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
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The 1960s-80s countercultures abandoned rationality because they believed it negated all meaning. They were wrong.| 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
The hippie counterculture was structurally and functionally similar to the Moral Majority Christian Right counterculture a decade later.| Meaningness
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
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
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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
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
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
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
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
Are you adult enough to accept that the world offers no absolute guarantees?| Meaningness
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
