What is David Chapman talking about when he talks about “meaning” in his book “Meaningness”?
I have read David Chapman’s online “book” Meaningness. I find his concept of nebulosity very useful, and his treatment of intellectual history is at least very interesting.
But his whole book is supposed to be about “meaning”, and I have never really understood what Chapman means when he talks about meaning. The bulk of the book details the conflict between what Chapman calls eternalism and nihilism, but most of his concrete examples of meaning seem extremely far removed from that conflict, and I struggle to bridge the gap.
Chapman likes to say that meaningfulness is “obvious” and gives some examples:
If you haven’t eaten in a couple days, then the meaningfulness of food is obvious. This isn’t a sophisticated case of meaning, but it’s one that’s hard to deny. We share it with other animals; it’s in our biology, not some arbitrary personal or social choice.
If I am hungry, then food feel subjectively important to me, yes. What does that have to do with eternalism and nihilism?
Different foods have different meanings; there’s fancy food and boring food and comfort food. What foods have which meanings vary somewhat from person to person and culture to culture, but some food is fancy enough that nearly everyone will agree it’s fancy.
People have opinions about food and emotional associations with food, yes. What does that have to do with eternalism and nihilism.
On a busy sidewalk, your eyes lock for an instant with those of a cute stranger coming toward you, and then they pass. You stop and look back over your shoulder and see that they have done the same. You can see that this is meaningful—even if it’s not exactly clear what it will mean—and an attentive third person would see the same.
What the hell? Yes, if someone stops and looks back at me, then I can derive information from that. I can derive that it is moderately likely that the person is interested in me, and it might be worth my while to try to talk to them. This seems to me extremely simple and pragmatic. What does that have to do with all the philosophy?
All these examples, as far as I can tell, are fully compatible with what Chapman calls nihilism. But these exact examples form Chapman’s attempt to refute nihilism: Because there exists “meaningfulness” as described in these 3 examples and a few more, nihilism is obviously false, according to Chapman.
Now, I do not feel a lack of meaning nor a search for meaning in my life. I am very concerned with ethics, but alas, Chapman’s treatment of ethics is woefully unfinished. Chapman seems very confident that he knows the answers to most if not all questions of ethics (and he contemptuously dismisses most moral philosophers and their work), but he provides very little in the way of arguments or explanations. Indeed, precisely because he is so sure of himself, I strongly suspect that Chapman does not understand ethics nearly as well as he thinks he does.
Is there anyone else who has read Meaningness and can help me understand what Chapman is talking about when he talks about… well, meaningness?
Try replacing “meaning” with “purpose” and see if it starts to make sense. Meaning is about orientation towards, salience, importance, and a sense of why things matter.
Nihilism is the idea that nothing matters, so there is no purpose to things, it’s just stuff happening.
Essentialism is the idea that purpose exists somewhere else other than here and now.
Meaning is embodied in our lives as we live them, just as they are, with nothing added or taken away.
Does that help?
Thanks for the reply!
Hm… do you understand Chapman’s claim that meaningness (or purpose) is neither objective nor subjective, and that existentialism is therefore false? Because to me purpose seems subjective, which suggests that existentialism is true.
Yes. This is a place where I think David’s phrasing is a bit confusing because what he actually means to say is “not only subjective”.
These’s two ways to get a better handle on what not only subjective means.
The first is to understand that subjectivity is really intersubjectivity. That is, we each have our own subjective experience, but we learn about other’s subjective experiences and treat them as facts, and then this creates a social reality that feels objective because it contains facts that we believe are true even if we don’t have direct knowledge of them ourselves.
But David is using “subjective” here to mean “only subjective” as in solipsism, which is a common view many people adopt and needs to be rejected. This happens because people correctly catch on to the subjective part and then fail to understand how their beliefs about the subjective experiences of others impact their own beliefs, sort of like they just see one level of the system and not the whole thing. That’s the kind of subjectivity he’s pushing back against.
Now I want to be clear that intersubjectivity is not the whole story when it comes to the complete stance. David’s also rolling into it the idea that meaning is not something that comes purely from doxastic or epistemic knowledge. It involves many other ways of knowing (and not knowing) that are perhaps beyond the scope of the question here. There’s a sense in which meaning creates itself and is orthogonal to the objective/subjective distinction, but I don’t think I can explain that idea in a comment, and is arguably why David’s writing a whole book.
ETA: Also, “existentialism” is a really loaded term and carries a lot of connotations. In one sense it’s neither true nor false because it’s making a metaphysical claim. But in another it’s true, in a limited sense, because there is no physical essence, which is the big thing David spends a lot of time arguing against (because it’s the naive view almost everyone has until they are convinced out of it). But then there’s the big sense of existentialism which is false because it includes all the stuff the post-modernists hung on to existentialism that grew out of a pure subjectivity assumption.
Thanks for the explanation.
Could you please give some concrete examples of this? It is still unclear to me how this relates to the big “search for meaning” that Chapman talks about.
I have some examples and more details about intersubjectivity in Chapter 9 of my book, Fundamental Uncertainty. Do those help?
As to how it relates to the search for meaning, it’s because if we think meaning is objective then we go looking for it somewhere outside our experience (but it’s not there) and if we think it’s subjective we may think it doesn’t exist. It does exist, just not “out there” anywhere (but also not exactly “in here” only).
Thanks! All your arguments about uncertainty and intersubjectivity seem very reasonable to me, but I still do not understand why purpose or ethics should be intersubjective.
(Laws and customs are obviously intersubjective phenomena, but ethics?)
They are intersubjective because everything we know is intersubjective, though to be fair sometimes “intersubjectivity” doesn’t address the question that’s really being asked.
For example, in ethics the question is more often “why these ethics?” rather than “how do we know ethics?”. And if we set aside metaphysical questions about moral facts (not because they are totally uninteresting, but because we can’t know the answers), what we’re left with is a set of normative rules and heuristics for how to behave, which changes the question “why these ethics?” to “why these norms?”, and this is an easier question to answer that involves game theory, cultural evolution, and adaptation to local circumstances.
For purpose, the question is again often “why this purpose?” or “why any purpose?” rather than “how do we know what someone or something’s purpose is?”. And why any particular person or system has the particular purpose they do is a complicated but ultimately physical question about teasing out causality to find why things are the way they are. I find cybernetics models helpful for understanding purpose, but many other tools like Pearl’s causality can be helpful in explaining the mechanisms.
Now hoooold your horses! IMO the metaphysical questions are absolutely key to the distinction between eternalism, nihilism, and (what Chapman calls) existentialism.
Wouldn’t every nihilist and existentialist agree with this?
Could you please give some concrete examples of the purposes you have in mind here?
Yes, this is true, the positions David argues against are metaphysical positions. Part of his argument is that strong metaphysical claims are nonsensical. He gives a kind of argument against metaphysics here (and elsewhere, this is just the most recent link I could find). I think this is not the best argument, and I give what I consider a better one in my book (draft chapter linked).
Yes, but only on the surface. They’d further assert that this is fundamentally the only way to think about ethics because they claim there are no moral facts. I am saying something different, which is that whether or not there are moral facts is unknowable, so we must understand ethics ignorant of them. This is a position that is also compatible with moral realism, since a realist can argue that ethics is the discipline of how we discover what moral facts are since any workable ethical system will be a natural expression of moral truth.
Sure. Living things generally have purposes like survive and reproduce. Tea kettles have purposes like heating whatever is inside them. Thermostats have purposes like keeping the thermometer reading the desired temperature.
I’ve written about this in this chapter, although that chapter doesn’t stand alone very well, so I don’t know how useful reading it would be without reading the whole book (and it needs some substantial improvements anyway).
This position seems compatible with existentialism. The existentialist could just say: “Your game theory and evolution explains why other people believe what they believe. It neither proves nor suggests that they are right. I choose to view ethics like this...”
(I am not sure whether your claim is compatible with nihilism. I am not an expert on nihilism.)
As far as I can see, this fails to cross the is-ought divide. The existentialist would agree that living beings have been shaped by evolution, and that this could in some sense be called a “purpose”, but each of us still can and must choose our own purpose.
(The topic of the purposes of man-made tools seems to me irrelevant to the question. Chapman also brings that up, and there I also failed to understand what that has to do with the topic of the book.)
I think it should be, though a nihilist probably doesn’t care because it doesn’t mean anything anyway.
Can you say more? I personally dissolved my original is-ought confusion a while ago and I’m not sure sure what you mean by failing to cross the divide.
My guess is you’re talking about the metaphysical kind of divide many people put between is and ought, treating them as fundamentally different things? If so, I’d just say we don’t know. What I know is that I know is from what I observe, and I know ought from what I expect, and these are both known through beliefs, which are all one kind of thing, and the only divide is in how I relate to certain beliefs as observations vs. expectations.
Let me try:
Hmm
I think the key is to realize that Chapman is trying to promote Buddhism, without saying it explicitly, pretending that it is somehow a spontaneous answer to questions that people are asking today.
In old texts, Buddha was promoting his way as a middle path between two (strawman?) alternatives. Chapman reiterates the same using modern words, calling those alternatives “eternalism” and “nihilism”.
It is an old rhetorical trick. In Western philosophy, it is called “thesis—antithesis—synthesis”, or as I call it: “strawman—opposite strawman—look I am the only reasonable person in this room”.
I would say that Chapman seems very confident that Buddha knew the answers to everything. And of course, Buddha couldn’t know about the moral philosophy that happened later, so there is neither agreement, nor disagreement.
.
I think Less Wrong needs an emoji for “yet another sneaky attempt to promote Buddhist dogma”.
In neither case are these positions strawmen. In the Buddha’s time, there really were people who believed in wielding power to make their lives comfortable to insulate themselves from suffering and people who believed that they could escape suffering by living lives of extreme asceticism. In fact, we still have people who believe these two things today, and lots of people believe weak versions of these view points: they think they can either fix their lives and finally be happy by buying one more thing or by finding happiness in complete denial of their desires.
Similarly, eternalism and nihilism, though in the former case a non-standard name for this philosophical position, are real positions adopted by real people, and as David argues in places, many people assume eternalism or nihilism without ever being very explicit about it, but if you press them on their beliefs it’ll become clear which assumption they are making. This is pretty normal, as lots of people have lots of non-explicit beliefs that they are assuming and they only become explicit when it’s forced out of them and given a name.
I think this is a mischaracterization of Chapman’s views.
He is a Buddhist. His way of seeing the world is very Buddhist influenced. And yet I think David would be quick the admit that Buddhism doesn’t have all the answer, because if it did then someplace like Tibet or Myanmar would be a utopian paradise (they are not).
It is fair to say that Chapman thinks Buddhism offers some answers to the problems in the modern world, but I think it’s unlikely he’d say that the Buddha in particular or Buddhism in general offers answers to everything. You can reach out and ask him, but I’m pretty sure, for example, that he’d happily admit the Buddha didn’t really know anything about quantum mechanics or general relativity or the germ theory of disease.
I know there’s a lot of folks on Less Wrong interested in Buddhism and who bring Buddhist ideas here. Maybe this is annoying if you think Buddhism in particular or religion in general are silly and that any ideas that come from them, even if they turn out to be correct, are tainted by this provenance.
I think it’s worth considering that most people on Less Wrong who are into Buddhism, like myself, did not start out Buddhist, and instead became interested in Buddhism because we were trying to find answers to questions. Traditional Western, rationalist sources offered inadequate answers. Buddhism offered some answers that seem correct in that they, for example, made our lives better.
If Buddhism knows how to make you happy, then you should want to believe that Buddhism is correct about how to make you happy, and you should want to practice Buddhism is you want to be happy. If you think Buddhist techniques don’t work or Buddhist philosophy is wrong, then you need to make specific arguments about why and where it is wrong.
Chapman definitely advocates for Buddhism and Buddhist-style practices, but he is also critical of Buddhism. In this article on Vividness (one of his other sites) he is very critical of traditional Buddhist morality: https://vividness.live/buddhist-morality-is-medieval