Meaningness
meaningness.com
meaningness.com
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 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.
Or at least that's how I see it.
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...
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.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.
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.
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/731
(Frost, "Maple")
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)
wget -r -l 1 -k -p https://meaningness.com/; ebook-convert meaningness.com/index.html meaningness.epubhttps://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-...
As a STEM major who has studied critical theory and postmodern thinkers, I laughed really hard at this. (because I think it's ridiculous).
> 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.
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.
If a creature starts talking about having purpose, that usually means the creature's own purpose, not purpose assigned to it by something else.
I imagine nxc1 had the latter in mind, not the former.
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.
...
> 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.
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?
[1] ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AITR-802.pdf
"Soon after, I realized that AI was a dead end, and left the field."
His bluntness and pith there are refreshing anyway.
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)
It feels very...Chopra. I don't know. Maybe the content makes up for it, but I would be very wary of proceeding.
(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)
[0]: https://meaningness.com/fundamentalism-countercultural-moder... [1]: https://meaningness.com/countercultures-fail [2]: https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
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:
http://newpossibilitiesassociates.com/uploads/9_levels_of_in...
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'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.
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.
I'm not sure that makes any sense at all: silly language
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)'.
And if that makes him cry, I'm OK with that. Consider it retribution for all the junk he's shoveled out.
> 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.”
https://meaningness.com/metablog/stem-fluidity-bridge
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.
Wouldn't that a bit of an unreasonable demand anyway, given the vastness of philosphy?
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.
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.
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?
('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)
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 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).
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".
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.
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).
Based on his opening will I read this? No.
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.
in particular he has written extensively about Buddhism and speaking personally I think he has a fascinating heterodox perspective on the subject.
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.
The commentators pointed all of them out though.
And Ecclesiastes addresses the problem of meaninglessness.
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.
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).
This idealism as opposed to materialism seems to be prominent throughout what I've skimmed of this site.
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.
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.
[1] https://sites.google.com/site/shkrobius/inthebeginning....
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.
What's the problem?
> grass precedes light
verse 3: And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
verse 11: Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation . . . "
Really?
> 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.
This has the verses laid out in a way that's easy to follow: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1/
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.
[1]: http://www.christiananswers.net/q-comfort/contradictions-bib...
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.
(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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, that's not the case here, as he does explain why both of these are actually wrong.
We get it. It's mediocre.
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.
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.
Sounds like HN to me.