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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Not at all. Hope and love don’t need to have any meaning in the wider universe in order for them to have meaning to me.

Serious question—how does the notion of "hope" become any more concrete in the non-materialist view? Perhaps your immortal soul can "hope" that it hasn't been attached to a physical body with a physical brain tumour pressing upon its physical amygdala.

Personally I cannot see how non-materialism usefully solves any criticism of materialism. All the same problems exist, except you're just pushing them back to a different plane of existence where they can be conveniently disposed of with appeals to mysteriousness.

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Either everything matters, or nothing matters. Choose one, and follow the resulting consequences.

I really don't understand how you could come to that conclusion. Whether something matters or not is entirely subjective or depends on context. Like, what does that even mean? My happiness matters very much to me, but doesn't matter at all to someone who will never meet me, or to the orbit of the earth around the sun... Yet the mass of the earth objectively matters very much to its orbit around the sun, and to many other things that would be affected by earth having a different mass. Maybe you mean, does it matter to me personally? Even then, I can't possibly see any reason why it would have to be all or nothing. Some distant galaxy on the other side of the known universe doesn't matter at all to me and likely never will. The current temperature outside matters to me a fair bit though, because it'll influence how likely I am to want to avoid the cold, or how long I stay outside.

Like I'm just trying to figure out if you're actually trying to say something meaningful or just saying something vague and abstract to try and sound "deep".

That kind of statement is fairly routine from people whose world view presupposes godly origin. The unspoken inference is that there must be some objective source of mattering. Whereas if we're all just material, we're all just dust and nothing ultimately matters. It's a play on our emotions. It feels like things matter to us, so it seems intuitively wrong that things could ultimately not matter.

But it's just wordplay. Things DO matter to me. I can care about the fate of my descendents many centuries hence; or the fate of human civilisation in a few millennia. So what if human civilisation (or any biological life of Earth origin) might not survive after a billion years and nothing "ultimately" matters?

Besides, the way most human religions try to instantiate this "ultimate mattering" seems fairly horrid to me.

Trite aphorisms don't matter, but I don't think that means nothing does.

Rejecting one aphorism is proclaiming the other

Matters to whom?

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent

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