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I've seen very similiar Hodgepodge's description of semiotics used to talk about the origins of Christianity's symbols by theologians. Usually prefaced with, finding this out may cause one (one being religious people) to despair (which it doesn't have to). Edit: in fact some pastors in good denominations study it, I really prefer a pastor with a semiotics background. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jul 13, 2018 |
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Jul 13, 2018 16:08
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Often when people talk about 'meaning' in life, they intend meaning in the sense of 'purpose.' Of course, the paradigmatic things that have purposes are artifacts. So, taking the artifact as the exemplary thing with meaning, they then conclude that humans can only have meaning of they were made, in a manner similar to the way artifacts are made. So they look for meaning in creator deities and (perversely) evolutionary or otherwise biological forces. Both run into serious problems, even with the most charitable assumptions. But we should reconsider the starting point. Why should we think that the kind of meaning it is good and proper for a person to have is the same kind of meaning that e.g. a screwdriver has? There are plenty of other types of meaning that are much more appropriate to assign to something like a human life - no need to make people out to be someone else's tool in order to give their existence significance. One possibility: a novel can have meaning in the sense of being about something, having a theme. It is a much clearer question to ask about a human life, what thematic trends can be observed in it, rather than what it's 'for'. Of course now the question of whether life has meaning is obviated. It is replaced with the (much more fruitful) question of what any particular life means.
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Jul 13, 2018 19:10
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That assumes that they aren't simply indirectly asking "what am I for?" which is not answered by trying to rephrase it.
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Jul 13, 2018 19:30
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OwlFancier posted:That assumes that they aren't simply indirectly asking "what am I for?" which is not answered by trying to rephrase it. One of the points I'm trying to make is that if that's the question, then it's just a perverse question. Humans aren't the sorts of things that can have purposes that are determined wholly, as with tools, by their makers and wielders. Even Abraham cannot do without faith after he has heard God speak. He still needs to decide, for himself, that yes, this the the voice of God and not some demon or my own disordered mind, and yet further that doing the will of God is something that is important to him. It is only in the context of those decisions that Abraham's further decision to sacrifice Isaac has the meaning that it does, and those decisions can't be imposed on him in the manner that the carpenter imposes their will on a hammer. In the end, if we're to make sense of meaning-talk at all, we end up with something closer to meaning-as-aboutness than meaning-as-purpose anyway. You might say: well, it's still a sort of purpose, it's just not the same kind of purpose as hammers have; it's sui generis or whatever. But the taking of artifacts as exemplary purposeful things was the whole reason we ever cared about creators of beginnings in the first place. If the kind of purpose you have in mind is totally incomparable to any other commonsense notion of purpose, then it's doing no conceptual work for you, and you're better off abandoning that framing of the question altogether. E: To summarize: 'what is my purpose' is a bad question because it assumes from the outset that humans are rather like artifacts, and they aren't. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Jul 13, 2018 |
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Jul 13, 2018 19:47
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I don't really see why it's a malformed question for a human? We can be reduced to tools that think by others, so with that in mind it seems quite reasonable to wonder what sort of tool you would find it most fulfilling to be. You can't escape the notion of people having functional purposes and I would suggest that believing you have one is quite important to most people's state of mind, which is why the question comes up a lot. It doesn't seem objectionable or unreasonable to desire a functional purpose in life though I would suggest that you are unlikely to have one handed to you, but the act of asking the question can be a useful step on the road to finding one. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jul 13, 2018 |
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Jul 13, 2018 20:49
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Juffo-Wup posted:One of the points I'm trying to make is that if that's the question, then it's just a perverse question. I've been looking into the distinction between, as you put it, meaning-as-aboutness and meaning-as-purpose, and while there does appear to be some formal recognition of such a distinction, it's one which we seem (based on the positions expressed in the thread) inclined to overstate. Both senses of the word can be generalized as what one might call meaning-as-intent. Intentionality has an interesting quirk in that there is a distinction between intension (meaning-as-aboutness) and intention (a subjective state of being oriented towards a specific purpose). However, in practice this distinction is... confused. A given dictionary will assign both meanings to each word, and the forms "intent" and "intentionality" do not account for this distinction. However, I'm sure most of you have picked up that it is quite common to talk about linguistic intent in a manner which encompasses both senses of intent simultaneously. Often while desperately attempting to salvage one's reputation as a decent human being. This happens because words and concepts have an intension which encompasses their definition and all the connoted properties, qualities, etc. In many cases, these properties include a teleological aspect. Intention, on the other hand, is a subjective state. Objects and concepts are incapable of intention. However, words and other signifiers are used by agents with subjective intention. This confusion also occurs in the word "purpose" itself, which can also be used in both these senses. For that matter, we also talk about purpose in terms of what we "mean to" do. I suspect that this tendency gives things which have an intended or (in the case of natural objects and patterns) evident purpose a misleading, animistic sense of subjective purposefulness. Strictly speaking, the purpose of a hammer does not reside in the hammer itself, but is rather something we assign to it (usually in the process of designing and creating it) along with the signifier "hammer." In the case of natural phenomena, we infer a purpose from our understanding of that phenomena's effects. Strictly speaking, however, it is currently unfashionable to speak of natural things as having a purpose rather than being the result of patterns which emerged through chance. Okay that's enough my brain hurts. I hope this made sense. My plan was to talk about meaning-as-significance and meaning-as-understanding next. Instead I think I'll hit things in Bloodborne. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jul 14, 2018 |
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Jul 14, 2018 01:18
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Hodgepodge posted:I understand what you're saying, although I'd argue it doesn't change anything with regards to what I've been saying. It's true that there's a distinction between the two uses of the word "meaning," but my argument still applies. The distinction between words and their meaning which I'm making is generalized in semiotics to, respectively, the signifier (or sign) and the signified (or refferent). The former is anything which communicates a meaning which is not the sign itself, which is then interpreted. The latter is the thing, be it a concept, subject, object, etc, referred to by the sign. Philosophy (at least tries) to move in the element of universality, which includes within itself the particular. The idea that you can create your own meaning in a meaningless universe is a deliberate dogmatic re-framing by using symbolic wordplay (A particular that includes within itself the universal).
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Jul 14, 2018 05:48
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Or the Real is ineffable and the best we can manage is to point. The water is wide and I cannot cross over it, nor do I have wings to fly.
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Jul 14, 2018 06:08
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honestly, I think it's a weirdly good answer to the meaning of life. life has no inherent meaning. we exist because our parents hosed at some point and didn't use protection for one reason or another (whether they wanted a baby or just cocked up and got a surprise), not because of some grand design putting us here for a purpose. what meaning exists in life, comes from what we do with it of our own accord, rather than any inherent quality of it. if you do something cool with your life? congrats, that's the meaning of it. if you don't? that's probably why you're navel-gazing over it in the first place.
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Jul 14, 2018 06:55
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If the meaning of life is that it can be anything you do or believe, then it is fundamentally meaningless, a distinction that has no distinction.
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Jul 14, 2018 07:50
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The concept of ahistorical universals is kind of silly when it’s contrasted against how the actual world works, like if one sets as the standard for meaning that it has to be ahistorical and universal, the only place it could theoretically be found is from outside this world, through essentially theology. It was an understandable standard when philosophy was intertwined with theology and there was the crisis of secularism and atheism, but hopelessly outdated now that it has passed and ended in the near-complete defeat of theology. I’m not quite sold on the idea of ”make your own meaning” because it requires a very postmodern, ”we don’t have access to objective truth and all our claims about reality are secretly subjective” attitude to make it a satisfying answer. However, I think we do have shared meaning brought to us from outside us, in a way I would classify as objective even if not universal or ahistorical. One source is nature, we are all human and all our subjective consciousnesses rest within the same platform of wetware formed by objective evolutionary processes, which forms the base for the whole concept of meaning to ever come to exist. Another source are the historical social formations we live in but have no power to define ourselves, which make demands of us and assign social, philosophical, theological etc. meaning to those demands, which we can either take as given or challenge, but can hardly stay indifferent to. Subjectively formed meaning would be more like a subjective evaluation of all the interacting and contradictory sources of meaning that are thrust onto us. Why call this kind of meaning objective if it is something that can be challenged, cannot all be accepted simultaneously by the same person, and only has a finite existence until some new trend of thought or change in how life’s necessities are acquired renders them obsolete? Because seemingly most people derive meaning from all kinds of shared sources right now. Because meaning in the first place is a concept that has only ever existed in thought, which resides in human brains, whose content can never be universal or ahistorical. People only mistakenly sought for universal meaning outside this world because of the spiritual way they understood their existence, which led them to seek the source of meaning outside human relations with the natural world and each other, which are, taking scientific discoveries as a given, the only likely source for it. And the idea that rather than being objective, meaning simply does not exist, would seem similar to saying that love does not exist because the current mythology we have formed around love doesn’t correspond to how most people relate to each other, or that gender doesn’t exist because how we have conceptualized it during the last centuries does not correspond to how most people actually experience it, and how the concept has shifted across history and culture. IMO when we are talking about the reality of what is no more than human experience, the existence of culturally accepted mythologies, the persistent and nigh-universal obsession with the concepts, shows the objectivity of meaning, love, etc, even if we don’t quite grasp how they actually work behind the scenes and our answers have shifted accordingly with who got to make the answers, how they experienced the world, and what their social aims were while doing that.
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Jul 14, 2018 15:13
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Neither love or gender exist in the way you are stating they exist, hth.
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Jul 14, 2018 15:57
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wateroverfire posted:Emerson's answer in your quote is IMO the best - "Don't waste your time thinking about it, just go live your life."
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Jul 14, 2018 16:19
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Hodgepodge posted:Both senses of the word can be generalized as what one might call meaning-as-intent. I don't think this is right. Meaning in language certainly isn't reducible wholly to intension - there is also a word's extension, which encompasses the objective causal relations between the word and the world. My own view is that reference (and hence extension) is wholly constitutive of meaning by itself, and that intensional characteristics hold in virtue of meaning relationships, rather than being determinative of them. To extend this notion from linguistic meaning to life meaning, we can notice that whatever a person's intent happens to be, and however other observers relate it's characteristics to other concepts through inference or association or whatever, there is nonetheless underlying all that an objective fact of the matter about the way that life interacts causally with all other lives and the world. KVeezy3 posted:If the meaning of life is that it can be anything you do or believe, then it is fundamentally meaningless, a distinction that has no distinction. "If the meaning of a word can be anything it happens to refer to, then it is fundamentally meaningless, a distinction that has no distinction."
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Jul 14, 2018 16:34
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Juffo-Wup posted:
We, outside of the word restrict its meaning till it by consensus it only means one thing. There is nothing beyond us to restrict what is possible for us, so we can not define ourselves in the same way we can define a word.
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Jul 14, 2018 18:21
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BoneMonkey posted:We, outside of the word restrict its meaning till it by consensus it only means one thing. I've just got done arguing that consensus is not (at the very least not solely) constitutive of meaning. BoneMonkey posted:There is nothing beyond us to restrict what is possible for us, so we can not define ourselves in the same way we can define a word. On the contrary, the whole universe conspires to restrict what is possible for us. It is not in our immediate power to define ourselves; to the extent that we have any power at all in that regard, it's mediated through our ability to translate will into action, and through the physical, social, etc. contexts that translate actions into outcomes.
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Jul 14, 2018 18:30
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Mighty Crouton posted:What do people mean by "creating your own meaning"? I think I would use this phrase as part of a claim that thinking persons are ethically self-determining. It's really about your approach to the question "what should I do?". If you think meaning comes from elsewhere, then you can ask this question of the world, wait for an answer, then do that. But if you need to determine your own meaning, then the person you're asking this question of is yourself, and you're actively involved in the process of deciding what your answer should be rather than appealing to someone else to decide it for you. (or, I suppose, working it out in dialogue) I don't believe that the outside world provides me with adequate answers to this ethical question, so I would echo the general sentiment that "I must create my own meaning". But, then again, I'm cognitively a massive introvert, so obviously that's where my brain is going to go; I expect myself to have the answers because investigation, logic and intuition are what I've found to be a reliable source of determining new information, and hence I am led to assume my meaning is decided by myself, because I don't think I would function well if I decided or discovered it to be otherwise. Indeterminacy fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Jul 15, 2018 |
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Jul 15, 2018 19:18
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Juffo-Wup posted:I don't think this is right. Meaning in language certainly isn't reducible wholly to intension - there is also a word's extension, which encompasses the objective causal relations between the word and the world. My own view is that reference (and hence extension) is wholly constitutive of meaning by itself, and that intensional characteristics hold in virtue of meaning relationships, rather than being determinative of them. I've since found better definitions of intension which address this, as well as brushing up on the concepts of the sign/signified/referent, which it turns out I missed something important about. The latter seems the most relevant to your point here; that being that I missed the distinction between the signified and the referent. Rather than being equivalent, the signified is the mental concept expressed by a sign, while the referent is the actual object(s) to which the sign and signified refer. Some sources note a substantial degree of equivalence between the signified and the intension of a sign, and likewise between the referent and the extension of a sign. What that comes down to is that you're correct that I wasn't accounting for the importance of the distinction between intension and extension, although the other sense of intent might be interpreted as accounting for extensions. I don't think intensions can be reduced to relationships between extensions (if I understood you correctly), though. An extensional definition of a word, for example, is ultimately a list of every referent to which the word applies (although in practical terms a representative sample suffices). In terms of meaning, I'd actually take a nearly opposite position from you and say that intensions are required for a sign to have meaning. For example, let's say I'm explaining the world to an alien being, and am asked what the term "President of the United States" means. If I merely list every President, the being might reasonably conclude that a woman cannot be President, because in order to understand the extensional definition, it would have to attempt to determine the intensional characteristics of the listed objects. One of the intensional characteristics which unite every PotUS is that every one is male, but an intensional definition (which lists the properties necessary for an object to be properly referred to by a word) would clarify that this maleness is an incidental, rather than definitive, property of American Presidents. The being would not, meanwhile, necessarily understand that American Presidents are elected officials, or that they command the executive branch of government, although it could at least also infer those properties. More seriously, it would not be able to answer the question "who is the PotUS," because an extensional definition does not specify that there is only one PotUS at any given time, or even that it is necessary to be alive for the term PotUS to be applicable in the present tense. (By way of contrast, this would not be a problem if we were explaining what a Nobel Prize winner is). e: more to the point in terms of the topic at hand, an extensional definition of life would be useless in answering the question "what is the meaning of life?" An intensional definition would also be inadequate, but would at least provide potentially useful answers in the form of the properties which define what it is to be alive. On the other hand, an extensional definition of "humans who lead meaningful lives" would be much more useful, but primarily because such a list would allow us to determine the intensional properties of the lives included in the list. Of course, without a set of criteria for "meaningful life" it would be impossible to assemble a truly definitive list in the first place, again suggesting the necessity of intension as a criteria for meaning. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jul 15, 2018 |
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Jul 15, 2018 20:46
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I'm no philosophy buff. I think philosophy is good and everyone should study and learn it but I have a long way to go. So I'm just going to use my own psychology and what litle of philosophy I do know. I think for some people they can make their own meaning. That's just who they are. Others, such as myself, find meaning through other people or ideologies. The Existentialists like Sartre would say I'm living in bad faith because I constantly bounce around from religion to politics to philosophy looking for something to give my life purpose or significance or structure. But that's just who I am. I find peace of mind in these ideas and beliefs. Sartre was right that freedom is the most awful thing imaginable and a lot of us are just trying to run away from it but so what? I'm under no obligation to reject everything that makes me happy and takes away my anxiety just to live up to some arbitrary standard of "being true to myself." But I guess people who say "I'll make my own meaning" and people who say "I find meaning in religion or politics or the love of another" are all just ultimately expressing their freedom to choose something. We have no proof of the material worth of any of these things. It's just what gives you happiness. Some people choose an individualistic meaning, others choose to let others decide the meaning of their lives for them. But it still ultimately is your choice. So, I guess I would say you are always the one making your own meaning even when you decide to let others hand you that meaning. Maybe that doesn't make sense and I'm dumb. I'm sorry. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 15, 2018 23:59
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Question for OP. How can you ‘make your own meaning’ if there is no such thing as free will? And by ‘free will’ I don’t mean the namby pamby compatibilist version (that the ‘freedom to act’ in some possible world is sufficient to be called ‘free will’), but true free will in the sense that you are able to act in contravention and outside of the causal chain. IE, if I present you with the choice of tea and coffee, and had a complete map of the causal mechanisms inside your brain, I would still fail to accurately predict your choice 100% of the time. You can argue about free will till the cows come home. I wrote out a paragraph on that but instead I’ll give you the tldr, true free will seems untenable or atleast extremely unlikely. Given that, what are these attempts to ‘create meaning’ really? Your moral compass and belief system are essentially the same as a marble rolling down an incline, and so ‘choice’ doesn’t enter into it. You end up believing what various inputs essentially program you to believe.
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Jul 17, 2018 01:18
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Ocrassus posted:Question for OP. How can you ‘make your own meaning’ if there is no such thing as free will? And by ‘free will’ I don’t mean the namby pamby compatibilist version (that the ‘freedom to act’ in some possible world is sufficient to be called ‘free will’), but true free will in the sense that you are able to act in contravention and outside of the causal chain. IE, if I present you with the choice of tea and coffee, and had a complete map of the causal mechanisms inside your brain, I would still fail to accurately predict your choice 100% of the time. Look at this kid who thinks there is a "self" which can have properties like free or unfree will 
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Jul 17, 2018 02:04
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I mean feel free to go down the radical skepticism route, there’s not much anyone can do to stop you. The ‘self’ in this case is just a discursive short hand for ‘whatever entity (or lack thereof) the hypothetical observer ascribes to their own presumed consciousness and mind’. ...or you can poo poo all over the chess board and say reality isn’t real I guess. 
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Jul 17, 2018 02:34
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Ocrassus posted:I mean feel free to go down the radical skepticism route, there’s not much anyone can do to stop you. The ‘self’ in this case is just a discursive short hand for ‘whatever entity (or lack thereof) the hypothetical observer ascribes to their own presumed consciousness and mind’.  is that any challenge to assumptions is likely to rest on other assumptions which are subject to substantial challenges. But beyond the playful skepticism, personal identity does have a lot of similarities with free will in terms of being intuitively assumed but philosophically problematic.e: I probably should point out that your argument is stated in too simple a form to be correct. That is to say that while the debate itself is unsolved, the idea that complex systems such as the brain are objectively equivalent to a single simple mechanical process is demonstrably false. Even where they are ultimately determinstic, it is often necessary to treat such systems as stochastic due to the vast number of factors affecting the outcome. Such systems also display emergent properties which invalidate assumptions based on the operation of their underlying mechanisms. Likewise, the idea that the universe itself is fundamentally deterministic is badly outdated; quantum effects are necessary to accurately describe larger scale phenomena. Arguments for your position exist, but attempt to account for the fact that they may no longer confidently rest on the Newtonian assumption of a deterministic physical universe. Actually, so many exist that I don't think a single field of study exists that does not possess an argument that all human activity is ultimately determined by its subject. There are probably professors of library science who consider the course of history to be overdetermined by filing systems. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Jul 17, 2018 |
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Jul 17, 2018 03:10
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Ocrassus posted:Question for OP. How can you ‘make your own meaning’ if there is no such thing as free will? And by ‘free will’ I don’t mean the namby pamby compatibilist version (that the ‘freedom to act’ in some possible world is sufficient to be called ‘free will’), but true free will in the sense that you are able to act in contravention and outside of the causal chain. IE, if I present you with the choice of tea and coffee, and had a complete map of the causal mechanisms inside your brain, I would still fail to accurately predict your choice 100% of the time. Surely, you have the problem backwards. You seem to be asking how, if people act for reasons instead of acting at random, their actions could be meaningful. But it seems obvious that meaning can only arise in the context of actions directed toward ends. Your "true" free will looks like it destroys meaning, rather than preserving it. Hodgepodge posted:For example, let's say I'm explaining the world to an alien being, and am asked what the term "President of the United States" means. If I merely list every President, the being might reasonably conclude that a woman cannot be President, because in order to understand the extensional definition, it would have to attempt to determine the intensional characteristics of the listed objects. One of the intensional characteristics which unite every PotUS is that every one is male, but an intensional definition (which lists the properties necessary for an object to be properly referred to by a word) would clarify that this maleness is an incidental, rather than definitive, property of American Presidents. The being would not, meanwhile, necessarily understand that American Presidents are elected officials, or that they command the executive branch of government, although it could at least also infer those properties. More seriously, it would not be able to answer the question "who is the PotUS," because an extensional definition does not specify that there is only one PotUS at any given time, or even that it is necessary to be alive for the term PotUS to be applicable in the present tense. (By way of contrast, this would not be a problem if we were explaining what a Nobel Prize winner is). I think I'd want to say that a term like 'President of the United States' is compositional, so it gets its meaning as a function both of the extensions of each atomic term plus the syntactic features of their mode of combination. And additionally that probably mental content is the fundamental content, and that linguistic constructions only inherit their meanings from that source. But I don't want to say a whole lot more on that topic, because I recognize that it's a big ol' can of worms in the literature. Hodgepodge posted:e: more to the point in terms of the topic at hand, an extensional definition of life would be useless in answering the question "what is the meaning of life?" An intensional definition would also be inadequate, but would at least provide potentially useful answers in the form of the properties which define what it is to be alive. On the other hand, an extensional definition of "humans who lead meaningful lives" would be much more useful, but primarily because such a list would allow us to determine the intensional properties of the lives included in the list. Of course, without a set of criteria for "meaningful life" it would be impossible to assemble a truly definitive list in the first place, again suggesting the necessity of intension as a criteria for meaning. The comparison I'm making is not to identify 'meaningful life' in terms of the set of people whose lives have been meaningful. I've committed myself actually to saying that every life is meaningful, and that they just mean different things. My suggestion is that the meaning of a life is a function of the causal history of that life interacting with the rest of the universe. That, for example, the meaning of Socrates' life is plausibly something like commitment to inquiry and loyalty to Athens or whatever. So that "what is the meaning of life?" is no more sensible a question than "what is the meaning of sentences?" It is particular sentences that have their meanings as a function of their pieces and how they interact with each other and the rest of the language. Likewise with lives, the meaning of any particular one is going to be found in the details of how it's gone.
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Jul 17, 2018 06:11
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Juffo-Wup posted:The comparison I'm making is not to identify 'meaningful life' in terms of the set of people whose lives have been meaningful. I've committed myself actually to saying that every life is meaningful, and that they just mean different things. My suggestion is that the meaning of a life is a function of the causal history of that life interacting with the rest of the universe. That, for example, the meaning of Socrates' life is plausibly something like commitment to inquiry and loyalty to Athens or whatever. So that "what is the meaning of life?" is no more sensible a question than "what is the meaning of sentences?" It is particular sentences that have their meanings as a function of their pieces and how they interact with each other and the rest of the language. Likewise with lives, the meaning of any particular one is going to be found in the details of how it's gone. It sort of sounds like the language of intension and extension isn't really suited to what you're trying to say. I'm parsing this as more like "[human] life is inherently meaningful, in and of itself, and for it's own sake." Whereas the idea of the "meaning of life" often attempts to identify a "significance" of life, or a "value" or whatever, treating life itself as either a sign pointing to some other thing, or looking at the properties of life in order to identify one or more which endow it with meaning. Whereas it would be strange to ask what the point of playing Roy: A Life Well Lived from Rick and Morty is- it seems obvious that the experience of living a whole human life is itself a worthwhile activity when it is an optional activity. There is a line of thought which identifies the underlying question as being "what justifies suffering?" In that case, of course, the honest answer is "nothing."
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Jul 18, 2018 01:02
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As far as I can figure, being told a meaning of life can't work - everyone's going to have their own variation, and have to arrive at it their own way. If you can figure it out, and manage to work at whatever it is, that's good. You take bits that work, or don't work, and mash them together into your own meaning. And... yeah, it's poo poo, and confusing, and stupid, but I think I still prefer it to the idea of there being a preset Meaning.
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Jul 18, 2018 01:35
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Hodgepodge posted:It sort of sounds like the language of intension and extension isn't really suited to what you're trying to say. I'm parsing this as more like "[human] life is inherently meaningful, in and of itself, and for it's own sake." From the point of view of you, a human. But there's no inherent meaning/value of human life from the point of view of the rest of the universe.
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Jul 18, 2018 09:34
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The very nature of meaning is subjective. It's not a question of whether we can create meaning, meaning is a creation already. The idea that meaning can lie outside of a mind is absurd, and thinking it can be so is just a vehicle for one person to try and get another person to buy into their particular understanding. 'Self-created' meaning is as real as it gets and it matters as much or as little as you personally see fit.
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Jul 18, 2018 12:55
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suck my woke dick posted:From the point of view of you, a human. But there's no inherent meaning/value of human life from the point of view of the rest of the universe. Since meaning is only possible for subjects, this is like saying "fire is hot." Unless you're proposing something sort of like apatheistic panpsychism.
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Jul 18, 2018 13:39
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suck my woke dick posted:From the point of view of you, a human. But there's no inherent meaning/value of human life from the point of view of the rest of the universe. The universe has a point of view?
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Jul 18, 2018 14:41
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Panpsychism is true and the universe has a point of view.
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Jul 18, 2018 14:53
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suck my woke dick posted:From the point of view of you, a human. But there's no inherent meaning/value of human life from the point of view of the rest of the universe. Meaning only comes about through the interaction of subjects with their environment, but it's not 'subjective' in the sense that a subject's idea of what they mean is privileged in fixing meaning. Thales was referring to H2O when he talked about water, even though he conceived of it as a simple substance rather than a compound. He identified a kind of stuff in the world and came up with a theory about it that was false. That's about as objective as it gets, surely. And in order for him to have been objectively wrong, there must have been objective facts about what he meant. I don't really know what you're looking for when you say 'inherent meaning/value,' if that doesn't count. E: As for value, if organisms can have interests (and they clearly do), then things can go well or badly for them, objectively. What more do we want? Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Jul 18, 2018 |
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Jul 18, 2018 15:47
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Something I haven't seen come up yet. When identity, meaning / purpose and community are absent, individuals can be targeted by extremists offering those things. From Neo-Nazis to ISIS there are pretty clear examples of this. This is to say the question can't really be avoided.
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Jul 18, 2018 21:47
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Juffo-Wup posted:Meaning only comes about through the interaction of subjects with their environment, but it's not 'subjective' in the sense that a subject's idea of what they mean is privileged in fixing meaning. Thales was referring to H2O when he talked about water, even though he conceived of it as a simple substance rather than a compound. He identified a kind of stuff in the world and came up with a theory about it that was false. That's about as objective as it gets, surely. And in order for him to have been objectively wrong, there must have been objective facts about what he meant. I don't really know what you're looking for when you say 'inherent meaning/value,' if that doesn't count. There's a delicate interaction between interpretation (meaning) and truth (knowledge) which the idea of the scientific method you're citing here is a good illustration of. Your point about objective facts about what he meant is interesting to me, since I first really got into these issues in Historiography as a grad student. For the purposes of History as a discipline, the objective component when studying Thales' ideas are the written records of those ideas left by himself and others within the scope of inquiry, as well as other physical objects which convey relevant information (in some cases this can include the testimony of living witnesses or cultural experts with rigorous oral traditions). It would not be inaccurate to say that what historians actually study is not the past itself, but the historical evidence of the past available in the present. While there is all sorts of interpretive uncertainty which is fairly intuitive in the case of ancient history, the validity of the discipline relies in the ability to make truth claims on the basis of this evidence. In the case of Thales, what we know comes from the writings of others, not the least being Aristotle. This makes the reliability and interpretation of sources a contentious topic. A particular issue is that our knowledge of his ideas relies a great deal on how Aristotle interpreted and characterized them. Two hundred years passed between Thales' life and Aristotle's, and there is doubt as to the nature and reliability of his own sources. On the other hand, interpreting and assessing the reliability of information from the available sources about topics we do not have direct empirical access to experience of is exactly what history is. And at the bottom of that, there is at least the objective statement that, for example, Aristotle said such and such about Thales. It is easy to falsify some statements. For example, if someone were to argue that no philosophers ever cared about what Thales thought, it would be simple to demonstrate that this is incorrect. For the rest, it is necessary for there to be agreement about rules of evidence and interpretation, but these are also standards of truth. These I would ultimately consider an intersubjective component. For example, empiricism is intersubjective insofar as we agree or do not agree that physical or reproducible objective evidence is a necessary basis for certain types of truth. However, that does not make the standard of evidence itself (inter)subective rather than objective. I suppose in the case of our example, there is an intersubjective component to the evidence, in that Thales and Aristotle might be considered as subjects, while the evidence we have of them is objective. That is also a component in, for example, law. Ironically, the Death of the Author is often believed to establish a less objective standard of interpretation of art than the statements of the author, etc, when Barthes' argument is for the text itself, an objective source of evidence, to take precedence over the subjective interpretation of the text by its creator. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jul 18, 2018 |
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Jul 18, 2018 22:03
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BrandorKP posted:Something I haven't seen come up yet. When identity, meaning / purpose and community are absent, individuals can be targeted by extremists offering those things. From Neo-Nazis to ISIS there are pretty clear examples of this.
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Jul 19, 2018 03:31
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how are you supposed to die for glory in a foreign land with a philosophy like that
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Jul 19, 2018 04:26
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Fansy posted:how are you supposed to die for glory in a foreign land with a philosophy like that Somebody offers you that and you die for glory in a foreign land for it. There's a whole bunch on how it's the way these groups radicalize people who aren't crazy.
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Jul 19, 2018 04:47
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Fansy posted:how are you supposed to die for glory in a foreign land with a philosophy like that Get born into a community with a strong sense of identity which offers validation for dying in a foreign land. And also offers few better opportunities to support one's family.
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Jul 19, 2018 06:11
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but validation can only be manipulated, for example for imperialist causes, when it's abstracted away from the logic of desires and satisfaction, which is what it's actually providing. of what value is social validation to you when you're dead? none, and it's only because dying and 'meaning' is obfuscated, that ideas like 'glory' are politically useful, and believed by anyone. if someone is to sacrifice themselves for something, or someone, it should be with the knowledge they aren't going to benefit from it, it's going to cost them, possibly everything. that may still be worth it, if they're fighting to defend their family, community or something like justice. but there's no way it could justify imperialism.
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Jul 19, 2018 06:26
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rudatron posted:but validation can only be manipulated, for example for imperialist causes, when it's abstracted away from the logic of desires and satisfaction, which is what it's actually providing. of what value is social validation to you when you're dead? none, and it's only because dying and 'meaning' is obfuscated, that ideas like 'glory' are politically useful, and believed by anyone. actually if you’re sufficiently racist or nationalist or member of a family of influential imperialists then it totally could, from your point of view
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Jul 19, 2018 08:01
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