It seems Hamas wants to save Israel from getting an intelligent leader who made a lot of money in Tech. Bennett's religiosity- precisely because it was Judaic- could have rendered things more 'objectively' ethical in that region precisely because 'existential' identities were not , economically, antagonomic.
Why are Jews- and their Christian and Muslim cousins in the region- so fucked in the head with respect to 'Social Choice' when, the evidence is, they can coordinate pretty well through market or mimetic mechanisms? One problem is 'externalist reasons'- i.e. the notion that people in the region mustn't do what is in their own interest. They must sacrifice themselves for the greater glory of their wider Religion or ethnic affiliation. Strangely, this can change unpredictably. The Saudis now want Palestinians to make nice with the Jews so as to get behind an Arab alliance against their true enemy- the Persians. For this reason, Gaza's attacks will only last long enough for Bibi to run out the clock on Bennett who can't benefit from, Hamas ally, Ra'am's support for the duration of the hostilities.
Some values, for 'regret minimizing' reasons, must be 'ontologically dysphoric'- i.e. not a home in this world. But such reasons aren't 'externalist' at all. Consider gender dysphoria. Some Feminists, subscribing to a paranoid 'externalism' re. Patriarchy, think it isn't really 'internal'. Rather, it must be 'false consciousness'. Yet, the science of the thing is clear. You can have the body of the wrong gender and can know it even if you live on a desert island. Thankfully, there is now a relatively easy fix- one which will get even better as Medical Science improves. There is absolutely no reason to bad mouth 'trans' people just because they are autonomous and reject our 'externalist' values.
Still, we are obliged to recognize that though 'Externalist reasons' are nonsense, they can have strategic value or can solve Newcombe type problems- i.e. telling lies with a straight face.
This is why sensible Jews- like other peoples- want some smart Jews- or rather those who seem smart, but aren't really- to talk utter shite so that the standard Jew does sensible things. This is merely a 'Hannan Consistent' Regret Minimizing Strategy.
As foolish as Gaza's recent attacks is Rivka Weinberg who writes in the Journal of Controversial Ideas-
Life is pointless.
No. The point of life is to propagate life. A particular life may seem pointless. But making that point is pointless save in some context where this might cease to be so.
That’s not okay. I show that. I argue that a point is a valued end and that, as agents, it makes sense for us to want our efforts and enterprises to have a point.
Cognitive resources are scarce. It does not make sense for agents to waste resources on pointless shite- like saying 'we should want our efforts to have a point'. This would be like saying 'we should have a clear and unambiguous intention to breathe in. However we should also value breathing out. Otherwise we might suffocate'.
Valued ends provide justifying reasons for our acts, efforts, and projects.
But so does stuff we just pull out of our arse if asked a stupid question like 'why are breathing out? It is pointless. You'll just breathe out again.' Obviously, the proper justification is 'Air that has touched you entered my lungs to further torment my heart by your being so close yet so impossible of attainment. My despair of ever getting a kiss from you escapes me as a sigh.' I guarantee, this will cause any silly person who is pestering you with questions to give you a wide berth. Of course, maybe this only works if you are as ugly as me. But if you aren't, fuck you're wasting your time reading this shite for?
I further argue that ends lie separate from the acts and enterprises for which they provide a point.
In which case there must be some further act or intention linking the two. This is like Aristotle's 'third man' argument. You need a further act or intention to link the previous act or intention to the point of the point and so on. There is an infinite regress.
We may, for some purpose, distinguish 'ends' from 'means' and 'strategy' from 'tactics' and 'objectives' from 'instruments'. But this does not mean that they might not be 'entangled' in a radical manner and that every such 'factorization' is provisional and defeasible. Is kissing a 'means' to an 'end' or an end in itself? When you are 17, you may give one answer. When you are 57 you may give a different answer- though the person you are kissing is the same. But that person may now see the thing as a means to an end whereas she previously considered it an end in itself. This does not mean I'm utterly lacking in virility. It's just that I find cuddles are very comforting. My resting heart rate goes down. I can feel the oxytocin boosting my immunity levels. Fuck you lockdown! Fuck you very much! I've become a fat, sentimental, pile of shite.
Since there can be no end external to one’s entire life
WTF! Everybody- even the saddest skinflint, loser,- has a grand-nephew or niece or maybe the grandkids of the girl that got away or whatever to leave their little horde of wealth to. Even if you are an utter misanthrope, there are animal shelters or Churches or Museums you can leave your money to.
since one’s life includes all of one’s ends, leading and living one’s life as a whole cannot have a point. Finally, I argue that since we live our lives and structure our living-a-human-life efforts both in parts and as a whole, it is fitting to be sad to recognize that leading and living a life is pointless.
It is sad that a useless tosser like me has lived a life most would consider pointless simply because I didn't try very hard and so nothing can be learnt from my failures. Still, at this very moment, there's a possibility that I'll get infected by some mutated virus and my immune system's catastrophic failure to rise to the challenge will help Doctors better understand some arcane cellular mechanism which in turn contributes marginally, but not immaterially, to some new breakthrough which makes our Species happier and more secure.
My discussion helps make sense of the literature that frequently talks around this topic but often does so vaguely and indirectly.
What if that literature was shite? Why make 'sense' of it? What is the point?
Rivka says the point has to do with 'ultimate meaning'. Everybody else- at least in their linguistic pragmatics- holds meaning to arise in coevolved processes of an 'economic' type. Absolute Truth or Unvocal Being or such impossible Love as even the most worthless tosser feels towards the spouse, the family, he may have had, indeed, anything beyond the temporal horizon, anything thoroughly ontologically dysphoric and wholly not at home in this world, is linked to 'artha'- meaning as an economic pragmatics- is that meaning which is meaningless to us here and now. We seek but a path whereas Truth is a 'pathless land'. It is the 'black Sun' which shines on the back of all things. By its light- which is but our 'darkness of the savants', you, dear reader, may see that this blogger- a Socioproctologist pointing an ignorant finger at academic assholes- would have harmed all those whom he loved if he had succeeded, by an assiduity or importunity all right-thinking people must find repugnant, in remaining salient in their emotional lives. But you would also see that Time is many fingered. This Iyer is his own 'Angulimala'. Like the aged Swinburne, taking his constitutional on Putney heath and pausing to babble in delight at every wee bairn in its pram, this Iyer- walking the Thames Path- sees Samsara is Nirvana coz baby in pushchair is everywhere there's a where.
Returning to Rivka- but hold, why not just say what we are all thinking? Rikva- what a fucking marvelous name! In the Indo-Iranian languages it has the meaning of 'rejoicing and praising (God)' and is linked to Hinduism's holiest text. In Hebrew the Mittani coin toss of the phoneme 'kv' fails on its tail. Yet it is associated with 'binding'- i.e a Vedic 'bandhu' or Abrahamic 'covenant'. Henceforth, I will use Rikva and Rivka interchangeably coz that's how stupidity flourishes.
It is no accident that we find Rivkas at Scripps. It was this, Price equation, priceless stupidity, whose ceaseless self-sacrifice kept current every Casteist Covenant- at least of a Kohain or Kaula type. It was Rikvahs like Solomon Maimon's mother in law who preserved the equally pernicious 'Golden Liberties' of Ashkenazi juristic overreach and consequent anarchy.
I recall recoiling from Maimon type wives in North London- they looked Teutonic but weren't. Why were 'Orthodox' women engaged in 'repugnant' trades- e.g. renting out shite apartments to 'colored' folk like me? The answer was, so hubby could stay in 'shul'. Maimon's mother in law, like his wife, kept a very successful Tavern. No wonder the guy wouldn't give his wife a get! I can think of no other Ashkenazi, Mathsy, prodigy who had a problem with booze.
Sorry. Fuck I know about Judaism? Let me honestly admit that my own Hindu orthopraxy was generated by indigenous women- which is how come mt-DNA diversity has been maintained in India via the caste system- not 'Aryan' men. The point to my pointless life is that my Socioproctological- i.e. shite- genes and memes have been kept out of the immaculate and uterine font of their amniotic gene pool. Mum spent a lot of money getting an 'ICS gotra' Vadadesi Vadama groom for my sister. But, once the fellow was safely back in the States, on a diplomatic passport (he'd been previously deported for drugs and rape), obviously, the guy did a runner. So Mom paid a lot of money to get hold of the girl baby of a fair-skinned (supposedly Afghan) prisoner in Tihar Jail so my sister could adopt a daughter less tall, less smart, but also less Dravidian, less dark, than she herself. Needless to say- this was a poisoned chalice for all involved. My sister had to abandon her parents because otherwise she- a UN official- could be done for 'human trafficking'. The fact that her daughter was Muslim and she herself would have been considered Hindu put a 'communal' twist to things. Thus she had to give her senile, over-talkative, parents the cold shoulder.
Thankfully, my sister- like Rivka- is engaged in something wholly worthless. She is a UN official doing 'anti-desertification' within a bureaucratic vacuum. Rikva, sadly, is courting 'controversy'.
Why, Rikva? Don't you understand that you are shit? That's the point to you. You smell bad. Smart kids avoid taking your classes.
Still, if your daughters become Doctors or Chefs or just Moms- your existence won't have been pointless at all.
Unlike mine.
God is just. Gender dimorphism cuts both ways. Pointlessness is represented by the winnowing out of X chromosomes.
Thus, I have only one reason to like Noam Chomsky. The guy was a mensch. A serious man. He and his wife raised three kids. Clearly, when properly paired up and bound, even a Chomsky has his uses. I didn't. But this does not mean my life has been pointless. I raised the value of certain women by raising their 'opportunity cost'. A 'competitive fringe' which doesn't actually compete nevertheless improves outcomes.
Returning to Rikva- whose research program is as foolish as Chomsky- we find an equally extraordinary set of non sequiturs parading as an argument-
Some people worry that life is pointless.
because they pointlessly worry about stupid shit.
That’s because it is.
In which case everybody should worry about it- unless there's an easy way out. If there isn't Rikva can't find it because she teaches a shit subject and has a low IQ. If there is, ignore Rikva coz she aint curing cancer. Just she is child minding overgrown cretins is all.
I don’t say that flippantly or glibly. I mean it and I will show it. The “meaning” of life can refer to several different things, including value, explanation, upshot, impact, significance, purpose, or point.
No. The meaning of x is some y. It is a one to one mapping. Disambiguation may be necessary based on some category or type theory. But for any given purpose, 'meaning' refers to one thing. It may be an inchoate thing. It may be a very big, 'slingshot' type thing which encompasses all reasons. But, it is not the case that the word 'meaning' can be used to refer to several different things if it is applied to one thing.
The meaning of life, like the meaning of death, refers only to what pertains to life, in the one case, or to what pertains to death, on the other.
What Rikva means may be 'in speaking of a life, or Life in general, the following types of things may be mentioned.' The problem here is that when people speak, other people tell them to shut the fuck up because they are stupid, worthless, tossers whose cogitations haven't actually made things better for anyone.
One cause of some confusion in the literature on the meaning of life is that
it is written by confused shitheads. Another cause may be that Woody Allen is God. He invented Philosophy to make fun of it.
which meaning of “meaning” is being used is not always sufficiently specified, even when the various meanings of the term are acknowledged. I will focus on “point” or “pointlessness,” as I take that to capture the essence of the problem of the meaning of life:
Why? We only bother with making 'points' when we don't greatly care about making decisions. Decision theory is important. It can more than pay for itself. But you can always drag in any homeless nutter to make all sorts of points in exchange for a can of special brew.
it’s pointless. Not necessarily the things we do or projects we pursue within a life, but the effort or enterprise of leading and having lived your entire life—what I call its “Ultimate Meaning;” the point of leading and living a life at all.
Either, you die, like Abraham, knowing your descendants will survive and thrive and do so in a virtuous manner, or- like me- you die, feeling yourself to be a Schopenhauerian 'small winner'- you did not feed your vanity by fathering lives bound to fail.
Rivka earns money by writing the following shite-
Just as the meaning of life is sometimes discussed without sufficiently specifying which meaning of “meaning” is in play, having a “point,” is sometimes invoked without sufficient specification.
Every sort of useful discussion does not 'sufficiently specify' Tarskian primitives. It would be foolish to do so. As with Aristotle's 'third man' argument- an infinite regress is involved.
What exactly does it mean for something to have a point?
That akreibia- i.e. 'precision' or 'exactitude' hasn't exceeded that which the subject matter sensibly affords. Is Rikva wholly ignorant of Aristotle? Fuck is she teaching her students?
I suggest that a point is a valued end (be the value objective or subjective)3;
but this is the suggestio falsi of a sophist who wishes to create an imaginary 'threat point'. The thing has no Muth Rational representation. It isn't philosophical. It is merely stupid, mischievous and wholly fraudulent.
Look at BDS. What did it achieve? It focused our minds- including Arab and Muslim minds- on the fact that Palestinians had produced shit intellectually speaking. Israel is a Knowledge Economy. We can't boycott guys who may find the cure to COVID.
Guys like me who knew- first hand- that a Palestinian Maths or other teacher was about 200 percent better, not to mention cheaper, than a Jewish teacher- and who thus believed James Michener's view of Palestine would prevail- i.e the indigenous people would capture and convert and make their conquerors more humane and productive- we were forced to admit that whereas Israel got rid of gangsterism (e.g 'Stern Gang) and assassination and shit in favor of a stern Histadrut Syndicalist Socialism, tempered by British Justice of an 'unwritten Constitution' type', the Palestinians went in the direction of pure Gangsterism.
Evolution, it appears, involves a Hannan consistent 'multiplicative weighting update algorithm' which tames Knightian Uncertainty by using regret minimizing strategies. It is apophatic not
an enterprise or effort has a point, or is purposeful, if we have justified reason to do it because of its valued end.
Justification, like judgment, is something only required where there is a reputational benefit. It is prudent to place more and more of our actions outside the scope of juristic reason.
Thus, the builder drives the nail into the wood to build a hut for a purpose, an end of value.
Fuck off! The guy does it to earn money. Try telling him he doesn't really want money. What he really cares about is building you a nice hut.
What ties point to value is the end-regarding reason you build the hut: you build the hut because you value the shelter provided the hut. (And you value the shelter because you value yourself. We can continue to ask about value until we arrive at something that has intrinsic value).
You can continue to ask about value so long as somebody pays you a salary. You will soon stop doing so when your College goes bankrupt because all the students start asking why they should value a worthless credential.
In your hut building enterprise, the shelter (or the person enjoying it) is your valued end, or the point of all that building.5 Purpose has “value commitments”6 and involves valued ends. If an enterprise is directed toward or grounded7 by an end then the end is being valued; it’s the point of the enterprise.
This type of reasoning disappeared 180 years ago with the 'marginal revolution'. It explained something we still see today- viz. building projects which stall during a recession. Value, like meaning, arises within a coevolved process. Mimetics operates till, at the margin, it doesn't get paid. That's why you see half built shopping malls all over the place.
This does not entail that seemingly process oriented or atelic pursuits are pointless and not directed toward or grounded by any valued ends. E.g., if we value the process of running or having coffee with friends, it may seem like there are no external ends involved yet we don’t find those pursuits pointless.
Fuck off! Ask your husband. He thinks it pretty fucking pointless.
But, even in those cases, the reason we don’t find the pursuits pointless is that they do in fact involve valued ends, namely, the exhilarating feeling of running or the joy of intimacy with friends.
Or the fact that you like kvetching about how your life- all Life- is so utterly fucking pointless.
And those ends, although reached throughout the time engaged in the pursuit, still lie separate from the pursuit itself.
So having an orgasm is completely separate from having sex. I tried to explain this to my significant others. Sadly, they were not convinced.
In his discussion regarding living meaningfully, Kieran Setiya distinguishes between telic and atelic pursuits.8
But he himself is distinguished by reason of his great stupidity.
Telic pursuits, such as building a house, are aimed at a final end—at completion.
No. They are aimed at getting a livelihood. Houses need maintenance. The bills keep piling in.
Atelic pursuits, such as talking a walk for pleasure, are not aimed at completion or a final state.
They represent 'maintenance'.
Setiya argues that many atelic pursuits are not only worthwhile but also crucial to maintaining a sense of meaningful purpose throughout the course of a life.9
But nobody argues that he isn't a waste of space.
Indeed, both telic and atelic pursuits can have a point. Both telic and atelic pursuits have, as purposes or points, values that lie outside the pursuits themselves. Atelic activity, such as playing with your children, having coffee with friends, or going for a stroll are not pursuits aimed at completion, but they are still pointful because they are grounded by or aim at external values of love, intimacy, joy, etc.
No. They may be 'discovery' or merely 'habitual' or 'mimetic' or 'displacement activity'. They can't be grounded in an 'external value' because of time complexity, concurrency, and computability problems w.r.t giving a substantive canonical form for essentially coevolved processes.
When you build a hut, your building is telic, aimed at completion.
Nope. We may start building a hut and then abandon the project because the locals are evidently cannibals and anyway the Peace Corps was a shit idea.
The shelter is valued because the person who will live in that shelter has intrinsic value and that’s the valued end, or the point, of building the hut. Similarly, if you take a walk to get some milk, the walk is telic, aimed at an end. If you walk to enjoy a pleasant stroll, the walk is atelic, not aimed at getting anywhere. But the point of either effort, be it the telic walk or the atelic stroll still lies in a value external to walking itself: the point lies, respectively, in the person enjoying the milk or the sheer joy of ambling about, both of which are external to the actual telic or atelic walking itself.
The point to doing pointless shit can always be said to be 'external'. Consider the UN peacekeepers in India. They have done nothing for seventy years. India keeps saying 'Fuck off, you useless tossers'. They say 'We'll pay you more and more money to stay. Our 'external' reason is that we don't want to do anything useful because then our worthless hides may be put in danger of bullet holes.'
You might think that you value, say, playing with your children, for its own sake but the play itself is not the valued end—it’s not the act of stacking blocks that is itself the point of stacking them. We want to know: why stack blocks? What is our valued end here? The reason we may value stacking blocks with our children is that we value our children, we value the love between us, we value the joy of play, we cherish the intimacy, the knowledge of each other etc., and those values—the children, the intimacy, the knowledge, the joy—are the points or the valued ends of playing with our children, and they are separate from the actual playing.
Fuck off! Playing with kids is cool. Also, they may believe us when we say we were bitten by a radio-active spider. In our spare time, we fight crime.
The valued end isn’t the playing. It is external to the playing, even if it is attained while playing. The point is not the running, it’s the exhilaration derived from it, etc. Things that may be intrinsically valuable, such as happiness, beauty, or truth can serve as valued ends for the effort or enterprise of pursuing happiness, making something beautiful, or acquiring knowledge but they are external to the pursuing, making, appreciating, or acquiring them and that’s why they can serve as the point of doing those things or engaging in those efforts. Projects, efforts, and enterprises consist of things we do or pursue, not values. Thus they may be grounded by or aimed at intrinsic values but they remain separate from the valued ends that provide a point to engaging in those pursuits, efforts, projects, or enterprises.
When you’re hungry, the point of eating is to enjoy the taste of food and become sated because satiety, you, and enjoyment are valued ends; when you’re nice to grandma, the point of your niceness is that grandma and her feelings are valued ends to you. Lots of pursuits, efforts and projects aren’t pointless because they are directed toward valued ends. That’s the good news. Being nice to grandma is somewhat safe from the perils of pointlessness, at least in my view. So is having coffee with friends, reading a book, getting out of bed, and quite possibly most of the things we do. The only little problem is that the effort or enterprise of leading our entire lives is pointless.
There is little point ridiculing shite which ridicules itself.
Fuck is wrong with Rivka? Or is she is a sort of Bibi who gets Hamas to collaborate in....what? Essentially this is just a Real Estate Project.
Why is Rivka Weiner or other berg so utterly shite? It's coz, I could be her fucking student! Her discipline is adversely selective!
Of course, I may be wrong. Perhaps Rivka will respond to what I've said.
Let us see.
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