- "The Universe has no objective, inherent goal, or meaning" is quite a strong metaphysical _assumption_ (and the notion of the subjective meaning makes for a completely different story, often equivocated for obvious reasons). One can practice spirituality without it. I am not preaching for The Meaning, this is a negative position of mine. Still it may feel liberating.
- What if "I" or "you" is secondary to the fact that these are just quite arbitrarily separated parts of the single Universe? I mean, while this is just another way of looking at things, it leads to a radically different phenomenology. This eases the _feeling_ of isolation: even the simple act of breathing implies there is an inseparable something to breathe in, and the act of walking tacitly includes something to walk on. Not to mention the myriads of social interactions going on.
- The Agency you wrote about may be overrated. What if e.g. the world is deterministic (or inherently random) on the layer of underlying physical processes? You can then go very far by analyzing what "to change [the world] according to our will" would really mean.
Ah, I see. I address metaphysical potentialities in sections 2 & 3. From section 3:
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> We can never speak in terms of Absolutes—in terms of definitive truth. Instead, we can speak only in terms of probabilities—what we think is likely to be true.
> Thus, what’s useful for us—what would be productive—isn’t to sit around wishing we could access an Absolutely-Objective reality… or to delude ourselves into believing that we can possess perfect truths. What’s useful is to cultivate a confidence—a faith—instead in our experience and Individual-Subjectivity. When it comes time to bet, after all, we can never be certain—we can never know that we know what’s real. The best we can do is make an educated guess; to form a theory from the data we believe we perceive—the information we assume to be true and real.
> The goal of science has never been absolute certainty. Instead:
> It’s only ever been to be certain to the best of our ability.
> ...
> Truth can’t be an inherent property—neither to knowledge, nor to reality. The inherence of a truth, after all, would be impossible to claim or prove, because any world of Absolute-Objectivity would necessarily exist beyond our abstraction; never observed, only inferred—known only in theory, but never in reality. We can’t know anything to be absolute truth, because:
> Truth is knowledge that we create… through the stories that we tell about our world.
The argument is therefore not that "the universe has no inherent meaning", but instead that "we cannot assume, based on available evidence, that the universe has inherent meaning".
Additionally, I would say that in the context of Sartrean Agency, the assertion is itself that it's arguments for both free will and determinism which are overrated, as in the footnotes of section 4:
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> 4 Determinism implies an absolute absence of freedom-of-action within existence.
> 5 “Free Will” implies an absolute presence of freedom-of-action within existence.
> 6 As in Sartre, wherein the concept of Agency exists beyond the simplistic dichotomy of Free Will vs. Determinism, and is the experientially-verifiable capacity of Subjects to act upon and shape their world. Wherein Free Will and Determinism respectively suggest absolute presence or absence, Agency instead refers to the empirically obvious degree of freedom-of-action which individuals observably possess within their circumstances (i.e. within their Facticity).
Nice, but simplistic. I dare not say "naive".
Or, should I say, just some narrow rabbit hole. :)
Care to elaborate?
Yup, sure :)
- "The Universe has no objective, inherent goal, or meaning" is quite a strong metaphysical _assumption_ (and the notion of the subjective meaning makes for a completely different story, often equivocated for obvious reasons). One can practice spirituality without it. I am not preaching for The Meaning, this is a negative position of mine. Still it may feel liberating.
- What if "I" or "you" is secondary to the fact that these are just quite arbitrarily separated parts of the single Universe? I mean, while this is just another way of looking at things, it leads to a radically different phenomenology. This eases the _feeling_ of isolation: even the simple act of breathing implies there is an inseparable something to breathe in, and the act of walking tacitly includes something to walk on. Not to mention the myriads of social interactions going on.
- The Agency you wrote about may be overrated. What if e.g. the world is deterministic (or inherently random) on the layer of underlying physical processes? You can then go very far by analyzing what "to change [the world] according to our will" would really mean.
Ah, I see. I address metaphysical potentialities in sections 2 & 3. From section 3:
***
> We can never speak in terms of Absolutes—in terms of definitive truth. Instead, we can speak only in terms of probabilities—what we think is likely to be true.
> Thus, what’s useful for us—what would be productive—isn’t to sit around wishing we could access an Absolutely-Objective reality… or to delude ourselves into believing that we can possess perfect truths. What’s useful is to cultivate a confidence—a faith—instead in our experience and Individual-Subjectivity. When it comes time to bet, after all, we can never be certain—we can never know that we know what’s real. The best we can do is make an educated guess; to form a theory from the data we believe we perceive—the information we assume to be true and real.
> The goal of science has never been absolute certainty. Instead:
> It’s only ever been to be certain to the best of our ability.
> ...
> Truth can’t be an inherent property—neither to knowledge, nor to reality. The inherence of a truth, after all, would be impossible to claim or prove, because any world of Absolute-Objectivity would necessarily exist beyond our abstraction; never observed, only inferred—known only in theory, but never in reality. We can’t know anything to be absolute truth, because:
> Truth is knowledge that we create… through the stories that we tell about our world.
https://themodernexistentialist.substack.com/p/3-method-and-madness-on-fact-and
***
The argument is therefore not that "the universe has no inherent meaning", but instead that "we cannot assume, based on available evidence, that the universe has inherent meaning".
Additionally, I would say that in the context of Sartrean Agency, the assertion is itself that it's arguments for both free will and determinism which are overrated, as in the footnotes of section 4:
***
> 4 Determinism implies an absolute absence of freedom-of-action within existence.
> 5 “Free Will” implies an absolute presence of freedom-of-action within existence.
> 6 As in Sartre, wherein the concept of Agency exists beyond the simplistic dichotomy of Free Will vs. Determinism, and is the experientially-verifiable capacity of Subjects to act upon and shape their world. Wherein Free Will and Determinism respectively suggest absolute presence or absence, Agency instead refers to the empirically obvious degree of freedom-of-action which individuals observably possess within their circumstances (i.e. within their Facticity).
***