This chart is an overview of Meaningness and Time: the past, present, and future of culture, society, and our selves. | Continue reading
When you discover you are owned by an ideology, you can escape. Better, you can find a larger space. | Continue reading
Intuitions of “cosmic meaning” root in hunger for personal social significance, and in encounters with vastness. | Continue reading
Everything was meaningless at the moment of the Big Bang. What could add meaning after that? | Continue reading
Lite nihilism includes a valuable, accurate analysis of the failure of eternalism. | Continue reading
Meanings come and go; they are not eternally stable—and that is fine. | Continue reading
Your future death does not make your present meaningless. | Continue reading
A world of total license: the catastrophe some fear if nihilistic views become widespread. | Continue reading
“Nihilism is inevitable, but not a problem.” This is mistaken: it makes you miserable and ineffective, and erodes social and cultural capacity. | Continue reading
Nihilism promises you don’t have to care, because nothing means anything. But you do care—and you can’t escape that. | Continue reading
If meaning lives only in Neverland, we can’t make much use of it. Fortunately, it’s here, now. | Continue reading
“Ultimate” means “at the end of a scale.” What is the scale of meaning? Should you want to be at the end of it? | Continue reading
Nihilism rightly denies objective, ultimate, transcendent, absolute, cosmic, and eternal meanings. What is left? | Continue reading
“Nothing REALLY means anything” sounds plausible when you feel nihilistic. What does “really” mean, though? | Continue reading
Nihilism, like botulism, is not an ideology or conceptual system. It is a stance: an emotionally-charged way of being. | Continue reading
Systems such as religions and political ideologies reinforce eternalism. They dispel doubt by denying nebulosity. | Continue reading
Most SAD lamps are not bright enough (in lux or lumens). How to build one brighter than any you can buy! | Continue reading
Routine activity usually goes smoothly overall, despite frequent minor glitches, because we have methods for repairing trouble. | Continue reading
Understanding concrete, purposeful activity is a prerequisite to understanding the formal rationality that depends on it. | Continue reading
The Eggplant is neither cognitive nor science, although it seeks a better understanding of some phenomena cognitive science has studied. | Continue reading
Rationalist theories of action try to deduce optimal choices from true beliefs. This is rarely possible in practice. | Continue reading
The mistaken belief that statistical methods can tell you what to believe drove the science replication crisis. | Continue reading
If probability theory were an epistemology, we’d want it to tell us how confident to be in our beliefs. Unfortunately, it can’t do that. | Continue reading
Propositions are whatever sort of thing it is you can believe. Nothing can play that role; so we need a different understanding of belief. | Continue reading
Rationalist theories assume perception delivers an objective description of the world to rationality. It can’t, and doesn’t try to. | Continue reading
Meaningness is broad and shallow; The Eggplant is tall and narrow. They demand different navigational plans and tools. | Continue reading
The correspondence theory of truth doesn’t work by metaphysical magic. We must do the work to make it work—by any means necessary. | Continue reading
Reduction is a powertool of rationality, but reductionism can’t work as a general theory; most rationality is not reduction. | Continue reading
Recognizing that some statements are neither true nor false was a major advance in early 20th-century rationalism. | Continue reading
Formal logic successfully addresses important defects in traditional, Aristotelian logic, but cannot deal with contextuality. | Continue reading
Early 20th-century logical positivism was the last serious rationalism. Better understandings of rationality learn from its mistakes. | Continue reading
Defining the subject matter: rationality, rationalism, reasonableness, and meta-rationality. | Continue reading
Why meta-rationality matters for progress: leveling up science, technology, and society, even as they are unraveling. | Continue reading
You can now read Part One of the meta-rationality book on the web. | Continue reading
Most SAD lamps are not bright enough (in lux or lumens). How to build one brighter than any you can buy! | Continue reading
Wonder at the vastness, beauty, and intricacy of the phenomenal world: a texture of the complete stance. | Continue reading
Peak experiences and the complete stance are similar in texture, but differ in intensity, conceptual content, and causes | Continue reading
Patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting in the complete stance, which resolves problems of meaning | Continue reading
Open-ended curiosity gives you the freedom to interact with the world without metaphysical presuppositions. | Continue reading
I have made available the source code for Sonja, my PhD thesis program. | Continue reading
Common critiques of materialism, from religion, political idealism, personal idealism, and nihilism. | Continue reading
Fundamental method for resolving problems of meaning, by finding nebulosity, pattern, and their inseparable relationship | Continue reading
Nihilism defends itself from the obviousness of meanings with spurious intellectual arguments. Here’s how to dispel them. | Continue reading
Meaning and meaninglessness, pattern and nebulosity all obviously exist—yet we resist recognizing and admitting this. Why? | Continue reading
Eternalism is the wrong idea that everything has a definite meaning, fixed by an external ordering principle. | Continue reading
Logicism and probabilism are the most influential versions of rationalism. | Continue reading
The global internet atomizes cultures, societies, and selves into tiny brilliant shards. Meaning has lost context and coherence. Now what? | Continue reading