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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Meaningness, Nihilism, and Me
  • I'm generally a big fan of Meaningness but on a few things I find myself disagreeing, or objecting for reasons that I can't quite articulate. Often this is when he touches on politics, I think we just have different orientations on that. Sometimes his stuff seems a bit oversimplified or schematic or reductive.
    • To put it in your own terminology, you read to me as overly patterned and insufficiently nebulous. But that is no doubt just be a reflection of my own biases.
from Nihil Unbound
  • Meaningness does not like:
from free will
  • Meaningness has almost exactly the same take as I do A philosophical zombie | Buddhism for Vampires
    • Some physicalists (most famously, Daniel Dennett) argue that we are all zombies. There is no what-it-is-like to see a glowing red LED. Your brain registers the fact that it is red, but there’s no “subjective experience” apart from that brain event. And, it couldn’t be any other way; so zombies are, in fact, inconceivable. The implications of his claim are, like everything else in this tangle, unclear.
    • I’ve wrestled with these problems for decades, and I can’t make any sense of them. All the possible solutions to the mind-body problem seem wrong...Generally, I think pretty clearly, and am pretty smart. So I figure anyone who thinks they aren’t confused about this, is probably so confused they don’t realize they are confused... My guess is that the problem is wrong. It asks a question that inherently makes no sense.
from Heidegger
  • A big influence on Meaningness and Phil Agre and thus indirectly on me. But I also have a pretty deep resistance; the man was a Nazi, and when the anti-rationalism starts to shade into fascism that's where I get off the train.
from Hegel
from Nihilism and Agency
  • Despite the sermons against nihilism of Meaningness, this feels bad. It's not a question of whether we should feel "very, very sad"
    Maybe it's this: "We don’t have any of these extra-special fancy meanings, and we can’t get them. Should we be very, very sad?" (I know you are just quoting that article) but it should be obvious that sadness precedes any philosophical conclusions
    , or not, that's how we feel, and we aren't going to be argued out of it.
from Existentialism
  • The Meaningness take: Sartre’s ghost and the corpse of God | Meaningness
    • Money graf:
      • Existentialism supposes the meaning lives inside your head (so it is subjective, internal, and individual). This is also wrong. I will explain later why meanings logically can’t be subjective. They also can’t be individual: they are inherently social. Also, we don’t have perfectly free will to choose meanings. We are constrained by, and unavoidably depend upon, biology and society and culture.
    • I'm not sure this is an accurate characterization of existentialism, which was about social commitment, not mere subjectivity?
    • More:
      • ...But existentialism conclusively failed half a century ago, so the word sounds quaint and dated, and most people who adopt it now don’t realize that’s what they are doing. Many think they’ve invented a clever personal philosophy—with no clue why it won’t work....If you seriously attempt existentialism, you will fail. You cannot create your own meanings.
from Eugene Thacker
  • Yow. Ah Meaningness has an opinion
    • This theory was developed by Suzuki together with the Kyoto School. That was a group of Japanese philosophy professors, founded by a close friend of Suzuki’s, devoted to synthesizing Buddhist and Western philosophy. Their work was world-class—brilliant. Unfortunately, the main Western philosophy they chose to integrate with Buddhism was German Romantic Idealism. That philosophy is long-since discredited in the Western world. It is also, in my personal opinion, mostly wrong and harmful. Suzuki presented this mash-up as the original, true, pure Zen; but also as not particularly Buddhist. Zen was, instead, the mystical essence of all religions; just as much a part of Christianity as of Buddhism.
from Discordianism
  • It occurs to me that the Meaningness presentation of pattern and nebulouse is exactly this, without the humor. But I suppose the original Discordians got it from Buddhism.
from atheism
  • Ah I see Meaningness has written on the incoherence of "existence":
    • One remarkable feature of the “existence” concept is that essentially no one—in either the Buddhist or Western traditions—even tries to explain what it is supposed to mean. It’s assumed that everyone knows—but no one can say. The harder you look into it, the less coherent and consequential the idea becomes. (I plan to write about this at length someday; there’s a stub version here.)
from Luddism
from nebulosity
  • Nebulosity is a term introduced
    introduced to me, that is, he didn't invent it.
    by Meaningness to indicate a certain set of qualities of our experience:
from goddinpotty/TODOs
  • TODO Bug sidenotes in backlinks come out badly, should probably just omit. Example on page Meaningness, there's a backlink from nebulosity (note: thought I fixed this but its still there)
from nihilism
  • Meaningness has a lot to say about nihilism. It's one side of the false dichotomy he aims to overcome (eternalism being the opposite error). To him, it's a stance, a posture people take towards the problem of making sense of their lives. He provides a detailed story about the dynamics of the nihilist stance; why people fall into it; how they escape out of it.
from Weird Studies/Joshua Ramey
  • If they are the eternalist and nihilist versions of the same thing: what is that thing? And is there a complete version? (I'm adopting Meaningness jargon)
from Shinzen
  • His book The Science of Enlightenment was recommended to me by Meaningness, but something about it was offputting – he is in fact trying to mix science and spirituality, but I guess I prefer them separate, my science-nerd brain and my meditation brain are too different. Eg – I am very taken with the paradoxical quality of meditation, that it is purposeless, that one should not have "gaining ideas", that you are already enlightened. Maybe that's all bullshit though? Shinzen's theory is much more straightforward: meditation is pracrice in being focused, a learnable skill which is of great value in life, the ultimate metaskill.
from algebraic!
  • May be related to structuralism, although I never really understood what that was all about to be honest, whereas algebraic is something deeply felt. GOFAI tends towards the algebraic: Cyc, but even more Meaningness's early work cognitive cliches
from sacred
  • Meaningness on No holiness—vastness! | Vividness
    • Almost every culture, religion, ideology, or world-view holds some things as sacred, pure, holy, or unquestionably true—and others as profane, unclean, or taboo. Among the few exceptions are Zen and Dzogchen. They hold that there is nothing that is inherently sacred. (This ought to be an obvious consequence of the Heart Sutra—but most Buddhists do not see it that way.) If you spend enough time with Zen or Dzogchen teachers, it is certain that they will at some point roast your sacred cows—whatever they are. Because nothing is inherently sacred, anything and everything can be experienced as sacred.
from 2023 Year End Review/Part 2
  • Tried to pick an argument with Meaningness about the reality of values
from Ultimate Meaning: We Don't Have It, We Can't Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad
  • Meaningness has weighed in: No meaning of life as a whole | Meaningness. He identifies Weinberg's stance as "lite nihilism" and his own view is expectedly more sensible:
    • First, “a project” is an optional technique for viewing patterns in your activity in order to rationalize it. There is no objective truth about whether or not something “is” a project. Sometimes it’s useful to view some things you are doing as a project, to better organize them; sometimes it’s not... Is it a good idea to view your entire life as a single overall project? Weinberg says that if you do, it should result in your being very, very sad. I think she’s probably right. So I recommend that you don’t do that.
    • I'd quibble with this; I think some people do manage to conceptualize their life as a project and that's just fine for them and may even be essential for cultural progress. The problems come from thinking you are obligated to do that.
from Is Technology Magic?
from Words of Power
  • book by Andrea Nye. A feminist critique of logic (as in philosophical logic). I remember reading this back in grad school when I was souring on logic, for not particularly feminist reasons, but it helped build the case. Probably got the ref from Agre or Chapman.
from Play
  • And according to the Buddhism-inflected theory of Meaningness, play is an important part of the complete stance, one of the textures of experience that comprise it.
    • Play is nebulous patterns of control, where eternalism promises complete control
    • Enjoyment of the dance of nebulosity and pattern, which is an aspect of play, is the characteristic feeling of the complete stance
from How to (not) think about nihilism
  • Meaningness has a well-elaborated investigation of the dynamics of nihilism – how one is attracted and how one escapes.
    • He falls back on stout pragmatic outrage though. So do I but I am also less convinced of that, sure, I have built a life for myself in the face of nothingness
from How to think about Nazis
  • This desire for moral fixed points is considered Bad by Buddhism, as transmitted via Meaningness:
    • Any fixed belief, or fixed emotional response, is a “reference point.” We use reference points as bricks to build the prison of identity. In meditation, we allow that structure to collapse. When the roof falls in, we see the boundless sky. That is the vastness of nonduality, where purity and impurity are equally meaningless.
from Fenway House
  • Undergrad co-op house at MIT. Where I learned to be a druggie anarchist hacker dude. Other luminaries I knew there include Meaningness George Hart Mike McMahon ("the smartest man in the world" and a founder of Symbolics, I learned a lot from him.). David Feinberg who later became a major gay novelist. John Redford
from 2023 Year End Review
from Meaningness/on values
    • Meaningness is a values-eliminativist
      • Give him the benefit of the doubt, he is not against value as such, just against dumb models of value, against eternalist theories of value that place it at the solid foundations of the cosmos rather than just some stuff we use in our messy lives and necessarily improvise as we go along.
        • You committed to a system because much of it is true and good and useful. You don’t need to abandon your system immediately, or even at all.2 You can own it, instead of its owning you. You can continue to use it as a way of thinking, feeling, and acting—instead of its using you.
        • This seems half-right, half achingly naive and false. Its more accurate to say that ideologies are part of the material we use to construct ourselves. We are more intertwined with them than the language above indicates. He's thinking of things like Marxism or Catholicism; I'm thinking more of things like the bourgeoise individualism that is the actual ideology of our social stratum.
      • Also here
        • The culture war’s justification for itself is that Americans are profoundly split over fundamental values. This is a lie. Mostly everyone wants the same things; but we can’t get them because the Other Side will block any action to bring them about. Everyone urgently wants the healthcare system fixed, but for exactly that reason Mooglebook AI whips the Other Side into a frenzy of opposition
      • Hm OK that is not against values as such, only that they are different. Let's call that conflict-eliminativism (see conflict theory ). He believes in ethics, more or less, so value is implied.
      • OK I get it now, it's kind of a koanic move. More of a provocation than a proposition. Well it worked, I'm provoked.

      • What if he's right?

      • Hm. Well, he doesn't mean there aren't values like "ice cream tastes better than dogshit". Because that would be stupid, wouldn't it? More like, values are not these fixed transcendential immaterial things that somehow drive our real-world decision-making.
from WWCS
from Bowker & Starr, Sorting Things Out
from Meaningness/on values
  • Meaningness is a values-eliminativist
    • Give him the benefit of the doubt, he is not against value as such, just against dumb models of value, against eternalist theories of value that place it at the solid foundations of the cosmos rather than just some stuff we use in our messy lives and necessarily improvise as we go along.
      • You committed to a system because much of it is true and good and useful. You don’t need to abandon your system immediately, or even at all.2 You can own it, instead of its owning you. You can continue to use it as a way of thinking, feeling, and acting—instead of its using you.
      • This seems half-right, half achingly naive and false. Its more accurate to say that ideologies are part of the material we use to construct ourselves. We are more intertwined with them than the language above indicates. He's thinking of things like Marxism or Catholicism; I'm thinking more of things like the bourgeoise individualism that is the actual ideology of our social stratum.
    • Also here
      • The culture war’s justification for itself is that Americans are profoundly split over fundamental values. This is a lie. Mostly everyone wants the same things; but we can’t get them because the Other Side will block any action to bring them about. Everyone urgently wants the healthcare system fixed, but for exactly that reason Mooglebook AI whips the Other Side into a frenzy of opposition
    • Hm OK that is not against values as such, only that they are different. Let's call that conflict-eliminativism (see conflict theory ). He believes in ethics, more or less, so value is implied.
    • OK I get it now, it's kind of a koanic move. More of a provocation than a proposition. Well it worked, I'm provoked.

    • What if he's right?

    • Hm. Well, he doesn't mean there aren't values like "ice cream tastes better than dogshit". Because that would be stupid, wouldn't it? More like, values are not these fixed transcendential immaterial things that somehow drive our real-world decision-making.
from Nil Combustibus Pro Fumo
  • OK this is weird: apparently the MIT Dramashop put on a one-act play based on the time David Chapman blew himself up at Fenway House:
from rationalism
  • David Chapman's (aka Meaningness) efforts to critique rationalism and replace it with a more powerful and realistic metarationality; My own views were deeply influenced by his work, which includes a much more systematic and thorough analysis of the problems of rationalism than anything here.
from postrationalism
  • A difficult to define ideology, but literally means people who have moved beyond Rationalism. Meaningness and Ribbonfarm are usually taken to be postrationalist, and I'm close enough to those precincts that it probably means I am too, although in truth I was probably never Rationalist enough to qualify.
from Buddhism
  • Meaningness sites are a good entry point to Buddhism for the rationalist and postrationalist. Meaningness itself seems to be firmly grounded in Buddhism while getting rid of all the religious machinery. Vividness is more explictly about Buddhism itself.
from Symbol Disease
  • First pointed out to me by Agre and Chapman. Articulated most clearly in that McDermott paper, Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity | ACM SIGART Bulletin
    • As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery. Many critics have urged that we are over the border.
    • Unfortunately, the necessity for speculation has combined with the culture of the hacker in computer science to cripple our self-discipline. In a young field, self-discipline is not necessarily a virtue, but we are not getting any younger.
    • Wishful Mnemonics A major source of simple-mindedness in AI programs is the use of mnemonics like "UNDERSTAND" or "GOAL" to refer to programs and data structures. This practice has been inherited from more traditional programming applications, in which it is liberating and enlightening to be able to refer to program structures by their purposes.
    • Alright I'm in danger of quoting the whole paper so will stop. Very Relevant to My Interests, and interesting to think about in the context of LLMs and vibecoding. It sounds positively quaint to think you can or should think of your program in mechanistic rather than intentional terms.
    • OK one more
    • Charniak <1972> pointed out some approaches to understanding stories, and now the OWL interpreter includes a "story-understanding module". (And, God help us, a toplevel "ego loop". <Sunguroff, 1975>)
from Shantideva
from antiphilosophy
from fluid competence
from free will
  • Meaningness
    • This is wise, but also a bit ... evasive? It evades the problem of moral judgement. I wager he doesn't think much of that either. I am not sure that is honest. We are always making judgements, aesthetic if not moral but the implications are the same.
from How to Meta
  • I really defer to Meaningness on this subject. He has seriously studied it, from many angles. His stuff on Kegan stage theory. metarationality is his current main slogan. He is lifelong Buddhist, and one view of meditation (probably a bad one) is that it is a process of going meta. You observe yourself, or the processes that compose yourself, including the process of observation. It's very meta except meta suggests thought about thought, whereas meditation is definitely not that, it's kind of the opposite, of learning to tamp down all that narcissistic monkeymind reflexivity.
from 2023 Year End Review/Part 2
from stance
  • This idea of a stance is partly inspired by David Chapman aka Meaningness who defines a stance as "a simple, compelling pattern of thinking and feeling". One his important points is that stances trump systems, that is, people's deepest beliefs are best thought of not so much as systematic ideas, but instead as attitudes or patterns of attitudes. Chapman is talking about something fairly specific: "patterns of thinking and feeling about meaningness", where meaningness is his neologism for "problems of value, purpose, and selfhood". His stances are defined in terms of large-scale philosophical positions like nihilism and eternalism. (see stance/meaningness for my attempt to understand his concept of stance).
from How Buildings Learn
  • OK that doesn't quite work, because any mental act requieres the participation of multiple layers. still I think there's something to the idea. Want to run it past Meaningness or some other pundits.
Twin Pages

TwinPages: Flancian

Meaningness

30 Oct 2021 - 03 Mar 2025
Open in Logseq
    • David Chapman (aka @meaningness) has been a major influence on my own thinking. His work at the MIT AI lab with Phil Agre made a deep impression on me when I was trying to figure out my own academic path. This included a critical take on the standard cognitive science view of the mind, which is pretty much Rationalism minus the more cultish and cartoonish aspects.
    • In AI, this manifested as the planning problem. This is a standard AI problem, in which an agent has a desired state and some available actions, as well as access to a representation of the current state of the world. The planning problem is defined as coming up with.a sequence of actions that when executed will achieve the goal. Chapman proved that this problem was computationally intractable, which was pretty significant, but for me the more interesting part of his work was how it led to a critique of the very basic foundations of the cognitive model, including representationalism and the default modularization of mind into perception, cognition, and motor activity.
    • He's taking on Rationalism more directly in his in-progress book on meta-rationality, In the Cells of the Eggplant. This is a systematic critique of the assumptions underlying Rationalism, together with a set of techniques to replace it. If I'm taking potshots at the Temple of Reason, he's mounting a full-scale artillery assault.
    • One aspect of Meaningness that took me awhile to appreciate was that it has a very complex and well-worked out formal structure, and the ideas form a sort of multi-dimensional lattice. There's an extremely simple idea at the core (which is straight out of Buddhism): people tend to fall into two separate, opposed and equally false modes of thought or being: eternalism (in which meaning is well-defined, fixed, and objective) and nihilism (in which there is no meaning whatsoever); and that it's possible to transcend this sterile polarity with better, richer ways of being (completeness). But this ultra-simple idea is elaborated into a precise and structured algebra of being.
    • This complex conceptual structure is striking to me because even though both he and I have a lot of shared background, and are covering some of the same topics, in our own evolving hypertexts (and both building our own toolchains to do so) – the two texts are very different. His seems to have a grand plan; mine really has no plan at all. So while he may write about the virtues of nebulosity; I'm living it. Or it's more like he's done the hard work of opening up this intellectual terrain which give me the freedom to play in it.
    • In other words (a) I owe him a lot, and (b) for many of the topics addressed here, you are likely to be better off reading the more serious and thorough treatment in Meaningness.