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Comment by codemonkey-zeta | Hacker News Reader

The absolute best resource I've found for educating myself about this topic is John Vervaeke's free online course "Awakening from the meaning crisis". You can search it in YouTube or Spotify.

He explains in detail exactly why a "nostalgic return to religion" cannot save us from, not just nihilism, but the entire set of crises western society is undergoing.

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The crises stems not from a loss or lack of meaning, it's from recognizing how limited our forms like narratives and myths/religions provide access to meaning. If we fully recognize the meaning load in any event, it's endlessly connected to past and future events. Any event's local-load is likewise massive. The idea we use metaphors as meaning sinks is bizarre. Metaphors are arbitrary, meaning is not, it is specific. This is the inherent problem.

The scaffolding we use for meaning, language, myth, causality, narratives, these are all Pleistocene tools that have long overstyed their welcome. Access to meaning is a total failure of imagination of the basics.

I'm not disagreeing, but what alternatives are there? And to continue with the tool metaphor: How would we know if it's a better tool? Without a vantage point where we could judge both the tools we have now to the alternative, we might be just trading one flawed tool for another. But I'm not going throw away a flashlight because it doesn't light up the universe either. At least with a flashlight, I can see something.

If what we get to navigate with the flashlight eventually extincts us in folk meaning, then better upgrade the tool.

The problem with meaning is the problem with the words. Get rid of them and their agentic curse that lowballs meaning. There are glyphs, movies, Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Chorti/Yucatec etc., Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

We use landfill for communication. Western languages are terrible hacks of sense-emotion-syntax. That got hacked in Gutenberg, ASCII, web now AI. It's dead.

Again, I'm sympathetic... but replacing one symbolic system for another doesn't answer the question of how any symbolic system relates to it's "meaning" or even in a more accurate way. We are always in the soup of language, change the seasoning, but we will always be in the soup.

Ditch them. Movies already demonstrate what Mayan/Chinese accomplishes momentarily. It's post-representation, post-symbolic, post-metaphor. verbs only, references only. Concatenation. Humans are slaves to symbols, look at computers. We have an S&M relationship to the arbitrary and Wall Street and Silicon Valley want it this way: they've made trillions off an illusion. We either shift to external references for action-syntax or enjoy the ride the dinosaurs took down. And they had a meteor. We've got a self-made mirage of the arbitrary.

The series:

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb...

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