
A touch of absurdity can help to wrap your mind around reality - mgalbraith
https://psyche.co/ideas/a-touch-of-absurdity-can-help-to-wrap-your-mind-around-reality
======
klenwell
There's a quote I recall from the introduction to Oscar Wilde's Importance of
Being Earnest in the Norton Anthology the first time I encountered the play
years ago as a college undergraduate in an English Literature survey class.
Something to effect:

 _Oscar Wilde 's play held a mirror up to Victorian society and it died
laughing at itself._

One way I've conceptualized comedy, especially satire, is as a kind of soft
cultural version of Karl Popper's falsification principle. When applied
successfully, it can change the way you look at the world by leading you to
reject, or at least question, the status quo.

I was expecting this article to suggest something similar. It maybe halfway
does?

 _According to research on the ‘meaning maintenance model’ of human reasoning,
surreal and absurd art can be so unsettling that the brain reacts as if it is
feeling physical pain, yet it ultimately leads us to reaffirm who we are, and
sharpens the mind as we look for new ways to make sense of the world._

Reaffirming who we are _and_ making sense of the world in new ways sounds
somewhat paradoxical. I suppose it implies a gradualist model of intellectual
growth.

Of course, comedy and ridicule can also be deployed to reaffirm the status
quo. But I've always found subversive humor more intellectually engaging.

~~~
marcoperaza
Humor is powerful, which is why people want to control what you are allowed to
laugh at.

------
hnarn
Camus famously said that the only serious philosophical question is that of
suicide. My impression is that some people see existentialism and the
absurdist core of it as an almost nihilistic outlook on life, but I don't
agree. Accepting that life is absurd, built on chance and completely lacks
reason has for me been the only secular help to accept the random winds of
fate that knocks your life over every now and then.

One of Camus best texts in my opinion, not only because of the beliefs
expressed but only because of it's welcome brevity and concrete language
compared to some other philosophers, is "The Myth of Sisyphus". Instead of
painting Sisyphus as a suffering prisoner, he paints him as an absurdist hero
with ideals that every human should aspire to.

Like the obsessive cleaning of surfaces in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi", Camus
states that "we must imagine Sisyphus happy": the struggle in itself _is_ the
meaning. And to my understanding, there's the core of existentialist belief:
lacking any God-given, external purpose, we must accept our absurd position,
and our individual responsibility to push our stones up the hill, and find
happiness doing it.

"Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.
He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master
seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral
flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle
itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine
Sisyphus happy."

~~~
nil-sec
I read this when I was very young and had something like a pre puberty
existential crisis. Like you, this book and the thoughts expressed therein
resonated with me and it is a view of the world that I have held dearly ever
since. I always liked it particularly, because it makes life a comedy instead
of a drama. Nihilism is much darker and feels very depressive to me.
Existentialism is meaninglessness too, but with a smile.

------
50
Skimmed the piece but it reminds me: it seems there is a thin line between a
psychotic and a mystic. But yes, once you expose yourself to a certain level
of crazy and/or you come to see how everything appears insane and/or you see
the mirage of necessity of it all, the rest of life feels like a gentle
breeze. From here on out: detachment, joy, and peace. Nothing hinders you.
Even more so: Your capacity to ground yourself in what-you-are - meaning, the
unconditioned you, as gooey as that may sound - is proportional to the
capacity that you can play life with lightness and humor. Although, that's not
to say you won't suffer, you certainly will. But your conceptualization of
suffering will be reconfigured and be understood as a sort of "good" thing - a
necessary process for the evolution of your consciousness, if you will. As
naive as all the above may sound.

~~~
AmericanChopper
I’ve found a good mix of Markus Aurelius and Soren Kierkegaard has equipped me
quite well for most of what life could throw at me. I’m never particularly
bothered by things beyond my control, and I’m typically quite happy with being
in charge of those things I can control.

~~~
50
I can see how those two philosophers can well-equip you with a good
metaphysical framework for life. I haven't read Aurelius's _Meditations_ but
it's lying around somewhere - in due time, I suppose. I failed an
existentialism course not too long ago and it partly focused on Kierkegaard.
The particular books I like from him are _Works of Love_ and _Fear and
Trembling_. If you are interested in more of his thinking, you might like the
Danish drama film entitled _Ordet_ (1955). Also, if you want to know more
about his personal life, I liked this read:
[https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/keeper-loves-flame-
regin...](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/keeper-loves-flame-regine-olsen-
soren-kierkegaard/)

~~~
AmericanChopper
Thanks, I’ll give that movie a watch. Personally I think Either/Or is more
significant than Fear and Trembling, but Fear and Trembling was ultimately
more influential. Personally I see stoicism and leap-of-faith style absurdism
as being quite complimentary. I find the leap of faith to be the most
appealing resolution to the absurd, but I don’t think the existentialists were
particularly successful in addressing anguish. The stoics on the other hand,
excelled in this regard.

~~~
50
One of the questions I was thinking about when I took that course on
existentialism is why might religious existentialism be superior, for lack of
a better word, than vanilla existentialism. Research on that question led me
to an essay titled "The Other Side of Despair" by Thomas Merton [1]. It's a
really good read that I think you'll like. I like the reference and analysis
of Kierkegaard's idea of "leveling" \- a process "by which the individual
person loses himself in the vast emptiness of a public mind" \- which is a lot
like "alienation" in modern day. Which also reminds me, I should check out
Kierkegaard's _The Present Age_.

[1]:
[https://thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com/2014/03/29/saturday...](https://thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com/2014/03/29/saturday-
reading-the-other-side-of-despair-by-thomas-merton/)

~~~
AmericanChopper
I’ve always thought it was because living a life with meaning requires faith
in one way or another, and the Christian existentialists were simply more
comfortable with the concept. The involvement of Christian theology really
just muddies the waters imo, because the broader topic is really just about
faith, and any effort to impart your own meaning (whether religious or
otherwise) to your own life is naturally an act of faith. Kierkegaard was a
Christian, but his philosophy revolves primarily around the concept of faith
(believing something you can’t prove). Nietzsche was an atheist, but his Death
of God was a rejection of faith in general as the basis for providing any
meaning to life.

The leap of faith as a philosophical concept is not about religion. It’s the
concept that a person can provide their own life with meaning, without any
rational proof to support such a conclusion. If you find the work of Christian
existentialists to be superior, it’s likely because you find the leap of faith
to be the superior response to the absurd.

------
carapace
The unpredictability of a message is a measure of its information content.

~~~
gnulinux
I don't understand this, can you help me understand? I can give you a
uniformly random byte. I can also give you a byte distributed from normal
distribution such that ~127 is more likely than 0 and 255. They'll both be a
byte (same bits of information) but getting 0 in one of them will be be a lot
more surprising than the other. How is unpredictability a measure of message's
information content?

~~~
jevogel
I believe the comment you responded to is referring to the concept of entropy
in information theory.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_\(information_theory\))

~~~
gnulinux
Hmm I believe you're correct. The answer to my problem above seems to be that
even though information is encoded in 8 bits in both cases, one of them is a
lot of more dense.

~~~
carapace
Yes, it's a fundamental result from Information Theory.

In the situation you describe the receiver has to know which distribution
you're using.

See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity)

------
chillingeffect
wow, this jumped out at me:

"Another showed that people who felt socially isolated became more defensive
of their broader national identity."

that sheds some light on how the pandemic is emboldening so may people in this
particular way.

~~~
xrd
Yeah, it feels like this can be expanded to explain a lot of things about
nationalism and tribalism. And, perhaps a path to move people out of the
narrow confines of that way of thinking.

------
stormdennis
Psychological experiments typically seem to feature really small sample sizes
(often composing readily available students) and yet have what seems like a
lot of unearned significance attached to their results, compared to what
claims about drugs have to undergo before they are taken seriously.

~~~
EmilioMartinez
Interesting view. It raises the question: What takes in each domain to be
taken seriously? How do the prices of admission compare on each level (from
deserving of attention to established theory)?

Anyone knows of a cross disciplinary study that benchmarks this?

------
csunbird
>According to research on the ‘meaning maintenance model’ of human reasoning,
surreal and absurd art can be so unsettling that the brain reacts as if it is
feeling physical pain, yet it ultimately leads us to reaffirm who we are, and
sharpens the mind as we look for new ways to make sense of the world.

This paragraph reminds me of the famous quote from Agent Smith in first Matrix
movie:

> But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through
> suffering and misery.

------
aaron695
I think this could be part of the Flynn effect.

I think abstraction in media changes the population, as it grows so do IQ's

You can see this in whole countries. But causation vs correlation blah blah
blah. YMMV

------
JackFr
Lost me at “Mulholland Drive” is a good movie.

~~~
gnulinux
I think Mulholland Drive is a great movie, why do you think it's not good?

~~~
JackFr
I think it’s successful as a practical joke in an emporer’s-new-clothes vein.
Professional film critics can’t even agree on what the actual story told in
the movie is, let alone any symbolism or allegory. David Lynch won’t give away
the game that there is no narrative, no meaning. Thus the movie, and all
criticism of it - including this comment - become a self-indulgent
intellectual pissing contest where the only limit to what one can read into
the movie is his or her own brilliance.

~~~
gnulinux
Yeah but there is a good way to pull it off, and there is a bad way to do it.
E.g. the Room also has the premise that it is SO much more about than what is
on the surface, but we all know that's a delusion and that the Room is a
shallow piece of movie. M. Drive doesn't give that impression, we're left with
"wait... what was this about?" feeling which, to me, means it's a great movie.
If I left the movie with "this doesn't make any sense, someone must have had a
stroke editing this movie" then it would be bad. I think Predestination is an
example of movie that is done in a similar vein but is significantly worse
(than M. Drive) as in if you hold it to some scrutiny it's clear there is no
deeper meaning and it's just intended to be "mind-blowing" or whatever it
means.

Another example is David Fincher's 1997 movie The Game.

Many directors tried this, yet none pulled it off like David Lynch. IMHO.

Just my 2 cents. I'm a movie layman.

~~~
lazerpants
I'm not sure about The Room, I felt the same way when I saw it, but after
briefly interacting with Tommy Wiseau it seems plausible to me that he's a
bizarre satirist with a strange sense of humor playing the long game.

I agree that Mulholland Drive is art, though I don't think it's particularly
good art and I don't like it much. What did you think of "David Lynch
Interviews a Monkey?" AKA "What Did Jack Do?"

