For eg. This by is epistemic view of humor "The essence of a joke, in Hurley, Dennett, and Adams’ view, is that the teller of the joke surreptitiously introduces a certain epistemic commitment, and then reveals it to have been mistaken."
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The first link makes the important point that you cannot get at the essence of humor by looking for the essence of jokes. Humor (and this is my gloss on the implication, not the argument in either article) is a posture of being, not doing.
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tldr of this thread... the problem of meaning is a problem of life-force in disguise, and has historically been addressed via one of 3 stances: serious, crazy, and humorous. Meaning-making, gonzo-experiential, and humor. Maps to sorokin's ideational, sensate, idealistic perhaps?
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Replying to
This is good. Here for it <deer eating popcorn.gif>
Off the cuff question:
Do the 3 stances map in any predictable way...
(or could one shape one's life stances in a way)
that might rhyme or resonate with a developmental model (Kegan) or a traditional life shape (4 ashrama?)
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I'm thinking that serious is an early adulthood stage (cf bildungsroman/Brahmacharya/early career development)
Gonzo-experiential is either a deepening commitment to a major project (career & family, or a major step off the conventional path)
Humourous is a sort of Ironic Sage
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Replying to
Hmm I wouldn't map these to life stages. I think you lock on to one of the 3 fairly early, like as a teenager, and pretty much stay there. You might take a tourist detour into the other 3 paths, but I've never met anyone who's shifted fundamentally.
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I think you're mostly right...
Howevs, I have definitely oscillated through all three.
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My original inclination, as a teenager (like you referenced), was quite capital S Serious. very interested in Meaning
Became inspired by very Gonzo types, and went through hardcore quest for the gonzo grail of experience
Am rapidly identifying less and less with those stances
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The distinction was that I don't think it was a tourist path through those two. some pretty hard core traumatic stuff intervened, as well as some Rao-ian "crashes"
Kind of reformatted a lot of my relationship with the world
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But your overall hunch that in general, these 3 stances don't map to life stages, and that they are personality attractor states that show up early in life and tend to persist, rings quite plausible to me.
my life arc isn't generalizable, even among outliers. (not a boast)
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This is a general bias on my part, and one reason I don't resonate as much with Kegan as and others do. I feel life-stage theories are in general overtheorized and life-variety theories undertheorized. Most people don't grow much. But they vary more than we think.
Yeah that's actually a big part of why I follow you. In the parliament of ideas I like to hear from the minority parties, and you definitely have an interesting opposition to contrast with Kegan, similar theorists, and ' project.
I like that distinction...
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I don't know that I oppose that viewpoint so much as I am interested in a different scope. Developmental psych/philosophy approaches are instrumental in the sense of stack ranking the human condition and making the "best" in some sense better by unpacking it.
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> life-stage theories are in general overtheorized and life-variety theories undertheorized
I would agree with this, fwiw. (Doesn’t mean stage theories aren’t useful; just means there’s probably low-hanging fruit in the variety theory orchard.)
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