I've always weary regarding this site because of all the specific technical terms the author seems to have created. But I see it posted a lot here.
Is "meaningness" as a philosophy worth checking out? Can anybody summarize it for me?
Is "meaningness" as a philosophy worth checking out? Can anybody summarize it for me?
It’s clearly trying to recapture a more positive philosophical mood as a bit of an antidote to the current trend of deconstruction. But whether it is a true and useful return to the pursuit of the “good life” or a naive attempt to cast aside the perils of grand narratives to return uselessly to a simpler time is, of course, a subjective opinion.
I’m rather sentimental myself and I believe a lot has been lost with today’s cynical postmodern-inspired philosophical trends, but I imagine those who think the work of deconstructing colonializing narratives that only soothe the already mostly comfortable is not yet complete are experiencing profound eye rolling whenever this stuff shows up on HN.
Do you know of anyone else doing anything similar in the space?
You could also put folks like Jordan Peterson in this bucket, but IMO he seems more interested in resurrecting (pun intended) Christianity in modern form rather than exploring entirely new frames.
Enlightenment brings aesthetic changes, "mountains and rivers without end", not only moral ones, and these new aesthetics answer many of the critical questions left by post-structuralism about the implosion of meaning in relativism: while reality may be relative, the beauty which emerges from the open, curious, aware mind of the tantric practitioner rebuilds meaning-ness as an aesthetic value.
(David Chapman thinks this is an acceptable description)
1) the mind's model of reality is relative, but we can only ever model reality as a whole inside of our own minds - reality as a whole is unknowable, even in principle.
This doesn't mean we can't know, for sure, quite a lot about specific subsets of reality: "is there milk in the fridge?" has a good, precise answer, but "what's it all about then?" does not.
But our answers to "what's it all out then?" shape our ideas about our lives, which in turn shape our behavior. So our answers to these "questions without answers" actually heavily impact our lives over the long run.
2) Meaningness is an aesthetic value in that it is perceived in things and situations, and can be created intentionally at times. The sense of purpose and significance, of rightness and beauty, may be fleeting, but they are as objectively real as musical harmony but with this principle applied across the entire field of awareness. A similarly broad concept might be "well-proportioned", which can apply to almost anything in almost any area, and "you know it when you see it."
How's that?
Let me preface the following: I've really enjoyed my time with this work and it's highly recommended if you're interested in these questions. We're all building up ad-hoc models of the world in our heads so I doubt anyone who takes these questions seriously would agree 100%.
My problem with it is that it ignores the observer - we are pattern matchers and we're drawn to find patterns by biological processes. The pleasing aesthetic of meaningness is part of a neurological reward system to find patterns. We could think of meaningness in terms of information theory, but there are no true patterns that always repeat exactly, even patterns themselves are transient (the nebulous nature he refers to). That implies to me we're soft matching local patterns in an ultimately global noisey environment. I'm still struggling to see how meaningness is different than existentialism, and feel he straw-mans existentialism a bit to make it different than his own framework. I love the definition of meaningness, it's the most complete definition of that fuzzy feeling that we all get some times and I would expect it would have value in psychology or understanding brain structure, but I have doubts it "means" anything outside the context of our consciousness.
But maybe that's outside the scope of this work, and he's not interested in meaning in a cosmic sense, but rather in the personal.
Nice keyboards!
Is it worth checking out? emphatic yes
Summarize? I will try, and probably not do a great job; I'm still digesting it.
The world is both "nebulous" [1] and patterned; observed patterns aren't really out there so much as a combination of "there" and in our mind. Some of these patterns are incredibly useful. One pattern is "the rational / modern world view", which lets science work. It is very good, but not complete.
Post-modernism noticed that no pattern is a perfect fit on the partially-nebulous world, and went nowhere with that, and ended up in a nihilistic, bad place. That isn't good.
The goal is to see patterns as useful, conventional truths, not ultimate truths. Then you can pick the right pattern / conceptual framework with which to approach a given situation.
In all seriousness, that is becoming one of my guiding principles (along with "divisions into categories are models"), so maybe I should pay more attention to this dude, except that he really is kind of hard to follow sometimes...
I would highly recommend reading Chapter 3-5 (Epistemology) of Objectivism by Leonard Piekoff. It's a much more logical and easy to understand take on these same ideas.
They want to avoid all the baggage that old expressions accumulate over the centuries and start fresh.