Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#81

Post by pizza » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

alisonkisk wrote: post #77

pizza wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it even meaningful to say that the universe - everything - has an entropy? Isn't it not even meaningful to talk about the entropy of something that is in a non-equilibriated state? People point to experiments about gas particles bouncing off the walls of closed boxes to prove how entropy is always increasing, but it really makes no sense to transfer that to the whole universe. I have been much more convinced that…

How can there be greater than maximal structure?

I might have messed up that wording.. basically as I understand it the universe started out pretty much homogeneous and uniform, minor deviations became magnified into seeding the structure that exists today, and basically some mix of inflation + gravitation will create additional structure forever, as measured by a value called the "shape potential" C = l_rms/l_mhl of a spatial configuration of particles [0]. l_rms is the root-mean-square length of the system and l_mhl is the mean-harmonic-length. He makes this argument that there are many potential geometric configurations that the universe could have started out as but he believes it started from the one that has the maximum shape potential, iirc. [0] https://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRev...

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#82

Post by bengarrr » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

pizza wrote: post #64

rendall wrote: post #35

For me and a friend, we'd joke about our existential despair. "What's wrong?" "The Void" Any philosophy that just asserted that the Universe has meaning was a non-starter, for me. There is nothing that I can see that unambiguously tells me that the Universe ultimately has absolute purpose or meaning. It could, but anyone who tells you they know the fundamental question of why we are here is delusional or a liar. The…

Is it even meaningful to say that the universe - everything - has an entropy? Isn't it not even meaningful to talk about the entropy of something that is in a non-equilibriated state? People point to experiments about gas particles bouncing off the walls of closed boxes to prove how entropy is always increasing, but it really makes no sense to transfer that to the whole universe. I have been much more convinced that…

Entropy IS always increasing. Water is always gonna flow downhill. Its not possible to go from maximally ordered to even more ordered, except in some kind of highly localized phenomena. But it is possible that it can return to that maximally ordered state after it reaches a maximally unordered state. This is the idea Roger Penrose has for the big bang is that it is the state of the universe immediately succeeding the heat death of the universe, at a certain point maximally unordered and maximally ordered can look the same, at least mathematically.

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#83

Post by pizza » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

bengarrr wrote: post #82

pizza wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it even meaningful to say that the universe - everything - has an entropy? Isn't it not even meaningful to talk about the entropy of something that is in a non-equilibriated state? People point to experiments about gas particles bouncing off the walls of closed boxes to prove how entropy is always increasing, but it really makes no sense to transfer that to the whole universe. I have been much more convinced that…

Entropy IS always increasing. Water is always gonna flow downhill. Its not possible to go from maximally ordered to even more ordered, except in some kind of highly localized phenomena. But it is possible that it can return to that maximally ordered state after it reaches a maximally unordered state. This is the idea Roger Penrose has for the big bang is that it is the state of the universe immediately succeeding the…

I'm not really talking about things that violate energy conservation or statistical mechanics. I'm talking about how the uniformity of the state during the big bang lead to something clumpier. Structure formation. And I still find it suspect to apply the concept of thermodynamical entropy, something defined for isolated systems at thermal equilibrium, primarily, to even make sense at universe-scale.

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#84

Post by acituan » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

GavinMcG wrote: post #58

acituan wrote: post #4

So many words for mere conjecture that is ultimately going to be used as a pat on one's own back for feeling bummed. I especially love the author's self-designation as gifted and not once expanding on this very narrow dimensionality reduction. What happened to the personality traits? What happened to character, adverse childhood experiences, education etc independent of so-called giftedness? Anyone could have come up…

> So many words for mere conjecture Yes, this is what's known as a "personal essay". There's some research citations, too, because the author is a researcher who has worked in this area, but if you're expecting a broad study correlating the Big 5, ACEs, existential depression, and giftedness, you should 1) look elsewhere, or 2) go get your PhD and do the work.

> but if you're expecting a broad study correlating the Big 5, ACEs, existential depression, and giftedness, you should 1) look elsewhere, or 2) go get your PhD and do the work.

My expectation is not that he had done a different study. My expectation was, personal essay or not, if they are throwing citations, academic credibility and 5000 words at the world about their central thesis, to eliminate the goddamn confounds first, or at least acknowledge that they haven't.

It is like writing an essay about "hair color and basketball performance" and making a career out of finding out incidentally blondes perform better, not the least because blondes really liked hearing it, while even shoe size would have been a better explanatory variable.

To my mind, "go elsewhere or get a PhD yourself" is a pretty elitist pushback. Rationality is a publicly available resource. We ought to make use of it.

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#85

Post by bengarrr » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

rendall wrote: post #35

For me and a friend, we'd joke about our existential despair. "What's wrong?" "The Void" Any philosophy that just asserted that the Universe has meaning was a non-starter, for me. There is nothing that I can see that unambiguously tells me that the Universe ultimately has absolute purpose or meaning. It could, but anyone who tells you they know the fundamental question of why we are here is delusional or a liar. The…

I was thinking about this the other day actually and I believe consciousness serves a higher purpose. If you think about it without any consciousness in the universe, nothing would ever be observed. Without consciousness the universe would just be an empty library, full of history and knowledge but with nobody there to read the books (assuming we are the only conscious life form in the universe). And that's fine I guess, the universe obviously could care less if we read its biography, but at the same time I think about how lucky it is that there is a biography to read at all. We could have been conscious beings in a universe that is truly chaotic and could never be made sense of but here we are in this nice one. That is able to be quantified and one that can be appreciated. One filled with unimaginable beauty and mystery to appreciate. Even if we have no tangible purpose, we still have the ability to observe and in a limited sense manipulate the universe around us and I think that is a highly overlooked facet of what makes being a human not completely unbearable. To me the meaning of life is to just simply to be. Butterfly affect applies here, just simply existing can have an unknowable cascade of effects that ultimately shape the story of the universe. My version is a little different: Entropy will always win. Until then, just exist and enjoy.

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#86

Post by all2 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

hungrykoala wrote: post #46

rendall wrote: post #35

For me and a friend, we'd joke about our existential despair. "What's wrong?" "The Void" Any philosophy that just asserted that the Universe has meaning was a non-starter, for me. There is nothing that I can see that unambiguously tells me that the Universe ultimately has absolute purpose or meaning. It could, but anyone who tells you they know the fundamental question of why we are here is delusional or a liar. The…

I think the "Universe/life has no meaning" sentence can mean two completely different things: 1. It could have a meaning, but there is none. For example food can have taste, but if it has none, we assume there is something wrong with it. 2. It is not possible for it to have a meaning, because it simply lacks that property. For example: what is the color of running? There is no color, and could never be. I think "Univ…

> There is no color, and could never be.

This illustrates the scope of experience we apply to the world. I have never seen a color of running, but somoeone has. Synesthesia is very real and to those who possess it, there is a color of running. There are whole worlds of understanding that we cannot see because we lack the ability to see them.

Some we can learn to see, some we deny because of reason or they have faded in our memories, some we dismiss out of hand because, well, "that can't possibly be true".

All that to say: you might be missing the meaning of life, the universe, everything because you are not equipped to see it.

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#87

Post by svcrunch » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

stared wrote: post #50

rendall wrote: post #35

For me and a friend, we'd joke about our existential despair. "What's wrong?" "The Void" Any philosophy that just asserted that the Universe has meaning was a non-starter, for me. There is nothing that I can see that unambiguously tells me that the Universe ultimately has absolute purpose or meaning. It could, but anyone who tells you they know the fundamental question of why we are here is delusional or a liar. The…

> Human-created meaning Could you give an example for "meaning" which is not "human-created"? A human (and possibly other animals') instinct to create meaning might be not different from a spider's instinct to make a web. "Meaning" looks like an evolution-selected motivation tool for long-term goals. If it is true, it is an ill-motivated question whether there is some universal meaning. The same as if there is an obj…

> Could you give an example for "meaning" which is not "human-created"?

Without providing a more objective definition of "meaning", this question seems circular.

Hypothetically, if someone gave you the example you seek, I see two possible responses:

  1. You see the "meaning". You'll then say that it implies the meaning is "human-created" (since it was *you* who found it meaningful).
  2. You do not see meaning in it, so you remain unswayed.

Neither outcome would cause you to change your position, which implies your position is actually just a definition.

If you argue that meaning is inherently subjective, then there is no point in asking for meaning which is not "human-created".

I will make a proposal for an objective definition of meaningful: something is meaningful if it is non-random, in the sense defined by Kolmogorov, i.e., it is compressible.

Using this definition, there is meaning all around us, very little of it human-created. Statistical reasoning, which drives the scientific endeavor, is among our most powerful tools for discovering this meaning.

The question really is: where does all this meaning point?

Unfortunately, even our best statistical methods fail badly in answering such questions. A concrete and convincing example is presented here:

Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5230747/)

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#88

Post by alfor » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

rendall wrote: post #35

For me and a friend, we'd joke about our existential despair. "What's wrong?" "The Void" Any philosophy that just asserted that the Universe has meaning was a non-starter, for me. There is nothing that I can see that unambiguously tells me that the Universe ultimately has absolute purpose or meaning. It could, but anyone who tells you they know the fundamental question of why we are here is delusional or a liar. The…

There might not be meaning to the universe, but there is meaning in the human enterprise.

We went from animals, to highly effective and conscious of ourselves and the universe. The human developpement keep pushing forward.

I think that the main cause of meaninglessness is our rejection of our own culture ( mostly Christian). There is good reason to reject them as the bearded magician in the sky seem stupid to a modern science minded person, however if you look at those stories at a second degree there is a lot of parts that make sense.

Theses stories were the bedrock of our civilisation and the spine of our consciousness. We need to update theses stories with what we now know instead of throwing them out because science make them look outdated.

Take a look at Jordan Peterson biblical series, it explain in evolutionary terms how we invented theses stories, what they mean, what we can learn from them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-wWBGo6a2w

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#89

Post by DangitBobby » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

acituan wrote: post #36

garyrob wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how some in the Hacker News community truly believe that their immediate, knee-jerk reaction to dismiss the work of a highly experienced professional in the relevant field, who is applying their lifetime of knowledge and experience to a subject, a reaction that involves neither knowledge nor effort, is automatically correct and important for other people to read about.

Do you have a counter-argument to the content other than pretending to know my knowledge, experience, intentions on the matter, and ascribing an inflated self-importance to discredit me as a whole (also known as ad-hominem)? Have you checked other comments in this thread? Do you find my criticism truly unique? Isn't almost every quarter in HN we discuss the replication crisis in psychology? Do you nonetheless ask for…

Calling out reasoning as fallacious is not as powerful as you think it is.

Re: Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

#90

Post by all2 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

NL807 wrote: post #52

rendall wrote: post #35

For me and a friend, we'd joke about our existential despair. "What's wrong?" "The Void" Any philosophy that just asserted that the Universe has meaning was a non-starter, for me. There is nothing that I can see that unambiguously tells me that the Universe ultimately has absolute purpose or meaning. It could, but anyone who tells you they know the fundamental question of why we are here is delusional or a liar. The…

I think I'm cool with that. There is no meaning to any of this chaos, but I make an effort to make my life feel meaningful, and that's all that matters. Like clay, on its own has no purpose, but you can fashion it into bricks and build something with it.

Chaos is an interesting word to use. Underneath all the chaos is so much order. Dare I say the universe is mechanistic in its working. The earth orbits in an orderly fashion, set at a distance from the sun that is just right to sustain life. The moon makes its transit, and with us all the planets here move in their own ordered fashion.

Or I suppose we could go smaller. Your body moves and goes, replicating one of the most complex forms of machine code known to man. That replication is paired with voltage gradients across groups of cells that determine macro organization of cellular structures.. The human body is self replicating, self correcting, and even keeps itself clean.

You see chaos, I see order (and I admit the order is becoming more chaotic). But that you recognize the chaos gives light to the fact that you desire order. And there is order to be seen if you look for it.