Comments on “Obstacles to the complete stance”

“one may naturally retract in shock” “React”? “Retreat”?

I don’t think of one retracting oneself, though Big Huge Thesaurus does include “recoil” as a synonym. (Which is, I guess the word I’d recommend.)

As always I’m completely on board with the substance of what you are saying, but some of the language rubs me the wrong way. I thought the whole point of stances is that (in contrast with beliefs) they can’t be right or wrong. But the first sentence says that the stances you’ve identified are not only right or wrong, but obviously so.

I suppose it’s a shorthand way to say “these stances don’t work very well, and cause unhappiness, confusion, and suffering”. But the “obviously wrong” I find jarring.

Maybe it’s the “obviously” more than the “wrong”. If confused stances were so obviously wrong, people wouldn’t adopt them, and you wouldn’t need to write a vast text explaining what’s wrong with them.

Yes, when you look at your larger text, it’s very clear on how you regard the confused stances. I’m honestly not sure why I felt called on to nitpick this particular bit of language. Don’t mean to be overly critical, that’s just how I engage with things.

Perhaps “obviously wrong” bugs me because while I sometimes use it myself, it’s not a very good phrase for communicating. What is obvious to me is not necessarily obvious to someone else, and vice-versa.

According to you though, the rightness of the complete stance is universally obvious, in the sense that everybody is already in it! https://meaningness.com/meaningness#already . It’s a consequence of the basic nature of everyday experience, which we all share.

I like that, it’s very democratic. Elsewhere though you say that this knowledge is only granted to those at a particular stage of development:

We are always already walking on clouds, because there is no ground anywhere. There is only ever an illusion of ground—and once we are free of that illusion, vast new territories open up for exploration....This recognition is the midpoint, and the key, to the transition from stage 4 to stage 5.

From https://meaningness.com/bongard-meta-rationality

This sounds maybe inconsistent? Or maybe I don’t understand the connection between stances and stages.

To go meta a bit: It’s been my experience reading your stuff that pretty much any criticism or question I can come up with is answered somewhere – but it’s not always easy to find where that is, even with all the very useful navigational aids you’ve built in. Maybe the problem is that the hypertext structure encourages dipping into random places and really it needs to be read with more focus, like a regular book.

David and mtraven,

My understanding is that the reason the complete stance can be both obvious and hard to maintain simultaneously comes down to the fact that life would generally be much simpler if one of the confused stances were correct. The complete stance requires you to be sensitive to context and judge each situation on its merits, whereas the confused stances come with predetermined narratives that each situation can be slotted into (and if they don’t fit very well, you make them fit).

I rewrote your first pgraph for you (but really more as a test of my own understanding, and I’m not sure I passed):

Confused stances are unworkable and we know they are unworkable – and yet we frequently adopt them. The complete stance works and is completely natural — and yet difficult even to notice. It seems invisible when needed.

Your explanation of meta-rationality as a specialized form of the complete stance makes sense to me.

Re: the incomplete work – even though I’m picking nits, in general I find your writing a model of clarity. And the intricate structure of the ideas is visible even though some of the text is yet to be written. I hope you can keep going through these weird and difficult times.

BTW I noticed three links broken (not just unwritten) on this page: https://meaningness.com/meaningness “Curiosity, playfulness, and creativity are three aspects of that skill.”

Maybe there’s a reason you haven’t added this in a footnote or something, but it would be great to see a list of any songs or other media you do think points towards or meaningfully describes a Compete Stance-way of-being.

As an example, I find some similarities between the stage-5 metarational ideas and Venkatesh Rao’s analysis of The Office in his series The Gervais Principle. I guess that’s more meta-media, but it’s still evocative of ways of thinking which seem broadly compatible.

As you’ve pointed out, the appendix of source texts for Meaningless is quite dense and impenetrable to most people for one or other reason, so maybe there would be value in a list of things which hint at the complete stance experientally. If nothing else, it could be a good example of a point you often make which is that often thinstane defies conceptual definition and explanation.

It’s an interesting question as to what art, music, film, books, etc. best demonstrate pieces of the different aspects of the complete stance.

Would love to know if this is something you’ve considered, or if there’s a reason you wouldn’t do so!

(Also thank you for writing Meaningness and The Eggplant,, they’ve both been transformative, especially during the lockdowns!)

“thinstane” in 3rd paragraph should be “the stance”

Typing on a (cracked) phone screen…

Your examples of obvious everyday meaning seem more sense (as opposed to nonsense), knowledge, or information than meaning. Even a committed 190 proof nihilist knows that potato mashers are for mashing potatoes, and that some people in society think that eating potatoes avoids animal suffering or whatever. But what good are either of those bits of knowledge when one wakes up at 3:00 a.m. wondering what it all means, what is worth living for?

Again, you seem to use ‘meaning’ ina slippery way, or a motte and bailey way. Motte: potato mashers are for mashing potatoes. Bailey: life is a joyous dance of meanings that make it worthy living.