This is all there is, says David Chapman. But what is, is extraordinary.

David Chapman is a really interesting guy. I've followed his writings on Buddhism, artificial intelligence, and other subjects for quite a few years. Meaningness is his main web site, and well worth a look. Chapman describes his form of Buddhism this way:

I am, somewhat reluctantly, a Buddhist. Of an odd sort: “the opposite of whatever you’d expect” comes close. That sort of Buddhism shares central themes with Meaningness. I explain it elsewhere:

• • A window has recently opened for Buddhist innovations that can address new cultural, social, and personal problems. Vividness explores possible futures, based on Buddhism’s history and its interactions with the modern–and postmodern—world.

  • Buddhism for Vampires is a playful, yet deadly serious, look at the dark side of Buddhism. We are all monsters, but we can embrace our monstrosity while retaining our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes.

"About David Chapman" on the Meaningness home page shows his impressive background.

I did a PhD in artificial intelligence at MIT. My undergraduate degree was in math. I’ve also studied cognitive science, biochemistry, Old English and Ancient Greek literature. None of that qualifies me to write Meaningness, but it may explain a certain STEM-ish orientation, decorated with occasional literary jokes. The closest thing I’ve written to an autobiography explains how I became a fictional character in Ken Wilber’s philosophical novel about artificial intelligence.

I have founded, managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics company. That may explain a certain practical orientation, and lack of interest in philosophical theories that depend on the world being very unlike the way it appears.

That last comment helps explain the essay from Chapman that appeared in my email inbox a few days ago. I liked it a lot, so have copied it in below. Chapman has a substack with the usual subscription levels, free versus paid. I'm on the free level currently, but am considering going to paid.

Here's David Chapman's essay about finding another option to (1) considering this isn't the real world, and (2) considering that this real world is meaningless and ordinary. Chapman argues that this world actually is extraordinary. The essay is a transcript of a video he made, which explains how it starts out.

This is it!

We’re actually here. I’m here in this room you can see behind me maybe, if you’re watching, not listening. You can hear my voice. I’m in a place. I’m in this world.

You’re in a place. You’re in a room, you’re out walking, you’re driving in a car, and you can see what place you’re in. We are in the actual world.

There are people of a religious or philosophical bent, they say, no, this isn’t the real world. We’re not really here. Everything we see is an illusion. Or, this is a garbage world. We’re stuck here, but the real world is somewhere else. It is quite different and it is much better.

The “real world” might be somewhat unimaginable. We can have some fantasies about it, but what we do know, they say, is that it is perfect!

This is a vision that is attractive when it seems like this world is no damn good. The message that this is a garbage world then becomes really attractive, and we want a way of escape to some other, better world.

So this is an idea that is just absolutely part of our basic way of being, and we’re imaginatively living in some fantasy land a lot of the time. We’re not actually willing to admit that we are here.

The only reason for thinking that there might be some better world is the sense that life couldn’t be so unfair that we’re stuck here in a world that is completely meaningless, worthless. It is dust and ashes. It’s garbage.

The idea that there is some other better world is obviously false. And so there’s a way of reacting to that, which is to say, yeah, we have to face up to the fact that this is all there is. “Is this all there is? Yeah. This is all there is. So I guess we have to make the best of it.”

This leads to a kind of brutal materialism, in which we imagine, okay, the world is actually meaningless, but we evolved to like some things and dislike some other things. And so, we haven’t actually got any choice here. All we can do is try to get as much of the stuff we like as possible, and accumulate it and consume it. And try to get rid of as much of the bad stuff. This isn’t even hedonism. I mean, hedonism would be better than this! This is a grind. Hedonism is a kind of carefree enjoyment of sensory pleasure where you can get it. This kind of materialistic outlook is actually joyless.

So this fantasy that there’s a better world leads to the fantasy that this world is meaningless and ordinary; and that all that is possible is engaging with it in an ordinary way. It’s like: Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Is that all there is? “Yeah, that’s all there is,” this materialist view says.

And that’s completely wrong. Because the world isn’t ordinary. The world is absolutely extraordinary. The actual world, not this imaginary fantasy world. The actual world is incredible. It is just amazingly beautiful. If you look around wherever you are. There’s colors, there’s shapes, there’s things happening.

There’s plants growing here, and there’s these books that are such incredible colors! And we don’t want to see that, because the extraordinariness is threatening. It could be overwhelming. The beauty is overwhelming. The possibility of joy is overwhelming because it can be taken away at any moment.

And the horror, the amount of absolute terror and suffering that is going on in the world, we just don’t want to deal with any of that. It’s just too much. And so we unsee it. And we know yes, flowers are beautiful. Okay, yes, everybody knows that. And yes, you can look at flowers and they’re nice.

And we also know there’s horrific wars going on with people being bombed and mutilated and dying in the street and living in absolute terror. And that’s somewhere else. “Let’s be in the ordinary world because the extraordinary world is too much to deal with.” So we narrow our scope of vision to what’s immediately on our plate...

Taxes are due tomorrow, we’d better stick to taxes. There’s nothing more ordinary than taxes, let’s face it. “And that’s life.”

So we shut out the actual world and live in a different fantasy world, not the fantasy world of the perfected philosophical utopia, or religious enlightenment or something. We live in the fantasy world of ordinariness. It is possible to start poking holes in the cloak of unseeing we put in front of the world, and to let a little light in, so that suddenly the intense red and blue of these books shows up as something remarkable and not just, “oh yes, that’s a book.”

Then we don’t have to live in the ordinary world. We can live in the actual world, which is extraordinary.

In the comments on this video and essay, I noticed a reply from Chapman to someone's comment that many people who are materialists find joy in life. Chapman responded that he was using materialism in the sense of materialistic, not as believing that matter is the sole reality.

Ah, I think the ambiguity of the word "materialism" may cause a misunderstanding here. (This is a problem with the "radio sermonette" format: there isn't time to be careful about clarifying terms to avoid possible misinterpretations.)

Here I meant "materialism" in the sense of "he's so materialistic." It's the stance that only the sorts of purposes we share with other apes are meaningful: safety, sex, power, status, territory, physical pleasures.

The other meaning is the metaphysical claim that matter is the only thing that exists. These are logically distinct and dissimilar. There's some sort of correlation or emotional connection, though.

I wrote about "materialism" in the relevant sense here (and elsewhere): https://meaningness.com/materialism

Comments

[Brian Hines]

Sant64, if you're wondering where your comment on this post went, it reeked of AI, being largely irrelevant to the content of this post. If you want to use AI-generated comments, you need to keep them brief, focused on the message of a blog post, and documented with what AI tool was used and what question was asked of it. Bottom line: it's much better to say something in your own words. If you have to use AI to tell you what you think about something, this shows that you have no knowledge of that something.

[Appreciative Reader]

Agreed.

Using AI like that, a straight copy-pasta job, while acknowledging it, is cretinous, and indicates ignorance of the nature of AI (or else the intent to troll). But at least it's honest.

But using AI like he tends to do, without attribution, reeks of a fifth grader attempting to cheat on his homework.

I'd noticed this myself, in a comment to the last post I think. And caught myself before I almost tapped out a caustic comment, given it's not my place to police this space.

Glad you've cleared out the nonsense yourself. It's ...cretinous, is what it is, using AI like that.

(No harm in using AI. But how to do it, is read the damn thing, then trace it back to the actual sources attributed there, and then use those actual sources as reference, as support, to make whatever the hell point you want to make, in your own effing words.)

[Ron E.]

“This is all there is” says David Chapman. If this were deeply realised then perhaps, we would all begin to take a bit more care of each other and the environment we live and exist in. True, the world is extraordinary, it’s vibrant – if only we could ‘get out of our heads’, stop seeing the world in habitual terms through our indoctrinated minds.

I’m happy with the world/universe being a material world, but within that material world is, if we could see it, an extraordinary world. Humans rarely pay attention to it. One can drive for an hour or two and not notice the sounds and sights during the journey, being engrossed in a usually unimportant flood of thinking. And, (my pet hate) as handy as mobile phones are, when out and about we could ditch the phone and notice the world about us.

Regarding sant64, I rarely look at his posts. I do wonder if he is trying to be obstructive flooding Brian’s site with long-winded, irrelevant information. A bit like those politicians who engage in filibustering as a way of obstructing progress.