Meaningness

by espeed • 10 years ago

189 126 10 years ago

Is this on topic?

JadeNB• 10 years 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.

JCzynski2• 10 years 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.

myth_drannon• 10 years ago

I think it is related to the many comments in "On Getting Older in Tech" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136060

Our software development work is meaningless in the grand scheme of life.

gkya• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

Pessimism absolves the thinking classes of ideas...

yarrel• 10 years ago

From a quick skim, it has the potential to become a GTD-style geek cult. So yes-ish.

abrichr• 10 years 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

surrealize• 10 years ago

"A work in progress, consisting of a hypertext book and a metablog that comments on it."

Sounds like HN to me.

scandox4• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

That may be. Here seems to be the heart of the argument:

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?

EdwardCoffin2• 10 years 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

[3] https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think

scandox4• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

This seems to happen a lot when accomplished academics from other fields discover philosophy.

jolux11• 10 years ago

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.

https://meaningness.com/fixation-and-denial/comments

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)

youdontknowtho2• 10 years ago

I think you got this one nailed.

It feels very...Chopra. I don't know. Maybe the content makes up for it, but I would be very wary of proceeding.

ashark3• 10 years ago

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)

Analemma_3• 10 years ago

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.

[0] https://meaningness.com/fundamentalism-countercultural-moder... [1]: https://meaningness.com/countercultures-fail [2]: https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history

jolux11• 10 years ago

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

sago• 10 years ago

tl;dr, but concluded it is sophomoric rubbish?

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.

trosh• 10 years ago

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).

scandox4• 10 years ago

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".

hosh• 10 years ago

I don't agree with all of Chapman's work or thesis, but I usually enjoy his writings and blog post immensely :-D

metaphorm2• 10 years ago

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.

scandox4• 10 years ago

Indeed you have skewered me there. But really I'm not dismissing his work. I'm doing what slushpile readers might call editorial triage.

Based on his opening will I read this? No.

cgag• 10 years ago

Classic sophomoric dismissal.

samirillian3• 10 years ago

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"

mbrock2• 10 years ago

Chapman was involved in some of the earlier collision between AI optimism and Heidegger's critique of cognitivism (via Dreyfus).

AnimalMuppet2• 10 years ago

Off the top of my head Heidegger pretty directly engages the problem of meaning.

And Ecclesiastes addresses the problem of meaninglessness.

scythe• 10 years ago

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.

projektir7• 10 years ago

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.

dingdingdang2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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

dingdingdang2• 10 years ago

Thanks, great one-liner!

Analemma_3• 10 years ago

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

ashark3• 10 years 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

(Frost, "Maple")

yks• 10 years 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.

EdwardCoffin2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

jolux11• 10 years ago

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

Zelmor2• 10 years ago

That the author has not heard of the latter.

mbrock2• 10 years ago

That's uncharitable and definitely incorrect.

nxc18• 10 years 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.

projektir7• 10 years 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_tower4• 10 years 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...

orasis5• 10 years 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-...

danharaj3• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

I'd be interested in reading your critique.

Zelmor2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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

combatentropy4• 10 years ago

In 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).

danharaj3• 10 years 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_tower4• 10 years 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)? 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• 10 years 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.

tyingq4• 10 years ago

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.

smhost4• 10 years ago

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.

clock_tower4• 10 years ago

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...

samirillian3• 10 years ago

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.

combatentropy4• 10 years ago

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?

clock_tower4• 10 years ago

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.

nickstefan123• 10 years 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.

smhost4• 10 years 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.

nickstefan123• 10 years 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.

justinmk• 10 years ago

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.

projektir7• 10 years ago

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.

nickstefan123• 10 years ago

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!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_dis...

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?

I like this quote attributed to Kant: "Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for".

praveer13• 10 years ago

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.

openfuture• 10 years ago

My solution: Just take responsibility for your actions and everything else falls into place.

jv22222• 10 years ago

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.

pasquinelli• 10 years ago

"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.

spyckie2• 10 years 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.

hasbroslasher2• 10 years 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

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