Meaningness

I seem to be a fiction

David Chapman — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:33:30 +0000

It’s the perfect postmodern nightmare. You wake up to discover that you are the anti-hero character in a novel. Worse, it is a famously badly written novel. It is, in fact, an endlessly long philosophical diatribe pretending to be a novel. And it uses all the tiresome technical tricks of postmodern fiction. It is convolutedly self-referential; a novel about a novel that is an endlessly long philosophical diatribe pretending to be a novel about a novel about…

I’ve just read Ken Wilber’s Boomeritis. It’s all that.1

And it seems to be about me. I mean, me personally.

The book diagnoses the psychology of a generation. Many readers have said it is about them, in the sense that they are of that generation, and they discovered ruefully that Boomeritis painted an accurate portrait.

But the central character in the book is a student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who discovers Continental philosophy and social theory, realizes that AI is on a fundamentally wrong track, and sets about reforming the field to incorporate those other viewpoints.

That describes precisely two people in the real world: me, and my sometime-collaborator Phil Agre.

1. It’s also brilliant, inspiring, funny, and (in the end) touching. Two thumbs up.

The Big Three stance combinations

David Chapman — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:49:37 +0000

Complex ideologies are based on collections of simple stances: fundamental attitudes toward meaningness. Some stances (addressing different dimensions of meaningness) work together well; others clash. Most systems align with one of three common combinations.

These combinations are:

Dualist eternalism: everything is given a definite meaning by something separate from you. Christianity and Islam are based on this combination; God is what gives everything meaning.
Monist eternalism: you, God, and the universe are a single thing, which is definitely meaningful. Advaita Hinduism is monist and eternalist, as is much current pop spirituality.
Dualist nihilism: we are isolated individuals, wandering in a meaningless universe. Existentialism, postmodernism, and scientism tend to dualist nihilism.

The puzzle of meaningness

David Chapman — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 07:33:50 +0000

Two years ago, well into a mainly happy marriage, you began a secret affair.

The attraction was overwhelming. The sex was scalding. You loved with a passion you had never felt before.

Your lover—also married—understood parts of you that your spouse did not. You were able to be a different person. You explored aspects of your personality that you had never been able to express before. You made different sorts of jokes. You went on adventurous dates, trying things your spouse—who you knew was sweet but a bit dull when you got married—would never have agreed to do.

After a year and a bit, the passion waned. Your secret meetings began to feel slightly repetitive. You found that your personalities would not be compatible in the long term. You wanted quite different things out of life.

It began to seem you were going through the motions. You had one meaningless fight about nothing. Then you discussed the future, and agreed to end the affair on good terms.

Now, you wonder: what did that mean?

Spiritual smugness

David Chapman — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:05:59 +0000

William James

Rin’dzin Pamo recently pointed out to me one of the most salient (and irritating) features of pop spirituality: its smugness.

“Spiritual but not religious” folks often have a hipster attitude: we’re cool because we get it. People reject the new paradigm just because they are too dull to get it. They are stuck in the old, bad way of thinking, which we saw through ages ago.

It might be helpful to know that the “new” paradigm isn’t; and that hipsters had the same smug attitude about it a hundred years ago.

Pattern

David Chapman — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 05:42:10 +0000

On the last page, I explained that meanings, like clouds, are nebulous: intangible, non-separable, transient, amorphous, and ambiguous. Meanings are also more or less patterned: reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite.

Nebulosity and pattern might seem to contradict each other, but almost always they come together. Meaning is usually nebulous to some extent, and patterned to some extent.

It can be hard to accept that meaningness is a matter of degree, not either/or. This book is about the confusions that come from assuming meaning must be either totally patterned, or entirely non-existent.

Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics

David Chapman — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:13:30 +0000

The Who—Won’t Get Fooled Again

Wavering nihilism is the defiant determination not to get fooled again. Having been swindled over and over by eternalism, the nihilist stance refuses to acknowledge even the most obvious manifestations of meaningfulness—lest they, too, turn out to be illusory.

Betrayal and loss

Eternalism makes seductive promises: that you are always loved, that the universe is in good order, that right and wrong can be known for certain, that your suffering has meaning, that you have a special role in creation, that there will be cosmic justice after death.

When you have been disappointed often enough, you start to realize these sweet lies are poison. Such grand promises cannot be kept. Discovering that you have been betrayed by eternalism, and have lost out on the promises it made, is a horrendous emotional blow.

Spam from God

David Chapman — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 05:03:33 +0000

Nihilism begins with the intelligent recognition that you have been conned by eternalism.

Schematic overview: all dimensions

David Chapman — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 23:16:09 +0000

This page is a schematic overview of the main part of this book. It briefly describes the various stances one can take to each of the dimensions of meaningness.

Dr. Bronner’s monist soap

David Chapman — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:25:03 +0000

I use and recommend this stuff.

Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating

David Chapman — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:00:43 +0000

A stance is a basic attitude toward meaningness. A stance is a tool for understanding, from which you may act. This pages defines a series of terms that describe ways you can take up such a tool.