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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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...

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)'.

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.

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.

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)

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