SBNR: system-free monism? | Meaningness
Spiritual but not religious (SBNR) often seems to mean system-free monism: All Is One, but for no specific reason.| Meaningness
Spiritual but not religious (SBNR) often seems to mean system-free monism: All Is One, but for no specific reason.| Meaningness
Stances—responses to meaning—are unstable thought-patterns. Often we adopt several contradictory ones in rapid succession.| Meaningness
Meaning and meaninglessness, pattern and nebulosity all obviously exist—yet we resist recognizing and admitting this. Why?| Meaningness
Geeks,| mrsteinberg.com
Hope is harmful in devaluing the present and shifting attention to imaginary futures that may never exist.| Meaningness
Five confused attitudes to life purpose, as an introduction to meaningness.| Meaningness
How—and why!—countercultures sought to reform psychologies and polities: to counteract alienation, anxiety, and anomie.| Meaningness
Failure to find new foundations for meaning, to recognize diversity, to provide community, and to transcend opposition: all doomed counterculturalism.| Meaningness
Distinguishing irrational, anti-rational, and meta-rational critiques of rationalism helps reply effectively.| Meta-rationality
Adding new comments is disabled for now.| meaningness.com
How and why modernity failed. All systems of meaning—religious, political, artistic, psychological—began to fall apart. Nihilism seemed the only alternative.| Meaningness
Fluidity addresses the atomization of culture, society, and self with ships that sail the sea of meaning: collaborative, improvised, intimate, and playful.| Meaningness
The 1960s-80s countercultures abandoned rationality because they believed it negated all meaning. They were wrong.| Meaningness
The hippies and the Moral Majority both tried to rescue systematic eternalism—and failed. We live amongst their wreckage.| Meaningness
I want a God / That stays dead / Not plays dead| Vividness
Romantic rebellion does not seriously try to overthrow the system; it is faux-heroic posturing. It can be harmful, but also inspires great art.| Meaningness
Materialism says that only mundane purposes like money, sex, and power count. It wrongly rejects higher purposes—but those too are not ultimate.| Meaningness
Dividing purposes into higher and mundane, mission pursues higher ends and rejects pragmatism; materialism seeks only selfish goals. Both are mistakes.| Meaningness
Available ethical theories are either eternalist or nihilist; both are useless. We must recognize that ethics are both nebulous and meaningful.| Meaningness
Meaning cannot be either objective or subjective. But meaning does exist: as interaction.| Meaningness
Adding new comments is disabled for now.| meaningness.com
Understanding why nihilism became silly may improve your attitude to life considerably.| Buddhism for Vampires
Its methods yield mainly wrong or nonsensical conclusions. We can and should do better.| meaningness.substack.com
Current AI results from experimental variation of mechanisms, unguided by theoretical principles. That has produced systems that can do amazing things. On the other hand, they are extremely error-prone and therefore unsafe. Backpropaganda, a collection of misleading ways of talking about “neural networks,” justifies continuing in this misguided direction.| Better without AI
Adding new comments is disabled for now.| meaningness.com
A glossary of unfamiliar words, and words used in uncommon ways, on this site.| Meta-rationality
A positive and realistic vision for the future of society, culture, and self, drawing lessons from recent history.| Meaningness
Over the past century, systems of meaning gradually disintegrated, and a series of new modes of meaningness developed.| Meaningness
The culture war, political polarization, Baby Boomer bafflement: the unending zombie slugfest pairing the two countercultures of the 1960s-80s.| Meaningness
Adding new comments is disabled for now.| meaningness.com
Wonder at the vastness, beauty, and intricacy of the phenomenal world: a texture of the complete stance.| Meaningness
Open-ended curiosity gives you the freedom to interact with the world without metaphysical presuppositions.| Meaningness
Adding new comments is disabled for now.| meaningness.com
A bridge from systematic rationality to fluid meta-rational understanding may be necessary to prevent civilizational collapse.| Meta-rationality
It is attractive to think that we each have a unique, transcendent, ultimate purpose in life. Unfortunately, this belief is both false and harmful.| Meaningness
Tara Isabella Burton on Silicon Valley’s Endarkenment| The New Atlantis
Adding new comments is disabled for now.| meaningness.com
Wistful certainty is a ploy for reinforcing eternalism based on the thought that there must exist whatever it takes to make eternalism seem to work.| Meaningness
Defining the subject matter: rationality, rationalism, reasonableness, and meta-rationality.| Meta-rationality
Systems of society, culture, and the self were the foundation of the modern world. Their glories have passed.| Meaningness
Reconfiguring categories, properties, and relationships is a meta-rational skill—key in scientific revolutions.| Meta-rationality
Explore the ideas of Meaningness in greater depth by reading the books that inspired it| Meaningness
Modernity was built on certainty in science and mathematics. That was revealed as delusional during the early 20th century.| Meaningness
The rationalist theory of justified action leads to nihilism. Understand your activity as a vivid, variegated landscape instead.| Meaningness
Nihilistic claims about subjectivity, inherent meaning, universal meaning, and scientific objectivity do not hold up.| Meaningness
Intuitions of “cosmic meaning” root in hunger for personal significance, and in encounters with vastness.| Meaningness
Meanings come and go; they are not eternally stable—and that is fine.| Meaningness
The many justifications for nihilism rely on a handful of mistaken patterns of reasoning.| Meaningness
Recognizing meaninglessness requires unusual intelligence, courage, and toughness. Nihilist elitism renders you stupid, cowardly, and helpless, though.| Meaningness
A world of total license: the catastrophe some fear if nihilistic views become widespread.| Meaningness
“Nihilism is inevitable, but not a problem.” This is mistaken: it makes you miserable and ineffective, and erodes social and cultural capacity.| Meaningness
Nihilism promises you don’t have to care, because nothing means anything. But you do care—and you can’t escape that.| Meaningness
Are you adult enough to accept that the world offers no absolute guarantees?| Meaningness
It's natural to react to meta-rationalism with skepticism or hostility initially. You may come to delight in it.| Meta-rationality
Your post on the different stances mostly focused on ideation, regarding what goes on individually in relation to meaningness. I imagine that, for most of us, this cognitive process is habitual and out of awareness. That led me to think about the stances’ effect on behaviour, how that propels our flip-flopping from one to another - and how it might be a key to recognising our own underlying stances. This could be confusing: behaviours derived from a stance often appear to mean, and are r...| meaningness.com
“Black magic” can be liberating in the real (non-magical) world, if you have been brought up in an excessively narrow moral code.| Buddhism for Vampires
A surreal, postmodern review of Ken Wilber’s book Boomeritis, which seems to be about my work at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.| Meta-rationality
I ain’t against gods and goddesses, in their place. But they’ve got to be the ones we make ourselves. Then we can take ’em to bits for the parts when we don’t need ’em anymore, see?| Vividness
