Where is Meaning?

Meaning is a property of a unique individual subjective experience.
Also, some lingusists might argue that it’s a product, or by product of language.

Have you been reading Thomas Nagel by any chance?

God Danmmit. I think we have covered this. Nothing has meaning, life means nothing, something means nothing, and nothing means nothing. There is no point to anything, and yet we still keep the same ideas circulating on the ILP message board. Why? There is no reason.

There may be lots of people who share common notions of what common propositions mean, and I think this gives rise to social values. Variances between those values between different localities may be based on common environmental conditions, those which are just about universal,(like proper funerals for your own people), might be rooted in,(dare I say), human nature.

Nagel wrote an interesting article that I can’t quite remember the exact title of,( I think it’s “Birth, Death and the Meaning of Life”.), that parallels alot of what you’re saying here.

I’ve got a thread called “post or request an article”, if you can find tha nagel article you should post it there. If I find it I will.

Meaning is not a thing. You can’t find it somewhere or trap it or catch it. It is a set of relations. There is meaning in a set of relations such as 1+1=2, or there is a fly in your soup, or I feel like crap today. Things only mean certain things in certain contexts so if you are wondering about the meaning of life itself we actually haven’t reached that point yet. We haven’t reached the scope where we can place our lives into the context of the universe itself.

Just relax and wait another generation or two and see what happens. Honestly I believe that the meaning of our existence and our lives is a way for the universe to learn more about itself. I’m not sure why, but why do we learn more about ourselves to preserve our existence? There’s an interesting idea where the universe computes itself making new ‘programs’ by organizing itself into particles, molecules, and ultimately intelligent life. Who knows what the next step is, but things are always getting increasingly organized and increasingly complex leading to something. It probably won’t be in our generation. Then again we could find a way to live much longer in this generation. Who knows.

Meaning is subject to interpretation.

You must see the universe as some sort of intelligent being with a divine plan. What do you mean exactly? Surely you don’t imagine there’s “A reason for everything” do you??

Darwin’s theory explains that evolution to higher life forms results from chance ocurrences and those changes might bestow some advantage to the recipient. There is no designer, no divine plan. The universe is no more than the product of your own mind. Without a mind, no universe.

meaing is always subjective, there is no objective.

and yes, in 2000 years, all you were will be dust in the wind.

-Imp

dude if this is the case, then why dont you be so kind to provide a link to the other discussions for the member of the ILP community, instead of trying crying.

there is no reason for that!

That depends. I plan on having my kleos reach to the sky.

Darwinism is Darwinism. What I believe is somewhat of a greater scope than just what we call organisms. Given what we consider the laws of physics currently if you have an open system, say the universe, things should enter into continual chaos, or entropy. But why then is there increasing organization? Maybe we have a closed system and a finite universe, or maybe there is something greater going on that we are unaware of. Is it really that farfetched to conceive that both these possibilities could be the same, or at least linked?

Evolution is merely the survival of the fittest, meaning what is able to maintain stability provided the given context is able to propagate itself. Don’t particles and molecules do this too? Energy is arranged into particles and as long as the situation permits it remains as particles. Same applies to molecular bonds. As long as the situation permits these bonds are stable and will not break. I really don’t believe that a cell, as complex as it is, is any more complex than a molecule. They both have an unbelievably large number of factors within each system that allows it to maintain its structure and resist any changes from external forces. So all I am saying is that evolution is not exclusively biological, but is just something the universe does to organize itself. The part of evolution we are in is the sociological one, the next step after the biological one.

Evolution posits a single tree of life that puts human beings in the same line of descent as every other kind of organism. However, major changes in organisms arise through small scale random variation and natural selection. The survival of the fittest is too simplistic. It’s more a question of certain intellectual advantages.

But my main issue with your argument is that it has an anthropomorphism sound to it. You seem to insinuate that the universe has an identity of its own. You say the universe organizes itself, as though it can do this outside of the laws of physics. As though it has a free will. As I see it you have mixed two different arguments together. You say that evolution is not biological but just something the universe does to organize itself.
This is incorrect. You are establishing an omnipotent authority over and outside of man which you refer to as the universe. Your argument is not grounded. It may very well be your belief and you are entitled to that but it is not logical.

The whole reason and purpose of reality is beyond human mental capacities. Lesser purpose and function of instances of reality can be seen in some ways. For example the purpose of the stomach is to digest food, and to provide the body with energy…

As everything has process, it has function, and most-likely has purpose or meaning, also. But that meaning may be seen as valueless, unreasonable, incomprehensible or wrong to humans in some way or another. Thus only a tiny amount of the meaning is reactively synthesized upon contact with an isolated instance.

Such a fancy monism…

The gene qualifies as a language, much more complex than any book.
If a book cannot be written by random mutations and white-noise,
Then surely life cannot be made by the random.

The Darwinists are rediculus.

Nothing matters as everything matters not.

Yes, I understand what you say and in one sense you’re right. The example of the stomach is valid. But you’re wrong to extrapolate this over the whole situation.
Yours is a form of ‘Teleological argument or argument by design,’ and is essentially religious in nature. You are trying to support an argument for purpose and meaning, but meaning has only arisen with Man, whether intentionally or unintentionally. You and I can give meaning to life in what and how we choose to live, but there is no other form of meaning. The world as we know it has been in existence for millions of years and any glorious mystery or purpose would have become evident in that time.
Nature, the universe shows us how life is, consciousness shows us how it ought to be.

The truth is when you die you consciousness just collapses back to the universe, but the energ/particles that were “YOU” actually remains in the universe, I have a feeling re-incarnation is real but not in the sense most people use it, consciousness of the universe, but we all get little pieces of it when our brains form some special structures that create a symmetry in space-time that cause it “turn on”.

I have a feeling it has something to do with spacial harmonics, where some kind of “supersyemmetry” occurs in human minds and allows the universe to see itself.

You are the universe (a piece ofit) and you are simply seeing a piece of yourself, when you look into a miror, what are you seeing? The atoms in your body were once in stars, so you really are “made of the universe”

We are all connected to the universe, alive or dead. If we think about before we were born we did not “exist” but we did, we were being formed as cells emybro/sperm in our respective parents in space-time before we the events occured.

Try thinking of it this way: In boolean logic, you either exist or you don’t, there is no “half-way” existence… so for ANYTHING to exist, it must have ALWAYS existed in a sense, we think of death as “nonexistence” but it really is not “non existence” since we “non-existed” before we were born, so are really returning to the first state of existence (non conscious).

As far as life is concerned, do what you want

The point of life is to do what is conrgruent with what you feel, and what you want, sometimes you don’t know and when that happens you either need to:

  1. Take time away and meditate
  2. Go push your boundaries and do things you’ve never done before, and ignore whether you think you “hate” or “dislike” them or not, and just keep travelling and/or searching for new things or places.

Much of what makes us happy we don’t even know because we haven’t travelled enough or gone out enough and explored enough of the world and different places, people, cultures, academics, jobs, etc.

But surely we have. Think of it this way; A perfect image of meaningless existence is provided by the ancient myth of Sisyphus. Here Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock to the top of the hill, only to see it roll back to the bottom, then to be rolled again to the top, whereupon it again rolls to the bottom – and so on, endlessly, through all eternity. The first thing this image suggests is heavy toil. That is, we imagine that the stone is a huge one, resulting in profound exhaustion. But that does not capture the essence of its meaninglessness. Work that is hard and onerous is not thereby rendered meaningless. Indeed, it is almost a mark of truly meaningful tasks that they are hard.
Important goals are seldom reached easily. If Sisyphus’s task were to carry a pebble up the hill, requiring minimal effort, and to keep doing this pointless thing forever, then the element of meaninglessness would be fully preserved. Nor is the meaninglessness of this imager captured by the fact that the stone never stays put. We can, for example, imagine that Sisyphus rolls a different stone to the top each time, and that each one stays there, such that the pile of stones gets endlessly larger as new ones are added. This does not help. It is still an image of meaningless existence.
What is it about this image, then, that so perfectly expresses the idea of meaninglessness, if it is not the idea of heavy toil or endless frustration? It is, clearly, the element of endless and pointless repetition. The same thing just happens over and over and nothing ever comes of it. A meaningless life, then, is just that – a life of perhaps simple and even easy tasks, endlessly repeated, with no significant result except more of the same.
On the other hand a meaningful life is a creative life. I mean poets composers, writers because with a great poem, painting or composition it is quite unique unlike anything that has previously been done or could be done again by anyone else.
The lives of most people are like clockwork, endlessly repetitive. They rise in the morning and do essentially the same thing today that they were doing yesterday and that they will do tomorrow, repeating the same pattern year after year until finally, they go to their graves leaving nothing of worth behind except a new generation to repeat the cycle.