A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning | Hacker News Reader

A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

meltingasphalt.com

325 pointscmpb249 comments

Really enjoyed this. I love how practical, humble, and respectful (even of religions, which I really appreciate) uncompromising nihilists tend to be. I happen to be a Christian, so I could go on all day about meaning, but if I could say one thing, it's this:

We all die, and it's more than likely even humanity will die out as well (even if it's at the heat death of the universe). You've pretty much rejected the possibility of true objective meaning, focusing instead on various ways of measuring subjective meaning. But at the end of the day, anything times zero is zero, which is fine if you're a nihilist, I guess. The focus in this framework is on you and your "meaning graph", but cool thing about knowing an ultimate God, is that he's a connection to your graph (both investing in your meaning, and pulling from your meaning via worship), that sticks in a way nothing else can. Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true; Romans 4:17 says, God "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." From what I can see, He's the only thing/idea/person that has the potential to provide any kind of objective meaning, so however delusional religion may appear (and I'll admit lots of it is deluded), there's only one God, and he is "the rock that is higher than I".

I think the (seeming) existence (or open question) of meaning hints at least at something "spiritual," but I think it's an extra stretch to paint it as some proof of theism and by association religious beliefs, some of which are (in a secular context) ethically debatable (but which are unable to be debated simply by nature of being deemed "sacred" and the debating of which is considered "blasphemy")

Personally, I think "music" is probably the most succinct example that our existence may not be purely materialistic in nature (... as I crank up my techno of debatable quality lol)

Laws have survived secular debate and been made stronger by it; medicine has survived secular debate and been made stronger by it; why would religious beliefs (if indeed they have something true and useful, nay, meaningful about the world to say) not potentially be made stronger by seeing "what remains standing" after fierce, intellectual, honest, secular debate? They could even start with "the puzzle of 'meaning'" and work from there. Sacrifice the more extreme/intellectually-weak beliefs to save the others, I say! ;)

But beware, there is a rocky road there, which you elect to base religion on: a very interesting blog post linked directly off of this one (http://meaningness.com/nebulosity-of-meaningness) talks about "intense meaning" in the context of an affair.

Funny to apply evolutionary principles to a critique of religion ;) But I do think you're making the incorrect assumption that religion hasn't already undergone that sort of strenuous debate. Jesus is probably the most discussed/doubted/critiqued figure in history - certainly we've had more time to find out his flaws and the flaws of his followers than we have of science. And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.

While religion in ancient Greece had great debate, anything that happened during and after the fall of the Roman empire had effectively zero critical thought to it for the next several hundred years. Christianity was ultimately thrust on western populations by force. It stayed there for generations until it became so engrained in European culture (and American culture, as a consequence) that nobody questioned it anymore until modern day.

It is a coincidence of history that Greece happened to have a a Christian faction that was good at converting people right around the same time that that Roman empire was collapsing.

Many other religions that tried to similarly gain traction were met with destruction before they hit critical mass, so you must be careful to acknowledge some survival bias here for your religion of choice. Christians, by pure chance, got the timing right.

> Jesus is probably the most discussed/doubted/critiqued figure in history - certainly we've had more time to find out his flaws and the flaws of his followers than we have of science. And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.

Well, to be fair, Jesus was the central figure of the religion of the people you're talking about and for a long time outing yourself as a non-believer was "problematic" for your well-being and status in society. Even today in the US politicians know they need to demonstrate their Christianity to become president -- I doubt we'll see an atheist, Jewish, Hindu or even Muslim president within my lifetime (I'm 31).

Also, religious dogma largely lives separate from science and philosophy. It is true that many aspects of what "Christianity" is have been defined by consensus in the Vatican Council (including what scripture -- and which specific version of that scripture -- is considered canonical) and some Christian churches have been adjusting their dogma since (e.g. the CoE has become more accepting of homosexuality, the Catholic church has accepted evolution as factual). But saying "religion has undergone strenuous debate" is a very romanticized view of history.

Not to mention that much of Christian theology/philosophy foregoes the possibility that any other religion might be true to the point where Pascal's Wager only works if you supply the premise "All other religions and sects are definitely wrong" (i.e. you can't accidentally insult the "True God" if you submit yourself to the Christian God and turn out to be wrong).

While what you say is true to some extent for Western Christianity, the fact remains that Christianity has taken deep root in a number of places in the world that were free of western biases, e.g., China, Korea, Africa, and South America. A huge diversity of cultures have had their own struggles with Christianity.

An even more interesting comparison is the Eastern Christians of Greece, Russia, the Middle East, etc. Their theology and relationship with science has been fundamentally and increasingly different than the West since the Great Schism.

While I can't speak about every culture, in W. Africa, Christianity took root because the colonial powers brought missionaries who established religious schools wherein the practice of traditional religion was impossible. For the longest time, these were the only schools available so the educated became Christian, and thus the powerful and well-connected were all Christian as a result.

In most of these cases, Christianity did not organically spread. It was brought in and forced upon local populations by mostly western colonial powers. Colonial powers always export their cultural beliefs and identities in an effort to bring those subjugated in line with their own ideas and expectations. Where religion wasn't brought in by colonialism's force, it was exported and introduced by typically western missionaries, yet another example of using a different kind of force to help it take root and spread. After some time, it's true that Christianity began to evolve with its own localized flavor, but it's not like these non-western cultures discovered Christianity via their own Damascus Road experiences with local prophets.

> While what you say is true to some extent for Western Christianity

Its just as true of Eastern Christianity.

> the fact remains that Christianity has taken deep root in a number of places in the world that were free of western biases, e.g., China, Korea, Africa, and South America.

All of those examples are largely a consequence of imperialism (largely, on the part of societies comprising Western Christendom.)

That's not to say that there aren't a few cases of durable Christian communities in regions (IIRC, particularly in the Middle East and East Africa, and some in South Asia) where they aren't a result of the heritage of ties between the common ancestor of modern Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christianity and the Roman empire, including those descendant churches ties to imperialist European states, these isolated communities are notable as exceptions within Christianity.

> Well, to be fair, Jesus was the central figure of the religion of the people you're talking about and for a long time outing yourself as a non-believer was "problematic" for your well-being and status in society.

Not before many, including the earliest Christian leaders, were killed for their belief in Jesus. Christianity has proven to be a determined startup.

A start-up that mostly flourished after they were bought out by the enormous Roman Empire.

There was enough flourishing before to prove the point.

Prove what point? Take off your retrospective determinism glasses for a second and note that for any alien species, there's probably going to be a few religions which have double-digits of the population. These religions started from nothing at some point, so of course they look extremely tenacious in retrospect, when in fact any other equally viral religion could have taken their place if history had played out slightly differently.

This is a fantastic analogy.

Christianity: The YouTube of 0AD

I don't think you can include apologetics or even theology as part of having a fierce, honest, secular debate on Jesus or religions. Apologetics and theological discussion already implicitly involve the assumption of truth, which prevents a truly strenuous, secular debate. As soon as you bring the claims of religions, with all their impossible-to-prove truth assumptions, into the debate, you're no longer having a secular debate. You have to leave the assumptions of divinity, faith, gods, afterlives, etc. None of these things can be adequately defined outside their self-referential religious contexts, and thus the very concepts that ought to be discussed in secular debate can hardly be given adequate definition to inform and frame the debate.

Comparing the persistence of Christianity to Baal and Thor is, I think, just this side of intellectually dishonest. If you're going to discuss comparative religions and their place in the dustbin of history, then like with other such comparative discussions, you shouldn't be making comparisons to things long since dead, especially myths. Instead, you're up against other extant religions with their own rich and ancient histories—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.

More importantly, the persistence of any of these religions provides no informative or measurable proofs of their truth claims. At best, we'd be delineating the ways in which they provide subjective meaning—but that tells us nothing at all about their objective truths. We cannot really say we've identified any of Jesus' flaws, given that the sole information available are stories written long after his alleged existence, all of which claim a god-man free of flaws. We can critique the flaws of his followers, but that still doesn't inform any objective and secular discussion of the truths and meanings of religion.

It's true that billions find meaning in their chosen religions. Millennia of effort has provided no conclusive evidence this is anything other than subjective, though.

> given that the sole information available are stories written long after his alleged existence, all of which claim a god-man free of flaws

I'm not sure that all of those stories claim that; only four of these stories were accepted as canon by the later consensus of Christian churches, but others are known to exist, which have somewhat different contents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel

Also, Christian churches reached some kinds of consensus about what they say the canonical gospels said about Jesus, but not everyone who has read those gospels agrees with those interpretations; there have continued to be some debates about what Jesus said about himself and what his early followers believed about him. Some of those interpretations have been considered heresies in mainstream Christianity for a long time, but there have been a lot of such views which people have held to quite strongly, and often claimed were supported by their readings of even the canonical gospels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_heresies

After all, one of the reasons that Christianity even had all of those ecumenical councils and promulgated those creeds was that there were lots of people who claimed to be followers of Jesus and didn't believe some or all of those things. (And maybe there would be more today if there had been a separation of church and state throughout the Middle Ages.)

I am exceedingly aware of the history of Christianity, its sects, its texts, and the many variations therein. I thought it was obvious the exchanges the parent was involved in were, from the parent's side, only referencing the canonical scriptures used by the church today. Thus far, the parent has given no indication that non-canonical texts or sects held authority. Moreover, non-canonical texts and discarded heresies hold little relevance to the primary matter being discussed. The multiple Christianities of history are a fascinating subject in their own right, but strike me as of little concern here.

Sorry, I didn't mean to take your remarks out of context.

Oh, no apology necessary. I find the points you brought up to be incredibly fascinating, and have spent quite a lot of time studying them myself. I probably erred in omitting mention of only referring to canonical scriptures. If this were a discussion on the subjective meanings found in various heresies—as deemed by the councils that won their debates—that'd be quite a fun conversation.

I don't think I would call someone well-critiqued when until roughly the 1700s to 1800s, critiquing him in the Western world, and also in parts of the East, would get you murdered.

>And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.

Neither has His Divine Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, from a pulp science-fiction franchise. The popularity of a character as a character does not indicate their historicity.

>Personally, I think "music" is probably the most succinct example that our existence may not be purely materialistic in nature (... as I crank up my techno of debatable quality lol)

Could you describe that in more detail? How is music not materialistic? I would consider it hedonistic and nihilistic, just like recreational drug use for example.

It's nothing like a drug, in my opinion. And it seems to serve detrimental evolutionary purposes, which makes no sense (anyone distracted by music is fodder for predators or accidents).

I was once in USAF basic training. One of the peculiarities of that 2 month existence was a total absence of music. This is not normally something people encounter in their lives. I found out that after a while I literally craved music. ANY music. I distinctly remember leaning into a passing car which had its windows rolled down and music pouring out, while I was marching. Around the 1.5 month mark we had to wait in an auditorium for a speaker and he was an hour late. The A/V crew (this was 1993, by the way) decided to put on the Black Album by Metallica, and the ENTIRE auditorium was jamming, metal fan or not. It was really something. It was one of the sweetest (and yes, most meaningful) musical experiences I've ever had. They ended up playing the entire album before the speaker finally showed.

Anyway, I'm here to tell you that something strange is up with music, and it is NOT materialistic in nature (at least, according to out current understanding).

And it's not like I don't think about materialism a lot, being a programmer who was once a Physics major. But try to come up with an objective evaluation of music and you will fail to. It is one of the most subjectively sublime values we have. I mean, all it really is, is sound wave patterns, but somehow it is much more. (Perhaps, just like the Mona Lisa is much more than the sum of ink, paper and wood frame it is made from.)

I'm confused by this post.

First you say it's not a drug. Then you say that after 2 months without it, you were craving it like an addict and desperate to get it however you could.

From your description, it still sounds like a hedonistic experience.

Based upon how you used it, I doubt that you and I could even agree on something simple like the meaning of the word "objective".

What was the point of your comment?

In religious discussions, people go around in circles arguing within the narrow space of each person's belief system. When even simple terms like "objective" are used in radically different ways, the conversation is doomed from the beginning.

This happens in politics too. And cross gender arguments. I don't think it's particular to religion, although I suspect the tendencies of religions to have a lingo makes it worse.

I agree. In any discussion where you have a great deal of difference between positions, you have this problem. The more emotionally charged or wound up in groupthink a person is, the worse it gets because the very language that could be used to bridge the gap provides less useful traction. It's not about higher-level concepts, it's about basic building blocks of communication.

I didn't have much time for posting yesterday, so I was a bit too terse - but my intent in making the point that I did was to try to get the original poster to think about the very words that he was using.

Often when I join in on heated discussions, I find that people are talking past each other. They throw out words that mean something to them that I don't think mean the same thing to other participants in the conversation. I normally encourage participants to slow down and either pick different words or settle on a common definition for some words that are causing the confusion. It's amazing how quickly some disagreements can effectively evaporate, or at least get whittled down to essentials, when everyone is communicating more effectively.

Well, barring space transit, humanity will be wiped out by the Sun long before the heat death of the universe, if not by some other catastrophe first.

I am Christian as well, but I didn't think the article handled religion well. In Christianity, "God's chosen people" are the tribes of Israel, not Christians. In Christianity, the meaning of life is love, something you don't have to be a Christian to believe or understand, so you certainly wouldn't have to cling to Christianity to hang on to this meaning.

Buddhism is about relieving suffering. Something that you don't have to believe in Buddhism to understand. You don't have to cling to Buddhism to believe that your meaning in life is relieving the suffering of others.

Anyway, the paragraph about religion and meaning didn't ring true for me.

If we can't build space transit in 100 million years we're not much of a species.

We have a finite energy budget to get out of here, it's not too clear to me how much we can take with us.

Why?

Because one of the main payoffs from getting here to the nearest habitable star system is that you're now closer to more habitable star systems.

But if turns out that it's very very expensive to get from one star system to another, then that recursive payoff might be very close to zero.

Are you saying you think we have to completely deplete all resources in a stellar system to colonize the next? There is way more energy to harvest in a star system than that.

It can take more energy than it's worth to transport energy from one star to another. Entropy is a pain, because it's like we're trying to find a relatively dry tree to hide under in a rainstorm and none of them stay that way for long.

If the cost of transporting mass and energy from one star system to another are sufficiently high, another problem is that only the people on the ship get a benefit, whereas everyone else is throwing away mass and energy for no conceivable personal benefit.

It would take a very dictatorial sort of government to overcome this kind of negative incentive.

To avoid the issue with the sun frying the Earth you'd only need to move a little out in our own system. Mars or Io or some such.

Musk is talking about a "cargo route" to Mars starting 2018 so 100 million years is quite a while to do things. http://qz.com/705299/elon-musk-is-building-a-supply-chain-to...

> In Christianity, the meaning of life is love

Technically the entire "love thy neighbour" stuff seems to largely be based on the understanding that "thy neighbour" is a fellow Christian (or Hebrew, considering Christianity wasn't yet a thing when most of it supposedly happened).

The Old Testament alone is full of double standards about how you should treat your fellow tribespeople compared to what is allowable to be done to outsiders or enemies of the tribe.

If Christianity had consistently interpreted these rules as universal, there probably wouldn't be many Christians around.

This is similar to Islam's claim of being the "religion of peace": Islam certainly expects Muslims to treat fellow Muslims well, and actually goes to some lengths to make sure non-believers shouldn't be directly killed, but it has fairly strict rules about apostates and people trying to convert believers away from Muslim faith.

Except when asked who is my neighbor, Jesus responds with the parable of the good samaritan (the samaritans and jews were enemies) which basically says, everyone, including your enemies, are your neighbors. It's the whole "do good to those who hate you".

True, those Samaritans were real jerks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIVB3DdRgqU

On a more serious note: while that is true, there are a lot of conflicting views on how those passages interact with the rest of the gospel. Especially considering that Jesus literally said he didn't want to abolish the old laws but then contradicted them. A lot of it can't be taken logically as absolute commands (otherwise the commands would conflict with each other) yet it isn't clear how contradictions should be resolved.

EDIT: Also Samaritans are generally considered Hebrews, even though their claims of origin were disputed by the "real Jews" at the time.

>Especially considering that Jesus literally said he didn't want to abolish the old laws but then contradicted them.

Not to be a pedant, but what literally happened is someone, likely well after after Jesus' lifetime, claimed Jesus said this and that. No one actually knows what Jesus literally said.

Well, depending on which Christian sect you subscribe to, the biblical accounts contain the direct words of Jesus Christ and Yahweh respectively. So I'll cede that if we're already going to treat the Bible as if it were objectively factual.

Otherwise we'd have to get into an argument who "Jesus" even was (assuming we accept the majority interpretation of history that there was someone who at least vaguely matches the biblical character of Jesus of Nazareth -- specifics aside).

> the biblical accounts contain the direct words of Jesus

That's not really a counter argument, as what qualifies as "biblical account" was decided many hundred years after the historical events.

The parent said "depending on which you subscribe to." There are millions of people who believe the phrase you quoted. So it is a counter argument, regardless of its objective true-ness.

Exactly. If we were discussing Harry Potter lore I would treat those books the same way. I honestly don't see any meaningful distinction between religions and fandoms of other creative works (except maybe that fewer people have been killed in the name of Harry Potter).

That said, I was really just making a witty remark. I have no reason to treat biblical accounts as factual (especially given the long and complex history of why biblical canon is what it is and the unreliability of narrators with questionable identities who weren't even alive at the time of the events they're describing).

The direct speech of Jesus in the bible is not necessary the literal word of Jesus of Nazareth the (possible) historical person, but under various interpretations of Christianity it is the literal word of Jesus Christ, the (fictional) character in the biblical narrative. The only difference is that Christians generally seem to think the biblical character is an exact description of the historical person -- for which there doesn't seem to be any reliable basis.

> Especially considering that Jesus literally said he didn't want to abolish the old laws but then contradicted them.

There are two distinct laws found in the Bible. One is the ceremonial law, which applied to the Israelites and revolved around the sacrificial system which pointed to and culminated in Jesus' death on the cross. After this event, the old, ceremonial law (animal sacrifice, circumcision, etc.) was no longer necessary, as the type had met antitype [0][1][2].

The second, everlasting law, which represents the character of God Himself, is the moral law, found in the 10 commandments. These were summarized when Jesus said to love God and love your neighbor[3].

So there was no contradiction in Jesus' words. He came not to abolish the law, meaning the moral law, but after His death, the purpose of the old ceremonial law was fulfilled, and thus was no longer necessary. The moral law, however, was and will be forever necessary, as evidenced by the writing of New Testament authors[4][5][6].

After the Jews rejection of Christ was complete, all people were granted invitation to join the figurative, spiritual Israel[7]. Not coincidentally, if you study it out further, you will find that almost everything found in the Old Testament in literal Israel, events which led up to the death of Christ on the cross, were a figurative type of what spiritual Israel would go through after Jesus' death and ascension into heaven.

This evidence also goes a great length in explaining away most other apparent contradictions Christians and others find in the Bible.

[0] Galatians 3:19

[1] Colossians 2:16,17

[2] Ephesians 2:15

[3] Matthew 22:36-40

[4] James 2:10-12

[5] Romans 7:12

[6] Revelation 11:19

[7] Galatians 3:29

What Jesus said was that he came not to abolish the old laws but to fulfill them.

Another thing Jesus said about the Old Testament law was that it was a lowered standard. "You have heard it said" not to murder, but Jesus said being angry (unjustly) is committing murder in your heart. In the same way, lust is like adultery.

And again, in conversation about divorce, the religious leaders of his day told Jesus that Moses allowed them to divorce, but Jesus said "Moses gave you this law because your hearts were hard".

So it's clear that in Jesus' eyes, the OT law was not the ultimate moral standard, which he said was summarized in "love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength" and "love your neighbor as yourself". If we truly did those things, of course we'd not murder, etc.

It's a bit like rules for children. I tell my toddler not to pull his sister's leg, but I want him to someday mature to the point where he doesn't need that rule, because he loves her and wants what's best for her.

The OT law, with its low standards, was still too hard for humans to keep, pointing to the need for Jesus to fulfill it for us - and He fulfilled not just the low-standard law, but the true one.

Love thy neighbor isn't what I was talking about, and as someone else pointed out, your interpretation of that to be fellow Christians is incorrect (although in real life a lot of Christians behave how you say and worse).

Similarities between Islam and Christianity are to be expected. Islam is an appendix (The Quran) to Christianity (The New Testament/Covenant), added about 700 AD. And both are appended to Judaism (the Old Testament/Covenant).

One can find much more objective meaning to existence without outsorcing it to some imaginable friend.

  > Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus,
  > nihilism is essentially true

And folks who don't give a rat ass about what Christians believe do know that nobody has monopoly on meaning and don't see the need to reduce everything else to nihilism. It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.

>One can find much more objective meaning to existence without outsorcing it to some imaginable friend.

Care to elaborate on this? I'm an atheist myself and I've been struggling with this a lot.

Aesthetics is one possibility. When someone straitens a picture frame they don't need that to last past the heat death of the universe for it to be worth it. Expanding this to say a painting or poem which also has a finite lifespan and you can even learn to appreciate a Mandala. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala

Keep going in that direction and a life well lived is it's own reward. And by well lived I mean occasional cliff diving not devoting oneself to charitable giving.

There is a lot of pressure for 'success' but I suspect many people are happier with a career in dog grooming than they would be as CEO of IBM. High status can be fun, or endless drudgery.

The issue is defining what it is to be "well lived". With out a sky daddy, you're pretty much unable to declare anything good or bad.

Some men want to watch the world burn. Tell me why that is wrong? You will say that human life has value. I will ask, honestly, why? From a purely reductionist perspective it doesn't. It's all just atoms. I kill cockroaches without a negative thought. There is no reason to not have the same view of people in a purely materialistic worldview.

Again, if one's aesthetics is gruesome, but enjoyable to that person, you cannot tell them they are wrong. You cannot interfere with them from an ethics perspective. They want to kill, steal and rape, you have to let them. Otherwise you're forcing an external model that you deem good onto them. We've already established that there is no actual good model.

The result is that we must accept hypocrisy. We must all realize that might makes right. The most powerful, flawed group of people are correct. They are the law.

You are presupposing a suicide bomber somehow had a bad life. I am rejecting that assumption and saying a swat team and the person their shooting could both have lived a great life.

Following the rules of society results in lower friction, and is generally a net positive trade off. That does not mean it's always the correct path. After-all George Washington could easily have been shot as a traitor.

It may seem the strange for a hangman to respect the hanged, but morality and rules need not be 1:1.

PS: This also set's up an interesting freedom duality where someone is free to impose rules and others are free to break them. With the right set of rules you end up with a Darwinian system with huge pressures to enjoy conforming. And a safety valve of people rebelling if the rules are unacceptable. Oddly enough this actually maps fairly well to the real world.

No, I make no assumption about the the suicide bomber. I'm say he didn't do anything bad. He could kill thousands. Not bad. The reason is that "bad" is meaningless. There is no such thing as right or wrong in a materialistic view. Aesthetics doesn't get you there. If the bomber things that the death of thousands looks good, it is. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

You are trying to add morality where there is zero need for it. "Tell me why that is wrong? ... You cannot interfere with them"

My point was you don't need to say what someone did was "bad" to stop them. As long as more people prefer an ordered world then the dissidents can be dealt with.

If majority rule says giving to the homeless is a capital offense then so be it. Physics and thus biology are going to impose a few rules. Further, completion kicks in at the social level. But, that does not mean Anarchy is "bad" just out competed.

Thus, while morality does not impose any rules collective groups of people do. Not because might makes right, but might exists and there is no right.

PS: At the extreme at one point I realized I was being paid in part to help maintain nuclear weapons. Not because I believed in them instead I liked money and other people want them.

Killing thousands might not be "bad" for a suitably vague definition of the word, but it's undeniably rude.

Philosophy has many different shades and colors (Philosophy of language, science, mathematics), and there is also a "branch" asking questions related to the meaning of life.

I can't tell you where you could/should start, because I feel like I would already influence you too much by taking some sort of choice away from you.

I will link a few essays I could find that are available for free and are not too long. I'm already influencing you a little bit by making this selection, but I urge you to do your own research: If you like one of the stories, try to find out who was influenced by whom (e.g. Kafka doesn't directly address meaning but influenced Camus; Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer), and consider reading things challenging the author.

[1] The Last Question - Isaac Asimov (http://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf)

[2] Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200)

[3] A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - Ernest Hemingway (http://www.url-der.org/a_clean_well_lighted_place.pdf)

[4] On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense - Friedrich Nietzsche (http://www.jpcatholic.com/NCUpdf/Nietzsche.pdf)

I've often see people link the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I'm gonna do it as well: http://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

While I'm writing this gutenberg.org seems to have some problems, but just search for "Metamorphosis Kafka", and you should find plenty of other sources.

Interesting that you seem to be like me in wanting people to find their own path instead of influencing them in one direction too much. My meta is that this gives them more ownership over their chosen path, from which they'll potentially derive more pleasure and more meaning :)

Trying hard to have people make up their own mind can be hard for dating, though.

> It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.

Only speaking for Catholicism here, but the fact that official Catholic doctrine touches so heavily on so many areas of life, making objective and universal claims about human nature, means that Catholicism can't help but make assertions about people who aren't Catholic or even Christian. This tends to deeply piss off a lot of people, even when no individual Catholic is actually applying those principles to specific non-Christian individuals. In other words, many people tend to not it when religions have anything to say about people who aren't in that religion.

There's a certain amount of amusement to be found when differing religions' assertions conflict.

I'm thinking specifically of a certain elderly Irish Catholic gentleman's response to the LDS' efforts to retroactively save ancestors by means of genealogical research. He was more upset than I thought he would be, given that the process was completely off the wall from his viewpoint as I understood it.

That's rather hypocritical though, right? Athiests measure religious people with their conceptions of science and reason, why can't it go the other way?

Speaking entirely for myself here as an atheist, I think most of us just want to be left alone to believe what we believe without having religious people constantly approaching us with "Well, you don't know Jesus, that's why you believe X,Y, Z." As if they're somehow certain that a God exists and that we simply aren't enlightened enough to see it.

I agree, but having some close Christian friends, I can tell you that some of them indeed are certain about some things. That's what they call faith.

Well, the devout most decidedly are certain a god exists and that everyone else aren't enlightened enough to see it—where it is the given devout person's chosen god.

Hitchen's Razor - "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

Like Hitchen's Razor?

I try not to police grammar, but it ought to be Hitchens' or Hitchens's. On a side note, he is sorely missed in a lot of contemporary conversations.

I agree. I did not agree with everything he wrote, but everyone of his articles were insightful and I came out a better person for having read and thought about them.

> It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.

In my experience, they do focus most of that measurement internally. Christians attend Sunday morning sermons, weekly Bible studies, confess their sins to one another, read the Bible, read books on Christian living, etc. all in an attempt to measure themselves against the tenets of their faith. The Christian faith even talks about the ways in which Christians should be more strict on fellow members of the Church than on outsiders.

But if you genuinely think you've found salvation and meaning, isn't it kind of selfish to keep that to yourself?

In my experience[0], most religious people use their religion to create and foster a sense of difference with Others, and do not keep the focus internally. American politics is a crucible of religious sources of obligational determinism locked in combat with secular forces.

If you genuinely think you've found meaning, it's not selfish to keep it to yourself, until such time as someone asks for your thoughts in their own search for meaning. Which means it's likely to only happen with people you've grown close enough to that they open their private selves to you.

[0]: A born-and-raised ethnic Christian who helped start two churches, whose family is still extremely religious, and who lives in the still very religious southeastern US.

>In my experience[0], most religious people use their religion to create and foster a sense of difference with Others, and do not keep the focus internally.

Having lived in both religious and secular communities, it seems to me that tribalism is a human universal. Secular people have no trouble judging the religious by secular standards. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just not clear about what the secularist complaint is at that point.

Also, my point was not that Christians (and religious people in general) never pass judgement on the rest of the world, but that most outsiders don't see the investment Christians make in subjecting themselves to scrutiny by the standards of their beliefs.

Complaints about religious hypocrisy are sometimes relevant, but sometimes they are a red-herring.

> American politics is a crucible of religious sources of obligational determinism locked in combat with secular forces.

Could you clarify what you mean by "obligational determinism"? The only google search results I could find lead me back to this thread.

> If you genuinely think you've found meaning, it's not selfish to keep it to yourself, until such time as someone asks for your thoughts in their own search for meaning. Which means it's likely to only happen with people you've grown close enough to that they open their private selves to you.

I'm as annoyed by the door-to-door evangelists as the next person (I think there are better approaches) but if you genuinely think other people might be missing out on eternity, then isn't it a bit schadenfreude to not reach out to them at all?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I can respect a secular person who says to a religious person "please don't talk to me about religion". Assuming the secularist agrees to do the same, the theist should generally respect that wish. I can also respect the secularist who engages theists and attempts to dissuade them of their beliefs. It makes no sense to me that secularists should ask theists in general to keep their beliefs private, as if they were talking about the color of their underwear or something.

Apologies for missing your reply till now, first of all.

> Having lived in both religious and secular communities, it seems to me that tribalism is a human universal.

Unfortunately, this is all too true. I did not mean to imply the non-religious were excluded from being tribal and differentiating themselves from Others, as well. I was only responding from my experience that, particularly within the public sphere, religion occupies just as strong a force in identity politics as other personal features.

> Could you clarify what you mean by "obligational determinism"? The only google search results I could find lead me back to this thread.

Thanks for asking. You've caused me to go back to an old text and discover I had, somewhere over the years, inadvertently mis-remembered a particular phrasing. The phrasing I should have used is "sources of religious obligation" or "religious sources of obligation". Basically, minus the determinism—too much time between studying and recalling philosophy led to a pretty boneheaded error. I draw the phrase from the excellent debate between Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff in Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate. My error, over the years, is rooted in a careless recollection of the role religious sources of obligation play in determining what a person thinks should or should not be done, particularly where coercive public policies are concerned.

I apologize for the error.

Thank you for the response, and for finding the reference.

> I was only responding from my experience that, particularly within the public sphere, religion occupies just as strong a force in identity politics as other personal features.

That is true. In contrast, one of my main points was that there is a significant amount of private, sincere religious practice that is not (primarily) political in nature.

I did not wish to downplay the role of religion in politics (which you correctly point out is significant) but rather the role of politics in religion.

Now, the question of what role religion should play (or should be afforded) in politics is an interesting one; one that I don't have a clear position on at present. I read some Wolterstorff while I was studying philosophy, but I don't recall that specific book. From what I have sampled so far it seems quite interesting.

> Now, the question of what role religion should play (or should be afforded) in politics is an interesting one; one that I don't have a clear position on at present.

I definitely recommend the Audi-Wolterstorff book. They both tackle this specific issue from opposing perspectives, and I found it highly illuminating at the time. It has remained with me to this day—even in misremembered form.

>But if you genuinely think you've found salvation and meaning, isn't it kind of selfish to keep that to yourself?

And isn't it stupid not to double-check the evidence and figure out how to demonstrate the ostensible truth you've gained to others?

That depends. If your definition of epistemic justification is some variant of Positivism, then my answer is "no".

If your definition of epistemic justification is not so utterly self-defeating, then "yes", but then we can no longer automatically infer that religious beliefs are unjustified.

How can you have a world view that doesn't encapsulate the whole world?

At most you can encapsulate the world you have perceived (+ stuff you imagine) which is much smaller then the whole world, and even that is a stretch, because we have limited computation available to us, so there is a lot you might be unable to account for due to limited time for accounting.

>From what I can see, He's the only thing/idea/person that has the potential to provide any kind of objective meaning, so however delusional religion may appear (and I'll admit lots of it is deluded), there's only one God, and he is "the rock that is higher than I".

How does the one god have any more potential to create meaning than a pantheon of gods, or one of the many "we are all part of god" spiritual ideas?

Another question for another day. Off the top of my head I can't think of a reason they wouldn't be able to create some form of objective meaning. My problem with lies more in the problems of evil, ontology, epistemology, and a compelling narrative to history.

That's the thing; having a whole pantheon of gods, each of differing levels of 'goodness' neatly solves the problem of evil. (so does postulating one true god who isn't entirely good or entirely evil.)

The problem of evil is only a philosophical problem insofar as you postulate a god of infinite ability, infinite knowledge and infinite goodness. Obviously, such a god contradicts the world as we see it. remove any one of those three pillars, and the contradiction goes away;

Further, I think, once you start knocking one of those three pillars out, so that we get a god who matches observable reality, I question if that god can create any more meaning than the traditional "What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power"

I mean, would you worship an insufficiently good god? one who intentionally chose some people for very good lives and others for very bad lives? My argument is that worshiping such a god would be either an act of fear or a grasp for power. What about an insufficiently powerful god? a god who really was doing his best?

Relevant quote:

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

- Epicurus

The flaw with this logic is it presupposes a standard of good that may be applied to a god. Under most monotheistic systems, the god is the definition of good. So anything that it does, including not preventing evil, is still good.

So it is a useless distinction then.

If god is omnipotent and anything it does is good... then there isn't any evil. So making the distinction between good and evil seems to not have any value.

Yup.

Meaning is something that is imposed by an observer. For something to have meaning, there has to be someone it has meaning to.

Religions typically offer a supernatural observer (usually but not necessarily a creator god) to play that part.

Atheists don't have the luxury of simply defining such an observer into existence, so they fall back to that which already exists or has a reasonable chance of existing if things go as planned: themselves, friends and family, their offspring, other humans, whatever comes after humans, maybe even some other species that is luckier than us and stumbles upon our remains.

But because meaning is subjective, it is also contextual: ultimately everything may be meaningless because there is no absolute observer ("ultimately" kind of implies there is no observer left anyway), but in the meantime there are potentially billions of people whose lives you can affect -- and many billions upon billions more if we as a species survive that long.

Talking about religions as if they were all the same or at least similar enough to lump them on a single pile is dishonest. That's often how apologists try to define their deity of choice into existence (drawing semantic arguments that define "god" in such a way it becomes a logical necessity) but there's no path from "there is something I shall call 'God'" to "everything in the Bible/Quran/Talmud/Necronomicon is true" short of circular reasoning ("because the Bible/Quran/Talmud/Necronomicon says so"), special pleading ("of course all the other religions are just superstitions") or "divine revelation" (i.e. non-repeatable personal anecdotes).

Speaking of "the meaning of (human) life to a rock" would be patently ridiculous: rocks don't have a capacity to impose meaning on anything humans do and even if they did we wouldn't be able to tell nor have any incentive to care.

Speaking of "the meaning of (human) life to Bob" likewise is only worth anyone's attention if we have any reason to actually care what Bob thinks.

Even foregoing the impossibility of proving the existence of a god or gods (given how awkward they are to define consistently across religions and how being able to actually demonstrate their existence would by definition refute their supernaturality) why should anyone care what they think about life, human or non?

Many religions like Christianity solve this problem by making their god vengeful. Don't do what Yahweh wants? Experience unpleasant things for eternity (whatever "experience" or "unpleasant" means in eternity). Do something he likes? Experience eternal bliss (whatever "bliss" means if it is eternal). Various sects disagree on the exact nature of the punishment/blessings and what is necessary to deserve them.

Either way, you have to wonder what difference it ultimately makes: if we're talking about some kind of post-physical eternal state of "being" without bad things, what's the value of good things? If there is none, what difference does it make whether you're blessed, punished or simply cease to be? It almost seems like an elaborate con based on all living things' natural fear of death and non-answers ("What was before the universe?" -"Turtles." "What was before turtles?" -"Turtles were always there. It's turtles all the way back.").

Also, with regard to the Christian god in particular: going by the Bible, Yahweh is not exactly the kind of character whose opinion I would value. The Old Testament is full of him commanding his followers to murder, pillage, rape and enslave others, not to mention the bloodshed and terror he allegedly inflicted directly. Even the New Testament paints a less than rosy picture of him. If Yahweh is real, he would be worse than all human tyrants of history combined and a perfect example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It seems to me you're thinking of Christianity in terms of its popular atheist parody, in contrast to the respectful, thoughtful view of the OP. A number of things you've said are simply not true, others are not in proportion.

There are a lot of problems to grapple with in epistemology and ontology, some of which you've identified. This isn't the place to debate them, though. A great book to start with though, is Miracles, by C.S. Lewis. It blows through a lot of shallow thinking about God and the nature of reality, as well as a number of things you've referenced: which god is the true one? Why is God so mean?

Also, I'd like to point out that if God has revealed himself to us in history (via Jesus and the witnesses of his resurrection), we don't need to simply theorize about him. There's actual evidence, which we can weigh against our own personal experience.

I'm an atheist, yes, but I'm hardly living in an echo chamber where I'm only exposed to parodies. I was raised as a Christian (although I was never a believer), live in a majority Christian country and my family as well as many people I interact with in my life are still Christian -- whether they actually believe in it or merely identify as Christian socially.

Most Christians I know are either religious because of personal anecdotes ("I felt like something protected me") or wishful thinking ("There has to be more to it than this") or fear of death ("Death is not the end"). Incidentally, few of them literally believe in the Bible although most of them have apparently accepted it as the window dressing for their own personal convictions.

I have merely skimmed most of the criticisms because as you say, this isn't exactly the place to have in-depth discussions. But it is also not the place to make blanket claims based on your pet religion.

> I'd like to point out that if God has revealed himself to us in history[..]. There's actual evidence[..].

This isn't evidence. This doesn't even qualify as an eye-witness account. This is what I mean by circular logic: you can't use biblical anecdotes to qualify the validity of biblical anecdotes. You can contrast them with independent data to see whether they are consistent, or you can look at them within the context of the scripture to determine whether they are internally consistent. But you can't validate them.

The Lord of the Rings is internally consistent. Many alternative history novels are internally consistent as well as consistent with a large subset of actual history (at least if the author cared to fact-check). But that doesn't mean they are "true".

The trivial truth about religion is that believers don't believe because of logical arguments. Logical arguments are only used to justify belief after the fact. If there was a consistent argument that "worked", there wouldn't be any atheists left -- and no, the cosmological argument doesn't work either.

"But the cosmos exists! Consider who created it!"

The difference to me is in being satisfied with an answer that you accept on faith vs one you can prove, though things like many-worlds possibly confound this exploration.

The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.

Science provides tentative answers that iteratively home in on the truth: Newton's theory of gravity wasn't wrong, it was incomplete, so it was replaced by Einstein's, which covers all the corner cases we've since learned about.

In science a failure is considered progress. If we can disprove a theory, it increases our understanding of the universe by telling us what isn't true.

Also, a scientific theory must be falsifiable: it must be able to make predictions (which is why string theory despite its name is often not considered an actual theory).

Religion on the other hand offers absolute truth statements. Since the dawn of man religion has been how we explain things we don't have an answer to: lightning, the tides, the origin of life, what happens after we die and so on.

As our understanding outside of religion has improved some of these answers have become ridiculous enough to make it socially awkward to retain them as dogma (though there are still Christians who will loudly tell you natural disasters are divine punishments).

>The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.

>Religion on the other hand offers absolute truth statements.

See my other comment here for another perspective on faith and religion[0]

In particular, the what happens after you die issue is applicable as it is one where we may never have conclusive evidence for the answer this side of life.

>The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.

As a Christian, my answer is I'm confident in my beliefs, but not 100% certain. I could be wrong as could you.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12084049

> The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.

No, you don't.

To be a strict empiricist, you have to be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer, and there's other approaches to knowledge which also require that, but, while empiricism (and some of the others) may overlap with atheism, there is no requirement of willingness to accept uncertainty attached to atheism (agnosticism, which by the conventional definition of "atheism" usually used now, is a subset of atheism, certainly requires a willingness to accept "I don't know" on at least one point.)

You cannot appeal to the claims of a religion as evidence for the truth of those claims.

> Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true

Some Christians believe this. Some Christians don't. And some Christians believe something which technically agrees with this, but doesn't actually hold that knowing Jesus by name or having any contact with formal Christianity is essential, which makes it functionally more like the reverse ("people for whom nihilism is true don't know Christ").

Christians, even by the narrow creedal definition, believe lots of different things.

> Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true

If nihilism is "essentially true" (whatever that means) for "folks who don't know Jesus" (whatever that means) then it is essentially true for people who do know Jesus. We're all in the same boat. Whatever the objective truth is, it's the same for everyone. The only question is who is burying their heads in the sand, and whether or not that's a good thing, or if it even matters at all. (Personally, I think it does matter, but I can see how a reasonable person could disagree.)

Burying heads in sand works when you can't take the data feed coming into said head. Christians make circular arguments to substantiate their beliefs, and those arguments are typically based on fairly trustworthy lessons. The only problem is, those circular arguments substantiate a singular all knowing god who is represented through the lense of a book a bunch of humans wrote 2,000 years ago. Marketing changes, but base concepts remain the same.

All worldviews start with assumptions. Secular materialism relies on circular arguments as much as Christianity, they just explain less (see Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton). The only difference is that materialists often refuse to admit their assumptions - which is why, as a Christian, I admire nihilists - they're not afraid to admit their axioms and follow them to their logical conclusions.

> Secular materialism relies on circular arguments as much as Christianity

No, that's not true. See:

http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/03/why-some-assumptions-are-...

Really, only the last paragraph of that post are relevant here. Secular materialism and Christianits share reason in common. The difference between the two is their explanation of why it works, where it came from, and why it matters. That's where circularity starts to happen.

> That's where circularity starts to happen.

No. This is what a circular argument sounds like: "The Bible is the Word of God, and we know this because it says so in the Bible." There is nothing like that in secular materialism. Secular materialism is a conclusion based on evidence. It might be wrong but it is not circular.

And, BTW, if secular materialism is wrong, then the way to demonstrate that is to show evidence that it is wrong. And if you want to claim that secular materialism is circular then the way to show that is to show how it is circular (which you won't be able to do because it isn't) rather than just to say that it is with no supporting argument.

> Secular materialism is a conclusion based on evidence.

No, its not. Secular materialism is an epistemology in which conclusions based on externally-verifiable empirical evidence are held to be the only justified claims of knowledge.

> And, BTW, if secular materialism is wrong, then the way to demonstrate that is to show evidence that it is wrong.

This rests itself on the assumption that secular materialism is correct (that is, it assumes tthat conclusions based on externally-verifiable empirical evidence are the only justified claims of knowledge.)

> And if you want to claim that secular materialism is circular then the way to show that is to show how it is circular

Secular materialism itself is not circular.

The claim that secular materialism is true because it is not shown to be wrong within the epistemological framework which secular materialism defines is, OTOH, circular.

> Secular materialism itself is not circular.

OK, but this is the claim I was responding to:

"Secular materialism relies on circular arguments as much as Christianity,"

> Secular materialism is an epistemology

No, it isn't. Secular materialism is "the theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena." (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Secular+materialism) It is a falsifiable scientific theory.

> The claim that secular materialism is true because it is not shown to be wrong within the epistemological framework which secular materialism defines is, OTOH, circular.

But that's a straw man. You're right, that would be a circular argument, but that is not the claim that secular materialism makes.

You are confusing secular materialism with science. These are not the same thing. Science is a set of assumptions, including the assumption that any theory that is at odds with evidence must be wrong. Secular materialism is a conclusion that follows from those assumptions plus the currently available evidence. There is no circularity. Science does not assume secular materialism. Science readily takes on board the possibility that dualism might be correct, that deities might exist, even that Jesus may have died on the cross to save us from everlasting torment in the afterlife. All of these theories are rejected not because they contradict scientific assumptions (which would be circular) but because they are at odds with the evidence.

BTW, science does not claim that secular materialism is true. No scientific theory is ever true, merely the best available explanation at any point in time. Scientific theories are always subject to revision based on new evidence or better arguments. That's one of the big differences between science and religion: in science, the discovery and correction of mistakes is considered progress. In religion, it's heresy.

> It is a falsifiable scientific theory.

No, its not. There's no conceivable empirical test that could refute it, even in principal.

> You are confusing secular materialism with science.

No, I'm not. Secular materialism and science are closely related but different. Science is a method for justifying knowledge, secular materialism is the belief that that method is the exclusive method for justifying knowledge.

> There's no conceivable empirical test that could refute it, even in principal.

Of course there is. Communication from the afterlife conferring information that could not otherwise have been acquired. Greater efficacy of prayer to one deity versus a different deity. The Second Coming.

> secular materialism is the belief that that method is the exclusive method for justifying knowledge.

Then you are using the term "secular materialism" to mean something different than what the dictionary says. I refer you to the following passage from Tom Stoppard:

http://web9.uits.uconn.edu/lundquis/Travesties.html

> Communication from the afterlife conferring information that could not otherwise have been acquired.

Any such communication (and any such afterlife from which communication was possible) would itself be explainable as physical processes. (Obviously, it would require new understanding of what the laws of physics are, but that's not unusual.)

Any phenomenon that involves an observed and predictable relationship between an observable action and an observable result can be explained physically (though it may require new physics.) Any phenomenon that does not is rationalized within a secular materialist viewpoint as either (1) random, or (2) an effect of some as-yet-unknown cause.

Nothing observable can falsify secular materialism.

> it may require new physics

But that is exactly what falsification means. When you "require new physics" you have falsified the old physics.

> an effect of some as-yet-unknown cause

Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity. Science does not rule out that possibility a priori.

BTW, here is an example of an unfalsifiable theory: God is real, but He will not reveal Himself to you unless you believe in Him. If He has not revealed Himself, then you just don't have enough faith.

> When you "require new physics" you have falsified the old physics.

Sure, there lots of things that could falsify our current understanding of physics (and elements of that understanding are falsified all the time without any negative impact on Secular Materialism).

But all that says is that the current models of physics are falsifiable, which wasn't in question. Falsifying them, however, doesn't falsify Secular Materialism.

> Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity.

Not in any non-physical sense.

> Science does not rule out that possibility a priori.

Science does not admit any entity that cannot be reduced to physical mechanism, nor does it need to admit any such entity since its framework allows explaining any predictable relation between observable cause and observable effect as such a mechanism, and it doesn't concern itself with anything other than such relationships.

(Whether this is all there is "in truth" is a question that goes beyond science -- secular materialism is the affirmative answer to that question -- and which is irrelevant to science.)

> Falsifying them, however, doesn't falsify Secular Materialism.

That depends on how they are falsified. If your "new physics" is just a minor tweak to the Standard Model -- a new particle, say -- then you're right. But if you can demonstrate something observable that isn't made of matter then that would falsify secular materialism.

Dark matter and dark energy could potentially do this. Notwithstanding that we're calling them "matter" and "energy" the truth is we have no freakin' clue what they are.

> > Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity.

> Not in any non-physical sense.

Sorry, I have no idea what that means.

> Science does not admit any entity that cannot be reduced to physical mechanism

Not true. It just happens to be the case that everything we observe appears to be reducible to a physical mechanism. But that's not an a priori assumption, it is an a posteriori observation. And it's also a pretty recent development. For example, whether or not life could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Darwin. Whether altruism could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Dawkins and Axelrod. The jury is still out on abiogenesis, but again, I'll give you long odds that that, too, will turn out to be physical.

> it doesn't concern itself with anything other than such [predictable] relationships

Again, not true. A phenomenon does not have to be predictable to be amenable to scientific inquiry. There are hard limits on our ability to predict, say, the weather. That does not mean that weather is beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. Quite the contrary, it is because of science that we know that there are fundamental limits on our ability to predict the weather.

BTW, weather presents the perfect example of how secular materialism could be falsified: if tornadoes, all else being equal (i.e. controlling for things like geographic location and construction quality), selectively destroyed the houses of worship of one denomination over another.

To be frank: no. https://www.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/3ghjwh/nondisc...

>There are a number of readily plausible accounts of metaethical naturalism that are available to the atheist. See, for example, Firth 1952, Railton 1986, Boyd 1988, Brink 1989, Smith 1994, or Foot 2001. My point is not that any of these accounts are correct (although I think that some of them are fairly likely to be true). Rather, my point is that if they are false, they are not obviously false. This means that they present the atheist with plausible accounts of objective morality that feature only natural facts, overturning claim (c) and, therefore, claim (a) as well.

>Claim (d) fails on two fronts. First, there are non-natural facts that can serve as truth makers for moral claims that are available to atheists and, second, any problem that the atheist faces with regards to these facts the theist faces just as badly. I take the first horn to be supported by the possibility of irreducibly normative properties, Platonic or otherwise, that are available to the atheist. Recent defenses of such views include Shafer-Landau 2003, Cuneo 2007, Wedgwood 2007, Enoch 2011, and Cuneo & Shafer-Landau 2014.

>On the latter point, that the theist faces the same problems as the atheist when it comes to non-natural normative facts (if there are any such problems), I agree with Heathwood 2012 that there cannot be any coherent theistic moral constructivism which does not refer to some irreducibly normative properties. Properties that are equally available to the atheist.

"You've pretty much rejected the possibility of true objective meaning..."

This depends on what you're trying to give meaning to. The 'god' perspective gives meaning to life (i.e., why are we here??). But why is it necessary to ask that question in the first place? Asking it implies that there is a meaning to life and you're trying to figure out what it is. It's not inconsistent to say that "life" doesn't have meaning (nor does it need to) but that "our individual" lives do have meaning. That meaning is defined for us by our genetic blueprint...it gives us the motive force individually to seek out the things that fulfill our individual lives. Once we die, the show simply ends.

I'm seeing a recurring theme in this thread (and others) accusing Christians of using circular / irrational arguments to substantiate their beliefs.

I'm a Christian and here is my assessment of the nature of faith.

Everyone lives by faith. When you decide to get in an airplane, you go by faith that the plane is sound, the pilots are skilled, etc. Same idea with driving to work, picking a job, getting married, conducting an experiment. By virtue of the fact that no one knows the future, we all must at the most basic level, live by faith.

Faith is commitment without knowing (with 100% certainty).

Of course that does not mean faith has to be blind and irrational. You make observations about the world, hear testimony of people you trust, think through the issues and come up with your conclusions.

Atheists weigh the evidence (e.g. if God exists, why is there so much evil? Or why does God not reveal Himself more clearly?) and don't see God.

Theists weigh the evidence (e.g. why is there something instead of nothing at all? or observe the improbability for the conditions that allow life in Earth) and see God.

Blanket accusations that theists having no rational basis for their beliefs are not fair. There is rational basis for either camp if one is open to honest researching and listening.

Throughout the ages there were and are great rational thinkers who profess faith in God. (e.g. Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton)

This is to say again, everyone lives by faith. I have great confidence that God exists, but can not 100% prove it. The atheist can not prove He doesn't. I concede that I could be totally wrong. A rationally honest atheist will concede the same about their own beliefs.

So we all make a decision.

Our death is the day of reckoning. Only then will there be the possibility to know for certain if what you have chosen to believe was right or wrong.[0]

TLDR; In issues of existence of God, afterlife, etc and therefore meaning, we cannot know for certain either way. So make the best choice you know how and we'll all find out if we were right later.

[0] Technically, in the case that I'm wrong (about the afterlife), we won't know much of anything.

>Throughout the ages there were and are great rational thinkers who profess faith in God. (e.g. Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton)

This form of argument could quite easily be used to justify other beliefs. Newton, for instance, was also a practitioner of the occult and alchemy. Pascal regarded medicine as unholy. Even purportedly rational thinkers have their blind spots.

That is true. Some of the most evil people in history were rational/logical to a fault. I will not follow them or believe in their ideologies.

However, I mentioned them (Pascal, Newton) not to justify faith in God, but to dispel the false notion that theists are all irrational and/or theism cannot be rational.

Right. I think I agree with the general thrust of your previous comment: all worldviews/metaphysics ultimately require leaps of faith of various magnitudes.

> Science taught me that it's all just atoms and the void, so there can't be any deeper point or purpose to the whole thing; the kind of meaning most people yearn for — Ultimate Meaning — simply doesn't exist.

I don't think that is something science can teach you. Science can give you the scientific method, but answering the question "Is the scientific method the only valid means of knowledge?" is philosophy not science. It seems the author is trying to smuggle in a particular philosophy under the guise of science.

Yes. Science based on methodological naturalism (where one only assumes naturalism). But I guess the success of the scientific method may add some support for metaphysical naturalism (where one actually believes that naturalism is true) too.

Especially if you assume that the scientific method is always valid--that all true statements can be determined empirically--you can't make statements like "Ultimate Meaning doesn't/does exist". If Ultimate Meaning cannot be defined, it cannot be tested for or measured, so no statements about it can be true or false. The answer to meaning would not be false, but null (or maybe 42).

Just like 42, "atoms and the void" here is just a science-flavored attempt to answer a non-question.

But if it cannot be measured it by definition cannot have any effect on reality so can be safely ignored.

I assume you mean that in the absolute sense, but one also has to realize that "cannot be measured" can also be a measure of our ability to measure things. So you certainly can have real effects that we're simply not able to measure.

And so in that sense, I'm not sure the premise follows, as some of the things we cannot measure are things like the conditions of the early universe, which certainly did effect[1] us.

[1] It affects us too, but I chose that word deliberately

sorry to ruin the joke if that's what it is, but this is sarcasm, right? (my point being: our instrumentation constantly gets better, and there are things that we can't now measure/might never be able to measure which have a material impact on things we can measure)

Positivism has fallen out of favor precisely because it cannot withstand its own criteria for meaning.

For example, the statement that "all true statements can be determined empirically" is not itself verifiable by empirical means.

What if you do do the determination of all true statements empirically? Is that not the empirical way to determine the truth of that all-inclusive statement?

> What if you do do the determination of all true statements empirically?

How would you demonstrate that you have done this? Particularly, how would you demonstrate that there is no true statement which you have not empirically demonstrated?

Gödel's incompleteness theorem already rules this out for mathematics, so why should we believe it about the universe?

Fair enough; I'll be a little more precise.

I think the correct way to state it is: "all true statements are either tautologies, or can be determined empirically (with arbitrarily high but not necessarily measure-1 probability)". This statement is itself a tautology, because tautologies are by definition true, and because "determined" implies some method of determination, which if it actually can be used to determine truth, means it can be used empricially. Determination and empiricism are secretly defined in terms of each other, basically. The reason this tautology is worth stating is that it gives a simple criterion for discarding non-questions: questions that have no method of determining whether they are true or false (with arbitrarily high probability), are always non-questions.

Confusing knowledge for purpose.

Or, understanding atoms (to this degree) is a long way from understanding a human being and our social and environmental context.

So, there's atoms and void. What are you going to do with your life?

(To the extent that's even a conscious choice.)

>It seems the author is trying to smuggle in a particular philosophy under the guise of science.

I couldn't agree more.

Further, I'll add another reason why one might find trouble with that statement: It seems that because of the usefulness of the scientific method, as far as I can tell the effect on human psychology appears to be such that we are in a time and place where we are buying into the idea that the ratio of x: human understanding, to y, the body of knowledge necessary for answering such questions the author considers is getting reasonably close to 1, otherwise the author would not say that.

It seems it may be the case that it is entirely possible there is even other intelligent life in the universe, who upon encountering us attempting to answer difficult questions, would regard us as we would regard our pet cats sitting in front of a book on particle physics.

Even still possible is that there is intelligent life lying outside our observable universe, or even outside our universe entirely, regarding us in a similar manner.

In the framework of our current knowledge, we look into the past at our forebearers and consider how much more we know; yet, they too looked into the past at their forebearers, and considered the same.

In what sense can something be said to exist if it's "outside our observable universe, or even outside our universe entirely"?

Guys, he's not talking about the Scientific Method. He's talking about Reductionism. As recent as a few centuries ago, it was in no way obvious to us that the universe was made out of Atoms and Math (as opposed to say, Adam Kadmon and Divine Inspiration). Continental Philosophers spent tons of energy on these types of questions.

It still isn't obvious to me ;)

I thought that "atoms and void" was a concept from Greek philosophy; Democritus - and one could argue that Democritus wasn't even an atheist; he thought that the soul was composed of 'soul particles' and while he had unconventional ideas about gods for the time, it is not at all clear that he didn't believe in gods at all.

It's like saying that it's all just pixels, therefore these words you read don't have any meaning.

I don't see how this analogy applies at all. We are not viewing the universe from the outside looking in at the "words," but rather make up the universe ourselves. In some sense, we are the aforementioned pixels.

If we're the pixels, then things like your relationship with your parents are the words johnmarius are referring to. The relationships we have with other people cannot be seen coherently through the "atoms and the void" view.

(But they can be seen through the "we're here to play" view espoused by the author of this article.)

> I don't think that is something science can teach you

Science can teach you that "it's all just atoms and the void"; the other part of the sentence is inference. And interestingly a similar inference as I made as a teenager, though I wasn't eloquent enough to really discuss it with anybody.

The basic premise is that if you reject the notion of a deity, there isn't even any standard by which any configuration of the Universe could be more meaningful than any other configuration.

Except if it's your own standard, which leads to meaning being a feeling more than an objective measure.

> Science can teach you that "it's all just atoms and the void"

Science can only teach you about things that can be measured. There are limits to what we can measure. For example, can we accept string theory to be true without being able to measure the activity from the additional dimensions it predicts? How do we get around the problems of quantum physics where the movement of particles cannot be measured without altering the state of those particles?

I'd suggest that whilst science is a noble endeavour, there will be limits to what we can discover scientifically. At this point, will we find that scientific leaders fall back on 'leaps of faith' to explain what we can only form an educated guess at? Time will tell.

Going back to the "all just atoms and the void" statement, we can't even say that without understanding what dark matter and dark energy are, as there's good evidence that they are something that exists beyond the "atoms and the void" we're currently familiar with.

The older I get, the more deeply weird and mystical this whole range of questions feels to me. It only recently occurred to me, for example, while reading about Whitehead's process philosophy, that even if he was right, and that by learning about process philosophy I'd discovered a radically different and more energizing explanation for what the fundamental nature of reality is, it just wouldn't matter; I couldn't produce a single example of how it would materially affect my life or my relationships, except possibly by making me one of those cocktail party bores who constantly talks about how amazing process philosophy is. Maybe someone else could/did produce something "meaningful," out of process philosophy, but for me, getting excited about process philosophy turned out to be fairly meaningless even if the idea itself is possibly-meaningful. Corollary: this may be one of the principle advantages to being able to make art, and especially narrative art: if I were a novelist, I might have been able to boil these process philosophy ideas down into some more humanistic narratives that actually would have some impact on some people. But I'm not, so the conclusion here is, the search for meaning may just be a red herring for me. Unfortunately, it may actually not be; hence the weirdness of it all: how would I know the difference, and what would happen then? And weirdest of all: what is happening in my mind that makes all of these questions feel so urgent all the time?

i haven't read about process philosophy and don't really know about whitehead other than recognizing the name, but a couple possible things it could do for you based just on what you said above: * it could give you structural analogies and metaphorical tools for understanding other problems, the way any mathematical/artistic/philosophical discipline can. * you might not be able to create your own art from it, but you might better be able to understand someone else's art, which might indirectly lead to more meaning for you or someone else.

people, like organizations, should do blue sky research. not everything that you learn has an immediately apparent application.

The older I get and the more philosophy/literature/science I digest, the greater the urge to disconnect. Forget about the news, forget about history, forget about philosophy, forget about travel, forget about tech (for the most part). Throw out the macbooks and the TVs and my library. It's all brain-clutter. I could be growing flowers or napping in a hammock instead.

I'm increasingly less convinced that satisfaction is ultimately aided by any of it. Probably that stuff was a useful stepping-stone to where I am, but it seems so much less important than it used to. I'm starting to wonder how akin knowing and finding answers are to various manifestations of pointless, restless acquisitiveness.

You sound a lot like the preacher in Ecclesiastes

And yet you comment on this, and presumably read the article.

> It's all brain-clutter. I could be growing flowers or napping in a hammock instead.

And this is why I worry about getting older haha

I tend to spend a good amount of time thinking about similar types of questions. I like to think my own philosophical developments over the years have allowed me to build a healthier relationship with my own existence. An old friend recently told me that life seemed "easier" for me these days.

So while it is quite difficult to say for sure (correlation != causation), I do think that sometimes these questions can be helpful.

I found it interesting to have a discussion about the meaning of life that mentions children and mentions marital affairs and concludes with the hope of science, and still never quite touches on our biological foundation. Shouldn't that be the jumping off point? All life is built to be physically and biologically dedicated to reproduction and the furthering of more life.

"children create meaning for their parents because (in most cases) they outlive their parents and become part of their legacy."

While true for (perhaps) most people, to me that seems to miss the mark a little, it feels slightly awkward to me. Children also create meaning for their parents because their parents satisfy their inherent biological mission to futher the species. Science has proven (as if we needed proof) that we have built in mechanisms that seek out and reward us for mating. It's the same reason affairs happen (another arrow, thus more meaning!): the biological mating mechanisms are strong enough to override our better judgements, we're driven to mate even if it has big risks.

Yes. I have a hard time getting excited about children when the species survival is in no danger, family names care so little value these days (I will be dead anyway) and there is no guarantee your kid will be a good thing for the world (we hope they will and that would be our legacy). There is the argument that says children will make you see life differently but that requires a lot of faith. Will it? Can I see it differently without the cost of raising children?

Anyway, I bet it's something a lot of people have thought about and come to terms with either choice. I still am unsure.

> "these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes?item=qt0464761

http://www.postmodernize.com/2014/03/the-dude-abides-but-sho...

Nihilists! ..Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

I've never had an issue valuing my life knowing that it has no eternally persistent meaning. A poor analogy, but I like to explain a finite life's meaning by asking if a movie is any less enjoyable knowing that it's going to end.

Sure, eventually our existence is rendered meaningless but that doesn't make it meaningless for me, now. Call that an illusion if you want, but it's as concrete as anything you can prove. Besides, what would a "not-ultimately-meaningless" existence look like? I haven't heard any proposals that sound appealing to me.

Finding meaning in pleasure sounds like Hedonism to me.

OP didn't say anything about finding meaning in pleasure, only finding meaning in every single moment instead of at some metaphysical end of time.

Ain't nothin' wrong with Hedonism.

There are many fundamental problems with hedonism, but hedonism avoids dealing with the problems because that's its nature.

What are the inherent problems with hedonism?

Small example: not taking care of your parents when they get old because it's not pleasurable.

That is a good example.

On the other hand, whilst hedonists may shirk some responsibilities, perhaps their focus on pleasure also ends up improving their ability at finding pleasure in the situations they find themselves in. If you intend to find pleasure, you may find it easier to recognise the opportunities to create it when they arise.

So to go back to your example of looking after parents when they get old, perhaps a hedonist would be resistant if that involved acting as a servant, but may be good company for them by playing games, telling stories, etc... Not all acts of compassion require self-sacrifice.

Finding value in pleasure is different than saying that only pleasure has value. It seems to me that a hedonist would not bother playing games or telling stories with senile parents, since only the games and the (pleasant) stories have value, and that they would do these things in more pleasant company instead.

Either way, there just doesn't seem to be any reason to deny that accepting and knowing pain is an important part of the human experience.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hedonist

Hedonist - "a person who believes that the pursuit of pleasure is the most important thing in life; a pleasure-seeker."

For the hedonist, pleasure is something to pursue. By having this focus, it gives you more experience of creating pleasure.

"a hedonist would not bother playing games or telling stories with senile parents"

Do you know any hedonists? I know some. They look to make situations more fun (for themselves, but this tends to involve taking others along for the ride). Perhaps you don't believe it's possible to have fun with old senile people, I'd say it's more than possible and I'm not even a hedonist (i.e. someone who looks for fun in a high proportion of their time, someone who is good at doing so).

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hedonism/

"Psychological or motivational hedonism claims that only pleasure or pain motivates us. Ethical or evaluative hedonism claims that only pleasure has worth or value and only pain or displeasure has disvalue or the opposite of worth."

I'm mainly concerned with the second category, since the first is more of a question for psychology and neuroscience. Anyway, you're constructing a false ideal. Even if we use Google's poorly defined and colloquial version of hedonism, the more representative real world examples are cases of pain avoidance, overeating, risky behavior, gambling/shopping addiction, and so on.

> Perhaps you don't believe it's possible to have fun with old senile people

What?

> "http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hedonism/ "Psychological or motivational hedonism claims that only pleasure or pain motivates us. Ethical or evaluative hedonism claims that only pleasure has worth or value and only pain or displeasure has disvalue or the opposite of worth." I'm mainly concerned with the second category, since the first is more of a question for psychology and neuroscience. Anyway, you're constructing a false ideal. Even if we use Google's poorly defined and colloquial version of hedonism, the more representative real world examples are cases of pain avoidance, overeating, risky behavior, gambling/shopping addiction, and so on."

In my experience, hedonists don't tend to be philosophers, they aren't concerned with providing academic claims about what motivates us, they're much more focused on pleasure in the here and now, rather than making claims that they're living life in the right way. If you want to study hedonism as a philosopher, be my guest, but it doesn't match what I've seen from the behaviour of hedonists.

Furthermore, they aren't 'pain avoidant' they are 'pleasure seeking', there's a big difference. Pleasure seeking people will chase pleasure even if there's a risk of pain along the way, pain avoidant people will avoid trying anything that may cause them pain.

> "What?"

I don't think what I said was unclear. The implication you made was that hedonists would avoid old relatives. In my experience, hedonists are 'omnivores' when it comes to pleasure, it doesn't matter whether it's playing cards with old people or going out clubbing smashed off their face, they go for everything with gusto. That's my experience of hedonists, they want to have fun and they want to bring you along for the ride.

> but it doesn't match what I've seen from the behaviour of hedonists.

it matches what i've seen.

> Furthermore, they aren't 'pain avoidant' they are 'pleasure seeking', there's a big difference.

no one is arguing that

> I don't think what I said was unclear

you put words in my mouth and then made up two other irrelevant arguments

> "it matches what i've seen."

Describe the behaviour of the hedonists you know.

they try to maximize pleasure and minimize pain

I think that's using too narrow a definition of pleasurable. Isn't the (pleasurable) time spent with your parents worth the trade-off of caring for them?

Hedonism isn't necessarily restricted to physical pleasure. There are emotional and intellectual pleasures as well.

You can move around the definition of pleasure, but then you end up with situations where pain as a means to pleasure is indistinguishable from pain as equal to pleasure, which undermines the whole premise of hedonism (that only pleasure has value).

How could you possibly end up in a situation where pain is equal to pleasure? I think pain would only be considered positive when it leads to greater pleasure.

Epicurus has a great hedonistic philosophy [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus ], here are some abridged excerpts from the wiki page:

    Epicurus' philosophy is based on the theory that all good and bad derive
    from the sensations of what he defined as pleasure and pain: What is good
    is what is pleasurable, and what is bad is what is painful. If pain is
    chosen over pleasure in some cases it is only because it leads to a greater
    pleasure. Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence because it often
    leads to pain.

    Although Epicurus has been commonly misunderstood to advocate the rampant
    pursuit of pleasure, his teachings were more about striving for an absence
    of pain and suffering, both physical and mental, and a state of satiation
    and tranquility that was free of the fear of death and the retribution of
    the gods.

Humans have a wide range of pleasures, of varying degrees of richness and sophistication. People sometimes object to hedonism on the grounds that it makes us no better than swine in the mud. But I think that reflects a poor opinion of humanity. Don't we get pleasure from symphonies, poetry, and great works of art?

Epicurus himself said he could be content with water, bread, weak wine and a "pot of cheese".

hedonism can look great when it's practiced by people who believe that the greatest pleasure comes from appreciating art. but it can look horrible for example in the case of suicide bombers, who i believe to be rational agents (i don't believe that they're mentally handicapped or on drugs or something). these are men who are completely convinced that they're doing the victims a great favor and that they will be rewarded with the highest pleasure imaginable. so in this case, the definition of pleasure has been moved so far that what is meant to be an expression of the highest pleasure imaginable is indistinguishable (to an outside observer) from pain.

maybe that's too extreme of an example, but it illustrates the point that the hedonist notion of good and bad is vastly ambiguous and can lead to undesirable situations, most notably in cases where people try to optimize for the afterlife, but also in varying degrees in other cases. so i think it ultimately it fails in practice as a moral philosophy.

I also think hedonism tends to stigmatize pain to an impractical degree. i think experiencing and accepting pain is an important part of life, not because it leads to greater pleasure, but because pain is a part of the human condition and there's value in observing it and recognizing its importance. in regards to art, there can't be catharsis without pain, so it doesn't make sense to me to say that pleasure is somehow better than pain in that sense. i think pain and pleasure are two sides of the same coin.

i don't know. maybe i'm just crazy

Like what?

Mercy killings and martyrdom (or any beliefs that optimize for the afterlife)

Thus, no problem.

The fact that if it fails to cause a fast death, it causes a big deal of suffering to the individual is not out of irony. But is still not a problem for it.

Case in point.

Epicurus had some thoughts regarding avoiding the problems with hedonism while still basing 'the good' on pleasure.

Dan Bilzerian embodies Hedonism

In a certian way of thinking, an externally persistent meaning is just an enforcement mechanism for slavery. When people talk about wanting to serve something bigger than themselves, they are implying that they aren't worth serving, that they can only achieve value by contributing to something, anything which is not like themselves. Is this personal devaulation necessary for a satisfying life?

Another attitude is to embrace existence as we come into it, to love ourselves as we are. We can still love other people and things that are not like us. Appreciation for the world can even be enhanced by beginning with embracing ourselves as we are because we're part of the world and it's part of us. When we make the world a better place, we make our world a better place. Selfish behavior is almost always short-sighted behavior. When we expand our perception of the universe, the difference between self and other is weaker than it might seem.

>Selfish behavior is almost always short-sighted behavior.

Only with the assumption that leaving the world in a "better" state (and bearing in mind opinions differ wildly on what that means) is the correct thing to do in terms of value/meaning.

Like, to the extremist - violent pursuit of their ideology gives their lives meaning. Vilifying selfishness is a weird position to my mind.

I'm not trying to villify selfishness, only address the criticism that usually follows this kind of statement. People look at any philosophy that says love yourself first and say it's just embelished selfishness, self-worship, narcisissm. They imagine it might lead to a Mad Max style dystopia of perpetual war.

There's a time for destroying and rebuilding things, but the kind of hostility that people usually associate with selfishness like corporations prioritizing short-term profits over the well-being of their workers is more a symptom of lack of long-term planning. What I'm saying is that it's possible to love yourself and serve yourself while still making things better for everyone without any kind of contradiction in motivation.

If I'm the richest person in the world and everyone else is fighting for survival, I still have to live in that world and suffer the consequences. If I contribute to my environment, I'm improving my own situation. There's no need to choose one or the other.

> If I contribute to my environment, I'm improving my own situation.

Yes, but a truly selfish person could improve their personal situation much more effectively by pillaging the commons, since any contribution you make to the environment is shared, but any money you can put in your pocket is for you alone.

The fact that you even think about the environment shows that you either don't have a easy way to profit from environmental degradation, or you're not a rational purely selfish utilitarian.

> What I'm saying is that it's possible to love yourself and serve yourself while still making things better for everyone without any kind of contradiction in motivation.

It's possible, but that just shows that you're not a truly selfish person since doing that takes more work. Truly selfish people think of ways to benefit themselves first, without regard for its impact on others.

> more a symptom of lack of long-term planning

If that were really the case, then over a long period of time you'd expect corporations that were bad at long term planning to get evolutionarily selected out. The fact that this doesn't happen means that either you're wrong, or there are very strong evolutionary forces that support short-term thinking.

Corporations with poor long term planning get weeded out and bought out all the time, even when they're among the most powerful in the world. It takes a global system of neoliberal economics intertwined with politics just to support the ones that do survive. Of course, we have a very limited frame of reference, as there are very few corporations even a few hundred years old, which in the very short span of human history isn't even a very long time.

I never claimed to be anything in particular. But I did state that there's an argument against the idea of needing to serve a higher cause to validate one's existence, that it seems very much like a motivational technique to coerce people into giving up their autonomy and intrinsic self-worth for the sake of someone else's interest. For a perfect example of this, look at Soviet propaganda, always emphasizing sacrifice for the greater global workers' struggle. Everyone was expected to be a little miserable as they worked together for the greater good. They didn't invent this idea, and it's been used many times throughout history.

I do think that with a wider perspective on the universe, the distinct line between self and other blurs. The meaning of selfishness changes when a person sees the people and things around them as an essential part of themselves. It's not just a matter of not being able to profit from pillaging the commons but rather a sense of personal loss when the commons are pillaged.

For example, I'm looking forward to all the scientific and medical advances that will happen in my lifetime. I know that increasing poverty, incequality, and war can be barriers to that advancement because the people who might push them forward will be denied access or killed. I might be motivated to make money selling weapons to regions suffering from war for a short-term profit, but I might be denying myself much more in the future. Maybe the person who was going to make the breakthrough to reverse aging was killed by one of my weapons. As one animal that can't survive outside of a nourishing ecosystem and a supportive community, I have strong disincentives for sabotaging my planet and my community, and I can't even know which acts of destruction might deny myself benefits later. I can only know that the only way to guarantee the best possible future is to do as little harm as possible.

> > What I'm saying is that it's possible to love yourself and serve yourself while still making things better for everyone without any kind of contradiction in motivation.

I think I was just trying to make a very narrow point, which is that our society does not actually perfectly align self interest with group interest, and so truly selfish agents would actually wreak havok.

You're saying it's possible to serve both at the same time, but purely selfish agents wouldn't care about that, which is why I don't think it's a good idea to encourage pure selfishness.

> The meaning of selfishness changes when a person sees the people and things around them as an essential part of themselves.

Yes, but that's generally not what people would hear if you tell them 'love yourself first'. Randian Objectivists seem like a bunch of selfish assholes to me :)

> For a perfect example of this, look at Soviet propaganda, always emphasizing sacrifice for the greater global workers' struggle.

It's human nature to look towards selfish interests first. It's completely natural that states, which need to mobilize people to work together, would urge otherwise.

The genius of modern capitalism is that it claims we can have our cake and eat it too -- look towards your own interests, and you will also benefit society. What people have forgotten is that is only true within a framework where capitalism is tightly constrained and controlled.

I'd like to note that Epicureanism is almost indistinguishable, practically, from Stoicism.

Serving something bigger than yourself lets you be part of something greater than you could achieve on your own. No one man could have built the Golden Gate Bridge, or the IBM PC.

This isn't an argument against collaboration. It's an argument against the idea that you are inherently worthless until you contribute to something greater than yourself. We can work together because we feel meaningless on our own or we can work together because we are confident in our ability to contribute and appreciate that ability in others as well. They might lead to the same result, but one is starting from a position of shame and the other is starting from a position of self-respect.

Besides, what would a "not-ultimately-meaningless" existence look like? I haven't heard any proposals that sound appealing to me.

Edward Jenner, perhaps?

If humanity fizzles out it's all moot, but if it lasts in perpetuity, Jenner's work will have done incalculable good, for the rest of time.

Sarah wondered why people started avoiding her at cocktail parties after the publication of her book "Every Cradle is a Grave."

Nihilism is a question about meaning, not an answer, so this author starts off in the wrong place by trying to find a meaning - as most do who take the moniker of "Nihilist."

Seems like the author is taking the absurdist/existentialist solution of choosing what is valuable. In this case trying to tie a more complex understanding of individualist hedonism ("feeling" meaning) with some kind of combinatorial pluralistic hedonism.

Pretty simply this is just a more verbose version of the existentialist hedonistic answer to the question of meaninglessness.

To quote the author:

I'm almost certainly reinventing the wheel

Pretty typical really. Most people who truly embrace the absurd either don't seek meaning or have already killed themselves.

Camus would tell you that by killing yourself, you have utterly failed to embrace the absurd. I would say the same for anyone chasing scientific techno utopias.

Camus would tell you that by killing yourself you have utterly failed to embrace the absurd

As an absurdist (not a nihilist) of course he would!

I think, that meaning can be only defined in the case, when one is immortal. If I'm mortal, everything I do, good or bad, is meaningless for consciousness, because it will cease to exist and everything that will happen after death will have no effect on it.

Any meaning, that's is defined while one is mortal is no more than illusion, in which people immerse themselves for whatever reason.

I agree. One workaround is to identify with your family or humanity instead of just yourself, then there is a shot at immortality. There are lots of instances of individuals dying in service of a greater good, such as the amoeba Dictyostelid, which when food runs out, climb on top of each other to form a stalk and then die, allowing the rest to climb to the top and form a spore which then explodes and spreads the rest of the amoeba toward greener pastures. Depending on the lifecycle stage, the Dictyostelid takes on the form of a group of individuals, a single animal-like creature, or a single plant like creature. Pretty amazing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyostelid

That's a bit pessimist, isn't it? It's a little bit like saying that living is not worth it because you'll die anyway. I think what we do is not about an indefinite future impact or goal, but about the how it impacts us and the people around us today, right now.

I see meaning as something not like a hard drive, where you store data once you are done, but like RAM, where you read, write and modify on the fly, constantly, while the machine is powered on.

Sure, at some point the machine will be powered off you'll be gone, but meaning doesn't have to be everlasting to exist and have an impact.

So much this. For some reason humans have no appreciation for the value of time. Because a relationship ends, doesn't mean it wasn't good while it lasted. Because I have something now, doesn't mean I will have it forever.

I go back and forth between your perspective and the previous posters perspective. In terms of the scope of the universe my behavior is impact-less but as I limit scope my impact grows.

I prefer this perspective because it avoids self importance - an attribute that in my opinion does more harm than good.

If there is no afterlife, then I'm immortal: the end of my life is equivalent to the end of the universe, end of time. And in my infinite (!) life I associate certain understandings to certain things and certain events: that's meaning. This is not particularly an illusion, as it's real and there in my mind, and one way or another, abstract things exist. The illusion is the universal phenomenon itself, a spectacle we briefly assist and affect.

If there is an afterlife, I'm immortal. Thus again meaning exists, this time so in accordance with your definition thereof.

Therefore, meaning exists.

Let me explain that you are in fact immortal. First, you have to see that there is no reason for your brain and my brain to have different "souls" (whatever that may mean). It only appears to you that we are different beings because there is no strong neurological connection between our brains. But there is a connection (albeit very weak), in e.g. electromagnetic and gravity forces between our brains. The universe, of course, really doesn't care about all this. So you could say that we are both one being, and we are one with the universe. This means that we (and everybody else) will only die when the universe ceases to exist. Which is not likely to happen soon, so for all practical purposes, you are immortal.

Another implication of this line of reasoning is that since there are no inherent boundaries between anything, the universe itself is thus a living, conscious being.

> Let me explain that you are in fact immortal. [...] so for all practical purposes, you are immortal.

That is not how the vast majority of people define "immortal".

Unless you're aiming for some kind of uplifting, motivational speech?

> This means that we (and everybody else) will only die when the universe ceases to exist.

You're playing a trick there by jumping from brain to atoms, but people do not define themselves by their atoms, but by their consciousness which will not survive death making what you're saying about all being one rather meaningless. So..

> so for all practical purposes, you are immortal.

Not even close, because I cease to exist the second my brain dies and whatever happens to my atoms after my mind is gone is completely meaningless.

Well, I think this is easily falsifiable. You are here because your ancestors, long deceased, reproduced. Clearly their life had meaning as expressed by your existence.

Whether or not they continue to exist in some other reality has no bearing on the fact that you exist now, thanks to them.

Not necessarily. We still have no evidence that consciousness exists off of Earth. The scariest solution to the Fermi paradox is that we are in fact alone, or at least first.

One can even stop just short of solipism and consider the possibility that humans are the only consciousness in the universe.

Granted, this is just a possibility, perhaps a very small one. But we know so little about such things.

My point is that you may have far more of an effect on Consciousness than you think.

> We still have no evidence that consciousness exists off of Earth.

We still have no objective definition of consciousness that would let us determine what it is that would be evidence that consciousness exists, on or off of Earth.

I didn't find this to be a very useful article. It takes steps to create an abstract-symbolic definition of meaning, but doesn't develop it further and also doesn't use it again in the rest of the article. At least half of it could have been left out, therefore.

The conclusion is also rather trite, and seems to adopt humanity's tendency towards techno-optimistic hubris as a proxy for meaning. The conclusion doesn't support the thesis that science can lead us to meaning. I can appreciate the complexity of human society by reading the Koran, or going to a death metal concert. I don't need science for that.

Science is truly great, it is the most successful and useful paradigm for organising knowledge. But I don't think it is a path to meaning, no matter how much you romanticize it. It's just as likely to kill us all and destroy the planet as it is to save it, the former being considerably easier than the latter.

"But I don't think it is a path to meaning."

No, it's not the path to meaning, but it is one.

You might be romanticizing meaning itself there.

"As always, there are caveats. I have a degree in philosophy, but haven't read any of the classic literature on this subject, so I'm almost certainly reinventing the wheel. And although I lean heavily on what I've gleaned from Sarah, David, and Venkat, I'm not sure any of them would endorse what I've written here. You might want to think of it as my own funky synthesis — and if it comes up short, that's entirely my fault."

Greatest and most self-aware disclaimer I've read in a long time.

One thought I have, is that human thinking is just one perspective which is limited to the realm of living thoughts. Meaning our thoughts are biased towards what we can see and think about, so we cannot see anything else. Human thinking has a limited range.

That's always what I conclude when I hear about life or intelligent life in the universe. We are made of life, but intelligence may be specific only to the life on earth, or maybe there are other forms of intelligence that are so different from our own that we could not even recognize them as intelligent of even communicate with them.

That's essentially what I think when I hear "we are a speck of dust in the universe". We're no just small and far from everything, we are not able to understand how our brain can be intelligent. That's why I'm a nihilist. I don't really see any interesting food for thought to chew on. What's "meaningful" is beyond our reach for now, and it will stay that way until our brain evolve, or we create AI smarter than us, or we just find ways to directly improve our intelligence (more neuron connections, neuro-stimulants or drugs, brain extensions, what have you).

Totally agree. IMO it's also be amazing if we could create an AI which could evolve itself to the point of understanding things we can't while understanding humans well enough to be able to explain those things in terms we could understand.

Then again, maybe if it found out "higher" "actual" truths, it could see that possibly explaining those to humanity wouldn't be "good", and thus lie / withhold information for our own "benefit".

And now we're back to morals and ethics.

Imagine if AI could just solve math or physics problems, or come up with theories.

People are able to push through a whole lot of suffering when they have meaning. When all pleasure is taken away (e.g. concentration camps), only the people who have something to live for are able to survive. (ref. "Man's search for meaning" by Viktor Frankl)

Too bad he doesn't mention evolution, because it plays an important role in preferring individuals who find meaning in something.

He does mention the evolutionary advantages of finding meaning briefly, at first, and then comes back to it toward the end of the essay. (He does a poor job of breaking his essays up into obvious sections, though; sorry for the lack of links to back me up).

Here's an observation of mine which Simler misses: I suspect that Meaning is the categorical dual of Power. In this context, Power is defined as "your influence on the state of world". Whereas Meaning is defined as "a phenomenon's influence on your state-of-mind and decision-making".

E.g. when a Vietnam Vet looks at a War Monument, that's meaningful because it impacts his emotional state. Maybe his buddy Bubba Gump died in the war. Maybe he'll resolve to live life to the fullest and open a Shrimpin Business.

Connections make it more likely that a phenomenon will impact your decision making, or carry an affect on something you value highly. The connections/gravitas hypothesis that Simler discusses is just a corollary.

Meaning is what you feel when you act and others benefit, regardless of the effect that action has on you. Happiness is when you benefit, regardless of who acted or why.

In order to have a happy, meaningful life, you have to contribute to people who accept you and have those efforts reciprocated.

Lots of smart people find survival in the selfish sense very trivially easy. If you do not seek out opportunities to contribute, you will lack meaning in your life. And if those opportunities do not challenge you, you will lack meaning in your life.

We are an interdependent species. Not great white sharks (independent) and not ants (dependent).

> "In order to have a happy, meaningful life, you have to contribute to people who accept you and have those efforts reciprocated."

I'd say finding meaning is broader than that. "Life is what you make it" rings true for me. It's possible to live a fulfilling life as a hermit if that's what you prefer, it's not always about finding meaning through relationships with other humans.

Unless you are projecting your own subjective mental map onto others which is what parent did with his proclamations. His definition of meaning is a popular one that stems mostly from "consensus reality" but it, as you and virmundi point out, is far from objective. In fact, the work of John C. Lilly [among others] teaches us that there is no objective reality of any sort and that the human mental map is programmable.

We can learn to shift and radically alter the way we view the world and therefore the reality we experience, and thus create and project our own meaning, which is no longer immutable but ever-shifting.

In philosophical terms, this is very similar to Nietzche's concept of the Übermensch. Alas, I feel that collectively, we have a long way to go until "consensus" catches up.

You have no logical grounds for your first sentence. As a result everything else collapses. Meaning is whatever a person defines to have value to them in a material world. They enjoy rape, the it provides meaning. You can't tell them they're wrong because it hurts others abstractly, and can't concretely if that's part of what makes it so meaningful to them.

There is nothing stopping someone from being a great white shark aside from the threat of violence from the group. If someone can figure out how get around that, like with home made genetic manipulation for viruses, well, they get to have their own meaning spread across the world.

The grounds are scientific, not logical: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1207%2Fs15327558ijbm1202...

What you are describing is the broader context of innate drive for something. Meaning is a feeling you get from satisfying certain (not all) drives.

But you're presuming that mostly suicidal is an nonfunctional mode. If a person has been depressed for 15 years, held loaded weapons to their head while they cried, and have a good way to kill themselves, it's good to be good doesn't matter. If that person doesn't care about longevity, but hopes for a fast death soon, meh. There is no meaning. Especially when you have only one drive, a fast death.

The article measures meaning by the amount of directed connection to other meaningful things. Interesting that this is almost exactly the same as PageRank. I think there's actually a significant relationship here.

Architect Christpher Alexander has developed a beautiful theory that is absolutely applicable to this topic (dare I say, second to none?) in his work 'A Pattern Language' and especially in his 'The Nature of Order' series. It's painful to think how little attention his work seems to get when you think of what could come from further exploration of the ground work he has laid in regards to understanding and creating meaning, that which comes from the heart and life preserving / nurturing processes.

I recommend reading Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism and Wisdom of Life to anyone interested in open-minded treatise of the subject so individually complicated as the meaning of the one's own life. It may sound gloomy, potentially distressed, yet, it offers philosophy that you'll not find consoling, but very helpful as you're growing your own meaning.

I always like to position nihilism like this:

Just because there is no meaning with life does not mean there isn't meaning in life.

You cannot be a nihilist by action only by intellect because you cannot not have a value system where somethings are prioritized over others.

The very fact that you need to pee, don't want to die, love your kids and so on are all things that create this value system in life.

Being a nihilist is mostly an analytical framework more than it's a way of life.

The good thing is that those "in life" values we all come with are mostly enough to create stable societies and human lifes.

Or put a completely different way.

Nihilist do not find meaning with life, but plenty in life.

Related, one of my favorite joke twitter accounts is Nihilist Arby's:

https://twitter.com/nihilist_arbys

A nice exploration of a typically domineering subject. I especially appreciate how starkly digestible the piece is in comparison to more formal philosophy works.

An excellent writeup, slightly distorted by its title. If you are concerned with meaning and try to find it and explain it, you are by definition not a nihilist.

A great, and wise, reading! Excuse me for this less serious comment.

Jokingly (but only a bit), I am waiting for "Show HN: Eigenmeaning" (or SimlerRank). Vide: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1820

I'm surprised no one has invoked Kant's categorical imperative. It doesn't directly address 'meaning'n but (a) the idea of a moral statement being necessarily true has implications for nihilism, and (b) the discussion in the thread touches often on moral philosophy.

> Existence, he says, is fundamentally playful

If existence is playful it is not without meaning IMO. Its not nihilistic.

Instead its more like a game, an adventure.

The meaning of play is both for fun and also to learn new things.

Play-based learning.

To me this sounds more like the Hindu concept of "lila" or play/sport/spontaneous action rather than nihilism.

I think the idea of meaning being contextual is spot-on. For instance, leaderboards and stats in gaming communities approach zero meaning to the world at large, but they're intensely meaningful within specific games themselves, and somewhat meaningful to gamers in general.

Isn't existentialism the cure for nihilism? It doesn't matter to the universe, but it matters to ME. I exist. From this we are left with the heavy burden of deciding what we think is good and bad, right and wrong.

Does this obviate the issue that one has to assign the definition of meaning somewhere in the graph? ie Meaning is subjective, and it has to be inserted to propagate down.

> So: meaning isn't a substance, but rather a feeling. In this way, it's a lot like beauty.

If I understand correctly, author is saying, that you can't measure nor exactly define meaning, and then building follow up logical chain based on that axiom.

If so, then it's just wrong, because all human feelings are results of biochemical processes inside a brain. They arise in exact situations and they are predictable as patterns. So, we can define feelings and analyze them to the point where we can see how they are building and what is causing one or another.

> "If so, then it's just wrong, because all human feelings are results of biochemical processes inside a brain. They arise in exact situations and they are predictable as patterns. So, we can define feelings and analyze them to the point where we can see how they are building and what is causing one or another."

I doubt we know enough about these processes to make such a claim. For example, will one set of patterns always result in envy, or can the patterns behind envy also produce adoration?

Furthermore, with what we think of as the 'mind', what influence does it have over the response of the 'body'. In practice these may be one and the same thing, but phenomena related to 'mind over matter' definitely seem to exist. For example, practitioners of tummo can voluntarily alter their body temperature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tummo

Without a deeper understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body, I wouldn't want to make any claims about how deterministic our minds are.

Modern science is a long way from mapping physical states to feelings.

And even if we could, it still doesn't explain why certain physical states cause certain mental states: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/#Explangap

As I first looked at this headline on the HN front page, it had a perfect "42" comments.

(I hate to ruin it, but it was bound to happen anyway).

Disclosure: I'm a big time nihilist and genuinely take questions like "does the morality of an action propagate at the speed of light," seriously which i encourage everyone who understands relatively to at least consider for a brief time

I don't really agree with much in this post, principally because it's preoccupied by personal meaning, for the individual. Often when reading contemporary philosophical texts you come across this idea of neoliberal logic (try searching google for it as a phrase)--it is, I think, 90% of the time, a nonsense idea used to obscure a bad argument, but in this case I think it applies: it's an atomised way of thinking about people and how they relate to the world. You'll note towards the end that the list of examples given of meaningful objects/activities are all entirely social in nature; except perhaps one, a career, a notion very central to our (neoliberal!) age, which hides is social nature under a cloak of economic relationships. The mention of Marx's idea of alienation is therefore funny to me: although one can understand alienation as the ennui of rote labour, you should remember that the idea is rooted too in commodity fetishism. The mistaking of relationships between people as the relationships between commodities. Each of his examples are, in strange way, social "commodities": abstract objects that an individual "has", and whose use-value is defined from its abilities to grant "meaning" to her, and can be "exchanged" between other individuals so that you might benefit from a fulfilling father-son relationship, or between the collaboration between famous artists, or the networking with workers from a prestigious company.

I say: it is the very relationships between people that are the generators of meaning, and (stands up on soapbox, music swells) that all meaning is rooted in social relationships between people, and that for anything to meaning anything whatsoever is necessarily proof of a relationship between you and some other person who may even be hidden from you. Reading an ancient text is a relationship that stretches back before you were even born: it's not an object that exists as a person does but is as real as a mathematical entity, and its understanding as a thing that can be conceived of in it's own right is the only way to build a worthwhile theory of meaning that is not just a handwavey precursor to information theory and problems of interpretation. Meaning is a relationship between people.

For a better treatment on nihilism--which better reckons on the effect science has on philosophy, or more to say the direction philosophy must take in order to be relevant after the ruin science has made of it--I recommend the work of Ray Brassier, altho it is.. very technical. There's a good interview with him here http://www.kronos.org.pl/index.php?23151,896 and in particular the following quote still lights a fire in my timid heart:

> Like Nietzsche, I think nihilism is a consequence of the ‘will to truth’. But unlike Nietzsche, I do not think nihilism culminates in the claim that there is no truth. Nietzsche conflated truth with meaning, and concluded that since the latter is always a result of human artifice, the former is nothing but a matter of convention. However, once truth is dismissed, all that remains is the difference between empowering and disempowering fictions, where ‘life’ is the fundamental source of empowerment and the ultimate arbiter of the difference between life-enhancing and life-depreciating fictions. Since the abandonment of truth undermines the reason for relinquishing illusion, it ends up licensing the concoction of further fictional narratives, the only requirement for which is that they prove to be ‘life-enhancing’.

> I consider myself a nihilist precisely to the extent that I refuse this Nietzschean solution and continue to believe in the difference between truth and falsity, reality and appearance. In other words, I am a nihilist precisely because I still believe in truth, unlike those whose triumph over nihilism is won at the cost of sacrificing truth. I think that it is possible to understand the meaninglessness of existence, and that this capacity to understand meaning as a regional or bounded phenomenon marks a fundamental progress in cognition.

Embrace the abyss, but stay human.

I for one don't mind a large silent empty universe that's pretty to look at.

I will put it "in vacca" but: I suggest LSD, for a new perspective on life.

I half expected the page to blank.

I've never read this guy's writing before but in this article I think he is way over-intellectualizing things.

Meaning is whatever you want it to be. Some people find meaning in easing the suffering of others. Some people find meaning in raising children who will raise children, etc. even if in the fullness of time they will all cease to exist. Some people find meaning in really good sushi. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. When I eat really good red snapper nigiri I experience pleasure. That is a real joy that meant something to me in the moment.

The big picture of the entirety of time and space means nothing because I don't live in that full reality. I live in a small pocket of time in a small pocket of space because I am a tiny being.

>Meaning is whatever you want it to be.

That is basically the post-modern absurdist position on the meaning of life. Most people still believe in an external source of meaning (religion) that exists regardless of your personal opinion.

What most people believe has no bearing on the truth; truth isn't a democracy, so your point lacks meaning. His point, was truth, you make your own meaning in this world.

>His point, was truth, you make your own meaning in this world

That is an entirely subjective belief. You and I might hold that opinion, but the majority of people in the world do not. For them, the "truth" about the meaning of life is externally imposed and exists outside any one person's opinion.

That one can make ones own meaning is objectively true, that there exists outside meaning is only subjectively true as there's no evidence such an outside force exists while ones own existence is not in question, so no, what I stated was objectively true while what most people believe is only subjectively true.

>what I stated was objectively true while what most people believe is only subjectively true

It's not really, but of course you believe it is. Nobody wants to believe that their beliefs are just as arbitrary any anyone else's.

It isn't a matter of what I believe, it is objectively true that people can "can" choose their own meanings in life; that is not a belief, it is a fact, this is objectively demonstrable by the fact that people do exactly that and you'll find many people in this thread saying exactly that.

It is also objectively true that people can choose to rely on an external source of meaning, but it is only subjectively true that external objective meaning exists precisely because it cannot be objectively demonstrated that the source of said external objective meaning actually exists, therefore it is a subjective belief that there is objective meaning outside ones self.

It's notable that you're selectively quoting leaving out exactly that part that explain the logic behind said statement. You're either unable to discern the meaning of objective/subjective, or you're being dishonest with the selective quoting. Either way, you're incorrect. If you want to continue to debate this, you must demonstrate the logical flaw in either of the two above paragraphs.

People finding meaning in religion falls under my suggestion that people find their own meaning. They find it in that religion and belief.

Now, you and they may take the opinion that their meaning exists whether I believe in it or not, and that their view is truth and my view is heresy. That's fine, they can believe that if they want to. I don't. However, my belief system has room for theirs.

Thanks for bringing this up. Small things can have huge personal significance. I think the article makes sense until it tries to model meaning in an impersonal way; there's a bit of a switcheroo when the author goes from saying meaning is an emotion to saying it is a matter of fact.

I'd say that meaning, as a cognitive emotion, is heavily dependent on what "facts" we hold to be true and what stories we tell ourselves. Most people are not telling themselves stories about the entirety of time and space, so it literally has no impact on their experience of meaning. Death, on the other hand, affects us all; everyone has an attitude towards their own future and eventual death, however unexamined it is. That doesn't mean everyone has the same attitude, though. Some people would like to become immortal above all else, while others are not bothered in the slightest by having a finite lifespan, or believe that their "spirit" is somehow infinite.

It is possible to intellectualize about where meaning comes from in order to bring more into your life, as a kind of therapy; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logotherapy

I find this stuff interesting to read and think about. But I think that ultimately all arguments expressed about the subject in words are in the same category: works of fiction. In the end, things... are -- including all the different ways people describe, or attempt, to describe meaning.

I would also add that I am logically correct about this, as things are in fact... are. Which is kind of a stupid thing to say but often times i think that stupid things being said in fact are smart things when they are said in a context of being a response to stupid things.

Add #2:

I also think that this falls under "philosophy" which is an academic discipline that became outdated and was superseded by science about a century ago now.

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