuable, and your patience for contradictory opinions is limited.
Here again someone will say, but just because I know John really wrote the book of John doesn't mean that John wasn't lying. That's where McDowell --- and the other books --- will talk about logic and human nature. Most of the disciples were martyred, terribly. Who would die for something they knew to be a lie?
> to call Josh McDowell an expositor of Orthodox Christianity is a bit offensive
lowercase o orthodox: "conforming to what is generally or traditionally accepted"
Besides, what in More Than a Carpenter would a Greek Orthodox believer disagree with?
Here again someone will say, but just because I know John really wrote the book of John doesn't mean that John wasn't lying. That's where McDowell --- and the other books --- will talk about logic and human nature. Most of the disciples were martyred, terribly. Who would die for something they knew to be a lie?
John may have really believed / perceived what he wrote and simultaneously been wrong about it. Human perception is unreliable, malleable over time, and subject to distortion from a wide range of internal bias and external stimuli. Plenty of people around the world genuinely believe in religious and spiritual experiences that directly contradict the experiences that you hold to be true.
I said the same thing myself, having witnessed a number of miracles in my Pentecostal world. Once I lost my faith I was shocked to realize that nothing I'd witnessed was conclusive. Far from it, in fact. Having had a lot of 'backstage' access as the son of the pastor, more than one miracle turned out to have not been a miracle at all.
well, i'll admit that orthodox and heretical aren't strictly antonymous, but at least in historical use, 'orthodox' (big-o or no) refers to "adherence to accepted creeds" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodoxy
By contrast, there are few concepts more "heretical" (in the literal/etymological sense of the word) than "sola scriptura," i.e., to "become a church unto oneself."
It is precisely this implicitly heretical "sola scriptura" preoccupation (and with it, such anxiety to prove the veracity of the physical texts themselves!) that contradicts the very concept of orthodoxy.
Sitting in a chair is either a) not an act of faith or b) the word faith itself designates nothing at all.
> Sitting in a chair is either a) not an act of faith or b) the word faith itself designates nothing at all.
It's the old "God of the gaps" argument. "Faith" here means ignorance. The reason we don't know the chair won't collapse is because we didn't pay attention in science class, or we don't know how structural integrity works, or we don't know the properties of certain materials, or whatever.
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.
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.
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)? 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.
Does thinking that Christianity is "evidence based" require assuming that parts of the bible are not meant to be taken literally?
Without going into a litany of examples, surely even devout Christians understand that large portions of the Bible are difficult to match to reality/science/etc.
Some parts of the Bible are hard to match with science; others are hard to match with Christian morality. The Catholic Church traditionally speaks of "four senses of Scripture", and advises using reason and observation to rule out readings that can't possibly be true; so, for example, the passage where God tells Saul to exterminate the Amelekites should be read as an allegorical instruction to destroy not just sin, but also habits that lead you to sin -- since it's not particularly difficult to prove that genocide is wrong.
(That instruction probably didn't happen, since two chapters later David's raiding the Amalekites just as if they weren't exterminated at all; but if it did happen, well, I wonder who Saul was talking to. The Devil likes to pass himself off as an angel of light; the test of an interaction with a supernatural being is what the said being asks you to do.)
And if you really want to embarrass a fundamentalist, talk about how you're a Creationist, and then start talking about the second Creation narrative -- the one that begins with "the spirit of God moving over the waters". Or talk about how you want to put the Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn, and then reveal that you mean the Ritual Commandments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_Decalogue). Or read the Books of Samuel, which are obviously two different narratives (with quite different outlooks on life) interleaved with each other...
I think it requires stretching the definition of "literally". For example, "seven days" might not necessarily mean "seven human days" but rather it might be some kind of magical God-time unit. An "ark" may not be a literal ship; or maybe it is, and the "popular" version of the evolutionary tree is misguided. And so on.
The most fun crackpot text I've ever read, Ilya Shkrob's "In the Beginning" [1], says that the seven days account describes seven different highly improbable events in Earth's history that were mainly responsible for the existence of intelligent life, and each of those events indeed could fit in a day.
> For example, "seven days" might not necessarily mean "seven human days"
I really didn't want to get into a point-for-point thing, but the "day" is just one issue. Birds and whales (great sea monsters) precede reptiles and insects, grass precedes light, etc. The Ark, and other stories, have similar issues that are hard to wave away.
> verse 3: And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
What are verses 14-17 about, then?
Edit: For clarity...
a) Birds preceding reptiles and insects seems obviously flawed.
b) Verse 3 "Let there be light" would almost have to correlate with the big bang...light somewhere, but not on the earth. Verses 14-17 seem clearly to be about the sun being created. Created millions of years after the grass (and other things that need light?), if we take the notion that "days" aren't literal, and are meant to match what we've seen in science.
I agree with you regarding "Let there be light" referring to the Big Bang. However, it's not unreasonable to assume that there might have been another source of light for these plants to grow. Alternatively, even if there wasn't, do you not think that a God who could create the Sun and the Earth from nothing would be unable to make plants grow without the Sun? It seems that many so-called 'rebuttals' of the Bible try to disprove it by explaining why some events are physically impossible, but what is impossible to an all-powerful God who created the laws of physics themselves? Is he not able to bend them to His will?
If one tries to nitpick on every little detail in the Scriptures, they will have a lot of occasions to do so. It is quite easy to find apparent contradictions by interpreting the Bible in a way that is suited to your goal. It is not, however, a proof that the Bible contradicts itself, as it relies on a specific interpretation. When it come to religious matters, very few things can be proven or disproven.
The way I see it, Christian faith is about being humble. You can't find God if you read the Bible with a self-righteous, know-it-all attitude, trying to disprove it line by line. I found this[1] page to explain this point of view quite well.
You cannot apply the principles of science to metaphysical matters, because science concerns itself purely with the physical, tangible world, and has no answers to offer regarding its origins, its meaning, etc. Science and faith do not contradict each other; rather, they complement each other. I like to think of myself as a highly rational individual; mathematics and programming, for example, delight me. Yet I have no issue believing that the Bible is true, and that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the creator of the Universe. Does that make me a fool? In the eyes of some, yes. Is it possible to be cognitively biased in a specific area yet highly rational in others? Absolutely. But to say that reason precludes faith is simply incorrect.
I'm not trying to disprove the Bible. I'm trying to disprove the notion that Christianity is somehow "Evidence Based". You mention faith, not nitpicking, etc. Or, in short, you're pointing out that it's "Faith Based"...which I have no qualms with.
> what is impossible to an all-powerful God who created the laws of physics themselves?
How about logical impossibilities and contradictions? Can God create copies of himself, or split himself into multiple aspects, such as into the Greek gods? If not, then God must be limited to logical possibilities. If yes, then any and all explanations are equally valid, so God is literally meaningless.
> science concerns itself purely with the physical, tangible world
That's not even remotely true. Physics constantly plays with metaphysical models, and it keeps the ones with explanatory power that can be mapped to observable phenomena.
> I like to think of myself as a highly rational individual
There's an alternative explanation here somewhere, but my highly irrational mind is having a hard time seeing the truth.
How do you reconcile this with the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and love? And don't say that Catholics don't count as Christian: St. Paul himself names these three virtues as the three abiding things, in that passage that everyone reads at weddings.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.