Dan: “You’re both dead! ‘Meaningless’ and ‘meaningful’ each don’t suit the ‘universe’ – and things only become ‘meaningful’ once we understand them. For this reason, all unknowable or misunderstood things will be meaningless, and all things fully understood can become meaningful. All things have the capability of being jugded by humans as ‘meaningful’ or ‘meaningless’ can be seen as either way, but in all actuality what we are doing is: to merely try to predict [and then control or deal with] a vast and never-ending process that changes as ‘time’ passes.”
you seem to know yourself pretty well, why not try actually reading some philosophical literature? It would compliment the clever rhetoric you essentially are repeating in different fashions.
I’m reading Neitzche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” – But I can only read so-much per day, and I like to read facts/science far more then I like to read “philosophy”. I believe that only pure fact can produce pure philosophy.
but Neitzsche isn’t dead yet…not until we understand the things that are meaningful…once we finally understand our place ‘physically’ with the rest of the universe, then Neitzsche will be dead.
Dan~: and things only become ‘meaningful’ once we understand them.
SIATD: Prove it.
Dan~: We can’t feel or claim that something is meaningful when we don’t comprehend it.
SIATD: I don’t understand all sorts of things but I still have responses to them…
Dan~, a feeling is just a feeling. If a loved one dies, we feel the pain, the hurt, the loss and we still rage against the meaninglessness of our loss. I agree with your first proposition. When we come to understand that death, we are basically saying that we have found a meaning for that death: it is no longer just a meaningless death. And just for the record, I do not mean that learning the results of the autopsy gives us understanding; it does not. We can understand the “how”, but the understanding that can possibly give meaning is the one that answers our “why?”.
I guess I would agree with you if what you mean is that we can’t say that something is meaningful to us when we have no understanding of it.
SIATD, having a response does not convey meaning. Crying at the funeral does not mean that the tears are tears of understanding or that for the person crying, their loss is meaningful.
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