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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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Meaningness/on values

08 Mar 2025 - 08 Mar 2025
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    • 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.