Comments on “Finding the complete stance”

I think a good class of concrete examples might be programmers working with ‘legacy code’.

I’m currently working with some code that’s not a central or prototypical example of legacy code, but I’ve noticed that all of the same issues of working with legacy code seem to be coming up: ignorance or uncertainty about both how the code works and how it ‘should‘ work.

The former – how the code works (if it does!) – is at least possible to discover – eventually (and maybe just most of the time).

The latter tho sometimes remains nebulous forever (to varying degrees)!

Code is written for people – either ourselves as solo programmers or for some nebulous audience of current collaborators, possible future collaborators, or even other passive readers. And yet there is no fixed meaning inherent in any code! Beyond the nebulosity of human language generally, the meaning of code can be slippery for many other reasons.

Consider a function named addSomething(x) but whose code instead is x * 5. Does the function name imply that its code is incorrect? Or ‘should’ the function’s name have been changed to calculateSomething instead (at some earlier point)? Maybe all the people that ‘matter’, e.g. all of the (other) people that work with that code, already understand that the function addSomething doesn’t ‘naively‘ describe its behavior and its name is understood more as a proper name than a regular ‘phrase’. Interestingly, naming code elements such that the ‘naive’ interpretation (relatively) closely matches its behavior is considered good practice. Unfortunately, there’s no set of fixed ‘naive’ interpretations available for all possible readers of any code. Computer science recognizes all of this as ‘Naming is hard!’.

I noticed reading this a strong parallel to Dongshan’s Five Ranks and Linji’s Four Measures. Intentional mirroring or natural convergence?

I’ve actually only read about the four measures in books about Dongshan, so the best I can find is this Google Books link inside a book about Dongshan. It’s probably from Linji’s recorded sayings (a common literature type in Zen mostly made up of sayings, koans, and poems attributed to a teacher but written after their death), which I found an English PDF of here but didn’t search around to find the four measures poem within it.

Both Linji and Dongshan lived in 9th century China, so the timeline matches the theory.

For myself, I think there is a kind of natural convergence in the way of talking about the same reality. I expect many people have found many ways to point towards the same features of the world and our experience of it many times, each expressed in terms fit for their context. As I’m sure you’ve experienced in your practice with Dzogchen and I’ve seen with Zen, many people have difficulty working with those teachings as they are traditionally presented, so finding new ways to say the “same” thing seems quite valuable to me!

Thanks for the link David – that is a good post!

Interestingly, I’ve found that I often don’t feel like I’ve written “the program” (or a subset of it) given even a few weeks or months between working on it!

The post you linked linked to this post, which I also liked:

• [Why Writing Correct Software Is Hard](https://pron.github.io/posts/correctness-and-complexity)

Just after reading the first ‘chapter’ of that post crystalized something that I previously thought was an objection to your larger project: the behavior or property of the phenomena of formal reasoning is generally unprovable.

I realize now that that is better understood as, in a sense, a proof of your larger project: even formal reasoning is ultimately nebulous!

I’ve been reading this blog for about three years now, and a general question keeps popping into my head.

What if this process of coming into the complete stance is part of the Zeitgeist of our times? If it is, then I’m partially falling into a semi-nihilistic form of meaning, because this would imply that the complete stance is complete in the sense that it surrounds the preceding stances, but then itself must be consumed by another stance to be discovered/realized in the future? Or is this a kind of logical regression just a systematic form of understanding what the stance is and not an experiential comprehension?

Thanks for response. Reading my post again, I think I have an uneasiness towards the idea of eternalism in relation to the complete stance itself, alongside other concerns.

It might be that I’m injecting eternalism in these ideas, but the way you write geives me the impression that while the complete stance is not The Number 42, it is still a kind of True Way out of the trappings of the eternalisms with regards to meanings. As in, even as you say this isn’t a permanent answer, the impression I get is, “This is the answer.” (I suppose this impression is akin to the Buddhism you’ve practiced and which I have also investigated mildly. Ideas like: desire to get rid of desire is not a contradiction. It’s like using a boat to get across the river and then leaving the boat because it is no longer necessary.)

Yet on the other hand, I get the sense that this is where wider culture is moving towards and, because of its impermanence, will move away from as well. What it seems to boil down to is that my internalization of the Law of Non-Contradiction still bothers me.

I also have some dissonance with the adoption of the Kegan’s “Evolving Self”. My concern here is that Meaningness is a kind of intellectualization (in the psychological sense of defense mechanisms) of meaning, but utilizing the concept of the Stage 5 self and general development of the self. To make that more clear: the project of meaningness could have been built up using the developmental stages as a means to show that the complete stance is on another “level” in the rational eternalist sense, but which can’t be explained through the complete stance, thereby isolating itself (and those who understand it) from being bound by other ideologies. Of course, this is using psychological theory as an eternalism, and rationality still as an ideal eternalism through which to criticize Meaningness, which might simply prove the point that Meaningness is nebulous and patterned.

I guess this goes to show that I have a resistance towards the complete stance because I’m having trouble seeing how to “jump the gap” onto the complete stance. (I’ve also had this resistance to Buddhism because of its metaphysics but I suppose that’s another topic). It feels like I get it, but that I am also missing something… is it because I’m still using rationality as a means to try and explain it to myself?

I also apologize for my first post, I realize I hadn’t really thought through and explicated my concerns as clearly as I have tried to do here.

Something that helped me finally (better) triangulate the complete stance is some ideas (that I already knew) from mathematics and computer science: incompleteness and undecidability.

One piece of evidence that I think you might be stuck roughly where I was is that you describe yourself as “having trouble seeing how to “jump the gap” onto the complete stance”.

So, as you wrote:

It feels like I get it, but that I am also missing something… is it because I’m still using rationality as a means to try and explain it to myself?

Maybe it would help to come at this ‘sideways’, purely from a scientific materialist perspective. First, think of ‘rationality’ as comprising of two separate things:

1. Mathematics and computer science
2. Models

[1] is ‘pure’ – if you accept the axioms, there are various interesting ‘truths’ that can be ‘proven’. These ‘truths’ are extremely useful! We have lots of evidence of this. But note that – even theoretically – these truths are incomplete, even inside these axiomatic systems. There is no Eternal (perfect) ‘truth function’ that can exist – even in principle.

We are embodied entities – we exist inside a lot of systems that we’d like to understand and in fact are elements of those systems and furthermore created by those systems. We only ever have access to some specific and limited data or info about those systems. We only ever have use of the specific models we were either given (e.g. by evolution) or have developed or discovered ourselves.

The Eternalist stance is that there’s one (unique) and perfect model (and here it is).

The Nihilist stance is that there’s no (i.e. are zero) models of any utility.

But, ‘just rationally’, we know that the Eternalist stance is impossible, even in theory.

We also have an abundance of evidence that the Nihilist stance is false.

So what does that leave us with?

We have some ‘pure truths’ that could be helpful, if reality happened to be similar. And indeed, it magically does appear to be. This is the Eternalist element of reality in a sense.

We also have a lot of different models, all of which are helpful, to varying degrees.But each model is only helpful at all for some specific context or some specific set of circumstances.

I further claim that meaning is akin to my treatment above of scientific materialism – meaning is structured (patterned) but contingent and contextual (nebulous).

The complete stance is the answer to the opposing ‘questions’ of Eternalism and Nihilism. It’s the “true way” out of that trap, but not the true way in a global sense, for all meaning, because there is no true way in that sense.

It’s like using a boat to get across the river and then leaving the boat because it is no longer necessary.

But note that it’s still necessary to use a boat (i.e. adopt the complete stance) to cross the river, even if we no longer need the boat on the opposite shore.

Sam,

I think some of your confusion is coming from taking David’s talk of “stances” too seriously, as if they are well-defined things. But by his own logic, the stances are themselves nebulous!

The way I understand it, the confused stances each make some mistake or other about meaning. The “complete stance” is just engaging with meaning without making those mistakes.

And there are multiple paths to getting there: just on this site, David uses both finding the common assumption and rejecting it and showing the traces of each confused stance in the other. And on Approaching Aro he hints at another option: thinking in terms of “fit” instead of “truth.” (The last path is particularly relevant to the Eggplant part of the book.)

Side note: in writing this comment I finally found a way to put into words a nagging worry I’ve had for a while now: the complete stance might not be for everybody! Most people are probably like Yuli Jadov on “Total responsibility” page and have found a way to make one of the confused stances work reasonably well.

Maybe the current crisis of meaning is just a matter of not enough people being able to do that. Like unemployment, significant problems show up well before a majority are directly affected.

This page is great in being almost actionable. What I, and, P≥0.95, lesswrongers need, is a worked example (and maybe a reformulation into the language of metaphysics).
Therefore I/we(?) would like if you wrote, or referred me/us to such an example soonish.
All the complete stances in more specific things are potential worked examples, and I (we??) would like if they all had worked examples

Cheers on creating what will be remembered as the first metamodern metasystem. (I’m refering to a “law” that things are never named after their inventors. To the extent you are the inventor you are an exeption.)

I’m a somewhat active commenter on LessWrong, and have been its entire life, so I think I can possibly help point you in the right direction, or at least a helpful one.

The first thing worth keeping in mind is that the ‘complete stance’ is ‘merely’ an escape from the dual traps of the stances that David names Eternalist and Nihilist.

If you’re familiar with programming, my (abstract) example (described in an earlier comment on this post) of working with legacy code seems like a good “worked example”.

This post – Doing being rational: polymerase chain reaction | Meaningness – is also a great ‘worked example’.

I don’t think there’s a single unique formulation of the complete stance in the language of metaphysics. The scope of metaphysics is too nebulous and far beyond ‘meaning’, which is roughly the subject of this site.

Also, the complete stance isn’t a replacement of ‘rationality’ – it’s an extension of it, aiding understanding of what it is, when it’s useful, and how it can be used (usefully). I think LessWrong has been extremely receptive to these ideas, both in direct response to the work by David, and in the independent work by LessWrong users themselves. Given how many LessWrong users already think of ‘rationality’, this is arguably very much the same ‘rationality’ project, i.e. these ideas are extensions of rationality and ‘meta-rationality’ can be considered a necessary component of “doing being rational”.

David, you write:

“Step 2: Finding patterning within nebulosity. The specific words matter here again. One aims at finding patterning, rather than specific patterns. That is, for this method, one avoids solidifying patterning into discrete forms. (Making patterns as discrete and rigid as possible can sometimes be extremely valuable, in engineering, for example. It’s counterproductive for this practice, though.) “Within” expresses the method of approaching the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern starting from the side of nebulosity. After finding nebulosity, one finds patterning as an emerging aspect of that nebulosity.”

I’m a bit confused by the sense in which pattern arises from nebulosity here. Do you mean emerges as in “look at the ambiguity/transience etc. and notice how those things themselves create pattern” (almost a meta-pattern of everything predictably being nebulous) or is it more like “notice within the nebulosity there are identifiable patterns. I gather that both of these are in some sense the same (non-dual) and this question only seems like a question from the confused stance of not appreciating that, but as a stepping stone towards that maybe it makes sense to clarify how to notice the pattern?

I’m thinking almost of just staring in front of me and noticing that things are ambiguous i.e. the boundaries between objects in my visual field are nebulous. The obvious pattern might be to point out that I can discern objects at all and point at them. Is it useful to try and see those boundaries as somehow arising from the ambiguity of them??