We should do something about this meme that “meaning” has to be associated with “believing in ontologically basic mental things”.
That is not easy. The meaning of a sentence equals the intent of the speaker. “The meaning of life” means something somewhere making our lives with an intent, for a purpose. It does not have to be ontologically basic—if it turned out we live in a simulation, brains in vats, in a grand experiment, that would at least explain an immediate intent. However then we would worry about the meaning of the lives of the experimenters themselves, trying to reduce it to some intent outside them. So at the end of the day, the only satisfactory meaning-of-life would be an ontologically basic intent from an ontologically basic mind. Divorcing these two from each other is not easy.
Quite frankly I don’t have an optimistic solution. I am a natural pessimitist and felt validated when I realized all this. No, there is no meaning to life at all because nothing has ontologically basic intent out there. The optimistic existentialist stuff, that we can “find” meaning in life is equally invalid, we cannot find something that does not exist. We can try to “put” meaning into life i.e. have intents, have goals, but it will never feel as powerful as the people who believe in an intent outside them (providence, fate, karma) feel about it. Let’s just suck it up, there is really no solution here.
The only optimists in this regard are the people who are glad about this all because it means freedom for them. How they decide if something is important still beats me, perhaps they have an internal value function that does not need to borrow terminal goals from an external source.
I wouldn’t feel like the “meaning of life” would be answered if we turned out to be brains in vats or whatever created with a specific purpose in mind. Notwithstanding the fact that they obviously have a lot of power to punish or reward me, why should I even care what they think?
To me it seems the answer would have to be an independent ontologically basic intent, but then I’m not entirely sure I should care about even that. So a satisfactory “meaning of life” might be impossible even in principle, which I think gives a lot more credibility to the existentialists.
The only optimists in this regard are the people who are glad about this all because it means freedom for them. How they decide if something is important still beats me, perhaps they have an internal value function that does not need to borrow terminal goals from an external source.
An answer I wrote in response to a related question
Does atheism necessarily lead to nihilism? (I think so, in the grand scheme of things? But the world/our species means something to us, and that’s enough, right?)
was:
No. Atheism does remove one set of symbol-behavior-chains in your mind, yes. But a complex mind will most likely lock into another better grounded set of symbol-behavior-chains that is not nihilistic but—depending on your emotional setup—somehow connected to terminal values and acting on that.
In a way you compartmentalize the though if missing meaning away as kind of unhelpful noise (that’s how I phrased it on the LWCW). This is not unreasonable (ahem) - after all the search for meaning is itself meaningless for a conscious process that has evolved in this meaningless environment.
Well, this locking does not really seem to work well for me. I know that ideal terminal values should be along the lines of wanting other people to be happy, but I really struggle to go from the fact that some signals in some brains are labelled happiness to the value that these signals matter. Since I have a typically depressive personality, not really caring about myself being happy, I cannot really care about others being happy as well and thus terminal values are not found. The struggle is largely that if certain brain signals like happiness are not inherently marked with little XML tags “yes you should care about this” where does the should, the value come from?
The closest thing I can get is something similar to nationalism extended over all humankind—we all are 22nd cousins or something so let’s be allies and face this cold cruel lifeless universe together or something similarly sentimental. But it isn’t a terminal value, it is more like a bit of a feeling of affection. A true utilitarian would even care about a sentient computer being happy, or a sentient computer suffering or dying, and I just cannot figure out why.
Since I have a typically depressive personality, not really caring about myself being happy, I cannot really care about others being happy as well and thus terminal values are not found.
Well. Thinking about it I realize that for your kind of personality a falling back to carng and following goals indeed doesn’t seem necessary. On the other hand the arbitrariness of nihilism isn’t that different from the passivity from depression—so in a way maybe you already did lock back into the same pattern anyway?
He is also running to be U.S. President, briefly posted on LW, and wrote an Amazon review of my book. He has managed to get lots of publicity for transhumanism, and I think on net will do tranhumanism lots of good.
I have a problem with how easily people can position themselves as authority figures in social movements which lack competition or standards to vet the candidates. A genuinely capable person might emerge regardless, but more through good luck than through a good process.
For example, Madalyn Murray O’Hair became America’s most famous atheist in the 1960′s and 1970′s because no one else wanted the job, not because she excelled at it compared with competitors. A mediocre but extroverted and opinionated woman willing to take risks could step into the void of the time and assume that title. Even during her life, many other atheists never bought into her cult of personality and considered her a charlatan.
By contrast, in today’s world, when many atheists have become minor celebrities, often with best selling books, and when atheists even in hick towns like Tulsa’s Seth Andrews can attract followings around the world by setting up websites and uploading podcasts and videos, Madalyn with that kind of competition wouldn’t necessarily stand out as particularly noteworthy.
I see a similar situation with today’s transhumanist scene. Any newcomer on the make with the right sort of personality (the sort I don’t have), willing to exploit social media to present controversial ideas as transhumanist philosophy, could persuade other people into accepting him as a transhumanist authority figure in a relatively short time. It would help if objective standards emerged to assess who deserves this kind of status and who doesn’t.
Now, Zoltan Istvan might do something eventually to show that he has the goods. In the meantime I have misgivings about his activities.
How sure are you that O’Hair became the speaker for American atheism because no one else wanted the job rather than because the media focused on her because she was annoying?
not because she excelled at it compared with competitors. A mediocre but extroverted and opinionated woman willing to take risks could step into the void of the time and assume that title.
Sounds like you described her “excelling at it compared with competitors” exactly one sentence after that sentence. Sure she might not have been the best that the movement could take a hold of but according to that description she did excel at it compared to her competitors.
Can you be more clear about what you meant to say?
O’Hair really is an interesting minor historical figure and also probably was the worst spokesperson American atheism possibly could have had, at least after the death of Jim Jones. She at one point attempted to defect to the Soviet Union because she approved of its official state atheism (which included brutal persecution of Christians, of course.) The Soviets rejected her, having been burned by western militant-atheist defectors before, like the Jonestown crew and of course, Lee Harvey Oswald. She also deliberately antagonized members of the media and publicly disowned her son when he converted to Christianity.
Okay, think of the movie version of The Blue Lagoon. It doesn’t work as a “love story,” because with only one boy and one girl on the island, they don’t have any alternative. They wind up in a sexual relationship by default, not because the boy has to compete with other boys to seduce the girl.
In Madalyn’s case, no one else wanted to become the country’s public face of atheism, so she managed to step into that role without having to push anyone else out of the way. And she managed to draw attention to herself afterwards because she lacked social anxiety and she said and did outrageous things which made her news-worthy, like filing harassing lawsuits against local governments for alleged breaches of church-state separation. Her boldness didn’t make her especially effective or look very competent. Instead many other atheists considered her a buffoon.
Since she was killed and mutilated by a fellow atheist, are you implying no one wanted her job because so many atheists are killers and associating with fellow atheists is dangerous?
You mean the ringleader, who the organization initially hired as a typesetter? That would be evidence of atheism, had he not joined with the intent of robbing the place. And he had this to say about his victim, according to this site:
“To simply label Madalyn an atheist, racist, homophobe, anti-Semite, etc., would be a tremendous misnomer. To her dubious credit, Madalyn Mays Murray O’Hair is an equal opportunity bigot, whose loathing of humanity is evenly dispensed without partiality.”
But sure, it’s not the situation I imagined. Maybe the real lesson is not to trust guys with mother issues.
Zoltan Istvan generated a lot of notice—to himself—with this troll on Huffington Post:
Is it Time for Fast Track Atheist Security Checks at Airports?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/is-it-time-for-fast-track_b_7549062.html
As I noted awhile back, I find his online career interesting to observe because it shows successful self-promotion in action.
Transhumanism related:
EVEN MATERIALISTS CRAVE RELIGION by Wesley J. Smith
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/06/even-materialists-crave-religion
The Church of Transhumanism: Let us Upload by WESLEY J. SMITH
http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/419688/church-transhumanism
Evangelical Christian or Transhumanist? A Quiz Written by J.M. PORUP
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/evangelical-christian-or-transhumanist-a-quiz
Even materalists crave some things that are traditionally associated with religion.
FTFY.
We should do something about this meme that “meaning” has to be associated with “believing in ontologically basic mental things”.
In his keynote at the LWCW Val of CFAR made the point that caring is an essential part of rationality.
Eliezer also speaks about the value of having something to protect. It’s Harry’s “The power The Dark Lord knows not”.
That is not easy. The meaning of a sentence equals the intent of the speaker. “The meaning of life” means something somewhere making our lives with an intent, for a purpose. It does not have to be ontologically basic—if it turned out we live in a simulation, brains in vats, in a grand experiment, that would at least explain an immediate intent. However then we would worry about the meaning of the lives of the experimenters themselves, trying to reduce it to some intent outside them. So at the end of the day, the only satisfactory meaning-of-life would be an ontologically basic intent from an ontologically basic mind. Divorcing these two from each other is not easy.
Quite frankly I don’t have an optimistic solution. I am a natural pessimitist and felt validated when I realized all this. No, there is no meaning to life at all because nothing has ontologically basic intent out there. The optimistic existentialist stuff, that we can “find” meaning in life is equally invalid, we cannot find something that does not exist. We can try to “put” meaning into life i.e. have intents, have goals, but it will never feel as powerful as the people who believe in an intent outside them (providence, fate, karma) feel about it. Let’s just suck it up, there is really no solution here.
The only optimists in this regard are the people who are glad about this all because it means freedom for them. How they decide if something is important still beats me, perhaps they have an internal value function that does not need to borrow terminal goals from an external source.
I wouldn’t feel like the “meaning of life” would be answered if we turned out to be brains in vats or whatever created with a specific purpose in mind. Notwithstanding the fact that they obviously have a lot of power to punish or reward me, why should I even care what they think?
To me it seems the answer would have to be an independent ontologically basic intent, but then I’m not entirely sure I should care about even that. So a satisfactory “meaning of life” might be impossible even in principle, which I think gives a lot more credibility to the existentialists.
An answer I wrote in response to a related question
was:
In a way you compartmentalize the though if missing meaning away as kind of unhelpful noise (that’s how I phrased it on the LWCW). This is not unreasonable (ahem) - after all the search for meaning is itself meaningless for a conscious process that has evolved in this meaningless environment.
Well, this locking does not really seem to work well for me. I know that ideal terminal values should be along the lines of wanting other people to be happy, but I really struggle to go from the fact that some signals in some brains are labelled happiness to the value that these signals matter. Since I have a typically depressive personality, not really caring about myself being happy, I cannot really care about others being happy as well and thus terminal values are not found. The struggle is largely that if certain brain signals like happiness are not inherently marked with little XML tags “yes you should care about this” where does the should, the value come from?
The closest thing I can get is something similar to nationalism extended over all humankind—we all are 22nd cousins or something so let’s be allies and face this cold cruel lifeless universe together or something similarly sentimental. But it isn’t a terminal value, it is more like a bit of a feeling of affection. A true utilitarian would even care about a sentient computer being happy, or a sentient computer suffering or dying, and I just cannot figure out why.
Well. Thinking about it I realize that for your kind of personality a falling back to carng and following goals indeed doesn’t seem necessary. On the other hand the arbitrariness of nihilism isn’t that different from the passivity from depression—so in a way maybe you already did lock back into the same pattern anyway?
He is also running to be U.S. President, briefly posted on LW, and wrote an Amazon review of my book. He has managed to get lots of publicity for transhumanism, and I think on net will do tranhumanism lots of good.
I have a problem with how easily people can position themselves as authority figures in social movements which lack competition or standards to vet the candidates. A genuinely capable person might emerge regardless, but more through good luck than through a good process.
For example, Madalyn Murray O’Hair became America’s most famous atheist in the 1960′s and 1970′s because no one else wanted the job, not because she excelled at it compared with competitors. A mediocre but extroverted and opinionated woman willing to take risks could step into the void of the time and assume that title. Even during her life, many other atheists never bought into her cult of personality and considered her a charlatan.
By contrast, in today’s world, when many atheists have become minor celebrities, often with best selling books, and when atheists even in hick towns like Tulsa’s Seth Andrews can attract followings around the world by setting up websites and uploading podcasts and videos, Madalyn with that kind of competition wouldn’t necessarily stand out as particularly noteworthy.
I see a similar situation with today’s transhumanist scene. Any newcomer on the make with the right sort of personality (the sort I don’t have), willing to exploit social media to present controversial ideas as transhumanist philosophy, could persuade other people into accepting him as a transhumanist authority figure in a relatively short time. It would help if objective standards emerged to assess who deserves this kind of status and who doesn’t.
Now, Zoltan Istvan might do something eventually to show that he has the goods. In the meantime I have misgivings about his activities.
How sure are you that O’Hair became the speaker for American atheism because no one else wanted the job rather than because the media focused on her because she was annoying?
Sounds like you described her “excelling at it compared with competitors” exactly one sentence after that sentence. Sure she might not have been the best that the movement could take a hold of but according to that description she did excel at it compared to her competitors.
Can you be more clear about what you meant to say?
Disclaimer: I have no idea who this person is.
O’Hair really is an interesting minor historical figure and also probably was the worst spokesperson American atheism possibly could have had, at least after the death of Jim Jones. She at one point attempted to defect to the Soviet Union because she approved of its official state atheism (which included brutal persecution of Christians, of course.) The Soviets rejected her, having been burned by western militant-atheist defectors before, like the Jonestown crew and of course, Lee Harvey Oswald. She also deliberately antagonized members of the media and publicly disowned her son when he converted to Christianity.
You have never heard of Madalyn Murray O’Hair?
Okay, think of the movie version of The Blue Lagoon. It doesn’t work as a “love story,” because with only one boy and one girl on the island, they don’t have any alternative. They wind up in a sexual relationship by default, not because the boy has to compete with other boys to seduce the girl.
In Madalyn’s case, no one else wanted to become the country’s public face of atheism, so she managed to step into that role without having to push anyone else out of the way. And she managed to draw attention to herself afterwards because she lacked social anxiety and she said and did outrageous things which made her news-worthy, like filing harassing lawsuits against local governments for alleged breaches of church-state separation. Her boldness didn’t make her especially effective or look very competent. Instead many other atheists considered her a buffoon.
This makes more sense. Less champion and more default.
Can you name one that you think was plainly wrong? Because you’re talking about a murder victim, which may explain why “no one wanted” her job.
Since she was killed and mutilated by a fellow atheist, are you implying no one wanted her job because so many atheists are killers and associating with fellow atheists is dangerous?
You mean the ringleader, who the organization initially hired as a typesetter? That would be evidence of atheism, had he not joined with the intent of robbing the place. And he had this to say about his victim, according to this site:
But sure, it’s not the situation I imagined. Maybe the real lesson is not to trust guys with mother issues.