In some sense, yeah, “life is inherently meaningless” and “living beings are just machines.” However, I am still struggling to wrap my head around the objectivity of aesthetics, meaning and morality. Information is now widely considered physical (refer to papers by R Landauer and D Deutsch). Maybe someday, we will once and for all incorporate aesthetics, meaning and morality under physicalism. If minds are physical, and aesthetics, purposes, and morality are real aspects of minds, then wouldn’t that imply that they are therefore objective notions? And thus not “meaningless”?
This is a gnarly rabbit hole, and I am not qualified to talk about this topic. I recently read Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons” to gain a deeper grasp of these topics and it’s a stunning and precious book, but I need to do more work to understand all this. I may have to read his magnum opus “On What Matters” to wrap my head around this. We don’t have a proper understanding of minds at this point in time. Developing robust theories about rationality, morality, aesthetics, desires, etc., necessitates actually understanding minds.
As you’ve pointed out, marketing matters. In my view, this is part of the reason why epistemic and instrumental rationalities are distinct aspects of rationality as defined in the sequences. If your goal is to explain an idea to your interlocutor and you can convey the same truth using different wording, with one wording leading to mutual understanding and the other leading to obstinacy, then the instrumentally rational thing to do would be to use the former wording. Here we have a situation where two things are epistemically equivalent but not instrumentally so.
In some sense, yeah, “life is inherently meaningless” and “living beings are just machines.” However, I am still struggling to wrap my head around the objectivity of aesthetics, meaning and morality. Information is now widely considered physical (refer to papers by R Landauer and D Deutsch). Maybe someday, we will once and for all incorporate aesthetics, meaning and morality under physicalism. If minds are physical, and aesthetics, purposes, and morality are real aspects of minds, then wouldn’t that imply that they are therefore objective notions? And thus not “meaningless”?
This is a gnarly rabbit hole, and I am not qualified to talk about this topic. I recently read Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons” to gain a deeper grasp of these topics and it’s a stunning and precious book, but I need to do more work to understand all this. I may have to read his magnum opus “On What Matters” to wrap my head around this. We don’t have a proper understanding of minds at this point in time. Developing robust theories about rationality, morality, aesthetics, desires, etc., necessitates actually understanding minds.
As you’ve pointed out, marketing matters. In my view, this is part of the reason why epistemic and instrumental rationalities are distinct aspects of rationality as defined in the sequences. If your goal is to explain an idea to your interlocutor and you can convey the same truth using different wording, with one wording leading to mutual understanding and the other leading to obstinacy, then the instrumentally rational thing to do would be to use the former wording. Here we have a situation where two things are epistemically equivalent but not instrumentally so.