About
What is the meaning of life?
Is it a buzz kill, or the only question that matters? Is it a movie, some kind of kitsch commodity? Is it ill-posed, nonsensical, or just plain misdirected? Is it more easily answered now than a thousand years ago? Is it even thinkable? Will the answer blow minds, beggar belief, or rot souls? And what does it have to do with the mad pace of technological change around us? Why are things becoming more strange, more difficult to reckon—more meaningless?
For that matter, what is meaning, anyway? Everywhere we turn its me-me-meaning this and me-me-meaning that… Surely we know what it is.
Except, we don’t. We only pretend to. Some of us pretend so hard that we actually wager innocent lives on what, when all is said and done, amounts to no more than wishful thinking and pedestrian conceit. No one can agree on the nature of meaning because no one has a clue as to what it is. All we have are guesses, conferences where confreres confer, rallies where the religious rail. Is it really just a coincidence that those guesses uniformly flatter the souls making them? My god. My good. My meaning.
All we have are self-aggrandizing hopes. Since only fools hope against the worst and prepare for the best, I think it’s time we set the flattery aside and begin exploring the ugly guesses, the humbling possibilities. If everyone has the wrong happy answer to the question of meaning, perhaps the right answer is the horrific one. What if no one can agree because there is no such thing as meaning, at least not in any sense resembling what our fractious ancestors assumed? What if human civilization is about to outgrow choices, purposes, and values the way it has outgrown destinies and gods, enter an age that can only be conceived nihilistically?
Storytelling is my primary means of sounding these darker possibilities. The centerpiece of my project is The Second Apocalypse, the tale of a monastic outcast who rises from obscurity to shake the world. Through flawed gazes and broken hearts I try to paint a canvas as savage and sage as those rendered by my adolescent idols, Howard, Herbert, and Tolkien. I’ve lived with this story for thirty years now (!) and I’m pretty sure I’ll never have a better one to tell. “Perhaps the best fantasy series written in the past decade…” The Atlantic.com recently declared. And I’m just getting to the interesting bits now.
Three Pound Brain is my secondary means of sounding these questions, a kind of philosophical scrapbook where I try to make theoretical sense of what seems to be happening—the nature of the biological, social, and technological processes behind our ongoing ‘semantic apocalypse.’ You don’t have to be a philosopher or SF writer to know that something profound is afoot: Even as ‘smart technologies’ populate our world with counterfeit agency, cognitive scientific research and big data are drawing back the curtain on our own personhood, rendering us more machinic. Some of the troubling answers I explore have been showcased on CBC’s Ideas, as well as published in Nature (with Eric Schwitzgebel) and The Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Feel free to contact me at richard[dot]scott[dot]bakker[at]gmail[dot]com.
R. Scott Bakker
March 26th, 2016
Hi Scott, relative layman here. I don’t know much, but I do know I liked Jerome Bruner’s ‘Acts of Meaning’. I presume you’ve read it given its relevance, and I wonder if you’d be willing to briefly indicate where Bruner fits in and how you’d respond to him, in such a way that I might start to orient myself when reading your work. Regards,
To understand my position vis a vis any intentionalist, let alone an arch-intentionalist like Bruner, you need to begin by asking what it is theoreticians like him are trying to accomplish. For all intentionalists, the claim is that only intentional cognition can solve intentional cognition. Bruner begins with this assumption (via a Wittgensteinian lens, if I remember correctly). I begin by asking the high-altitude biomechanical question of what intentional cognition consists in, argue that its most significant feature (from an explanatory perspective), is heuristic neglect: that it utilizes cues as a way to overcome intractability, and so can only be reliably applied in certain, largely practical contexts. The kind of theoretical work that Bruner (and psychology more generally) engages in has all the problems it does simply because they’re attempting to use practical tools to do theoretical jobs. And this I think, provides a very parsimonious lens through with to understand why folk/commonsense approaches both succeed and fail the way they do.
Finding ways to theorize a post-intentional discourse of the human is what this blog is all about. It all comes down to theories of meaning. Bruner’s adapting philosophical theories that have already been developed, whereas I’m in the process of developing a theory that hopefully some future Bruner will be able to adapt to their research domains.
Thank you.
Unfortunately the only instrument that you have to try and figure it all out is thought, rather like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. A book that might be of some interest to you or possibly not is, Self Gives Meaning To Things, No-Self Takes It Away by:Jean-Michel Terdjman
All the best, Philip
Why assume thought is an instrument?
Yes you are right, thought in itself is not an instrument but it is used as one by man. You used the thought/knowledge that you have about reality as an instrument/tool/means to ask me “Why assume thought is an instrument”?
“You used the thought/knowledge that you have about reality as an instrument/tool/means to ask me “Why assume thought is an instrument”?”
Why assume thought/knowledge is something we ‘use’?
Interesting interview with former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, actually mentioning tribes and them reading just their own stuff in a post fact environment and an erosion of buy in to democracy that was taken as a given.
Link should have given the pertinent time – 7:40
Turn off off your t.v, your phone, radio and your attitude. Walk up to a stranger and ask the politely. How do you feel? Then go and get laid, reality reset complete.
No idea how long this new about page has been up, I rather like it far more than the previous rendition. 🙂
I’m curious to know if you are familiar with the ubiquitous, deep, depressing, nature of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s fantasy epic, Dark Souls? I haven’t read any of your books yet, but if your fantasy novels are anything like Dark Souls’ grim nature let me know. For I have never explored such a rich and dark world as of the world in Dark Souls. Genius story telling too if your unfamiliar with it, look it up!
Just finished The Unholy Consult.
As long time fan, cheers!! It’s a belter.
I just finished The Darkness That Comes Before this morning. The themes of the book led me to research on you which eventually led me to this page.
I find your thoughts on the meaning of life very profound, and what you said about doubt, and how doubt isn’t necessarily a bad thing is something I agree with.
I embarked on my own quest to find out the meaning of life, although the journey wasn’t as long, in depth and academic as your’s. I’ve read different books on philosophy, religious texts, observed and I’ve never stopped asking questions.
Consequently, I have a question; where I’m from, Africa, many still accept the existence of spiritual and metaphysical experiences, and everyone at least knows someone who has ‘experienced’ or ‘grasped’ with this.
I’m curious to know your thoughts on the spiritual and metaphysical?
What is that term. Maximizing utility in an information vacuum. It all turns on that. Data science. Consciousness, cognizance, science logic. Science is like a ruler and pen and ink in the dark. Still bound by what we can’t see. But dispels some amusing notions about what it could be. Even what people call the ‘it’ factor I think is the good use of that native ability. Based in logic. Consistent both intellectually and squares with the measurements. Strikes true if I wax poetic. Anyways. Just some thoughts. And what will come as we reach out with a wooden arm into the space that build stairs for us. Hopefully