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Comment by scandox | Hacker News Reader

> “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.

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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

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.”

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.

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.

> I'm still not sure that he does entirely

Wouldn't that a bit of an unreasonable demand anyway, given the vastness of philosphy?

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.

Thanks for the link. I found it very insightful. I especially like the sublinked exposition on nihilism: https://meaningness.com/nihilism-hardcore-vs-lite

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:

http://newpossibilitiesassociates.com/uploads/9_levels_of_in...

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.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhyamaka

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.

I think we're basically in agreement.

yes, I would say so as well

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).

[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

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.

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.

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.

He's not trying to talk to the philosophers. He's trying to talk to STEM people. So he chooses his writing style and terminology to that end.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

I think you might be very surprised if you read some of the author's other works then. good summary of his work is here:

https://vividness.live/

in particular he has written extensively about Buddhism and speaking personally I think he has a fascinating heterodox perspective on the subject.

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.

The commentators pointed all of them out though.

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?

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

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"

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

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

And Ecclesiastes addresses the problem of meaninglessness.

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 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.

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 think that's actually a great description. Much better than my vague feeling. Thanks.

Classic sophomoric dismissal.

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